Thinking Machine's Inskip

With more indignation than chagrin British editors of those popular papers which deal in political prophecy agreed last week that never have they failed more completely than in trying to forecast in recent weeks whom Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin would choose to fill the new and potentially all-important British post of his deputy as Chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defense (TIME, March 16).

The appointment of the deputy is the direct result of charges by such elder statesmen as Sir Austen Chamberlain, K. G., that the "thinking machine" of the Prime Minister has proved inadequate to carry the burdens imposed by his rank as Chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defense. In London it was universally predicted that a man of conspicuous energy and brains would be chosen. Among the capital's more blatant newsorgans each has had its favorite candidate, the most arresting being the Daily Mail's choice of an Australian, famed Stanley Melbourne Bruce, kinetic, Conservative, air-minded and alert onetime Premier of the Commonwealth, today its High Commissioner in London and last week League of Nations Council President.

Last week brought the "complete surprise" that Squire Baldwin chose to be his deputy a man who must appeal strongly to the pious judgment of the Prime Minister's good wife Lucy. Neither she nor Mr. Baldwin ever pays the slightest attention to newspapers, a circumstance which makes the Prime Minister's acts frequently bewildering to newspaper readers and even more so to their editors. Stanley Baldwin decided to place the Committee of Imperial Defense in the hands of Sir Thomas Walker Hobart Inskip.

Sir Thomas is President of the Lord's Day Observance Society. He frankly "disapproves of all Papists" and particularly of the Pope. There are, in his opinion, ecclesiastically dangerous radicals among the bishops and archbishops of the Church of England, and, when they led a great battle in Parliament to "reform" the Prayer Book in highfalutin fashion, it was the Low Church, mobilized and led politically by Sir Thomas Walker Hobart Inskip, which mightily defeated the High Churchmen and made sure that the Prayer Book shall remain unchanged for many, many years (TIME, Dec. 26, 1927).

The voice of Sir Thomas is often raised against "the Godless and shameless Bolsheviks of Russia!" It was his ambition as a youth to become a missionary of the gospel, but instead the law claimed him until War carried this pious layman into the profession of a spy--or rather into the British Intelligence Service. Next he was attached to the legal office of the British Admiralty. Of late years he has served as Attorney General, a post which in Britain does not carry full Cabinet rank. When Novelist Compton Mackenzie in 1932 disclosed some of the secrets of the Intelligence Service, he was promptly and successfully prosecuted by Attorney General Inskip. Since 1934, Sir Thomas has become the villain of an entire literature penned by indignant Britons who contend that an act which he put through the House of Commons destroyed all that is summed up by the old saw, "An Englishman's house is his castle." Under the Inskip act, as yet unenforced in full, British police may on mere "suspicion" obtain a High Court justice's order to burst into private homes and ransack them for "treasonable literature." Merely to "possess" such literature (as distinguished from writing, publishing or showing it to anyone who might be "treasonably seduced") is made a crime.

As a human being, Sir Thomas Walker Hobart Inskip is a large, lugubrious, burly man with a commanding voice and manner. These may be qualities of value in standing up to the truculent British generals, admirals and air marshals of the Committee of Imperial Defense. The Prime Minister not only appointed Sir Thomas his deputy last week but also raised him to full Cabinet rank as Britain's first Secretary of State for Coordination of Defense.

In House of Commons lobbies a remark frequently heard was that this appointment was a "Baldwin bumble" and that Sir Thomas may be expected to "out-bumble Baldwin." Particularly scathing was Winston Churchill, whose friends had ardently angled to get him the appointment. Silently disappointed were such publicly groomed aspirants as Sir Samuel Hoare and the Air Minister, Viscount Swinton.

The pay of Sir Thomas was a thumping $135,000 as Attorney General. He will receive only $25,000 per year in his new post, where he will have a major voice in the spending of Empire billions for armament (see p 25). A good coordinator would equalize the amount of "drag" or "pull" possessed by each of the three fighting services and traditionally used to warp Government decisions in favor of that service. The British Admiralty naturally has always been strongest in these contests, the Royal Air Force has shot up recently to second place in "drag" and the Army makes a poor third in looking out for itself. In the services most of Sir Thomas' friends are Admiralty men.

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