Polecat Hunt

"A piece of impudence," cried tall, gimlet-eyed Lord Vansittart, 68, in Britain's House of Lords last week. Bristling with rage, the onetime (1930-38) Permanent Under Secretary of the Foreign Office told his peers how the Soviet news agency Tass ("a nest of guttersnipes") had wriggled out of a libel suit filed by Vladimir Krajina, Czech refugee and onetime resistance fighter. The Soviet Embassy had declared Tass a state organ (TIME, July 11), and a British court had no choice but to grant diplomatic immunity to Tass, which had accused Krajina of being a traitor. Krajina's last resort was to appeal to the House of Lords.

Lord Vansittart protested such "preposterous and unprecedented" extensions of immunity at a time when all the countries of the Communist empire treat British and U.S. representatives "like stink." Answering Vansittart for the government, Viscount Jowitt, Britain's Lord Chancellor, brought cheers when he announced that the government was setting up a committee to consider changes in the law which made Tass libel-proof. To illustrate Tass's mendacity, Viscount Jowitt read a Tass report in Moscow's Literary Gazette of how Londoners "supplement their starvation rations ... On Sundays, armed with guns and traps, [they] set out for the suburbs to hunt wild rabbits, starlings, squirrels, hedgehogs and polecats." Viscount Jowitt offered a -L-5 prize for every polecat found in the suburbs--"so long as they keep away from the zoo."

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