The British Election: The Tories

This report on Britain’s election was cabled by TIME Correspondent Andre Laguerre:

WINSTON LEONARD SPENCER CHURCHILL is fond of his collection of goldfish. When he approaches their pools in the lovely grounds of his country house at Chartwell Manor in Kent, the goldfish dart eagerly toward him. Churchill, wearing his familiar siren suit, an overcoat of a peculiarly bilious pea green draped over his shoulders, was feeding them one afternoon this week. One hand held the inevitable black cigar, and the other dipped into the tin of fish food proffered by his bodyguard.

“I won’t be doing this much longer,” he observed. “In a week or two they will go to the bottom of the pool to hibernate. Just as well, perhaps. I might be too busy.” Whether he will be busy as Prime Minister or again as leader

of His Majesty’s Opposition in the House of Commons about to be elected was, of course, a question vitally preoccupying Britain, the world, and Winston Churchill.

When I arrived at Chartwell I was greeted with a quick-fire question: “What is your idea about it all? Now, don’t say something to please me.”

“Well, sir, I think it would be a good thing for most people if you won this election.”

Gruffly, Churchill shot back: “It will be a very hard thing for people if I win, I can promise you that. They will all have to do very much more.”

Churchill, in the words of a friend, “wants sweat and tears, in order to avoid the blood—and so that when we think of Great Britain we don’t have to visualize the first word in inverted commas.”

To a nation economically overextended, vitiated by controls and egalitarianism, puzzled and upset by loss of prestige overseas, and in the main jealously attached to the social gains made by her poorer classes since the war, Winston Churchill this week broadcast a jesting reminder: “The day is Oct. 25—make a note of it in your diary.”

About four registered electors in five will remember, and vote. The betting in London is a little under 2 to 1 that they will return the Tories to office. The present Labor majority is so razor-thin that a small swing would bring Churchill back. Labor holds 54 seats by fewer than 3,000 votes. No landslide is needed —merely a consistent trickle—to give the Tories a majority of 40 or 50 seats, which they regard as the minimum with which they could work for five years.

The Tories have a better prospect of winning this election than they had in 1945 or 1950. But they are not improving their chances with a campaign which is being less smartly conducted than Labor’s.

The Iranian issue, which the Tories have ridden hard, is not quite as advantageous for the Tories as it ought to be. Churchill is justified in saying that Labor’s Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison does not have the right to put the question, “Well, would you have gone to war to save the oil?”, because if Churchill had been in office the situation would not have arisen. But the fact remains that Morrison does ask the question, and so do Socialists all over the country.

Where the Tories are confident of having made inroads is not in the organized union vote, but in areas of small industry and commerce. I found on a trip through the Midlands that the lack of incentive to do a good job worried people.

“I want to farm,” said a gaitered man from Leicester. “If I have a hand who works better than the others, I want to pay him more. That’s good for him, and good for me—good for everyone, isn’t it?”

Abbey House (Tory headquarters in London) knows that the rising cost of living, and especially the absence of any constructive Labor approach to current and looming threats to the standard of living, are the Tories’ best talking points.

Britain, on the threshold of 1951’s winter, must cope with a mounting and perilous trade deficit. Her money has lost a quarter of its purchasing power in six years. She is taxed to the hilt. Prices have inflated faster than pay packets, and food this summer was 40% more expensive than in 1947. Dissatisfaction with nationalization and with controls is rife.

“Hundreds of new, unnecessary jobs . . . The old bosses weren’t much good, but at least you knew who they were. And they never put experienced chaps under some young cocksparrer from Whitehall,” complained a railroadman in Coventry.

And yet—the Tories have not fully exploited these openings.

Memories of Dewey & Victoria

It took me days to get close to real Tory intentions on certain issues, so it is easy to understand the busy voter’s uneasiness, about the generalities with which he is being fed.

Partly this is because Tory leaders themselves are vague or divided about just what they would do if returned to power, and find more convenient an empirical attitude: “We’ll see when we have to tackle the problem and get all the facts”—which also assumes that those problems will be better tackled by practical Tories than by Socialist theorists. Partly it is due to what Lord Woolton—”Uncle Fred,” the mild, silvery-haired and able chairman of the party’s central office—calls “Deweyism.” Overconfidence, that is, which in this case takes the form of assuming that the Tories can ride to office on Labor’s bad record.

“What we tend to forget,” said a Tory campaign manager, a brainy and broadminded Yorkshireman, “is that Labor also rests on its record. We tend to forget that a grumbler is not necessarily a Tory convert. We tend to forget the vast blocs of solid Labor voters—the millions of workers who don’t realize that it was Hitler, who beggared the world of goods, and not the Socialists, who created the conditions for full employment.”

The obverse is also true. There are millions of Britons who have been taught to revile the consequences of the harsh Victorian economy, and who are convinced that the Tory aim is to restore the privileges of the governing class.

To win, the Tories will have to convince these millions that they are a truly national party. First evidence of the transformation of the Tory Party since the shock of its 1945 defeat can be seen in its very structure. Then it had three-quarters of a million dues-paying members—now it has 2,500,000, including 200,000 members aged between 18 and 30.

Accent on Youth

This intake of youth is the most important factor in the new Toryism. Nearly 100 young or youngish new Tory M.P.s invaded the House of Commons after the 1950 elections. I have talked with many of them, and found them impressive. Dynamic and free of prejudice, they surely represent the most hopeful element in British politics today. Coming from the middle classes rather than the great families, they have not yet inspired the confidence of the mass of workers. Given the chance, that should be only a question of time.

The biggest question about Toryism today is whether the “Young Turks” will soon be having a decisive say in making party policy. They are not conservative, for they seek change. They are not reactionary, for they do not want their party to return to what it was before. They are creators, architects of a new Britain which can merge the best of her traditions with the lessons learned from the past. The young Tories are typified by David Eccles (TIME, Oct. 8), himself the most talked-about young Tory, and one of the most impressive.

The man who said, “The ownership of property . . . comes as a reward for work; it’s no longer a passport to the good graces of the Tory Party,” is the son of a surgeon and married to the daughter of the late Viscount Dawson of Penn, who used to sign George V’s medical bulletins. Eccles’ wife, Sybil, is dark, intelligent, and rated about the party’s best woman speaker.

Eccles, 47, has a quality that is much rarer in Britain than in the U.S.: a rather studied personality adapted to the role he wants to play in life. Tall and incredibly good-looking — a TV natural — his manner has just the right combination of good form and easy friendliness. He certainly knows how to put things so that the cloth-capped worker will understand them, and has a gift for the happy phrase. Eccles on wage controls: “… I have been against the wage freeze. Bad chancellors resort to it as drunkards cling to lampposts, not to light themselves on their way but to conceal their own instability.” Some of the older Tories look down their noses at Eccles as a brash publicity hunter. The truth is that he is a very good man whose reputation is likely to spread all over the world in the next decade.

Ernest Marples is another booming young Tory.

Aged 44, short, wavy-haired and precise of speech, he was born in a worker’s home in Manchester. He came to London to seek his fortune, and before he was 40 had found it — building apartments. He had sworn not to enter politics until he was financially independent —”so I should never be tempted to take a post or make a speech because my job depended on it” — and was elected an M.P. in 1945.

A man of drive and considerable assurance — the success type, if ever there was one — Marples is today the enlightened managing director of a big London civil engineering and building business. Marples’ specialty is housing. The Tories, with the re-introduction of free enterprise, aim to build 300,000 houses a year. In the big debate on housing last fall, Churchill called on Marples, whose success against the formidable Bevan on that occasion gave him a political standing overnight.

Far less spectacular than Eccles or Marples is a quiet, relatively unknown, 47-year-old lawyer named John Selwyn Lloyd.

Lloyd has a fine brain, and is devastating in debate. Lloyd is very much of a latecomer, but all the insiders speak of him with respect. And he is liked by his elders, which helps. He typifies the millions of middle-class young Britons who went through the war, understand the element of Christian generosity in the Labor movement which saves it from tawdriness, and desperately want to build an improving life for themselves and contribute to the progress of their countrymen. Selwyn Lloyd may advance slowly, but he will advance surely.

The Flannel Group This trio by no means exhausts the list of impressive Tory backbenchers. Indeed, the one thing which is more striking than their quality is their quantity. Within their party, the young Tories have to fight not so much active opposition as passive resistance, the exponents of which they have irreverently called “the flannel group” (because flannel, unlike a brick wall, resists while giving way).

Tory flannelism can still be met in small swatches everywhere.

It exists on the Tory backbenches, where there are still men who see every Laborite as a bolshevik and every reform as a snare of Satan. Most importantly, it exists among the Tory bosses.

Churchill himself is a problem. He usually runs the Tory Party rather like a British public school, where boys do not advance much out of their turn, and juniors do not supplant prefects.

Moreover, Churchill is passionately loyal, and when a man in his 77th year returns to power after being loyal all his political life, he is liable to bring with him a certain amount of dead or dying weight. Over a late drink in a West End club, young Tories have confided that they wish “someone would mow the front bench down with a machine gun,” or that “the old man, God bless him, would throw in the towel.” They feel that some senior Tories have no communion with the new Britain.

The Seniors

In fact, several of the most important Tories after Churchill are sympathetic with the new Toryism.

Anthony Eden — “my trusted deputy,” as Churchill has pointedly called him— is now the designated dauphin of the party. There is a view widely held among Tories that Churchill, whose health is uncertain and who needs rest, might not stay more than a year or so in office if elected. Then, having given the impulsion of his prestige and authority to the re-establishment of the British international position, he might hand over the reins to Eden.

At 54, Eden retains much of the glamour of the handsome, Homburg-hatted Foreign Secretary of the ’30s. He is the party’s only big drawing card apart from Churchill, and is a much better House of Commons man than his leader, who is growing deaf and is often querulous or outpaced in debate. Eden knows just how much M.P.s will take. He never makes the mistake of seeming virulent or spiteful—and is a past master at the British art of making a speech which seems to be above party politics.

Eden encourages the young Tories. He is nice to them—but then, he is nice to everyone, and that is perhaps why many sense a streak of weakness in his character.

By far the most impressive of the senior Tory leaders is 51-year-old Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, sometimes known as “deadpan David.” A lawyer, he “took silk” when he was 33; only one man in British legal history did it at an earlier age, and that was in 1668. Attorney General in 1945, he was deputy chief prosecutor at the N¨urnberg trials.

He is a man with an absolutely first-class mind. If the Tories get in, Sir David will probably be Minister of Labor. This would be a key job in any Tory government, because success in the No. 1 aim of Conservative policy—to step up production—could obviously be attained only with cooperation from the trade unions.

Maxwell Fyfe has a nervous manner, is a poor public speaker, and has little crowd appeal. But these are not insurmountable handicaps in British politics, and success in dealing with organized labor could make him the most important Tory in the land. He is a hero to many of the young Tories.

Bigger Cake & Lingering Controls The clash between the young Tories and the “flannel group” is shown in Tory policy, as set out in convenient lack of detail for the election. Churchill himself is suspicious of new approaches to economic problems, and recently growled at a specialist: “You economic experts always make it sound so complicated. After all, it’s only barter.” (Deep and disgusted Churchillian accent on the last word.) In emphasis, the split among Tories is as sharp as it is between Attlee and Bevan. The young men, for example, want to attack monopolies immediately. There is no anti-trust legislation in Britain, and about one-third of British industry is monopolistic. In denationalizing steel, the seniors are thinking of refloating the industry on the old lines, while the juniors would like to have blocs of small shares either given or made available to workers employed in the industry.

The older men mean to cut taxation first by reducing government expenditure and then by gradually building up production. The young Tories want to go all out for increased productivity from the start: “We are much more interested in having a bigger cake than in reallocating this one.” The divergence does not lie simply between the young and impatient and the old and wary. Some of the latter are not fully aware of the importance of directly associating the workers with their efforts, and perhaps underestimate the extent to which Britain can still be galvanized by inspiring leadership in a well-explained common cause.

The emphasis which all Tories place on the re-introduction of incentives to work and the competitive element does not mean that they could abolish controls overnight. The coal, railroad and road transport industries will not be denationalized. But they will be decentralized, state control will be made remoter, and management transferred as far as possible from Whitehall. The free national health service will certainly take a slash

from the Tories, who say with sincerity that there is

a minimum standard of living below which they will allow none to sink. They also like to claim that they will provide the same social services at less cost, which is electoral nonsense. One idea that the Tory brain-trusters are now considering is to make a charge for inexpensive medical drugs or treatment for minor ailments, but to give expensive drugs and major attention free to those who cannot afford to pay.

The Differences That Matter

There are no important differences between Tories on defense and foreign policy. Together they criticize Labor’s administration of the defense program, but do not think a greater effort possible at this time.

Tory quarrels with Labor on foreign policy boil down to the claim that Eden would be a more efficient Foreign Secretary. Says one Tory: “The process has always had three stages. The first is a statement by Mr. Churchill of the necessary course to take, the second a denunciation by the Prime Minister of Mr. Churchill’s ideas as puerile, the third the adoption of Mr. Churchill’s ideas by the government.”

From all these circumstances has grown one of the most widespread illusions about this crucial election: that little really separates Tories from Socialists. In fact, there are two all-important differences: 1) the difference between the man who believes in free enterprise, and only imposes controls when he sees no alternative, and the man who believes in state ownership and planning for their own sake; 2) the presence of Nye Bevan. No one doubts the patriotism of Mr. Attlee or that of the Labor Party, and Attlee has never weakened on the defense program, but it is evident that if he returned to power he would have trouble putting it over in the face of Bevan’s opposition in his own party. Bevan believes that the Russian threat is exaggerated, and that Americans are “atom happy.”

It is hard to dodge a conclusion that the Briton who is willing and able to take more than a narrow view of his own interest must take a chance with the Tories.

But, at election time, it would be Utopian to expect everyone to take more than a narrow view of his own interests. Looked at in that lazy but human light, the Tories ask for more hard work before they can promise rewards, while Labor offers the comforts as well as the inconveniences of inflation, plus the vague assurance that somehow everyone will be looked after.

The Tories are appealing not to the Briton’s traditional ability to tighten his belt, but—and profoundly—to his sense of human and national greatness.

Greatness is a subject upon which the Englishman is usually inarticulate. But the Tories like Selwyn Lloyd and David Eccles are deeply conscious of it. They know that this is a country which must live on its wits, not on its resources. They know that the Briton is born with, or has acquired through the centuries, a gift for leadership which the world can ill afford to spare. They know Britons are tired, but they don’t think Britons are ready to abdicate.

In the continuity of British life, in the strength of the fabric of its body politic—of so much sterner stuff, despite all buffetings, than that of any other European nation—in its fidelity to the old standards, combined with its curiosity about new horizons—in all these things there is evidence that the feelings of men like Eccles and Lloyd are shared by the great majority of Britons. How far they are shared, the poll next week will show.