World: MAUDLING: An Undeserved Reputation for Indolence

BRITAIN’S new Chancellor of the Exchequer has a voracious appetite for good food—and tackles complex economic issues with the same gusto. Youngest of six postwar Tory Chancellors (he is 45), breezy, beefy Reginald Maudling is a warm, relaxed middle-of-the-roader with a fast, fluent tongue and a nimble mind. He likes to recall the advice of his tutor at Oxford: “Philosophy progresses not by finding the answers but by progressively clarifying the questions.” Reggie Maudling’s talent for clarifying policy questions—and finding answers—has earned him recognition as one of the most vigorous intellects in British public life today, and a likely Prime Minister in the future.

Incentives to Expand. Next to the Prime Minister himself, the Chancellor of the Exchequer treads the highest wire in British government. In a nation that survives by importing raw materials, turning them into manufactured goods and exporting them again, living standards can only be realistically improved by boosting productivity, which in Britain has grown at less than half the rate of its European trade rivals. An easy-money boom (“You never had it so good”) led to dangerous inflation that threatened to price British goods out of world markets. Chancellor Selwyn Lloyd has had to clamp drastic restraints on wages (the “pay pause”) and credit, thereby deeply alienating the traditionally Tory middle class. Though his harsh medicine was necessary, Lloyd’s pious manner of dishing it out irked even his colleagues, who term 1962-style austerity “Selwynism.”

The new Chancellor is expected to ease credit restrictions a notch, lighten the 10% purchase tax on homes that has helped to perpetuate Britain’s housing shortage. But eventually he will face the same problems as his predecessor, will have to try to maintain the pay pause—which the government now euphemistically calls “incomes policy.” In the long term, Maudling hopes he can give labor and industry the incentives for the vigorous economic expansion that will in turn finance sorely needed school and hospital construction—and pave the way for another Tory election victory.

Success in Supply. Reggie Maudling’s open, persuasive manner is the antithesis of Selwynism. Unlike his predecessor, who has always been ill at ease in the House of Commons, Maudling is a born debater with a stylish turn of phrase and a quick wit. Once, when a Labor critic jeered at the government’s decision to cut beer taxes, Maudling shot back: “I detect one or two notes of acidity, no doubt arising from mixing cheap bitter and sour grapes.” Maudling, whose own tastes run to dry martinis and dancing barefoot on the Riviera with his pretty wife, has an undeserved reputation for indolence. According to a malicious rhyme that once made the rounds of the Commons, Reg Has no edge And Maudling Is dawdling.

FAMILY But despite his deceptively casual manner, wartime R.A.F. Officer Maudling was one of the brightest and most diligent of the “backroom boys” who helped to liberalize Tory policy in the early 1950s.

Elected to Parliament in 1950, Maudling became right-hand man to “Rab” Butler, now First Secretary of State, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer. In 1955, as Minister of Supply, he successfully streamlined Britain’s aviation industry, got it to mass-produce planes instead of blueprints. Maudling’s biggest failure came in 1957, when he led Britain’s attempt to forestall the European Common Market with a 17-nation free-trade area. Though negotiations were broken off by France, even his friends concede that Maudling was bored by the long-drawn discussions and dubious about Britain’s need to join Europe. Today he is one of the government’s leading “Europeans” and a stout proponent of Britain’s entry into the Common Market.

Roadblocks in Africa. In 1959 Maudling became Harold Macmillan’s youngest Cabinet member. He retrieved his reputation as President of the Board of Trade, a key economic post in which, despite gloomy expectations, he managed to expand Britain’s trade with the Common Market. A tough, pragmatic bargainer who is trusted by the party’s right wing (he did not oppose the Suez invasion), he was picked last year to succeed Iain Macleod as Colonial Secretary, has quietly demolished some herculean roadblocks in the path of independence for African territories, notably in reaching agreement last month on a five-year plan to settle 70,000 landless natives on a million acres of Kenya’s choice White Highland farmland.

Part of Maudling’s success as a politician lies in his ability to present unpalatable arguments in rational, easy-to-take terms. Discussing Britain’s economic problems, he said recently: “No one wishes to return to the old, harsh disciplines of unemployment and grinding poverty. But unless their place is taken by the self-discipline of a responsible society, the whole basis of a free economy—and therefore of a free society—is in jeopardy.” The nation may react to such Maudling talk as it did to Selwynism, but, grins the new Chancellor, “I’m an optimist.”