Great Britain: The Leyton Affair

It was the most shocking blow Harold Wilson’s Labor government could have received. Never before had a British Prime Minister been so brutally humiliated at so early a stage of a new government. Running for Parliament in a supposedly “safe” seat in the London constituency of Leyton, Her Majesty’s Foreign Secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, 57, was rejected by the voters —and lost his political life.

The slap was aimed not only at the Prime Minister but at his party and platform as well, as Tory Leader Sir Alec Douglas-Home was quick to emphasize. “It is the country’s verdict on the first 100 days of Socialism in practice,” crowed Sir Alec. Added Jo Grimond, leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons: “If Mr. Wil son wants to stay in office, he really must start doing things which appeal to a wider public than the hard-core Socialist voters.”

Three Crises. Gordon Walker’s defeat left Labor with only a three-vote majority in the Commons. That meant Wilson had little hope of carrying through the package of welfare legislation he had promised in his October “manifesto.” The slightest number of absentees, caused by flu or a heavy London fog, could bring about the defeat of any bill or a vote of no confidence. And while a loss on a minor bill could be shrugged off, a no-confidence vote on a major measure could force an immediate general election on terms of advantage only to Tories.

Wilson was also saddled with the need to find a successor for Gordon Walker. Trouble was, Labor had no one else with real stature in international affairs. So Wilson had to turn to a man who was a familiar figure among Labor experts, but who was unknown in the diplomatic salons of the world. He was Michael Stewart, 58, a Labor M.P. since 1945, who last October was Harold Wilson’s choice as Minister of Science and Education.

A “moderate” in the Labor Party spectrum, Stewart is a shy onetime schoolmaster who opposed Wilson’s Labor leadership when Hugh Gaitskell died in 1963, later patched things up and served Wilson competently if obscurely as a housing expert in Labor’s Shadow Cabinet. Since Stewart is so lacking in experience, Wilson obviously will have to make most foreign policy decisions himself for many months—a clearly depressing prospect for a man who has so many problems to handle on the domestic side.

The crisis that forced Wilson to reshuffle his Cabinet was the third since the new government took over. First was the threatened devaluation of the pound, which stemmed from the chronic imbalance in Britain’s foreign trade. Then there was the imbroglio over the controversial TSR-2 “Hedgehopper” bomber. Then came Leyton.

Harassing Raids. Actually, the Leyton debacle need not have happened. According to some insiders, Gordon Walker was offered a choice of three “safe” seats after his upset three months ago in an ugly racist campaign at Smethwick, a seat he had held for 19 years. One was in Scotland, the other also away from London. But Leyton—which for 32 years had returned the same familiar old Socialist, Reginald Sorensen, 73, to Parliament —was close to the heart of political power, and Gordon Walker chose to run there. Sorensen, known as “Reg” to most of his constituents in semidetached, working-class Leyton, was pressured into accepting a life peerage, reluctantly set out for the House of Lords with Wilson’s assurance that it was for the good of the party. It really wasn’t.

Leyton voters resented the callous imposition of an outsider in place of their beloved Reg. Harassing raids by British Nazis introduced the shade of the Smethwick race question into the Leyton battle (TIME, Jan. 22). Gordon Walker proved to be an inept campaigner, somehow above it all, who managed to leave the impression that he had descended by brocaded balloon from the intellectual heights of Hampstead to the depths of fish-and-chips Leyton. Sir Winston Churchill’s grave illness added to voter apathy, kept many Leytonites glued to the telly and away from the polls.

No Safe Seat. When the votes came in, Reg Sorensen’s October plurality of 7,926 melted to nothing, then less than nothing. The final count: Tory Ronald Buxton, 16,544; Gordon Walker, 16,-339. To further tarnish Labor’s image, Technology Minister Frank Cousins—an old union man who had never run for Parliament before—faced a “safe” seat situation similar to Gordon Walker’s in the Midlands constituency of Nuneaton. Where his predecessor won the seat by 11,702 votes last October, Cousins could only win by 5,241. The message from Leyton and Nuneaton was much the same: from here on out, there is really no safe seat for Harold Wilson anywhere.

More by-election tests were ahead. Next month, three Tory seats will be tested. If the Conservatives should win by increased majorities this will add to the Labor Party.