GREAT BRITAIN: The Balloon & the Cigar

It is traditional for the men of the House of Marlborough to marry pretty women, love the British Empire, dine well and raise hell in politics. Lord Randolph Churchill, father of Winston, had “force, caprice and charm.” At times he also had bitter words for his colleagues in the House of Commons and blunt criticism of mismanaged government.

Like his father whom he idolized, Prime Minister Winston Churchill has found much to criticize in British Government. After World War I he wanted his comrades in victory to abolish the two-party system because he believed then that it would “paralyze the action of the states.” Before World War II his voice rose loudest in criticizing the appeasers of Munich and the iniquities of the Tory Party machine.

Last week, true to tradition, another Churchill had added his say about how Britain should be governed. He was the Prime Minister’s brash and volatile son, Major Randolph Churchill, an M.P. for the Lancashire cotton-weaving town of Preston, who was on one of his leaves from duty in Egypt.

Young (31) Randolph Churchill is not as young as he once was, nor as amusing. At the age of 19, sure of himself and the world’s affairs, he lectured in the U.S. on such subjects as: The British Empire and World Progress; Why I am not a Socialist.

Returning home, young Randolph lectured British audiences on life in America and the poor quality of American food. He got a job earning £2,000 a year working for the Hearst press. (To a British aristocrat the source of money is of small importance.) But he itched to be a proper politician. He tried three times, a boisterous, hard-hitting, unsuccessful candidate for Parliament who rebelled against Conservative Party tactics and advice. One month after World War II began he married redhaired, green-eyed Socialite Pamela Digby, daughter of the nth Baron Digby. He was then a subaltern in the exclusive the Queen’s Own Hussars. In 1940 he finally got his seat in Parliament in an unopposed election. His father, whom he adores, sponsored him before the House, beamed like a sunflower shortly thereafter when his son’s first child was christened Winston.

In Egypt as a press-relations officer, young Randolph won the respect of correspondents writhing under stupid Egyptian and British censorship. In 1942 he joined up as a commando, was injured last May in an auto accident. Invalided home, young Churchill took the long route, via the U.S. Here he visited politicians in Washington, production men in Detroit and nightclubs in New York.

Back in England it was no more possible for Churchill to keep quiet about politics than it has ever been for other members of his family (except when they are running the show). To his constituents in Preston he expounded the post-war aims of “thinking people of all classes” as “the abolition of unemployment, equality of education and opportunity . . . removal of class distinction.”

The Churchillian gifts of caprice and phrase made him add that if the Labor Party and the Tory Party did not mend their ways “a party of the center” may emerge and throw them. Observers noted the similarity between some of Churchill’s ideas and those of a new political (ginger) group which has emerged officially under the title Common Wealth.*

Labor’s London Daily Herald editorialized that “center parties have no place in the British political system. They create a confusion in which democracy is weakened and dictatorship fertilized.” Randolph snapped back with an attack on “unrepentant Munichmen” and Trades Union Congress Laborites. “more anxious to have political power than to achieve desirable public ends.” He repeated his claims that modern government is “an adventurous and exciting science” and that the British public wants a change.

But last week Randy formally abandoned his theories of a center party, explaining that he had advocated it as a “trial balloon.” Commented the News Chronicle: “One cannot avoid the suspicion that it was an older member of the Churchill family who stuck a needle—possibly a lighted cigar—into the trial balloon.”

* Led by Writer J. B. Priestley, rich and liberal Sir Richard Acland and socialist M.P. Vernon Bartlett. the Common Wealth is demanding that one-third of the House of Commons resign and stand for re-election.