GREAT BRITAIN: The Aftermath

Fortnight ago, when they handed him the most decisive British electoral victory since World War II, Britons in effect ordered Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to give them more of the same—more prosperity, more economic growth, more social reform. Last week, as he reshuffled his Cabinet, Tory Macmillan made it plain that he had got the message.

Macmillan’s most significant move was to name reform-minded Home Secretary R. A. Butler to the additional post of chairman of the Conservative Party. By so doing, the Prime Minister served notice on Tory Blimps that their party’s whopping 100-seat majority was not to be taken as an excuse for a massive assault on the welfare state or the class-cracking redistribution of Britain’s wealth that has occurred under “the new Conservatism.” At the same time, Macmillan effectively sidetracked Butler from the Foreign Office (which Butler badly wanted), thereby cleared the way for keeping Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd, who is content to let Macmillan make foreign policy.

The Repairman. Most of the rest of Macmillan’s Cabinet changes were little more than moves to patch up weak spots or to map out new areas of government concentration. To unsnarl Britain’s crippling traffic problem, he gave the Ministry of Transport to Ernest Marples, a self-made businessman who rose from a Manchester slum to become Macmillan’s indispensable No. 2 man when the P.M. was Housing Minister. Rab Butler’s predecessor as party chairman, the ebullient Lord Hailsham, was named Lord Privy Seal—a post in which he will serve as a kind of scientific overseer in charge of coordinating Britain’s advances in medicine, atomic energy, agriculture and education. As such. Hailsham will work closely with red-headed Duncan Sandys who stepped over from the Ministry of Defense to the Ministry of Aviation—a newly created department that will supervise both commercial and military aviation, thereby supply a key link between science, industry and defense.

Macmillan’s choice to replace Sandys-ex-Transport Minister Harold Watkinson —was the only real dark horse, since he has as yet had little chance to distinguish himself. Far more predictable was the resignation of Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd. By divesting himself of Lennox-Boyd, Macmillan also divested his government of some of the lingering stigma of colonial setbacks in Cyprus, Kenya and Central Africa and opened up a tricky but potentially politically rewarding job for able, ambitious Iain Macleod, previously Minister of Labor.

Backward Glance. While 10 Downing Street hummed with this high-level version of “going to Jerusalem,” heavy silence hung over the Hampstead retreat of defeated Labor Party Leader Hugh

Gaitskell. But with Labor’s executive committee scheduled to hold its first postelection meeting next week, other Labor leaders were howling for a change. Labor’s trouble, proclaimed Aneurin Bevan, did not imply public rejection of socialism because Labor had not “held aloft the banner of socialism” but had fought on “issues that can only be described as pre-1914 liberalism . . .” Nine days after the election, Deputy Labor Party Leader James Griffiths, 69, resigned so that younger men could look into the “reexamining and reorganization” of che party. Some Laborites predicted that the mercurial Bevan would allow himself at 61 to be put into Griffiths’ job; others insisted that he would revert to his old role as leader of a left-wing revolt against Gaitskell’s leadership.

But the most provocative Labor postmortem came from the right wing of the party rather than the left. “If Labor is ever going to win a future election,” wrote Economist Douglas Jay, one of Gaitskell’s closest advisers, “we must re move the first two fatal handicaps—the class image and the myth of nationalization. We are in danger of fighting under the label of a class that no longer exists. We must purge propaganda phrases such as ‘the militant working class,’ ‘working class solidarity’ and all the rest.”

So far, none of Labor’s leaders had shown any interest in Liberal Party Leader Jo Grimond’s broad hint that Labor might do well to contract a marriage of convenience with his growing following, but in a final burst of daring, Economist Jay did go so far as to suggest that the very name “Labor” might have become a handicap. “Might there be a case,” he asked, “for amending it to ‘Labor and Radical’ or ‘Labor and Reform’?”