GREAT BRITAIN: Never ‘Ad It So Good

Venturing forth early last week from Chequers, country residence of Britain’s Prime Ministers, Tory Squire Harold Macmillan earnestly read the lesson (Joel 2: 15-16) at the Anglican parish church of Ellesborough. “Blow the trumpet in Zion,” he intoned; “call a solemn assembly: gather the people.” Barely 36 hours later, after a fast flight to Balmoral Castle in Scotland, Macmillan officially advised Queen Elizabeth that he planned to call a general election on Oct. 8.

“Important international negotiations lie ahead,” said Macmillan. “It is clearly right that the people should have the opportunity of deciding, as soon as practicable, who are to represent them in these negotiations.” The papers immediately labeled it a “summit election,”, and Opposition Leader Hugh Gaitskell, caught off base visiting Premier Khrushchev in Moscow, hurried home to take up the challenge. Asked Laborite Gaitskell at London airport: Isn’t it “better to be represented by people who have all along believed in the need for a summit meeting?”

The Suntan Vote. Never before had a British party won three straight general elections without coalition support, but there was little doubt that Macmillan, a master of political maneuver, had chosen the top psychological moment. The Tories’ Suez fiasco and its architect, Sir Anthony Eden, were fading into oblivion; the Macmillan government was basking in the new Anglo-American warmth generated by President Eisenhower’s triumphal tour. Even the Queen’s prospective baby and the sensationally brilliant summer seemed to count in the government’s favor. Macmillan, complained Labor Party Chairman Barbara Castle, was “rushing to the country in a suntan election to mobilize the heat-wave vote.”

Fact was that such favorite Labor Party targets as the bloody consequences of Tory colonial policy in Kenya and Cyprus seemed unlikely to cut much ice. The real issue in the election is the rising standard of living and its continuance. On that score, wavy-haired Hugh Gaitskell, Oxford-trained economist who was Chancellar of the Exchequer in Labor’s last government, was in the awkward position of arguing: “We can do it better.” Last week, with unemployment dropping and installment buying at an alltime high, Britain, was riding a wave of prosperity so general that even a delegate to the Trades Union Congress in Blackpool echoed Macmillan’s airy slogan, said: “We’ve never ‘ad it so good.” According to the Gallup poll, the Tories were 5½ points up on the Socialists, enough to return them with perhaps twice their present 60-seat majority in Parliament.