GREAT BRITAIN: The Art of the Practical

(See Cover)

Outside Conservative Party headquarters in London’s Smith Square, jubilant crowds stumbled over TV cables and shouted noisily at each new bulletin heralding the election of yet another Tory M.P. At 1:25 a.m., long after the Laborites at their glum command post across the square had conceded defeat in Britain’s 1959 general election, an elegant, grey-haired figure in evening dress stepped from a sedan to a surge of Tory cheers. “Well done, Mac,” shouted voices. “You did it!” The tall, patrician-looking man paused for a moment, his handsome wife in blue evening gown at his side. “It has gone off rather well,” murmured Prime Minister Harold Macmillan.

Marking 28 million Xs on ballot papers that carried no mark of party affiliations but simply the names of their parliamentary candidates in 630 local constituencies, the voters of the British Isles last week gave Maurice Harold Macmillan, 65, a smashing personal triumph in one of the most decisive and significant political battles of the postwar era. Macmillan had led his party to its third straight victory and doubled its majority in the House of Commons, a feat without parallel in the annals of British politics. Overcoming a slashing Labor Party challenge, he had won his own mandate to rule Britain for the next five years. He had won, too, the right to speak for England at the summit he had done so much to promote, and to conserve and expand the Tory-fostered prosperity that had cracked the class lines of British society and provided the votes for his victory.

The victory that Macmillan brought off was of the famous kind that made Tories whoop as for Blenheim, Waterloo or Mafeking. “I reckon that 100,000 bottles of bubbly were consumed within an area of four square miles of London,” said a nightclub owner after glittering thousands had danced, drunk and cheered till dawn. The staid London Stock Exchange erupted in an exuberant burst of buying as morning-coated brokers shouted bids at lung-top, stood on chairs to make sure their bids were recognized; industrial shares soared 16.1 points for the biggest rise ever recorded in a single day. The box score of Macmillan’s win:

Seats Millions of votes

1959 (1955) 1959 (1955)

Tory 365 (345) 13.7 (13.3)

Labor 258 (277) 12.2 (12.4)

Liberal 6 (6) 1.6 (.7)

Thus, a swing to the Tories of a small fraction of the British electorate in marginal constituencies was enough to jump their Commons majority from 53 to 100 seats. Liberals, on the strength of their 1,600,000 popular vote, forecast with eager optimism that they would soon succeed Labor as the chief opposition party —a prediction that overlooked the fact that more than 40% of British voters stuck by Labor through the sweep. But the fact remained that for Britain’s 53-year-old Labor Party it was a staggering defeat, threatening to open never-healed wounds, confronting Labor’s leaders with the hard fact that Britain’s citizens want no more socialism.

Mrs. G. Complained. The man who fashioned this dramatic political triumph for Britain’s Conservatives sports the languidly aristocratic look and the offhandedly arrogant air of a lordly old Tory of the style of Wellington and Disraeli. But behind the elaborately careless Edwardian manner that provokes both cheers and jeers for “Supermac” and “Macwonder,” Harold Macmillan maintains a superbly efficient mastery of the political art of the practical. For all his proud Tory brows and mustache, Macmillan possesses an agile intelligence and free-ranging historical imagination that have enabled him to adjust cheerfully to the limits of Britain’s present-day power, and to work to make his country the “senior junior partner in the Western alliance.” And domestically Macmillan is an unabashed pragmatist who looks to the right, borrows from the left, and walks grandly through the middle in the immemorial British tradition.

Against this formidable foe, Labor had waged an aggressive “We can do it better” campaign. This display of vigor, reinforced by the unexpectedly effective performance of Labor Leader Hugh Gaitskell, upset Tory plans for a quiet election and turned the three-week campaign into the toughest-talking election battle since Labor’s 1945 victory over Winston Churchill. Said Labor’s “Nye” Sevan: “I have seen the squint in [Macmillan’s] soul.” Macmillan himself, harking back to an old description of Hugh Gaitskell as “a desiccated calculating machine,” gleefully cracked: “I still think he is rather desiccated, but his reputation as a calculator is gone with the wind. His promises are the gambler’s last throw.” “There have been a number of personal attacks on me,” said Gaitskell, “but I don’t complain.” “I complain,” Mrs. Gaitskell piped up. In his best parade-ground manner, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, no candidate but deep in the battle, barked: “Anybody who votes Labor should be locked up in a lunatic asylum.”

“I’m All Right, Jack.” Whether all this slanging had changed any votes was highly questionable. What clearly had swung the election to the Tories, as able Young Tory Labor Minister Iain Macleod had shrewdly predicted, was the growing stake in society possessed by Britain’s “new men of property”—car-owning, house-owning young workingmen whose fathers had never been able to save a shilling but who themselves were apt to have a comfortable nest egg in the local Building Society.

In the warm, sunlit autumn of 1959, Britons could unreservedly agree upon one proposition: never had so many of them had so much, with so few misgivings. The careless shrug of prosperity provided the title for Britain’s current movie hit, I’m All Right, Jack. New restaurants and coffee bars, supermarkets and service stations were mushrooming in cities; in suburban subdivisions, new houses priced from $6,000 to $12,000 often sold before the foundations were laid. In offices and factories, bulletin boards were gay with postcards from vacationing workers in Rome, Majorca, the Costa Brava.

Above all, Britain seemed to be a nation of wheels: helmeted couples on motor scooters, farmers’ wives on motor bikes, families wedged like chocolates in baby cars. In eight years of Tory rule the number of car owners in Britain had doubled; there is now a car for every 3½ families v. one for every seven families in 1951. Purchases of electrical appliances are up by a third, furniture by a fifth, largely financed on the “never-never,” as Britons call the installment plan.

Off to the Midlands. Good times, piled atop the welfare state, have created a British social revolution of dimensions hardly foreseeable even five years ago. In thousands of new municipal housing estates, streets are jammed with parked cars: there are few garages, because builders never guessed that so many low-income renters could be car owners. Refrigerators and washing machines—luxuries reserved for the few when Labor last held power in 1951—are now commonplace in workers’ homes despite a steep purchase tax. TV aerials, ten times as many as in 1951, march out over green farmlands where only a few years ago laborers’ cottages were lighted with oil lamps.

Another facet of the new Britain is its increased social mobility. The slum dwellers of London’s grimiest streets are moving in thousands to “new towns” in the countryside and to jobs in newly built chemical and plastic plants near by. In South Wales, where coalpit closings evoke bitter memories of post-World War I soup kitchens, Laborites now complain: “Our boys are going to the Midlands.” And it was among the humming steel mills and automobile factories of the Midlands that the laboring man of property led the biggest swing to the Tories.

The Successful Greek. Such a panorama of peace and prosperity was a far cry from the bitter confusion that Macmillan inherited from Sir Anthony Eden in the aftermath of the Suez invasion less than three years ago. Not since Winston Churchill took office as German armies poured across Western Europe had a British Prime Minister gone to Downing Street under more unhappy circumstances. Unemployment was rising at home, living costs were rocketing toward record heights, the pound faltered as gold and dollar reserves plunged to a five-year low. Internationally, Britain’s prestige was at its lowest ebb in modern history. The U.S. had publicly repudiated Britain, the alliance was strained, President Eisenhower had quietly refused to invite Eden and his ministers to Washington. The Commonwealth itself, led by India and Canada, had condemned Britain’s act of violence.

Moving into 10 Downing Street, Macmillan (who still proclaims, “I believe history will prove us right over Suez”) posted a line from The Gondoliers on an office door: “Calm cool deliberation disentangles every knot.” Detached, confident, unflappable, the new Prime Minister promptly began to operate on the premise that a cardinal point of British foreign policy nowadays is the amount of influence it can exert over U.S. foreign policy. Back in World War II, sent to North Africa on his first ministerial assignment by Winston Churchill, Macmillan had already accepted the inevitable British transition from senior to junior partner in the Atlantic alliance. “Never forget,” he pep-talked junior British officers at Eisenhower’s North African headquarters, “that we are the Greeks in their Roman empire.” Within five months after Suez, the Prime Minister with the proud Tory look was making the most of his wartime friendship with Ike, and of his own American blood (his mother was Helen Belles of Spencer, Ind.), to re-establish the alliance in a meeting with Ike in Bermuda.

The U.S. rift mended, Macmillan set out to repair his Commonwealth fences with a Far Eastern tour, astonished everybody by getting on splendidly with Nehru. (“I wonder if the Romans ever visited Britain after they left,” asked History Buff Macmillan at Delhi.) And last February, sporting a preposterous white astrakhan hat, he flew off to Moscow. There was derision, anger and waspish comment in Western capitals when he returned to London after a series of public humiliations from Nikita Khrushchev, to announce insouciantly that he favored a whole series of East-West summit meetings. Last week, with the West busily engaged in preparations to go to the summit with Khrushchev, he looked a good deal more realistic. So far, Harold Macmillan has been a pretty successful Greek.

The Deflationist. To stop the deadly inflationary drift he faced on Britain’s domestic front, Macmillan was ready to take bold risks. Clamping a tight credit pinch on the business economy, he forced the bank rate up to 7%, the highest level in 37 years. These daringly deflationary tactics brought on the heaviest unemployment Britain had known since World War II, and cost Macmillan’s Tories by-election after by-election, but they effectively stalled the trade unions’ drive for the annual round of handsome wage boosts.

By last spring Macmillan’s stern economic medicine was beginning to show results. When Labor M.P.s noisily demanded a debate on unemployment, Iain Macleod was able to drive them to cover by producing figures showing that the number of jobless had shrunk to 1.9% of Britain’s labor force. Since then, Britain’s prices have remained steady, and the pound holds firm despite the fact that London’s bank rate is now down to 4%. British industrial production has been rising steadily since April, is expected to top last year’s levels by 5% or 6%, and British exports are also up 6% over 1958.

The Silver Spoon. Despite the dramatic revolution he has worked in Britain’s economic fortunes, Harold Macmillan is still not every Englishman’s cup of tea. Though he assiduously keeps alive the memory of his grandfather, a Scottish tenant farmer who in 1843 walked penniless into London, there to found the publishing house of Macmillan & Co. Ltd., Harold Macmillan himself was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Endowed with the best upper-class English education (Eton and Oxford), he served as a company officer with the elite Grenadier Guards during World War I—in which he was three times wounded. Soon after the war he married Lady Dorothy Cavendish, daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, thereby acquired bonds with most of England’s remaining great Tory families.

With his country-squire manner, his tweedy attire, and his speech so casual and so polished as to invite suspicion that it has been rehearsed, Macmillan sometimes reminds his countrymen of Walter Savage Landor’s lines: “I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.” Even a Tory sympathizer, watching Macmillan on television a fortnight ago, found himself “suddenly and strangely aware of an awful feeling of class consciousness.” But those who have listened to and watched Macmillan longest remain unimpressed by such nuances, remember instead that he is a shrewd business executive and, above all, a supreme politician.

The Clubman. Unlike the moody, ill and meddling Eden, Macmillan gets the best out of his ministers and civil servants by keeping hands off their departments, taking pains to parcel out praise for good jobs, but not so profusely that the coin is devalued. An early riser, he tackles state papers as early as 6 a.m., works with such dispatch that seven secretaries, arriving at 10, find their in-boxes stuffed with documents, some inscribed with marginal notes in red ink, others with summaries of the Prime Minister’s views or orders. “Things are never on top of him; he is on top of them,” said one secretary.

Suave in a large crowd, shy in a small one, Macmillan is really at home only in the professional, forensic atmosphere of the House of Commons, in the tweedy domesticity of his Sussex country place, or in the intimate company of a few Establishment friends. He is a member of seven clubs, including those exclusive rivals, The Club and The Other Club. The night Dwight Eisenhower telephoned about the Lebanon-Jordan crisis last year, Macmillan was finally tracked down at the Buck’s Club, a tight little islet of ducal, military and shooting types. It is in such exclusive places, where he can put his long legs up with an after-dinner brandy, that Macmillan—like Palmerston, Melbourne and Asquith before him—talks out the ideas by which Britain is going to be governed in the next five years.

Division of Labor? With the mandate he now has, Macmillan is not likely to feel timid about making whatever changes he wants in his new Cabinet (see box). But the most sweeping political changes produced by last week’s election are likely to be in the Labor Party. For Labor, Macmillan’s triumph was a defeat so harsh and decisive that it posed a real question as to whether the party could survive in its present form. Hard as Hugh Gaitskell had fought to moderate the dated dogmas of socialism, the Labor Party had not been able to shake off the unpopular name of nationalization, the unhappy memory of postwar austerity or the unforgiving fetters of narrow trade union interests.

“We still represent nearly half the nation,” cried Gaitskell doggedly after the election. “We shall attack again and again until we win.” This was brave talk, but if Hugh Gaitskell continued to pursue his policy of moderation, he would run a real risk of driving Labor’s doctrinaire left wing into secession from the party. Already Aneurin Bevan. onetime leader of the Labor left wing, was ominously proclaiming: “We lost because our policy measured up too closely to Macmillan’s. Now there will be some changes.” What Bevan did not seem to appreciate was that if the changes consisted of a return to that oldtime socialist religion, Labor’s chances of winning any British election in the foreseeable future would plummet still further.

The Mountaineer. For Washington, Macmillan’s victory was unalloyed good news; U.S. officials had not been looking forward to bickering with Nye Bevan, Labor’s candidate for Foreign Secretary, over recognition of Red China or Central European disengagement. And they found no cause for dismay in the fact that Macmillan’s eyes were evidently fixed as intently as ever on the summit. (“He’s a bug on it,” said one British official.) Optimistically, Washington took the view that now Dwight Eisenhower was assured of a strong partner within the Atlantic alliance to help carry through his effort to relax East-West tensions.

For Britain the decisive election verdict ended, for all practical purposes, the threat of renationalization of the steel industry, and opened the way for a new flow of capital into the United Kingdom, already the No. 1 country in Europe for U.S. investment. The Tory sweep also cleared the decks for the economic expansion that will have to come if Britain, whose strength derives from trade, is to regain from Germany its place as the world’s second trading nation. Next spring’s budget is apt to include a modest income-tax cut and other fiscal relaxations that will enable businessmen to boost output.

No less important to Britain’s future, however, are such social goals as the Tory program to step up slum clearance and rehouse a million more Britons by 1965. For Harold Macmillan, such programs are both ethical and practical imperatives. As he sees it, the guiding principle of Tory democracy must be that laid down by his favorite predecessor, Benjamin Disraeli: “To elevate the condition of the people.” It is by elevating the condition of the people that Macmillan has led the British electorate steadily away from the sterile socialist doctrines that once threatened to emasculate the free economy that is Britain’s best hope for the future. In an electorate whose workers have become middleclass, said Macmillan in a TV victory speech last week, “the class war is obsolete.” Then, with that faintly superior smile, he added: “Nowadays it is ungrammatical but true to say that ‘us’ are ‘they’ and ‘they’ are ‘us.’ “