Great Britain: Outlook: Macleody

At their annual conference at Brighton last week, the Tories debated their future. During the speeches and the votes, the man who will have most to do with that future sat silently on the sidelines. But little escaped his clinical blue eyes and card-index memory, and this week Iain Norman Macleod, 47, goes into action as new chairman of the Conservative Party, bringing with him the kind of dynamism that wins elections.

On the eve of the party conference, bald, stocky (5 ft. 9 in., 190 Ibs.) Iain Macleod, who had been Colonial Secretary for two years, was transferred by Prime Minister Macmillan to the key posts of party chairman and leader of the House of Commons. Though seemingly unconcerned as Tory fortunes sagged to their lowest point in more than four years, heavy-lidded Harold Macmillan can react under pressure like Mac the Knife. Pulling his switchblade, he lopped off his liabilities, pinned down his most formidable adversary, and cleared the path toward the next general election.

Out from the Nerve Center. To move up Macleod, Macmillan relieved Home Secretary Richard Austen Butler, 58, as party chairman and Commons leader. Macmillan’s overt aim was to free Butler to act as his personal deputy, and take charge of the group of ministers assigned to handle Britain’s crucial negotiations with the European Common Market. Shrewd, tart-tongued “Rab” Butler, who has long been Macmillan’s chief rival for 10 Downing Street, was thus removed from the party’s nerve center to an assignment that could make or break the government—but will reflect luster, if Britain enters the Common Market on favorable terms, mainly on Harold Macmillan.

Into Macleod’s old job went the Board of Trade’s Reginald Maudling, 44, who has little knowledge of the government’s complex colonial problems, which have become a major source of disaffection within the Conservative Party. By installing a new man in the Colonial Office, Macmillan effectively forestalled criticism at the party conference; but the move will not easily brake the African colonies’ full-throttled advance to independence.

Too Left to Be Right. As Colonial Secretary, Iain Macleod liquidated African colonies at a clip that would soon have liquidated the Colonial Office. Diehard imperialists argued that he was selling the white man down the river, but Macleod’s policy was built on bedrock Tory principles: duty and realism. With most young Britons, he believes Whitehall has a responsibility to bring the colonies to mature independence and membership in a multiracial Commonwealth. Pragmatically, he knows well that no force on earth can halt the tide of nationalism. But Macmillan realized that if Macleod had stayed on, his colonial policies would have brought down on him the Tory censure that kept his old patron. Rab Butler, from becoming Prime Minister: “He’s too far left to be right.”

By moving him to his new job, Macmillan clearly opened the gate to Macleod’s eventual succession as Prime Minister. No clear heir apparent had previously been allowed to emerge, but Harold Macmillan,at 67, is beginning to feel his age. At Brighton last week, he allowed that he would not be “at the helm for all of that time.” He added: ”For, like one of Shakespeare’s characters,*I do not intend to live after my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff of younger spirits.”

Iain Macleod’s value to the party lies largely in the fact that he is detached from the vanishing aristocratic tradition that equated Conservatism with “toffee-noses,” as the English call stuffed shirts. The affable, convivial son of a Scots doctor, Macleod is by his own definition “upper classless.” When he went into politics as a “backroom boy” in 1946, his main loyalty was to the “One Nation” envisaged by Disraeli: in today’s terms, a broadly libertarian society free of pre-war Britain’s corrosive class distinctions.

Too Clever by Half. In 1959, as chief strategist of the party’s General Election campaign, Macleod tailored the Tory image to the ideal of a “property-owning democracy.” He argued that in newly prosperous Britain, the new and ever-growing middle class is more concerned with improving its living standards and educating its children than with political dogma. Snorted Macleod: “The Socialists haven’t had a new idea in 30 years.” Blossoming as a TV star in the campaign, he confirmed voters’ worst doubts about Labor’s pie-in-the-sky program with the simple question: “How are you going to pay for it?” Labor never did explain, but the Tories won their third straight victory with an increased majority—a feat no other government had achieved in Britain for more than a century.

Canny convivial Iain Macleod is an authority on bridge (his first rule: “Always scheme to give the defenders as many chances of guessing wrong as you can contrive”), and the author of a biography of Neville Chamberlain to be published this month. A wartime infantry major—he still limps from a wound suffered before Dunkirk—he is married to an attractive justice of the peace who is partially crippled by polio, has two children. His greatest political assets: timing, subtlety, rock-solid patience. If he has a liability, it is the uniquely British fault of being “too clever by half,” i.e., showing it. It was not one that troubled the Tories last week. “The outlook,” went their quip, “is definitely Macleody.”

*The King, in All’s Well That Ends Well.