Great Britain: A Psychological Case?

On London’s cocktail-party circuit, the 200-page manuscript that was handed to Harold Macmillan last week had been billed in advance as a sort of Tropic of Mayfair. Compiled by Lord Denning, Britain’s second highest judicial official, the manuscript was the result of an exhaustive, three-month investigation into the security aspects of the great Profumo-Keeler-Ivanov scandal. But the churchgoing, teetotal jurist had also been directed by the Prime Minister to look into “rumors which affect the honor and integrity of public life,” meaning gleeful, persistent gossip that several other ministers in Macmillan’s government have indulged in profumian revels.

Headless Man. A reform-minded judge who once declared that “it is impossible to draw the line between crime and sin,” Lord Denning, 64, set about his assignment by interviewing 160 Britons, ranging from Harold Macmillan (twice) to Call Girl Mandy Rice-Davies, who gushed: “He’s the nicest judge I ever met.” He checked into the Argyll divorce case, in which an unidentified lover of the duchess—known as “the headless man” because his face had been cropped from nude snapshots that were introduced at the trial—had been rumored to be a Cabinet minister.

Denning even questioned witnesses about the warm-blooded aristocrat who, said Mandy and others, served Mayfair dinner guests in a black mask and little else. Finally, after a secretary had typed Denning’s 60,000 handwritten words on his findings, Macmillan spent a late night digesting the top-secret report, called a special Cabinet meeting to discuss it, and showed it to Opposition Leader Harold Wilson. Then Denning’s opus went to the printer for official publication this week.

No Special Session. It will land with a dull thud on the party circuit. Word soon leaked that the report contains no suggestion that any ministers save Jack Profumo had been flagrantly indiscreet, or that the former Secretary for War had been guilty of any breach of security. However, the report was expected to criticize Macmillan’s government for its failure to act in the Profumo case for more than a year after security agents were aware that the War Secretary was sharing Christine Keeler’s favors with Soviet Naval Attaché Evgeny Ivanov. This aspect of the case, which has drawn the Labor Party’s fire from the beginning, prompted Harold Wilson to demand that the House of Commons be recalled from vacation for a special session next month to review the Denning report. Prime Minister Macmillan denied the request.

The House debate will probably be held soon after Parliament reconvenes Oct. 29, and already there was talk that if it does not prove too damaging to the government, Macmillan may decorously make way for the younger leader for whom many Tories are clamoring. Lingering Tory hopes of a quickie election this fall were dented last week by the latest Gallup poll, which indicated that the nation’s vigorous economic recovery had done nothing to restore voters’ confidence in the government. If elections were held tomorrow, said Gallup, a record 42% would vote Labor, only 29% Conservative, a 5% gain for Labor since August 1942.

“The English Sickness.” The truth is that neither political party has succeeded in firing the nation’s imagination. Even the most challenging issue in Britain’s postwar history, its membership in a unified Europe, is slowly foundering in apathy or outright Europhobia. In the nine months since Charles de Gaulle put out the unwelcome mat, more and more Britons have come around to the condescending view that enforced intimacy with Continentals might fatally corrupt their demi-Eden.

One of the most surprising pleas for Little England came last week from the Bow Group, the generally liberal Young Turks of the Tory Party, which issued a minority report vehemently opposing its leaders’ determination to join the Common Market. Its basic theme is that “the continuing and ever-surprising failure of the French, Germans and Italians to adopt the methods of government in which the British can operate with any satisfaction” reveals an irreconcilable difference “of temperament and outlook which they have no intention of remedying.”

Those who still believe that Britain will have to join Europe argue that Britain’s stabilizing influence would in itself go far toward bridging such differences. But there are deeper and less rational reasons for British insularity. In a new book called Great Britain or Little England?, Author John Mander, assistant editor of Encounter, blames the tragedy of Dunkirk, “which strengthened out insularity where it ought to have destroyed it once and for all.” Dunkirk, he reasons, “meant the physical expulsion of Britain from Europe” and at the same time “sharpened her sense of distinction” from the conquered nations across the Channel.

Psychologically, British mistrust of foreigners is a relection of what Europeans call the “English sickness” of national snobbery, which sees Britain, in the Economist’s words, “forever in a special and protected proconsular role across the world, with power or without. This still eats into the assumptions and the policies, not just of Tory traditionalists, but of Labor and Liberal ones as well.”

For all its resources of political experiencec and industrial skill, Britain, nearly two decades since war’s end, has yet to adjust to the realities of its new place in the world, or even to accept them. Thus, warned the usually pro-government London Times last week, “the mood in which the general election is fought could be even more important that who wins it. To the outside world, Britain now seems something of a psychological case.”