GREAT BRITAIN: Trenchant Tory

In his first nine months as the Queen’s First Minister, Harold Macmillan has been a good deal more effective in Cabinet and Commons than in the country at large. He commands debate by knowing his mind; he has repaired the party damage of Suez by acting as if it had never happened, while keeping on one of its architects, Selwyn Lloyd, as Foreign Secretary. His administration has not hesitated to make bold and imaginative redefinitions of military and economic policy. Yet Macmillan has not yet succeeded in translating his primacy among politicians into popularity among the people: in the latest test, a Gloucester by-election fought last fortnight, the Conservative poll tumbled a full 20%, a loss surpassing any suffered in Eden’s bleakest days.

Last week, with general elections barely two years away at the most, Prime Minister Macmillan moved to repair his government’s unpopularity. In the most important of several Cabinet shifts, Macmillan promoted his Education Minister, Viscount Hailsham, 49, to the top Cabinet post of Lord President of the Council, where he will be one of an inner four (along with Lloyd, Home Secretary Richard A. Butler and the Exchequer’s Peter Thorneycroft) though not saddled with a ministry. He then named Hailsham chairman of the Conservative Party.

For Queen & Country. The most vehement, articulate and dynamic of the new generation of Tory ministers, Hailsham is a meaty, Churchill-jawed figure of fire and ambition who has emerged since Suez as a popular leader despite what he regards as the blight of nobility. When, as Quintin McGarel Hogg, an Oxford undergraduate of 22, he learned that his father had accepted his first peerage, he literally danced with rage, shouting: “He’s done it without consulting me! It will interfere with my political career!” As young Hogg realized, it has been generally acknowledged for the past 30 years that a Prime Minister must be a member of the Lower House in order to espouse his policies there.

After a brilliant Oxford career, Hogg excelled in London law courts, won a seat in Commons (as an all-out supporter of Chamberlain’s appeasement policy), was wounded fighting in Africa, helped form a Tory Reform movement in Parliament for wider welfare measures.

In 1950 his father died, and Quintin Hogg, after a fruitless appeal to Prime Minister Attlee, wrathfully denounced “the arrogance of ministers” who declined to change constitutional practice so that he might stay on in the House of Commons. Hogg became Viscount Hailsham, and stomped off to what he called the “political ghetto,” the House of Lords.

Erudite, self-assured and sometimes petulant, Hailsham, a devout Tory of the “For Queen and Country” tradition, does not suffer fools gladly—and he includes as fools a wider group than do more prudent politicos. Outspoken to the point of bluster, courageous to the point of rashness, he sounded off from the Lords against nationalized industry, Socialism (“imposed equality”), in favor of capital punishment, against lowbrow radio and TV programs, and above all, for a “firm” British line in foreign affairs. After Suez he came into his own as the party’s favorite orator, blurting openly what many Conservatives felt. Never failing to mention first that he is part American (his maternal grandfather was Judge Trimble Brown of Nashville, Tenn.), he went on to say: “Almost for the first time in my life, I have begun to find it hard to say that I am half American, and still harder to say that I am proud of it.” Then he proclaimed roundly: “We do not wish to hear any moral lectures from those whose moral weakness and incapacity to see the facts was the precipitating factor in the [Suez] crisis.”

Sour Opinion. Most observers blame the new Tory electoral setbacks on inflation and the unpopular Rent Law. Hailsham, taking office last week, characteristically issued a more sweeping pronouncement: “I believe that public opinion in Britain has never been so sour; the people have lost confidence in democratic life.” Old-regimental tie (the Rifle Brigade) awry, he tossed in a few reassurances that he would be “a member of the team” and “a listening post.”

“Just the man to revive Conservative enthusiasm,” acknowledged the left-wing New Statesman. But the Economist thought the appointment “a mistake,” forecasting that so robust and ambitious a spokesman would tend to report not what the constituencies want but “what he personally thinks they ought to want.” Either way, Hailsham would soon be heard from, doing his provocative utmost to arrest what he calls “a fall in the tone of public controversy.”