Great Britain: Home in the Highlands

For the Highland villagers of Perthshire, Britain’s Prime Minister last week put on the liveliest show since Bonnie Prince Charlie battled through their misty glens in 1745. In Dalguise and Dunkeld, Amulree and Buchanty, and scores of other grey hamlets and market towns, Sir Alec Douglas-Home shook hands with shepherds and shopkeepers, downed a wee drappie with farmers, popped into cottages, schools and smithies. The Prime Minister even took a noble pratfall in the mud as he was scrambling up a haycart to address the folk in sleepy Dunning. “Well,” he grinned, getting to his feet, “it’s better to fall now than later.”

On the stump, Douglas-Home seemed relaxed and slip-proof. To win election to Parliament from the safe Tory seat, he raced through the glens in a fast black Humber, making dozens of plain-spoken speeches on topics ranging from winter grain prices to East-West relations. Wearing a battered tweed jacket and a jauntily angled checked-cloth cap, he fielded involved local questions with a barrage of statistics that showed he had done his homework in the hillside cottage near Comrie that became the official seat of government during the campaign. When heckling stirred an uproar in the crowd he was addressing at Aberfeldy, the Prime Minister calmly sat down in mid-speech, refusing to let party stewards throw out the interrupters. Said he: “They are harmless people.”

As Douglas-Home put it, “the eyes of the world” last week were on rural Perthshire; but Tories’ eyes were focused on a far more critical by-election this week in Luton, an automotive center 30 miles from London where experts detect a swing to Labor after 13 years of Tory majorities. As Luton goes, said the pundits, so may most other industrial areas where Labor has traditionally been strongest. Speaking more to Luton’s floating voter than the faithful in Perth, the Prime Minister used every crossroads stopover last week to inveigh against the Labor Party’s “card-index, button-pushing society.” With a socialist government, said he, “we would be like puppets on long strings of red tape, with the strings pulled in Whitehall.” To his listeners’ delight, the Prime Minister invariably added: “As a Scotsman, I never think Whitehall knows best.”