Great Britain: Anybody’s Race

Heading toward the Oct. 15 balloting, Britain’s election campaign was hotting up last week—and so were the candidates, frequently egged on by hecklers. In Lancashire, Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home, in fact, took a live egg square between the shoulder blades, and was booed down by sign-waving youths (WHO EXHUMED YOU?) in Birmingham. He got so riled trying to make himself heard in suburban London that he snapped: “I don’t mind opposition, but I’m not prepared for people who won’t listen.”

Deputy Labor Leader George Brown had to run a gantlet through Wellingborough public schoolboys with Tory leaflets stuck in their boaters, who chanted “rubbish” every time he opened his mouth. “I take it for granted that you’re an expert on it,” he shouted back. Brown proved himself no expert on the subtleties of British economic life when he promised that Labor would cut mortgage rates to a ludicrously low 3% from their present 6% levels, which might appeal to house-hungry slum dwellers, but which to most informed Britons would merely sound like confirmation of Sir Alec’s allegation that the Labor economic program was a “menu without prices.” Harold Wilson committed a gaffe of his own, charging a “Tory plot” behind a strike at the Hardy Spicer factories that threatens to idle Britain’s whole automotive industry. He was promptly slapped with a slander suit by the Hardy Spicer management while Sir Alec chortled “panic.”

But for all the histrionics, neither side could really prick the apparent lack of interest on the part of the electorate in the issues that matter to the parties. For Labor, as Wilson thundered last week, the paramount issue is “the economic crisis which every expert expects to follow this election boom.” For the Tories, it is the retention of British control over nuclear weapons—”the ticket to the top table” in world affairs, as Home put it.

Preoccupied with pub, pram and payments on their proliferating cars and washing machines, the British voters continued to bask in a magnificent Indian summer, seemed interested mostly in the diversions of the campaign. The Daily Mail put on the front page a picture of a pretty makeup girl powdering Sir Alec’s nose before a TV appearance, relegated what he said to page 6.

The Gallup poll for the first time last week reported the Conservatives ahead, thus making unanimous the swelling Tory tide that Britain’s two other public opinion surveys noted weeks ago. But at the same time Gallup oddly confessed that a random survey taken to double-check its scientific sample showed the opposite—Labor still slightly ahead—and the bookmakers agreed. Which presumably left it still anybody’s race.