Churchill Reshuffle

The making of one of Her Majesty's ministers in Britain is something akin to turning out a good Scotch whisky. It takes considerable mellowing in the cask of Commons, a goodly bit of gentle sloshing about in the lower recesses of the ship of state and a year or two in the political cellar of some influential member of Her Majesty's government.

But last week, Prime Minister Winston Churchill uncorked a rare exception to the formula. As his new Minister of Health, one of the toughest jobs in the government, he appointed Iain Macleod, a wee but peppery native of the Scotch-bibbing Western Isles who is only 38 and has barely completed two years in Parliament.

Macleod really made his mark with one speech six weeks ago when he took on and bested Leftist Aneurin Bevan, the undisputed heavyweight debating champ on the opposition side of the House. Even though the subject was socialized medicine, which Bevan considers his own, Macleod outreached him with facts, outgunned him with ridicule (TIME, April 7).

Winning the Blue. A small, pale man with waning hair and a limp brought on by World War II wounds, Macleod speaks a scholar's Gaelic and a debater's English. He went about getting into politics the way he went about winning his "blue" (i.e., school letter) at Cambridge. Only fair at sports, he started a bridge club and thus won his blue (going on to become one of Britain's bridge aces in international tourneys and bridge editor for the London Sunday Times'). When he wanted to enter Parliament after the war, he contested for a seat in the Western Isles which the Tories had not even tried to win since 1931, and so distinguished himself in losing that the party took him on its domestic policy "brain trust" in 1946, and then got him a parliamentary seat in the 1950 elections.

As Minister of Health, Macleod succeeds overworked Tory Veteran Harry Crookshank, 58, but Crookshank stays on as leader in the House of Commons. To solace Crookshank, Churchill also made him Lord Privy Seal, which is all honor and no work.

Wave from the Left. Since Macleod belongs to the young Turk Tory faction led by Chancellor of the Exchequer Rab Butler, Churchill carefully balanced the appointment by making one of Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden's proteges Colonial Minister: Henry Hopkinson, a handsome ex-Foreign Office man with an American wife. To complete the reshuffle, Churchill sent the outgoing Colonial Minister, Right-Winger Alan Lennox Boyd, to the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation, to replace John Maclay, who resigned after being sent to a sickbed by a job that was too much for him.

The reshuffling, which was generally applauded, came at a time when voters all over Britain were showing their dissatisfaction with Churchill's six-month-old Tory government. In a new wave of local elections, the Labor Party won control of 101 borough councils and cut sharply into Tory majorities in many others. In the past month, Laborites have gained a net of 546 local government seats; the Tories have lost a net of 501. Far from panicked by the trend, the Prime Minister took the occasion to announce that he was buttressing his cabinet for "three or four years of stable government."

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