On Others' Toes

In the House of Commons, Clement Attlee, leader of the Opposition, had just gravely accepted Foreign Secretary Eden's announcement of the Southeast Asia agreement. Suddenly, from the farther end of the Labor front bench, burly Nye Bevan came scrambling over his colleagues' feet to reach the dispatch box. Almost stepping on Attlee's toes physically, as he was in fact politically, Bevan flatly defied his party's leader. The Asia agreement, he cried, was "a surrender to American pressure," and it "will be deeply resented by the majority of people in Great Britain." The agreement was framed, he went on, "for the purpose of imposing European colonial rule." Behind him, Attlee sat white and tense.

Next day, after a long evening's struggle with his political soul in a friend's flat, Nye Bevan told Attlee of his decision: he was resigning from the shadow cabinet and would "resume the freedom of the back benches," where he can criticize his own party leadership to his heart's content. He "profoundly disagreed" with Labor's decision to support EDC and the immediate rearmement of Germany (though privately he admits that German rearmament is inevitable). The Asia proposal, he charged, was "tantamount to the diplomatic and military encirclement" of what he persists in calling "republican China."

Ever since he made his peace with Atlee and joined the shadow cabinet after his 1951 resignation from the Labor Cabinet. Nye Bevan has been biding his time and waiting his chance to seize leadership from Atlee and the Labor moderates. But some of his closest friends admitted last week that Nye had let his emotions on the Indo-China issue and the importuning of some of his hotheaded followers get the better of his judgment. Attlee's prestige was higher than it had been in months from his responsible handling of the recent H-bomb debate, in which Churchill's attempt to score partisan points against Attlee (TIME, April 12) proved to be a bad misreading of the House's mood.

Nye's walkout left Attlee securely in command but the party as a whole weakened. It certainly jeopardized Bevan's own prospects of a Cabinet job if Labor got back in.

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