What Politics Is About

At the beginning of the week. Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was plainly in trouble. Lord Salisbury, the remote and formidable Kingmaker (as the British press liked to call him), had abruptly quit the government over its freeing of Archbishop Makarios (TIME, April 8). Tory M.P.s were muttering about the "intense humiliation" Macmillan had brought on the country in Bermuda by making Britain dependent on U.S. guided missiles--minus their nuclear warheads. Within Britain itself 1,700,000 workers were still out on strike, and the pound sterling was fluttering.

Ominously, the News Chronicle's latest Gallup poll showed that if a general election were held now, 40% of those asked would vote Labor, only 31% Conservative. Never in recent years had Labor held such a lead. But the poll also logged a record number of "Don't Know" votes (21 1/2%)--and strangely enough, most of these were reported by pro-Labor voters. If Britons were dissatisfied with the go-day-old Conservative Macmillan government, they were also dubious about Laborite Hugh Gaitskell's Opposition.

Labor Trouble. At this point, Macmillan's fortune took a turn for the better and Gaitskell's for the worse. Opening the Bermuda debate in the House of Commons, Macmillan boldly seized on the left-wing Laborite cry for calling a halt to H-bomb tests, before Britain has a chance to try out the first one it has made. "Would the right honorable gentleman accept the logical consequences of abandoning the tests, which means abandoning the weapon?" asked Macmillan. Gaitskell retreated. Finally he replied: ''The Prime Minister is perfectly right. Our party decided to support the manufacture of the H-bomb here." Thereupon a noisy revolt broke out in the Labor Party.

Echoing the classical threat in Lysistrata, Mrs. Norah Hinks urged the National Conference of Labor Women at Torquay to lock their husbands out of their bedrooms until the government agreed to call off the H-bomb tests. After three hours' bitter wrangling with the pacifists and Bevanites in his own parliamentary party, Gaitskell caved in. To avoid a party split, he backed a compromise, urging postponement of the tests for a "limited period."

This irresolute performance was the biggest blow to Gaitskell's prestige since he took over leadership from Clem Attlee 15 months ago. Ex-Tyneside Miner Billie Blyton in an angry speech declared he had never seen such "knock-kneed" leadership in his life, and once again there were many to say that Nye Be van (now living it up on a tour of India) was, after all, the party's best choice for leadership. Such talk always pleases the Tories--Nye Bevan makes such a fine bogeyman to wave at British middle-class voters.

Initiative Gained. In the face of Labor's divided leadership, the Tories stood together. Not one Tory joined Salisbury's walkout, and even hard-shell "Suez Group" M.P.s scratched their heads over the marquess' resignation ("Why over Makarios?").* In the House of Commons, Conservatives took pleasure in Macmillan's recital of how at Bermuda he had held up his own end against Eisenhower (as a result, III Tories quietly withdrew the anti-American motion they had submitted in the heat of Suez). In the same week, Britain's costly strikes came to an end, and the Treasury announced that a 1955 deficit of $221 million in Britain's balance of payments had been converted to a $632 million surplus in 1956.

All was not right with the world, but all was no longer quite so wrong. The government's new defense policy had an air of authority about it, and promised a brighter economic future. Macmillan, if not yet out of trouble, at least seemed to have gained the initiative. Brushing off the other damaging figures in the Gallup poll, he seized on the number of "Don't Knows" and observed jauntily: "It is these people--the Don't Knows and the Don't Cares--that politics is about."

* One irreverent explanation, by Poetaster Reginald Reynolds in the left-wing New Statesman and Nation: The early Cecils made a pile of dough-- No toady to the Tudor House was truer: They grabbed the Abbey properties, and so Their blood became appreciably bluer; But--having profited by such gymnastics-- They're still suspicious oj ecclesiastics.

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