Prime Minister's Return

Back from a 32,000-mile, six-week swing through the farthest reaches of the Commonwealth, Harold Macmillan felt a "sense of exhilaration and renewed faith" in the strength of Britain's empire ties. The Commonwealth had seen an unexpectedly relaxed and genial Macmillan. Fresh from a rousing reception in India, he landed at Karachi in Pakistan (in a Britannia turboprop airliner nicknamed "The Flying No. 10") to be greeted by cheering thousands, detoured 700 miles north to the North-West Frontier mountains never before visited by a British Prime Minister.

At Khyber Pass tribal leaders draped garlands around Macmillan's neck, gave him the traditional Pathan tribesman's greeting: "Welcome; come in peace." In Ceylon, which has been busily ejecting Britain from its old military bases, even Macmillan was amazed at the warmth of his welcome from crowds that lined the streets as he passed. Between speeches in Australia, the visitor shed his necktie and distributed the steaks in person at a Queensland sheep-station barbecue. In Melbourne he went out of his way to shake hands with policemen, housewives, schoolchildren and members of his honor guard. "A triumph," cried London's Spectator. "He is not known to have put a foot wrong, to have hurt any feelings, or to have dropped any bricks." The Economist spoke admiringly of "the new, uninhibited Macmillan."

Shock at Home. But Harold Macmillan stepped off the plane at London Airport to face jolting news. For weeks the country had been watching the Lancashire textile center of Rochdale, where a crucial by-election campaign was being waged to fill the seat left vacant by the death of Tory M.P. Lieut. Colonel Wentworth Schofield. Contesting the seat again for Labor was 47-year-old Jack McCann, a local diesel-engine fitter, who was handily defeated by Schofield in the last general election. A sturdy, 41-year-old real-estate agent from nearby Burnley named John Parkinson was to hold Rochdale for the Tories. The unexpected element in the race: Britain's long-dormant Liberals, who decided to enter the lists with a candidate of their own. He was Ludovic Kennedy, 38, Eton and Oxford, lecturer on current affairs and latterly a widely known television commentator. Kennedy cut a wide swathe through Rochdale, helped mightily by a glamorous fellow campaigner, his ballerina wife Moira Shearer.

When the votes were counted, Labor's McCann, with 22,133 votes, had won, and, to the nation's astonishment, the Liberals' Kennedy had swept into No. 2 place with 17,603 votes, leaving Tory Parkinson a bad third with a paltry 9,827. Never in living memory had a government candidate been so humiliatingly battered to the bottom of the poll.

In the House of Commons next day, Laborites greeted the government with shouts: "Resign! Resign!" Opposition Leader Hugh Gaitskell taunted: "In view of the catastrophe which has overtaken the party opposite, and the decline in the Conservative vote from over 50% to under 20% of the electors, does not the right honorable gentleman think it desirable that the business for next week should be scrapped and Parliament dissolved immediately?"

Mass Desertion. The Liberals were jubilant. But their success was clearly attributable more to the personality of their candidate and his chief campaigner than to the persuasiveness of their policies. More significant was the fact that, while Labor voters had stuck to their candidate, Tories had felt so little attachment to their party that they deserted it in droves to vote for Kennedy. Commenting on this "mass defection," the London Times said: "To the ordinary voter, the government do not appear to have the strength, efficiency and cohesion which inspire confidence." One Rochdale cotton worker put it more directly: "Ah'm agin the government--they put up me rent, they put up me bus fares, they put up me muther's rent and even cut dahn the baccy allowance ter the old-age pensioners. That was cruel, proper cruel. And they seem just about as daft wherever they go. Mind you, that not ter say ah'm Labor--them Socialists want ter nationalize the mill. Anyway, you don't 'ave ter vote for either of 'em. It's 'andy lahke, 'aving the Liberal."

But the Conservatives had no intention of agreeing to an election before the present Parliament's term runs out in 1960. "If we're going to take a rubbing, we may as well put it off for 18 months," said one Tory M.P. By then, Harold Macmillan's long-term policies against inflation may have begun to pay off. At London Airport, the Prime Minister greeted Gaitskell's demands for his resignation with a chuckle. "I have heard leaders of the Opposition say that before. I remember having said it myself, in the past. It is common form. Remember, in war or politics, a single engagement does not settle a whole campaign."

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