Reputation Day

The power of the Mother of Parliaments grew out of its power of the purse, and many a British leader from Gladstone to Macmillan has made a name for himself when, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he presents his annual April budget to the House. Last week's Budget Day spotlighted a new Chancellor, the Tories' fourth in four years.

Tall, earnest Derick Heathcoat Amory, 58, is regarded as a comer in British politics, partly because he is not too pushy about getting there. A quiet, unpretentious West Country bachelor squire who rode to hounds and managed the family textile business until World War II, he helped plan the costly Arnhem operation and, at 44, insisted on going along. Breaking a thigh in jumping, he was captured, went home on crutches from a German prison camp at war's end in time to run for Parliament. He felt a family obligation to run because a young, politically promising cousin had been killed in the war. His personal diffidence won him respect in the House; his shrewd advice on business affairs won him esteem in the City. At the Ministry of Agriculture he managed to achieve a success in that "graveyard of future Prime Ministers."

True to tradition, Heathcoat (pronounced heth-cut) Amory held aloft Gladstone's frayed red dispatch box as he strode in to members' cheers last week. But as he plunged into his businesslike speech, pausing only at a reference to milk processing to refresh himself with a glass of milk thinly laced with rum and honey,* the House soon realized that the self-effacing Chancellor had produced an even more self-effacing budget. He had decided that Britain was not going to get caught in the American recession, but should not risk trying to expand its economy just now, either. His "standstill budget," as the papers called it, vouchsafed only the smallest mercies, trimming income taxes only for those over 65, and halving the cinema admission tax to help the movie business up from penury. The Chancellor's one concession to industry: scrubbing a 30% tax on distributed profits and a 3% tax on undistributed profits in favor of a flat 10% profits tax.

Laborite Harold Wilson called it "a mouse of a budget," but Labor was not too anxious to show itself in favor of inflation, for if threatened nationwide strikes occur soon, Labor stands to lose politically by them. In a TV broadcast, Heathcoat Amory agreed that to Britons his poor-mouth talk, when gold and sterling reserves had risen a billion dollars in six months, must seem "tiresomely cautious." But precisely because he did not bow to political pressures, the budget increased the new Chancellor's reputation. "It would be folly," said Harold Macmillan, "to be an island of inflation in a deflationary world."

* For the long reading, Chancellors are allowed to sip something. Sir Stafford Cripps drank orange juice; Winston Churchill, not the most memorable of Chancellors, drank "an amber fluid."

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