Daggers for Mac

"Give Mac the sack," cried the crowds in Orpington, a longtime Tory stronghold in suburban Kent. In a mid-term by-election, the district was captured last week by a pugnacious, 33-year-old Liberal candidate who piled up a massive, 7,855-vote majority (total voters: 43,187) over an exceptionally able Conservative opponent. Following three other by-election setbacks for the party in a week, Orpington was the worst defeat that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's Conservatives have suffered since they took office eleven years ago. Said Party Chairman Iain Macleod: "These are daggers thrust at us."

The Liberal stabs were the big surprise. Though they won outright only at Orpington, they captured most of the 41,111 votes lost to the Conservatives elsewhere. Long in decline, the Liberals will have only seven M.P.s in the 630-seat House of Commons.* Appealing to voters disenchanted by Macmillan's crackdown on credit and pay raises, the Liberals run on a platform resembling Labor's (main difference : the Liberals do not favor nationalization of industry). They are unencumbered by the Labor Party's internal feuds and by the proletarian stigma that keeps many middle-class voters from going Labor. Sniffed Macmillan: "The Liberal Party is performing the valuable function of the exhaust pipe in the motorcar."

The Tory-minded Daily Telegraph put it more temperately: "The country is saying it does not like the government it has got, but it's still a long way from deciding what alternative to choose." Tory Strategist Macleod is confident that if the party sinks low enough in by-elections, it will bounce back in time for the general election that Macmillan is expected to call some time next year. Said he: "How should Conservatives act now? I offer you the Clan Macleod motto: 'Hold Fast.'

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Before it can contemplate a general election, the government will have to grapple with two balky issues: Britain's entry into the Common Market and the future of the Central African Federation. In an ingenious, unprecedented gambit, Prime Minister Macmillan announced last week that he is giving sole responsibility for the federation to Home Secretary R. A. Butler, who is already in charge of Common Market negotiations.

A new British-drawn constitution for Northern Rhodesia threatens to break up the federation because it grants the blacks more power than cantankerous Federal Prime Minister Sir Roy Welensky proposes to stand for (TIME, March 9). In the past, the problem was confusingly divided between Colonial Secretary Reginald Maudling, responsible for African territories that retain colonial status (Northern Rhodesia, Nyasaland) and generally considered an ally by African nationalists, and Commonwealth Secretary Duncan Sandys, who is responsible for self-governing territories (Southern Rhodesia) and has the ear of Welensky's white supremacists. It was obviously sound to end this two-way pull by putting Butler in charge, even though Labor Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell loudly denounced it as a ''nonsensical gesture." While not a political maneuver, Macmillan's move inevitably enhanced the political prospects of ''Rab" Butler, whose fortunes had seemed on the ebb last fall when Iain Macleod was moved in as Conservative party chairman and leader of the House.

* In 1905 the party won 376 seats; it stayed in power until the 1922 defeat of Britain's last Liberal Prime Minister, David Lloyd George.

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