A Quoodle or a Fink?

And Quoodle here discloses All things that Quoodle can. --G. K. Chesterton

When Britain's Conservative Party Co-Chairman Iain Macleod resigned from the Cabinet last October, he went off to edit the liberal Tory Spectator, and for his nom de plume chose Chesterton's Quoodle. The name proved all too apt. Last week, in the wake of an embarrassing disclosure, many Tories were cursing Quoodle as a fink whose loose tongue was damaging Conservative chances in the forthcoming general election.

In a bitter Spectator article, Macleod charged that Sir Alec Douglas-Home was chosen to succeed Prime Minister Harold Macmillan only because Macmillan could not bear the thought of his then-deputy, R. A. Butler, taking the reins. And Butler, argued Macleod, was "incomparably the best qualified of the contenders." When the ailing Macmillan decided to resign, he soon saw that none of his own favorites in the Cabinet had a decisive lead over Butler. Since "Macmillan was determined that Butler should not succeed him," the Prime Minister arranged an elaborate set of party soundings weighted to show that Home was everybody's compromise candidate. In fact, wrote Macleod, only two of the 13 ministers he had spoken to favored Home, while many agreed that Butler "was the right and obvious successor." Macleod resigned rather than serve under Home, as did Health Minister Enoch Powell (though Rab Butler stayed on as Foreign Secretary).

Macleod's revelation revived once again the controversy over the Tories' strange "evolutionary" method of choosing a Prime Minister, suggested that the technique owed more to Machiavelli than to Darwin. It also showed fissures in a party which traditionally has gained much of its public strength by presenting a sound, "nonfissiparous" image. Though Macleod's caustic chronicle came in reply to a fulsomely pro-Macmillan book by Journalist Randolph Churchill, and thus allowed Macleod to appear only to be setting the record straight, many Britons sensed the beginnings of a new leadership battle. If the Conservatives lose to the Labor Party in the next election, one wing of the Tories might well claim that Sir Alec, as an unnaturally evolved leader, ought not to lead the party in opposition.

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