The Loyal Opposition

The pomp and perquisites of office evaporate almost as swiftly in London as in Moscow. Within 24 hours of Labor's victory at the polls, Sir Alec Douglas-Home had to rent a car to move his household out of No. 10 Downing Street. For his Tory ministers, many of whom had held office far longer than Sir Alec, it was even more wrenching to adjust to life without liveried government limousines, green scrambler telephones, deferential aides.

"It's like a bereavement," sighed one ex-minister. "Alone, no one to talk to, nothing to do." For Sir Alec, there was plenty to do.

With a toughness seldom displayed while in office, he called members of his former Cabinet together on the blue Monday morning after elections, impressed on them that he would nip in the bud any impending challenge to his leadership of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. In his clipped and cocky manner, Home told them, as he told the British people on TV: "I'm leading the Conservative Party--and I mean to go on doing so as long as I am useful in that position." He then proceeded to reshuffle his Shadow Cabinet--the "leader's committee," as he prefers to call it--to reunite and reinvigorate the party.

Sir Alec established his able former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Reginald Maudling, 47, as his No. 2 man and, in effect, deputy leader of the party. A short quarter step behind came Edward Heath, 48, the Tories' tough-minded, troubleshooting economics expert, who will be responsible for the party's policy planning. Back from self-imposed exile came Renegades Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell, who had refused to serve in Sir Alec's administration after the unseemly struggle for succession to Harold Macmillan's premiership just a year ago. Macleod's job: leading the Tory attack against Labor's program to renationalize the steel industry. Right behind Maudling and Heath in authority Sir Alec installed Selwyn Lloyd, 60, onetime Foreign Secretary and a highly regarded party stalwart who was sacked by Macmillan as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1961. Lloyd's job: to drill the backbench battalions for the counteroffensive against Labor in the Parliament that opens this week.

The man who was chiefly responsible for the Conservatives' return to power in 1951, and thereafter, will no longer roam the corridors of power. Shadow Foreign Secretary Rab Butler, 64, who twice lost out for the premiership (in 1957 and 1963), and has groomed such potential Prime Ministers as Maudling, Heath and Macleod, was relieved of his job as deputy Prime Minister and the party's most dynamic idea man. Butler's demise seemed inevitable after a pre-election newspaper interview in which Sir Alec's old rival had sardonically hinted at a Tory defeat.

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