Harrying Harold

GREAT BRITAIN

Last month the Tories were all set to pounce on the Labor government with a motion in the House of Commons to censure the drastic and controversial measures of Harold Wilson's first 100 days. Out of respect for the dying Winston Churchill, Sir Alec Douglas-Home and his fellow Tories held their tongues. By last week, when the debate finally came, both sides were fairly bursting to get at each other's throats.

"The honeymoon is over," said Home, as he took the floor to blast Labor for raising taxes, strangling credit and threatening to cancel the British aircraft industry's multimillion-dollar project for the supersonic Concord airliner. Home could hardly be heard. For as he began to speak the House dissolved into a raging bedlam of angry partisans, bellowing insults at one another, shaking fists, waving sheaves of papers in the turbulent air. Amid repeated pleas for order, Sir Alec managed to charge that the Labor government had gone back on its campaign promises to revitalize Britain, turned instead to "panic measures" and "hysterical accounts of Britain's problems" that had spread "doubt and confusion" throughout the land. "I do not know how the right honorable gentlemen opposite can sit complacently in their places with this litter of broken pledges around them," said Douglas-Home. "If there is any rectitude left in them, they should go."

Now the noisy jeering came from the Tory benches. Trying to make himself heard between outbursts ("Resign! Resign!") of up to 20 minutes' duration, the Prime Minister dismissed Sir Alec as a "scat singer,"* blamed Britain's economic squeeze on the "irresponsibility" of the former administration. And, he warned, the squeeze was going to get worse. With that, he announced bitter news for the aircraft industry: cancellation of two major contracts for military planes, which the government decided were too expensive and would take too long to build. Britain could buy the planes more cheaply from the U.S., Wilson said.

The censure motion was defeated on strict party lines--306 to 289, with nine Liberals abstaining. But Wilson was in deep trouble, and he knew it. Another major Tory onslaught can be expected soon, and the chance absence of even three Laborites at any crucial vote could be enough to bring down his government.

Missing from the House last week were two familiar figures, both former Foreign Secretaries. Richard Austen ("Rab") Butler, 62, holder of six Cabinet posts in Tory governments and rejected aspirant for the prime ministership when Harold Macmillan resigned, announced that he was leaving his front-bench seat to accept a life peerage and become Master of Cambridge's Trinity College. The Labor Party's Patrick Gordon Walker, disappointed loser in last month's by-election at Leyton, announced that he had also accepted a position in the academic world--as adviser to the Initial Teach ing Alphabet Foundation, an institution that promotes the use of a 44-character alphabet as an aid in teaching children to read.

-In jazz terms, a musician who uses nonsense syllables (boot'n dee-ba bwa-ba-doo-ee) instead of words to heighten the effect of the voice as a musical instrument. In Sir Alec's league are some of the finest musicians in the world, including Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, scat singers both.

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