The Last Lap

"The tide has turned, and is now running strongly in our favor. One more shove and we can get Britain back on course." It was a brave boast, but as Britons prepared to go to the polls for this week's general election, Tory Leader Ted Heath clearly needed to pull out all the stops. Nor was his claim without a shred of support. Britain's major opinion polls did, in fact, register a slight shift to the Conservatives, though hardly enough to slice significantly into the Labor Party's huge lead.

It was, however, enough to convince hard-driving Heath that his fast-moving campaign was paying off. By air and auto, he continued to crisscross the nation, rapping Prime Minister Harold Wilson's Laborites for rising prices, for failure to settle the Rhodesian crisis, and for waste in government. "Vote Labor and pay later," Heath warned his listeners.

Confident of victory, Wilson brushed aside Heath's charges, turning the accusations into attacks on the 13 years of Tory rule that preceded Wilson's brief 17 months in office. He was still coolly confident of victory as he made his way by train around the hustings. At one Labor rally, he was hit in the face by a stink bomb thrown by a 14-year-old boy. The fluid splashed into Wilson's right eye, and he retreated from the platform for emergency medical treatment. After two days the inflammation subsided, but the incident pointed up the campaign's most unlovely aspect: a surge of violent heckling by teen-age hoodlums.

Heckling is an honored British tradition, and Wilson, for one, thrives on quick parries with dissenters. At a recent rally, when a heckler shouted "Rubbish!" Wilson shot back: "We'll take up your special interest in a moment, sir." But neither Wilson nor anyone else could always cope with the current ragging. Every major candidate had been shouted down repeatedly, and the Labor Party temporarily barred from its rallies a BBC television crew that was filming a documentary on hecklers on the grounds that being on-camera only inspires more extreme behavior.

As the campaign drew into its final week, there were predictions that Harold Wilson and his Laborites would win by 120 seats or more in the 630-seat House of Commons. Wilson's aides were talking less ambitiously of perhaps a 50-seat majority. They feared that Labor supporters might be so mesmerized by the poll predictions that they would stay away from the polls in large numbers out of sheer apathy. If that happened, the Tories might indeed turn the tide in marginal districts and, at least, avert a Labor landslide. By any pollster's calculations, however, victory seemed beyond the Tories' reach.

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