The Thinking Man's Election

Coatless in a raw February wind, the Prime Minister hoisted himself onto the back of a green Land Rover in the courtyard of the North Ealing Conservative Club. The wind had long since whipped the hand-lettered WELCOME TED HEATH sign from the club's red-tiled roof, but his audience of 150 constituency workers loyally shivered through Heath's homiletic. Winding up the set-piece campaign talk, he proclaimed that thanks to the oil that will be gushing from the North Sea before the end of the decade, "we are going to be one of the fortunate countries in the West."

That was about the only good news that Heath could offer British voters as he took his bid for a new five-year mandate down to the wire. Amid a nationwide coal miners' strike and a government-ordered three-day work week, Britain goes to the polls this week to elect a new Parliament in its ninth general election since World War II. As the campaign headed into its third and final week, new issues tumbled into the headlines almost as fast as the candidates could cope with them.

First, the government reported that food prices climbed 20% last year--the biggest increase ever recorded--for an overall rise of 53% since the Tory Party led by Prime Minister Heath came to power in 1970. Then the government Pay Board announced that a major error had been made in computing miners' wages in comparison with those of other industrial workers. The National Coal Board, it explained, had included the miners' three weeks of vacation pay in assessing their pay levels, while pay figures for other industries, calculated by the Department of Trade and Industry, excluded holiday pay.

Safe Guess. The extraordinary disclosure suggested that the miners' slowdown, the three-day week, the strike and even the election all might have been averted, since it lent strong justification to the miners' main argument that they had fallen behind other workers in pay. On election eve Heath is expected to get more bad news when the January trade figures are released. The Labor Party's shadow Chancellor, Denis Healey, has predicted that they will be "hair-raising"--a fairly safe guess.

Inevitably, inflation has become the chief issue of the campaign, as it was in 1970; in that election, the Conservative upset of the Labor Party was largely credited to housewives who bought Heath's pledge "to cut prices at a stroke." This time, Labor's Harold Wilson is seeking to turn the tables on Heath. He urges voters "to cut Mr. Rising Prices [Heath] at a stroke"--meaning at the ballot box. "If prices go up any faster," he told an appreciative Labor audience last week, "housewives are going to decide it's cheaper to do their shopping in the morning rather than wait until the afternoon."

The race promised to be nip-and-tuck all the way. At week's end, the Tories still held a slight lead over Labor in the polls. While the Liberals do not stand a chance of winning, there is in creasing speculation that they could cap ture enough seats to keep either Labor or the Tories from a majority and thus hold the balance of power. Liberal Party Leader Jeremy Thorpe talks grandly about taking 60 seats; a more realistic estimate is that the Liberals will do well to win more than 20. With 635 seats at stake, either Labor or the Tories will need 320 for a voting majority -- two fewer than the Tories held at dissolution.

The Liberal program calls for giving workers a share in running businesses; limiting prices, dividends and earnings; and imposing penalty taxes on those exceeding the limits. The party's biggest asset is Thorpe, 44, a suave, genial and articulate lawyer who calls both Heath and Wilson extremists, adding: "The return of either would automatically engender the mistrust of the other half of the nation." Campaigning by closed-circuit television from his North Devon constituency -- which he won in 1970 by only 369 votes -- Thorpe said last week that he would prefer not to form a coalition with the Tories or Labor. Assuming his party picked up enough seats, he said, he would rather keep the Liberals acting as "an intelligent and responsible opposition."

Switched Controls. Compared with some previous campaigns when a candidate had to know how to take an egg on the chin, this one has seemed almost antiseptic. Consisting of a ritual round of morning press conferences for the party leaders, brief "walkabouts" to shake hands with voters for the benefit of TV cameras, and ticket-only speeches for the party faithful at night, the campaign has been geared almost entirely to television. Despite his diffidence and somewhat starchy image, Heath has increasingly displayed a relaxed confidence -- occasionally even overconfidence. Plunging into a greengrocer's in Hendon last week, he incautiously asked Clerk Sheila Kane how prices were. Said Sheila: "Disgusting."

For his part, Wilson has seemed less aggressive than usual, though some of the old spirit began to rise when hecklers turned up at a meeting in Southeast London. "If you switched the controls from your mouth to your ears," he barked at them, "you might hear what I have to say." When Heath lashed out at Labor's plans to nationalize North Sea oil, Wilson replied that the Tories were now finding Reds not only under the bed but "under the seabed."

The slanging match took an ugly turn when Heath charged that Labor had "backed the lawbreakers and undermined the moderates on every important occasion" and "is subverting the high standards of British public life." Then Chancellor of the Exchequer Anthony Barber somberly intoned on television that a Labor government "would be putty in the hands" of the Communists. Said Wilson: "By raising again the witch hunt of the Red menace, [the Tories] impugn the patriotism, the honesty, the principles of every Labor voter --half the voters of this country."

One Tory junior minister last week argued that scare tactics against extremism were paying "handsome dividends.

People seem to be frightened about losing their jobs and savings and about what lies ahead. They are therefore closing ranks around the government they know." But a leading pollster read the election mood another way. "In many ways," he said, "it's a thinking man's election. The floating voter so crucial to victory is having trouble making up his mind. I'm afraid that for most of them it looks like another case of voting for the lesser of evils."

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