W estminster Commentary
`GOOD GOD,' said Mr. Birch, when he was told the news of Dr. Dalton's resignation, 'they've shot down to wait, the earth spun our fox.' The patient fox settled round three or four thousand times, a dull report was heard in the distance, and a sad procession of mourners, clad in hunting pink trimmed with black, passed by. The fox doffed his hat with a beaming smile. Tally-ho!
And all over a lousy fifty million quid ! Though, of course, it wasn't only over a lousy fifty million quid, but over the whole of the Government's fiscal policies, in the struggle around which the fifty million became the oriflamme of both sides. And just in case anybody is silly enough to think it— I sec that Babs, bless her little Blackburn-cotton socks, was putting forward the theory on the telly the other night—it had better be said, at the risk of embarrassing those of my readers who are not as fat-headed as Babs, that the resigna- tions were not a kind of proleptic comment on the findings of the Parker Tribunal. (Though how Mr. Harold Wilson's heart must have leapt when he saw the headlines and thought for one wild instant that a miracle had happened and that his bacon, for which the hard-faced dealers of Smith- field, when the Tribunal finished its hearings, would not have offered you more than fourpence a hundredweight on the hoof, might be saved after all!) 'The Treasury Ministers,' said Mr. Birch, 'were out to win the battle of ,inflation and the others were not.' Them's fighting words where I come from, and (I dare say) where Mr. Mac- millan comes from, too. Mr. Sandys has taken a poke at them already. But for hours now those hawk-eyed and omniscient men, the leader- writers of the Spectator, have been arriving in their powerful black cars from all parts of the country, and I may safely leave to them the task of sorting out the Government's policies. For Taper there is the more rewarding task of examining the crisis in the cool, clear light of la comedie humaine.
Where, to begin with, does it leave the departed three? There is no precedent for the simultaneous resignation of the entire governmental represen- tation of a Ministry (I know that Mr. Heath, technically speaking, is a Treasury Minister, too, but it would take a sight more than fifty million quid to shift him), and in any other Ministry it would be quite inconceivable. But despite the Treasury's obsession with the virtues of a gently continuous inflation, and although Professor Powell, difficult though it sometimes is to believe it, is an ex-professor of Greek rather than economics, they made a formidable trio whose departure will not easily be forgiven. It is highly unlikely that Mr. Thorneycroft will ever again be offered a post in an administration of Mr. Macmillan's forming, but since the odds increase every day against Mr. Macmillan's ever again being in a position to form one (since this would necessitate the Tory Party winning the next elec- tion) this may not be worrying Mr. Thorneycroft quite as much as many people seem to think. In- deed, if Mr. T. were a shrewder and more Machiavellian figure than anything I have ever seen of him has led me to suppose, one might spin a very pleasant fantasy. The Government, it would run, is hedging on the fight against in- flation lest it find itself getting no votes at all at the election. Well, the hedging produces the expected results—another round of wage-claims, another twist to the spiral, another exchange crisis, another run • on the pound, until there looms the awful shadow of dev—hush! don't say the word! Then there is an election and they lose it good and proper. Mr. Macmillan is unlikely to be keen on sitting out five years in the kind of wilderness they are busy preparing for them- selves, with his grand climacteric already past and the moors and the guns and the tweeds and the ridiculous hats a-calling. And where then does the party, its eyes brimming with tears of sorrow and apologies bubbling on its lips, turn but to the boy from Monmouth, who forecast the whole thing, and even jeopardised his career for what he knew to be the only road to salvation! And Mr. Horatio Thorneycroft is not the man to for- get his Spurius Lartius Powell and his Herminius Birch.
But it is, as I have suggested, unlikely. In a sense, though, this does not matter; whether it is so is only half of the question, the other half being whether Mr. Macmillan believes it to be so. And I wouldn't be a bit surprised to learn that he does. His letter to Mr. Thorneycroft was the kind of involuntary yelp, compounded equally of pain, rage and astonishment, that is emitted by a man whose thumb has just been bitten off by his own watchdog:How dare he?
Well, how dare he? Can it be that Mr. Mac- millan is no longer quite the man he was, as far as the Tories are concerned? Not long ago his supremacy was of a kind hardly equalled in peace-time this century, except by the Member for Woodford—and even he, long before the end, was being muttered at from the back ranks. Indeed, so complete was his sway that one Con- servative MP was moved to give it me as his opinion only last month that if the Government were to bring in a Bill to hang the Queen in Trafalgar Square at least 300 Tories would trot through the lobbies in support of it. The Times newspaper, which always knows a good thing when everybody else sees it, summed up the feel- ing in the party on Monday in as vomitorious a leader as even that organ has ever produced. 'Coolly and firmly backing a courageous Chan- cellor of the Exchequer,' it drooled about Mr. Macmillan, 'he has at last brought the inflationary part of the wage spiral within some fair hope of a halt. . . . Everything is done subtly, calmly. The final stroke is firm and decisive, there is an absence of fumbling, because the mind in control is relaxed and unhurried, having coolly calculated before it acts. . . . He is the most engagingly human Prime Minister we have had for a long time. . .
The very same night, while the inhabitants of Stornoway, whose Times does not arrive until late in the day, were settling down to the cross- word, the old lady of Printing House Square was caught with her bombazine trousers well and truly down. 'FLINCHING,' they called their leader on Tuesday, and declared that Mr. Macmillan, who the day before had been 'coolly and firmly backing a courageous Chancellor of the Ex- chequer,' had not 'supported -his courageous Chancellor of the Exchequer.' And he seemed 'unable to see that adherence to a limit can repre- sent a matter of principle.' No doubt it will be more difficult for such persons as still took The Times seriously to do so in future; but despite the fact that it was, broadly speaking, right on Tuesday, there is no doubt that on Monday it spoke, only a few months late, for the Tory Party as a whole.
Now what? Well, it Would be going a little far to say that the party is behind a Mr. H. Nicholls, who is Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Works and took it upon himself to declare that the disputing factions in the Cabinet 'ought to have their heads knocked together,' and even further to think that it is behind Mr. Geoffrey Hirst, who has, it seems, considered resigning the Conservative Whip, but must first (of course) consult his divisional officers, and wait for the House to reassemble, and see that his bedsocks and hot-water bottle are ready at hand. Still, that the boat is rocking it would be idle to deny. Mr. Macmillan could not very well have postponed his tour, even though it meant leaving Mr. Butler, whose support is nearly as dangerous to a politician as that of Lord Beaverbrook, in charge.
(When Mr. Butler's spirited defence of the Government appeared, a colleague more apt than I to think in French threw up his hands and murmured, ne manque plus que celce; but I was able to restore his spirits by showing him Mr. Butler's more characteristic reply to the heckler who asked him whether the resignations were in fact connected with the Parker Tribunal. Instead of the perfectly proper monosyllable 'No,' Mr. Butler went red—oh, yes, I assure you that Mr. Butler can go red—and declared, 'I really must not say a word. It is quite impossible for me to say anything.') But the faux-bonhomie is wering thin even in the eyes of some of Mr. Macmillan's more teak- headed supporters. Not even at London Airport was it wise for Mr. Macmillan to refer to the resignation of the entire Treasury Ministry as 'our little difficulties,' even if he could not go so far as to say that the Government was visibly falling apart at the seams. The Tories will rally, it is true; if (as I believe) the dauntless three do not intend to press in the House their differences With what remains of the Government, the crisis Will in the' fairly short long run serve only to isolate still further the dissident wing of the party, While the mass of the lobby-fodder goes soldier- ing on. But things will never be quite the same again. Nor is there any particularly good reason Why they should be. It is, after all, Mr. Mac- millan who has been saying more frequently, firmly and tediously than any of his colleagues that there ain't gonna be any election. Well, if there ain't gonna be any election, why should he falter now in the application of policies which be knows—let's say believes, to be on the safe side—to be essential to the country's economic health? And that there ain't gonna be any elec- tion I take it is now even more certain; though the split will be healed, or at any rate papered over, it will take some time for the electorate to be persuaded that it isn't there. And the elec- torate simply will not give a vote of confidence to R divided party, whatever the merits of the rival arguments. The muffin-man's bell, in short, is beginning to sound ominously like the one attached to the dead-carts that went round during the Great Plague collecting the bodies.
Besides, Mr. Macmillan is hardly the most popular politician in the eyes of the rest of the world that this country has ever had. His broad- cast to the nation, which seemed to be some- what contradictory of his speech in the foreign affairs debate just before Christmas, caused a great flutter in Washington and Paris, neither of which handsome and interesting cities is on his route this trip. What with one thing and another, it may be as well that Mi. Macmillan did not postpone his trip; the pot may, of course, actually boil over while he is away, but it is more likely to simmer down. Certainly the Opposition can be relied upon, if their early reactions are anything to go by, to make as big a hash of it as they usually do. Mr. Gaitskell lost the oppor- tunity to_make a national, as opposed to a party, point, and Mr. Griffiths lost the opportunity to make an even approximately coherent point of any kind. (See 'A Spectator's Notebook.' But do not see Mr. Griffiths.) But I think that this time an inappropriately used catch-phrase or two, a healthy dose of cant, a dozen of assorted platitudes and a pair of moustache-tweezers will prove inadequate. What the Conservatives need is a really good economic policy. And as a matter of fact they used to have
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