Westminster Commentary
CRITICISING Mr. Heathcoat Amory has for some years now been rather like smoking, in church; even a drunken atheist would con- sider it disgraceful behaviour. There are signs—as yet, it is true, no bigger than a man's hand—that the Chancellor has cottoned on to this shining tribute to the bipartisan spirit which animates our politicians When they catch sight of a really decent chap (Which cannot in the nature of things be very often). I am far from wishing to spoil the smooth surface of this harmony, so I will just say now that I do not wish to be told again that the Chancellor is a simple-lifer who boils his own breakfast egg, does his own washing-up, and can often be seen (especially by press photographers) coming out of Lyons tea-shops after having a fourpenny cup of tea. We (and I do mean we) pay Mr. Heathcoat Amory a salary of £5,000 a year, and he is in any case quite well off in his own right; it is high time he got himself a daily (as if he hasn't I) and left these carefully rehearsed spontaneities to the Prime Minister, on whom they sit more naturally. A nod being as good as a wink to a blind horse (and there are certainly plenty of those about), I am sure I need say no more on the subject.
Which leaves me with the Budget. The scene reminded me, as formal occasions in the House of Commons always do, of the description in the Pall Mall Gazette of the 'glittering gala night with which Beerbohm Tree opened the Her Majesty's Theatre : 'A scene of brilliancy, tempered by ladies.' Tempered, indeed, not only by ladies. As usual, the House was full, but not quite so full downstairs as it was last year; the bruised ribs of Mr. Thorneycroft's Budget are evidently still re- membered. Upstairs, however, every inch of the Speaker's, Ladies', Distinguished Strangers' and Peers' Galleries was fully occupied. There was the usual crop of Chancellor's relatives and the inevit- able Uncle Fred (Winston lead us, Woolton feed us, will ye no' come back again?'), a living rebuke, with his pink cherub's countenance, to that cold clergyman who would not let a parishioner decorate his child's tombstone with angels on the grounds that they did not exist. One detail it is sad for a traditionalist like myself to record : the num- ber of toppers has now fallen to two, adorning the heads of Mr. Gerald Nabarro and Sir Colin Thornton-Kemsley. lchabod, or words to that effect.
At 3.16 the door opened to admit a very care- free-looking fellow; his face was round and smooth, his brow unlined, his eyes clear and sparkling, his step only just short of jaunty. He looked like an ex-Chancellor, which is exactly what he was, and Mr. Thorneycroft walked to his seat beside Dame Flo as if he was going to listen to his successor's speech with his hand on his handkerchief, ready to whip it out and stuff it into his mouth if his amusement threatened to turn into an unseemly guffaw. Over the way there was a remarkably fine turn-out of Liberals (apolo- gies, by the way, for confusing Messrs. Holt and Wade and not seeing Mr. Bowen in my descriptidn a fortnight ago of the Entry of the Gladiator); in all you might say that everybody who was any- body was present.
On the very second of 3.30, as Mr. Simon was answering the one question on the Order Paper addressed to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who should appear but the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself, holding up a big red box as if he had all sorts of goodies inside it. A very long cheer greeted him as he picked his way deftly round the large number of ex-Chancellors who littered the Front Bench. Then he opened the box, extracted the goodies and got cracking. Pray do not accuse me of vulgar Americanisms; I mean only that he started with a joke. It was one of Dr. Johnson's, and a good one, too.
If Mr. Heathcoat Amory is remembered for nothing else, he can certainly claim to have made the fastest Budget speech in history. At times his delivery reached almost the speed of Mr. Leslie Hale's, and the language being used by those poor pencillers upstairs whose duties obliged them to take it down verbatim grew quite shocking. He spoke, collectors of the byways of history may care to note, for exactly the same length of time as Mr. Thorneycroft—one hour and forty-three minutes.
Of all theNariaterjarganathatirlaa.ve spreacl_theig • - poisonous tendrils around the language in recent years, none is more inimical to the life of its host (will any biologist aware that 1 am mixing my scientific metaphors kindly keep such information to himself?) than the financial variety. The Finance Bill itself, we know, must be couched in a wholly incomprehensible language bearing no relation whatever to English. But why the Chan- cellor should indulge in yet another variety of gobbledygook is beyond me. I have given up expecting any Chancellor, or anybody else for that matter, in or out of Parliament,. to stop for a moment and consider what phrases like 'five thousand four hundred and forty-three million pounds' actually 'neon; but I do wish—vainly, I know—that someone could make a Budget speech that did not include remarks like the current Chancellor's assertion, within a hundred seconds of his opening, that the 'dominant objective' of our policy must be `to maintain the value of our currency,' or at any rate that such pious contra- dictions of everything every Government since the war has ever done were not followed within two minutes by the same idea dressed up in the rags of a cliché that even the Earl of Home would pencil out of his script; 'Costs and prices,' said the Chancellor, 'continued to be our Achilles' heel.'
Still, this is to live down to my reputation (laughably unfounded, as those who really know me will testify, especially if I twist their arms) as a captious and destructive critic, though if pressed I shall call to my defence so unorthodox a witness as Lord Hinchingbrooke, who appeared to have stopped listening within three minutes. Given the limitations of Treasury orthodoxy within which the Chancellor had to work (and although a root-and-branch reconstruction of our entire fiscal system would do a power of good I suspect that Mr. Heathcoat Amory is not exactly cut out for the role of Robespierre, ripe though Sir Roger Makins is for that of Citizen Hugh Capet), this was a sound and sensible Budget; though the welkin will remain unrung, hands will at any rate remain unwrung. The byway-collectors I mentioned earlier can notch up the only Budget within living memory delivered on a glass of milk (the Chancellor, I noticed, first drank from it when he got to the bit about 'milk for processing,' though he did not stop for a bowl of cereal in the previous sentence, which was about cereals, nor a plate of pig-food a moment later, when he men- tioned pig-food; no doubt he agrees that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds); they should also note that the invasion of Egypt by British, French and Israeli troops which took place in November, 1956, is now officially circum- locutionised into 'the Suez trouble.'
The Budget was received, as befits so unspec- tacular a box of tricks, without either a delirium of joy on the one hand, or a paroxysm of rage on the other. The Opposition brayed loud and long at the Chancellor's favourable mention of the Cohen Committee, the Tories cheered short and low at the details of the new profits tax, and they united to shed a joint crocodile's tear at the bit about the plight of the old people. As Mr. Heath- coat Amory went on, and it became clearer and clearer that this was not an election Budget, one could sense the relief sweeping through the Oppo- sition; it is easy, after all, to yell 'Bribes!' at a Chancellor, but a good deal more difficult to persuade the bribees to be high-minded and refuse them.
But it is not only not an election Budget; it is also a fair Budget. If a Chancellor has several hundred millions of largesse to distribute, he can put it into a large syringe and give us all a shot in the arm; but with the limited elbow-room available this year, it would be difficult for the most benighted of the Government's opponents to claim that the Chancellor is grinding the faces of the poor and buttering those of the rich. Oh, never fear, they did, do and will claim just that; all I said was that it would be difficult. Though Mr. Gaitskell, following on, wisely based his criticism on the at any rate arguable thesis that with world conditions as they are the time was ripe for an expansionist Budget, the Opposition, to everybody's amazement, suddenly interrupted the quite unintelligible mumbling of Sir Charles MacAndrew, who was formally asking the House to approve the various tax-changes, with loud cries of 'No.' Since nobody had been listening to Sir Charles, and couldn't have heard what he was saying if they had been, nobody knew precisely what point in the proposals had aroused the Labour Party's wrath. After they had divided I went downstairs to find out what they had divided on, but naively asked for the information from some MPs. 'How should I know?' each asked in genuine bewilderment, and I had to wait until nightfall before I discovered that it had been, as one might have guessed, on the profits-tax pro- posals. The Labour Party does not know much, but it knows that 'profit' is a dirty word, and Sir Theobald Mathew himself never hounded a humble back-street pornographer as the Labour Party hounds anyone who uses such obscenities in their presence. The trouble with the Labour Party (one of its troubles, anyway) is that it is simply out of date.
As for the purchase-tax proposals, Mr. Nabarro has not, at the time of writing, been heard from (though he doffed his hat and bowed at each concession announced), but here again the Chan- cellor, bowed under the weight of Treasury ortho- doxy, did as well as could be expected. After all, not even the 'down-with-profits' brigade, not even Mr. Arthur Lewis, who greeted the announcement of the lower duty on port and sherry with a cry of 'That'll please the railwaymen,' can maintain that purchase tax ought not to be reduced. So, all in all, the fourth Conservative Chancel- lor since the war came well out of his ordeal. There will not be an election; there will not be a panic; the Tory Tannhauser will not rush pre- maturely back to the Venusberg and the arms of his abandoned inflation; and, barring outsize accidents, there will not be an autumn Budget. What there will be it is not so easy to say; around this time of year it is easy to forget that the Budget is only one part of the financial system of the country, and the Chancellor is only one member of the Cabinet. The others, with the railwaymen, can yet knock the edifice down. But, on the whole, I prefer to regard as symbolic the moment when, as Mr. Heathcoat Amory turned to his taxation proposals, the sun burst through and illuminated the Chamber and everyone in it. Thus irradiated, they looked almost beautiful; it was indeed a solemn and moving moment.
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