Mac's Merger
ACCORDING to Lord Lambton, writing last week in the Evening Standard, the Prime Minister told American correspondents in the course of an off-the-record meeting that 'nothing should stand between the eventual merging of this country and the United States'; and the Sunday Express—to whom such sentiments are deplor- sble—argues that as Mr. Macmillan has not challenged the report, it must be presumed to be true. To call on a Minister to deny something he has said off the record is unusual, and the Prime Minister may reasonably feel that if he looked out for and corrected all the misappre- hensions about him and his colleagues in the Beaverbrook newspapers, he would have time for very little else. But in this instance, it would be a happy idea if the Prime Minister did reply. The next time he speaks on the subject in public he should say that in fact he told the American correspondents nothing of the kind; but that, now Lord Lambton has put the notion into his head, it seems a good one.
There need be no feeling of surprise if he should express the opinion that the two countries must eventually come together. The picture that, has emerged of Mr. Macmillan as the White Hope of Toryism is false. It is based largely on the fact that he reunited and reinvigorated the Conservatives after Suez, which misled some of his followers into thinking of him as a Little Englander: they forget that, by all accounts, he was the Minister responsible for halting the invasion. Mr. Macmillan's record shows him to be of the Centre—well to the Left, indeed, by Conservative standards. In TV producer lang- uage, too, he is incorrigibly mid-Atlantic. If, as is possible, he has at last realised how futile his Summit hopes were, what better decision could he make than to abandon the role of the great pacificator, and take up instead the much more realistic job of going down to history as the statesman who converted the Atlantic Alliance into a political reality?
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