Harmony House

Sightseeing Britons and G.I.s jostled in the coppery sunlight outside No. 10 Downing Street and the Houses of Parliament. In the jampacked central lobby of the House of Commons, police had to clear a passage for the arriving members. In the green-carpeted Chamber, Laborites milled about like schoolboys starting the fall term. There was a new bar below, on a level with the terrace overlooking the Thames, but on opening day it was deserted.

Seventy-year-old Winston Churchill regarded the hubbub with a placid eye. Back from a Mediterranean holiday with 14 new watercolors and a coat of tan, the wartime Prime Minister had a new role in the new Parliament: leader of His Majesty's Loyal Opposition.

For the moment, he bided his time so stolidly that impatient young Tories took umbrage, growled that Winston was ignoring them as usual. Clement Attlee earnestly answered Members' questions. Ponderous Ernie Bevin recounted what was already an old story, the meeting of the Big Five Foreign Ministers. Churchill, who well knew the exasperations of a session with Molotov, conceded that Bevin had given a "clear, temperate and able statement . . . made upon the disappointing event. . . ."

It was a week of harmony, and this week would be another, with Winston Churchill absent, nursing a sore throat. But the calm was illusory. Troublous weeks and months of struggle were ahead.

In the Chamber, the Attlee Government with its huge Labor majority had little to fear. The greater problems lay outside, and the debates would reflect them. Even as the session got under way, the Government had to rush troops home from the Continent to help unload food cargoes when 40,000 striking stevedores refused to work. Cried Fuel Minister Emanuel Shinwell, until lately an expert in parliamentary disorder: "I am a socialist, not an anarchist, and I want order and reason in our industrial relations."

Then there were Palestine, and housing, and India--the whole host of postwar posers over whose liquidation Winston Churchill no longer had to preside. Many a Briton who had helped Labor into the driver's seat wondered when, and how, Labor would get going.

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