Battle Joined

Hurrying home to London from an Italian vacation last week, Britain's No. 2 Conservative, Anthony Eden, found himself in a crowded plane seated next to a King's Messenger. Eden dozed off, but awoke with a start when, one of the messenger's heavy briefcases fell off the rack into his lap. It was addressed to "His Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs." Since Eden will certainly hold that job if the Conservatives win the general election three weeks hence, Tories thought it a favorable omen.

Overshadowed by the King's illness and the Iranian crisis, the election campaign got off to a slow start. The Conservatives were first into the paper war with a 2,500-word party manifesto signed by Tory Leader Winston Churchill. "Vague" was the word that turned up in most editorials about it. As expected, Conservatives promised to undo the nationalization of iron and steel--but, significantly, they promised no radical changes in either foreign policy or in the Socialists' popular (and expensive) health program.

Most surprising plank in the Tory platform was a promise to help pay for rearmament by taxing excess profits--a mighty radical proposal for Tories (but not as radical as the Socialist scheme to freeze all dividends). Churchill's Tories were plainly asking for a doctor's mandate: just trust us.

Topperless Tories. In Toryland, where grow mossier mossbacks than among American Republicans or Southern Democrats, there also sprout promising young shoots of a new species, with Winston's beaming approval. Last month handsome Tory M.P. David Eccles, 47, warned the elders of his party: "If the Socialists can successfully identify us with the rich and themselves with the poor, then when the heads are counted, they must win. What sort of party are we? Company directors in top hats with fat checkbooks? What nonsense! There are twelve million Conservative voters. They are easily recognized: the active producers of wealth, the skilled workers with hand or brain, those who manage or dream they will some day manage a factory or a farm . . ."

Though there were some mutterings from the squirearchs, Eccles was widely applauded for trying to shift Tory emphasis from "inheritors of wealth" to "creators of wealth." Socialism, on the other hand, said Winston Churchill, is trying to keep in power by "appealing to moods of greed and envy," by keeping "the vanguard back" for the benefit of the laggard.

Peace & Prosperity. Laborites, before they could square away at the Tories, had first to quit fighting each other. This they proceeded to do last week at the seaside city of Scarborough. Before the election was announced, Clement Attlee and the rebel Laborite Nye Bevan had been scheduled to square off against one another in Scarborough. Instead of starring for the rebels, Nye--who hopes to win the election after next, and doesn't want the blame if the Socialists lose this time--stepped up to praise Attlee, not to bury him. But it was still Bevan the rebel who raised the roof.

"Of course there are differences of opinion," he said in soft, husky tones. "I hope there always will be. And when we have differences of opinion, we express them rather roughly because if we didn't, nobody would hear them. We assembled in Scarborough to have an argument. But that argument has now been replaced by a bigger argument. I have been fighting the Tory all my life ever since I was a nipper. Once we are returned to the House of Commons, we can resume that other argument." With that, fighting Nye addressed himself to the faults of Winston Churchill and the sins of the Tories. In the Arcadia cinema next door, Attlee murmured: "We may have our differences; we may have our disputes, but we all have the same aim . . . the brotherhood of man."

It was a touching, if not convincing, reunion. The Labor Manifesto, which appeared next day and to which Bevan assented over a cup of tea, gave no sign that the Labor ranks had really been closed. It skirted all the touchy points.

The Socialists had two lines to peddle: apology for troubles at home (Attlee: "We've had to bat on a very sticky wicket"), and insistence that Churchill would be too militant (Herbert Morrison: "I tremble for the cause of peace if the Conservative temperament and warlike excitability were predominant in Parliament"). Actually, this suspicion of Churchill plays on his bulldog reputation and not on his recent utterances, for Churchill is acutely aware of the danger of sounding warlike in war-weary Britain. On these unspecific lines, the battle between Attlee's Socialists and Churchill's Tories began. But no one who knew the two men could doubt that their differences were real and that the struggle mattered.

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