Out of Order

For a few moments last week, the mother of Parliaments, at home in her stately Westminster Palace, seemed perilously close to entering her second childhood. The first symptoms of retrogression became apparent as ultra-Conservative Sir Herbert Williams gawped in ruddy embarrassment at the wreckage of a broken egg lying before him in the House of Commons, its slithering yolk merging relentlessly with the green of the carpet. "Is it in order, Sir." a Labor member was demanding of the Speaker as Sir Herbert stared, "for an honorable Member to throw an egg across the floor of the House?"

"Quite out of order," the Speaker ruled, adding his "hope that whoever is responsible will see that it is put right." Exuberant Sir Herbert, who had playfully tossed the egg toward the Labor benches during a debate on food prices, vainly tried to cover the hideous remains with a piece of paper. "I did not realize that it was a real egg." he stammered abjectly. "I thought it was a crock egg."

The next night Her Majesty's legislators indulged their capacity for capriciousness in a more serious way. When the House of Commons was all but empty. Tory Backbencher Hugh Linstead tried to forward a concern of his own and moved a prayer* against the government's easing of restrictions on imported glassware. Later Linstead tried to withdraw the motion, but the Laborites seized on the absence of his fellow Tories to force a vote. Not expecting any important business to come up, most of the Tories had scattered far & wide, and many of them had been careless about being paired in their absence (Churchill paired with Opposition Leader Attlee, since both were dining that evening with U.S. Ambassador Winthrop Aldrich). Before the vote was called, the Labor whip rushed out to phone his flock. One set, who had been campaigning in two London districts for imminent by-elections, was easily found in pubs; and a group of 20 Bevanites were discussing their future at the home of one of them in Vincent Square. Giggling like schoolboys, they were all rounded up in the darkness of the respectable old square to await the strategic moment when they would swoop into the House of Commons by the back door and take Tory Whip Patrick Buchan-Hepburn by surprise. Swoop they did, just as the vote was held, to defeat the government forces by a majority of four.

Next day, when the House gathered again, Churchill was greeted with Laborite cries of "Resign! Resign!" Grinning, the old warrior, whose Conservatives had worked the same trick on a Labor government more than once in the past, replied: "I think we shall all agree that it seems to have been a rather sharp piece of work." But resign he would not, and need not, on so inconsequential an issue, though it was the first time the government had been defeated in this Parliament.

* A parliamentary fiction by which the Parliament "prays Her Majesty" to revoke an order made in her name by the government acting as "Her Majesty in Council."

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