Housekeeper for a Crusade

Clem Attlee was gone, and in the chair as deputy leader glumly sat the usually perky, 67-year-old Herbert Morrison. All his life he had worked to occupy that chair in his own right, as leader of the Labor Party. Last week his mouth was set as he directed the reading of the ballots.

As the Labor M.P.s listened in tense silence, the teller read out: "There voted for Mr. Hugh Gaitskell, 157; Mr. Aneurin Bevan, 70." In third place, with a humiliating 40 votes, was old Herbert Morrison, who only two years ago was recognized as Attlee's likely successor.

There was a momentary burst of applause for Gaitskell the winner, which quickly fell into a painful silence at the sight of Morrison's stricken look. The man who had helped shape British Socialism for 35 years had been rejected by his colleagues with a derisory handful of votes in favor of a man who was a newly elected M.P. when Morrison was Deputy Prime Minister. "It was the most terrible experience of my political life," said one Labor M.P. later. "It was like watching a man being beaten to death and knowing that we were nearly every one guilty."

Silently, Morrison rose from the chair and gestured to Gaitskell. Embarrassed and flushed himself, Hugh Gaitskell moved along the platform to take the chair. Morrison took Gaitskell's empty seat and stared straight ahead.

Lost Leader. In the moment of his triumph, Gaitskell turned to Herbert Morrison and spoke in tones of warm and genuine regret. Morrison had announced he would resign as deputy leader if he lost. Earnestly, Gaitskell begged him to change his mind: the party needed him. Morrison shook his head.

When Morrison got to his feet a few minutes later, his tone was not that of the cocky cockney veteran of 30 years in the House. How could he carry on as deputy leader, he demanded bitterly, after the party had rejected him; how could he "face the jeers of the Tories?" Nearly overcome, he turned to Gaitskell and asked: "May I be permitted to leave this meeting?" Head bowed, he stepped down from the platform and made his way to the door. Moved by a single impulse, every Laborite rose to his feet and stood in silence--as if at a funeral. Outside, Morrison brushed blindly through a crowd of waiting reporters and disappeared into the shadows of the lobby.

Labor's new leader turned to his chief rival. "Let bygones be bygone," said Gaitskell. Aneurin Bevan smiled and pledged his support. But there was no jubilation; no one headed for the bar to celebrate. They had rejected Bevan because he was too unreliable and would "frighten the country off us." Sadly they had rejected Morrison because he had become too old during the long years as Crown Prince. Gaitskell had been chosen in cold rationalism, not hot enthusiasm.

Tentative Answers. Once the Socialists were a fierce and demanding minority, and cried injustice from housetop and street corner. The comfortable feared them. Gaitskell represents a new generation. He is no militant. He never talked himself hoarse on windy street corners under a policeman's hostile eye (as did Morrison), or chewed tobacco against the pit dust (as did Bevan). But 30 years after, Labor was in the position of having won its crusade. Once the citadel is stormed, the need is not for happy warriors but a good housekeeper; the welfare state needs to be run, not won. Successful British politics today consists in capturing the middle, and Hugh Gaitskell, more than any other Labor leader, is fitted for that appeal (see box). He has little interest in the panacea of nationalization long urged by Bevan. For him Socialism is a matter of fair shares and equal opportunity. And as much as any Laborite, Gaitskell shares Winston Churchill's conviction that the safety of the free world depends on the firm friendship of the U.S. and Britain.

Last week Britain gratefully received Labor's choice. "Aneurin Bevan is a rousing one-man band," wrote the Laborite Daily Mirror. "But the leader of a party must be the conductor of a massive orchestra." From the far Tory right came an echoing chorus. Gaitskell, wrote Journalist Randolph Churchill (see PRESS), is "a first-class politician of patriotism and ambition. He has political guts, and merit. Let us salute him."

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