Their Tiredest Hour

The House of Commons was crammed to the doors last week as Harold Macmillan faced the grimmest hour of his political career. Grey-faced and hollow-cheeked, the Prime Minister sprawled on the government's green leather front bench while Labor Party Leader Hugh Gaitskell called for a censure motion against the government. Gaitskell demanded Macmillan's resignation and an immediate general election, argued that Macmillan's purge of Chancellor of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd and 15 other Conservative ministers "was the most convincing confession of failure which could have been offered by the government." Liberal Party Leader Jo Grimond likened the Prime Minister's "all-round slaughter" to "the Borgias on one of their more unsavory evenings."

Amid jeers from the opposition and tight-lipped silence from his own benches, Harold Macmillan rose listlessly to defend his policies. In a tired voice that at times was barely audible above Labor's barracking, he spoke for nearly an hour, dusted off half a dozen Macminimal economic palliatives that had first been recommended 15 years ago in the Tories' Industrial Charter. Macmillan's most important proposal was for a National Incomes Commission ("Nicky") to supplement the government's new National Economic Development Council ("Neddy"). Jointly, these bodies, whose actual authority is undefined, would act as anti-inflation watchdogs, try to continue the unpopular "pay pause" by seeking to tie wages to productivity. From the glum rows of Tory M.P.s came hardly a cheer as their leader concluded: "We intend to carry on and complete our work."

20-Year Low. When it was time for the vote, the Tories predictably closed ranks and won their automatic majority; the censure motion was defeated 351 to 253. But it was a vote for survival rather than a vote of confidence, and it could not conceal deep dissatisfaction both in the country at large and in the Tory Party.

Oddly enough, a Gallup poll reported last week that the great majority (74%) of those questioned approved of Macmillan's infusion of youth into the Cabinet. Yet an increasing number of Britons also felt that the 68-year-old Prime Minister should have added his own name to the list of ministers fired for "tiredness." The new Cabinet, cracked the Sunday Telegraph, "is, so to speak, the New Frontier--under Eisenhower." In just nine days, the number of those who professed dissatisfaction with Macmillan himself had risen from 39% to 52%. Only once before in Britain had a Gallup poll ever found a majority dissatisfied with a Prime Minister--in the dark days of 1940 and Neville Chamberlain.

As for the party's feelings, discontent is deepest among hard-core Tories. By his brusque, humiliating dismissals of leading ministers, Mac the Knife violated the most sacred tenet of Toryism: party loyalty.* Said one former government minister last week: "The Tory Party is a peculiar, organic thing of which you're either wholly a part or else never really of it. Even a Tory leader may not really be of it--he can use and be used by the party for so long as he's required, and then he becomes expendable. That's what happened with Churchill. He never respected the Tory Party's gods. Macmillan's no more of the party than Churchill, and the time is approaching when the party will eject him, too."

Sympathy for Selwyn. The party's reservations were voiced out loud last week by former Prime Minister Anthony Eden, now Lord Avon, and Tory Kingmaker Lord Salisbury, who both protested that sacked Chancellor of the Exchequer Selwyn Lloyd was "harshly treated." Added Eden pointedly: "I have no doubt that Mr. Lloyd will serve the nation again in high office." Macmillan's likeliest successor remains Deputy Prime Minister R. A. ("Rab") Butler, who last week solicitously assured victims of Mac's massacre that he had nothing to do with their demise.

If the party slips still farther in three by-elections scheduled for fall, Macmillan may be forced to resign, though few top Tories are now betting on his early retirement. After Parliament recesses this week, Macmillan will leave for Yorkshire's grouse moors. There, as his foes know well, a few days of nonpolitical bloodletting usually work wonders for Uncle Harold.

* As expressed by Stanley Baldwin's vow, on resigning as Prime Minister in 1937: "I won't spit on the deck, and I shan't shout at the helmsman."

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