It's tough at the top

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH

Unfortunately, I left the House of Commons at two o'clock on the morning after Mr Heath's birthday and so missed the historic scenes three hours later when Mr Hogg was being heckled and shouted down by his own back benches. It would have been worth the extra three hours of crippling boredom to have heard Mr Hogg. in best pre-devaluation Callaghan style. turn on the hostile rows behind him and proclaim that he had served the party for thirty years. had given up a career and a peerage (which is more than Mr Callaghan ever did) and would not be put off by unmannerly people forty-live of whom subsequently defied their Whip to tote against the Race Relations Bill's third reading.

Wednesday's revolt could have been avoided by the simple expedient of leaving the third reading of the Race Relations Bill to a free vote, as advocated by Mr Selwyn Lloyd, Sir Harmar Nicholls and your political correspondent. In- stead, Mr Heath decided to invite a revolt from the back bench right by ordaining abstention. after the left had been charmed into submission and the Shadow Cabinet right, meagrely repre- sented in Mr Geoffrey Rippon, had been simi- larly squared. Mr Ronald Bell's amendment was the predictable result of this; what was much less predictable, and can only be ascribed to a mammoth failure in communications. was the second amendment signed by important members of the 1922 Committee executive.

Of course, it takes two to communicate, and by no means all of the blame should be put on Mr Heath. Since Lord Salisbury's resignation eleven years ago it has always been accepted that the Tory Cabinet is some way to the left of the parliamentary party. Recently. and especially after the sacking of Mr Powell. the Shadow Cabinet has moved further to the left while the party has moved further to the right. Mr Macmillan was always prevented from going ostentatiously further left than his rank and file would accept by his chairman of the 1922 Com- mittee, the former Mr John Morrison. Mr Morrison (now Lord Margadale and of blessed memory! !) was respected throughout the party for his sound right wing views and for his ownership of countless acres in Wiltshire and Argyll, all groaning with pheasants and grouse. He also enjoyed the confidence of Mr Mac- millan to an extent that no one seems to enjoy Mr Heath's. His successor, Sir Arthur Verc Harvey, is an amiable enough man who is popular in the party and gets on well with Mr Heath. But either Mr Heath fails to take Sir Arthur into his confidence. or Sir Arthur is not competent to represent the opinions of the party forcefully enough.

It would be absurd to see the dissident amend- ment as a direct challenge to Mr Heath's leader- ship, but it would be equally absurd to see it as no more than a shot across his bows on the single issue of race. It is a shot across his bows, but on the whole issue of leadership. Discontent with Mr Heath is reaching a very high point indeed at the moment, and there are only two ways for him to meet it. The first is simply a matter of educating his party in the workings of the constitution. A large part of the discontent derives from impatience at Labour's continua- tion in office, and Mr Heath must simply preach

patience, rather than pander to an impatience which he can do nothing to assuage. 1-or this reason one rattler dreads his great speech on the economy at Wembley next Tuesday.

The second thing--and I fear he will need to do this before the party conference if he is to avoid the kind of humiliation which he does not, at present. have the stature to survive— is to produce a very strongly worded policy docu- ment on immigration. I heard him answer ques- tions off-the-cuff at Dudley on this matter, and he did it very well.

There is no strong Heath-must-go movement as yet, and since the main beneficiary of any such movement at the present time would be Mr Hogg, it cannot start immediately. The only thing which would get it off the ground would be if Mr Heath, in best Labour party tradition, decided to meet his critics head on. He could probably just beat them on race, but not at all on the leadership issue which underlies it. Mr Hogg has managed to convince the 1922 Com- mittee that he would secretly have liked to oppose the Race Relations Bill, just as he has convinced the press and liberal public that he would secretly like to strengthen it. Perhaps both impressions arc true—they are not incon- sistent--but whatever the truth, it scarcely matters. Unless Mr Heath can learn to be a little more adroit in his personal style, he is in for trouble.

As Mr Len Williams goes out to govern Mauri- tius, nobody seems quite certain just how im- portant the vacant post of Labour's general secretary really is. The National Executive, which meets on Wednesday to decide whom it will recommend at the party conference, may be getting ideas above its station. The sub-com- mittee appointed under Jennie Lee's chairman- ship to scrutinise the short list of eight which had been compiled from thirty-six applicants decided that none was distinguished enough. So the corridors of power have been buzzing with extraordinary and unfamiliar names: Fred Hayday, Gwyn Morgan, Terry Pitt. Mr Caller- mole, Lord Delacourt-Smith. Perhaps these have always been names to conjure with at the right time and in the right place, but your poli- tical correspondent must admit that they took him by surprise. Finally. attention settled on someone called Mr Alf Allen. of usoAw, the shopworkers' union. where he has long been regarded as a veritable giant among men. Further inquiry produced the sueeestion that the general secretaryship of the Labour party was not nearly important enough for Alf Allen.

Well, if the general secretaryship is not im- portant enough for Alf Allen, who on earth is it important enough for? There is always Mr Greenwood, of course. Nobody could say that great talents would be wasted were he to be given the job.

Downing Street has been strenuous in its denials that Mr Greenwood is the Prime Minis- ter's candidate; so one can only assume that Mr Wilson is worried about the matter. The composition of the National Executive is such that the unions should, in theory, have control of it. Out of twenty-eight members, twelve are appointed by the unions directly and a further three, called women members, are elected by,

the party conference, which means in effect by the unions.

Even so, it is possible that Mr Wilson could push his own man through the National Execu- tive. Of the twelve union members, one, Fred Mulley, is a minister and so already on Mr Wilson's meal ticket, while two other mPs- Messrs Bradley and Padley—probably have no particular wish to displease their leader. The three official women members are all MPS, and one of them, Alice Bacon, is a minister. The votes of Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle, Wedg- wood Benn and Anthony Greenwood are not much in doubt. Jennie Lee and Irene White are both ministers, while Joan Lestor will surely vote for Mr Greenwood in default of any other left wing candidate. The sixteenth MP on the National Executive is someone called Mr Arthur Skeffington who represents the Co-op and who, unknown to your political correspondent until this moment, has been usefully employed all this time as parliamentary under-secretary to the Minister of Housing, Mr A. Greenwood.

Armed then with the votes of this parlia- mentary caucus, Mr Wilson needs only a couple of outside votes to overcome any opposition organised by Messrs Callaghan and Brown, his treasurer and deputy leader. And he has enough patronage at his disposal (the reform of the House of Lords is not entirely without its opportunities) to secure that. But he will have a much tougher job when the nomination is put before the party conference in October.

When this happens the two giant unions, Frank Cousins's TGWU and Hugh Scanlon's AEF, will have not two but over two million votes. Mr Wilson can't hope to make them all life peers. And the conference will have to vote not only on Mr Greenwood's appointment but also on a change in the party constitution whereby he can retain his membership of Parliament and of the Cabinet. This rule was adopted at the suggestion of Ernest Bevin to keep Herbert Morrison out of the job on Arthur Henderson's death. The position of the left here is that, while it is prepared to accept Mr Greenwood as general secretary faute de mieux (although not regarding him as a man of the left), and while it is quite prepared to see a good left wing general secretary in the Cabinet, fighting the good fight there, it is absolutely and un- compromisingly not prepared to accept Mr Greenwood as general secretary in the Cabinet. Perhaps Mr Cousins has told them what sort of a figure Mr Greenwood cuts there.

The Prime Minister is not going to be allowed to have his cake and eat it. He does not want to lose a reliable stooge from the Cabinet and he does not particularly wish to see Rossendale go Tory.

At the moment of writing, Mr Wilson may have convinced himself that he will be able to persuade the conference to accept both Mr Greenwood and a change in the constitution. All I can say is that he is wrong. He must choose between having Mr Greenwood at Transport House and having him in the Cabinet. Since the post of general secretary really comes into its own only when the party is in opposition, and since Mr Wilson is not by nature inclined to look quite as far ahead as that, he may well decide to keep Mr Greenwood in the Cabinet. This leaves the question of the general secretary- ship open again. Assuming that Alf Allen really is too grand for the job, and judging only on the comparative vehemence of, certain denials, I might guess that Lord Delacourt-Smith is Mr Wilson's second runner. But if the Prime Minister decided to withdraw from the conflict, as he loudly proclaims he has done, then a good outsider to watch is Bill Simpson, of the old Foundry Workers, who has been finding that time hangs rather heavy on his hands since his union was merged with the AEU. It seems as good a reason as any for taking the job on.