Westminster Commentary
'MEN crowded round him, patting his back and gripping his hand, and women kissed him . . . when he left . . . a crowd surged round him on the pavement outside, still cheering him and patting him on the back.'
Tommy Steele be damned; Peter Thorneycroft. The combined efforts of my entire staff of re- searchers have failed to discover a precedent for a Chancellor of the Exchequer being kissed in public (and not many, I might say, for one being kissed in private; have you ever seen a picture of Mr. Gladstone?), and for that reason if no other Mr. Thorneycroft's name deserves to be remembered. A cousin of mine (who is on occa- sion, I fear, little better than an idiot—we call him the black Taper of the family) last week bought his small daughter a pair of goldfish. In- sisting that their bowl should be filled with running water, he put it under the tap in the kitchen sink; the bowl filled, then overflowed, and the goldfish went down the plughole. The child burst into floods of tears, managing through her grief to ask what strikes me as an eminently sensible question for a four-year-old : 'Why didn't you put, the plug in?' Well, there was a time a few days ago when it seemed that Mr. Thorneycroft was going to go down the sink of oblivion in a like manner. On Tuesday night, however, the late Chancellor, in a speech to his constituents which produced the demonstration I have mentioned, put the plug in, and the goldfish of his reputation may yet live to gorge itself on the ants' eggs of justification while Mr. Mac- millan and the rest of the Cabinet are left to gaze sadly on the years that the locusts have eaten.
Mr. Macmillan, in short, may have made the worst calculation of his Premiership. It is true that Lord Salisbury a mighty man was he, with arms like iron bands; yet when he took his de- parture the chestnut tree shed not a leaf, let alone a tear, and where is his Lordship npw? (Hatfield, to be precise, and in a perfectly filthy temper about it.) But there was one vital difference be- tween Lord Salisbury's resignation and those of the Palm Court Trio; he was wrong and they were right. This is the point that seems to have escaped Mr. Macmillan, and there may be a fearful retribution in store for him.
Already the smoke-screen so industriously laid last week is blowing away. As the Spectator pointed out, the resignations were not merely over the sum of £50 million, and the rest of the Cabinet were not simply defending family allowances from the ruthless axe of the hard- faced Peter of Monmouth. It is worth spending a little time, I think, in examining some of the things that have been said about the resignations. Beginning with Mr. Macmillan's thoroughly dis- ingenuous letter to his ex-Chancellor, which em- phasised (among other things) that there is not only no gratitude in politics but not even much common civility, most of Mr. Thorneycroft's erstwhile colleagues have been quick to attack him in public. They include Mr. Butler, Lord Mills, Mr. Brooke, Mr. Watkinson, Mr. Molson, silly Miss Pitt, Mr. Anthony Barber (a member of that egregious band of greasers, the Junior Whips) and, worst of all, Mr. Sandys, who started off by virtually calling Mr. Birch a liar, saying that 'there is not a grain of truth in the sug- gestion that the Government have been wavering in their resolve to fight inflation,' and then went on to state quite categorically that the question was 'whether . . . it was right to slash the social 'services'—an assertion in which there is certainly not much more than a grain of truth. Only the Foreign Secretary remembered his manners, say ing that he greatly regretted 'the loss of a valued and courageous colleague and friend.' It is clear that although on Hoylake UDC they do not teach their members how to be Foreign Secretary, they do at any rate instil into them an aversion W spitting in the eye of a man who already has a piece of grit in it.
Still, Mr. Lloyd's speech stood alone; what with the well-drilled chorus on the one hand and the industrious keyhole-whispering of Dr. Hill on the other (the advantage of a crisis like this is that it reminds us that Charlie is not in fact dead, the widespread belief that he is having arisen from an examination of his achievements hither• to) it is not surprising if the tide was beginning to flow against Mr. Thorneycroft. Mahy of the political correspondents of the newspapers appear to be under the impression that if they are told something by Charlie or some other government publicist it must be so, and may therefore be printed as a fact.
Most ridiculous of all the inaccuracies were those in the News Chronicle, which started og splendidly on the Wednesday by saying in alt analysis of the Government since the election that 'Only two men are still doing the top jobs they were given less than three years ago—Lord Kilmuir . . . and Mr. Lennox-Boyd . . (the list in fact also includes the Attorney-General, the Solicitor-General, the Commonwealth Secre- tary and the Lord Advocate), and devoted the whole of its front page on the Saturday (with a banner headline saying, 'Thorneycroft the facts') to what purported to be the 'inside story,' but which was in fact based on an elementary howler by the writer, who had dreamed up (i0 spite of its categorical contradiction by Mr. Thorneycroft) the theory that the ex-Chancellor's intention had been to hold expenditure to the level of last year's Estimates, rather than the year's (much larger) actual expenditure. The Daily Mail—whose first reactions might have been written by the polarised Noel Barber, so little grasp on reality did they have—said, 'They agreed that everything possible should be cut, but there was this £50,000,000 beyond which they would not go.' The Times had, admittedly, burnt its fingers so badly on the Monday that much could be forgiven it; but to sum up the situation by saying that 'Mr. Thorneycroft's action could, of course, be right without his colleagues neces- sarily being wrong' was not the best way to restore shaken confidence in the wisdom of Printing House Square. The Daily Telegraph, in a passage naive even by the standards of that newspapers said that 'The crisis over the Estimates . . . arose suddenly,' though how this could well be, seeing that they had been the subject of discussions for sonie weeks, it is hard to fathom. The Telegraph also put forward the engaging theory (as a fact, naturally) that Mr. Birch and the Prof. re- signed out of loyalty—indeed, out of 'the loyalty to be expected in British public life.' The Daily Express—but I think that the political and finan- cial experts of the Daily Express, after their per- formance over the Bank rate 'leak,' need not detain us. As for Tribune, it called on no less a person that Mr. Aneurin Bevan to say, 'On the face of it, it does seem astonishing that a margin of less than one-hundredth of the total budget should precipitate a political crisis of such dimensions, That it has done so points to some- thing of more significance than is involved in a difference of £50 million.' Alas for the shortness of human memory; Mr. Bevan himself resigned over a difference of £13 million.
After this grubby tide had flowed for days, It was pleasant indeed to get to Mr. Thorney- croft's speech. It was a dignified, sensible, un- yielding statement, not only of the principle on Which he resigned, but of the economic plight Which faced—and still faces—the country. He Went as far as he could towards giving the official story the He direct, and for the rest he is clearly content to let time be the judge. Of course, it may be that the whole restrictionist policy was misconceived from the start, but we may be sure that Mr. Macmillan's compromise with it is not going to be an adequate substitute either for Mr. Thorneycroft's whole hog on the one hand or for a genuinely expansionist policy on the other. Mr. Macmillan, in fact, has blundered badly, even in the narrowest party sense. For when the Esti- mates are published there will certainly not be anything cheerful in them, and the Budget can hardly be expected to produce much comfort for anybody. The picture, so assiduously painted by the Prime Minister and his proper Charlie, of a Cabinet with the welfare of the people at heart protecting it from the cold-hearted Chancellor is not only a false picture; it may raise, when its falsity becomes apparent, a reaction very little to Mr. Macmillan's taste. Can one not see and hear the populace throwing their sweaty night- caps into the air and crying of Mark Antony Thorneycroft, 'Let him be Cmsar 1 '? Well, no, perhaps one cannot. But we have not heard the last of the Member for Monmouth, and neither has the Prime Minister.
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