Political Commentary
The puppets fall down
Patrick Cosgrave
A fortnight ago—less perhaps—nearly any journalist in Westminster—nearly any dispassionate observer, for that matter—would have held to the well-worn proposition that the Government front bench looked a great deal stronger than its opposition equivalent. On the Tory side, so the argument ran, the only potential Prime Minister appeared to be the Leader herself (though at a pinch Mr Whitelaw might be added). On the Labour side, so the argument continued, there was a galaxy of talent—almost anybody from Mr Crosland to Mr Healey would look convincing in charge of our affairs. Then, suddenly, the puppet master withdrew; and the puppets all fell down.
Up to a fortnight ago almost any member of Mr Wilson's cabinet was willing to sneer at him. It is an extraordinary fact, as I observed last week, that no comparably successful party leader was held in such low regard by his fellows. Now that he is gone, however, it becomes apparent to what extent his colleagues depended on him, not only for business, but for reputation. Mr Bernard Levin, it is true, has preserved intact his devotion for Mr Roy Jenkins, in spite of the Home Secretary's innumerable jellyjowled prevarications (principally over the People's Republic of Clay Cross) of recent years—but the attachment of Mr Levin to a particular politician is the mark of death on the unfortunate man's forehead. And Mr Jenkins (who made a pretty fair fist, after all, of being Chancellor of the Exchequer) is not even the front runner.
It is only when one sits down and contemplates the record of the two men between whom the leadership of the Labour Party and the Prime Ministership of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is to be fought out that one fully realises how desperately impoverished the Labour Party is. Mr Callaghan, after all, was quite the worst Chancellor we have had this century : McKenna, Snowden, Churchill, Lloyd, Barber all had their faults and made their mistakes; but none departed from office in Great George Street in quite the broken-backed and humiliated fashion that Mr Callaghan did. It requires no great effort of memory, after all, to recall that Mr Callaghan was so seized of his failure that he wanted to resign from government altogether: he was preserved from obscurity and given the Home Office by Mr Wilson, and Mr Wilson alone. And this, say substantial sections of the governing party, is the man whose election to leadership will cause a wave of confidence to flow through the chancelleries of Europe.
And then there is Mr Michael Foot. For years Mr Foot had been the thinking Tory's favourite Socialist (Mr Powell, for example, admires him intensely). In his shabby clothes, scuffed shoes and heavy glasses he has always seemed to be the perfect tamely fanatical Whig with a few weird ideas (I bet he will not, in the course of the leadership campaign, repeat aloud his idea that nobody ought to be allowed to earn more than £7,000 a year) and no principles worth a damn. Throughout his time at the Department of Employment it was well understood by all concerned that he was the catspaw of Mr Wilson and Mr Jones. Whatever they agreed he agreed to implement, even when a lifetime's expressed conviction had to be sacrificed on the altar of the closed shop. However, even as a Secretary of State—and always understanding that he uttered only in the tones of his master's voice—Mr Foot, it could plausibly be argued, could not do much damage. But as Prime Minister ?
A minute's contemplation of the two front runners makes it possible to understand Mr Denis Healey's stated conviction that he felt he had to stand in order to be able to say in a year or so's time that he had at least given the party an opportunity to choose something better than the goods at the very front of the display counter. Of Mr Healey himself the best that can be said is that he has a certain rugged air when saying this week the opposite of what he said last week ; and that his manner suggests that he will thump very severely an interlocutor who suggests any contradiction in his invariably contradictory arguments. Of Mr Jenkins Mr Alan Watkins has acutely observed that the only thing one can imagine him fighting for is a good table in a good restaurant. To be sure he has a wellmannered air, and a once fashionable inability to pronounce the letter Sr'. But can it with confidence be suggested that he has any other characteristics, let alone convictions?
Which brings me to Mr Benn and Mr Crosland, who are easily the most impressive candidates—neither of them of course, has the remotest chance if victory. Mr Benn frightens a lot of people (most of them Tories) but he has consistently and clearly expounded a coherent political philosophy over a number of years. It is not a philosophy I care for; and the Britain Mr Benn would like to create is not a Britain I would care to live in. But it is a philosophy that a great many Labour supporters believe in, even if few of them have the courage or ability to articulate it; and Mr Benn, unlike his rivals, has never shrunk from saying what he thinks.
Mr Crosland has written several books and delivered innumerable lectures. It could not be suggested, even by his most enthusiastic admirers, that he has been an effective or distinguished minister; but he is the kind of man one can imagine growing in office. He is a touch arrogant intellectually —which probably explains why he is standing in so (for him) hopeless a contest: I imagine that he finds it unbelievable that his party really wants to choose between Mr Callaghan and Mr Jenkins. In his writings Mr Crosland has more clearly and thoroughly expounded the case for a mixed economy with the balance inclining towards state control than any other so-called Social Democrat, and this makes him the natural and appropriate opponent to Mr Benn and the doctrine of thorough-going state control of the economy and the national life which the former Lord Stansgate so lucidly expounds.
And all this, of course, brings us back to Mr Wilson. A week ago most commentators were praising him for—among other things—his ability to cover division within his party. What is becoming increasingly apparent is that he also had an ability to conceal poverty. Most of us have had the experience of hearing Mr Wilson mutter about how he had had to step in to save Jim or Roy or Denis from some appalling blunder or other. We have always regarded these mutterings as a part of the inimitably jocose Wilson style, a part of his own not wholly serious illusion of indispensability. It becomes increasingly clear, though, that each of his mutterings represented no less than the sober truth that all the skill was his; and such achievement as there was was his also. It is now very easy to understand why a man of genuinely first-class ability like Mr Jack Jones cannot bother to concern himself very much with the question of who is to succeed Mr Wilson.
And who—to get back to the horse race —will succeed Mr Wilson? It is difficult to imagine any scenario which does not conclude with a Callaghan victory: when the final ballot comes it is difficult if not impossible to imagine the left voting for Mr Jenkins or the right for Mr Foot. On the other hand the speed with which the initial Callaghan push foundered (at lunch time on the day of the resignation it was widely believed he would win on the first ballot) gives rise to doubt about the capacity of the Foreign Secretary's candidature to withstand strain. It is conceivable, even, that Mr Jenkins, if convinced that he could not himself win, would prefer to be number two to Mr Foot, rather than number three to Mr Foot and Mr Callaghan in a government run by the latter. In any event those in the Tribune group who have supported Mr Foot rather than Mr Benn are going around with broad grins on their faces; for there is no imaginable result that does not make Mr Foot at least the second man in the government. It seems apposite, though, to end with the comment of a senior Tory, Made the day Mr Wilson went. 'None of them' he said, will be as hard to beat as Wilson.
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