Cloth cap strikes back

POLITICAL COMMENTARY AUBERON WAUGH

Far more remarkable than the fact of Mr Gunter's resignation was the manner he chose. For as long as anyone can recall, he has been muttering about not wishing to remain a member (those were his exact words) of any government which shrank from implementing the Donovan Report on the trade unions. In those far-off days, one must remember, it was thought that the Donovan Report would pro- duce a few recommendations from which a particularly unselfconfident mouse might reasonably shrink. The time for him to resign— or at any rate to threaten resignation—was when George Woodcock received his appointment to the Commission. Thereafter, it was quite obvious that the Government was never going to be faced with a recommendation to push through the reforms on which Mr_Gunter had set his heart. And when Mr Wilson expelled him from the Ministry of Labour, appointing Barbara Castle, the notorious middle-class intellectual, in his place, insult was added to injury.

But instead of resigning, or threatening to resign, on either of these occasions, Mr Gunter was content to grumble. Like a bull-frog, he blew up his chest to the most awe-inspiring size, then deflated again with only a croak. There were two possible explanations for this: the first is the obvious and uncharitable one that the drop from Cabinet rank at £9,750 a year to being a humble backbencher at £3,250 was more than he could countenance; the second that he hoped to fight back later. Of these, the first is shown to be as unworthy of the man as we can now, with miraculous hindsight, say we always knew it was. If the second explanation is the true one, then it follows that something must have happened during the last three months to con-

. of blessed memory ! !' vince him that the struggle naught availetti.

It has been suggested that he was displeased with the situation at the Ministry of Power, and no doubt he was. But this can scarcely have been a major consideration, since he gave Very little evidence of an awareness that he was the Minister of Power. He left his heart in the Ministry of Labour. Instead, there are three reasons given for his resignation: that he re- sented the Parliamentary Committee of the Cabinet, as a sort of Inner Cabinet from which he was excluded: that he resented the present style of leadership, whereby any disagreement within the Cabinet is interpreted as disloyalty; and that he resented the preponderance of middle-class intellectuals. The first two are stock grumbles. As a matter of fact, the Parlia- mentary Commitee is not at all an Inner Cabinet. Important matters have invariably been referred to the full Cabinet. Mr Gunter has been able to live with the Prime Minister's paranoia for three and a half years, and even appeared to enjoy reacting to it with dogged insensitivity. No, the last explanation is far the most inter- esting, and the only one which explains the manner of his going, as well as the matter.

Naturally enough, his departure has dis- tressed all the forces of sanity in the Cabinet: Mr Jenkins, Mr Healey, Mr Callaghan, Mr Crosland and even, I dare say, Mr Marsh. He was a steadfast and courageous fighter who could always be relied upon to come down on the right side in a crisis. What has distressed them even more is the fact that he left without consulting one of them, without soliciting their support on any particular issue in dispute, and without even saying goodbye. Nobody need be surprised that Mr Gunter, after the series of humiliations to which he has been subjected, should turn his back on Mr Wilson. What is much more extraordinary is that he should also seem to turn his back on his friends, and the only clue which he gives in his letter of resigna- tion to the Prime Minister is contained in the openine of the second paragraph, much ex- panded during his broadcasts on Tuesday : have the feeling that the best service I can render to the folk from whence I came . .

Nothing illustrates the gulf between the middle-class intellectuals and the plain working man better than the unbearably poignant double exclamation mark with which Mr Gunter chose to underline his irony at the end. The Ministry of Labour (`now of blessed memory! !') was his haven, it is true, but it may be a measure of the extent to which the middle classes (whether self promoted or born) have taken over the Labour party that nobody could think of another office for him in any reformed Labour Cabinet. Mr Gunter was prepared to accept middle-class leadership from Mr Gaitskell in the old days when the trade union voice was extremely strong in Labour's counsels. A hang- over of this loyalty would have made him pre- pared to accept middle-class leadership from Mr Jenkins, whose Welsh mining parentage at least is unimpeachable, provided he could be sure that the traditional working class voice was still strong, and that Labour was still a working class party. However, he saw the Parliamentary Committee of the Cabinet from which he was excluded as a kind of middle-class intellectual conference, and he saw the by-election results at Oldham and Nelson and Colne as the inevit- able price of this.

A cynic might point out that Mr Gunter's concern for the grass roots of the party might not be entirely unconnected with his own self- identification : the Government was losing touch with Ray Gunter, ergo the Government was losing touch with the working class. Apart from the smear of personal vanity which might be

implicit in such an interpretation, and which is surely repudiated by the very pointlessness of his resignation's timing, as well as by its selfless- ness, the fact remains that he is absolutely right.

Thus Mr Gunter will not become a leader of the right or of the left in his new role on the back benches —these distinctions are rapidly be-

coming irrelevant. He will not even appear as a leader of the trade union MPS—he is scarcely in a position to lead them against the prices

and incomes policy, in any case. He will not

even, except as a by-product, represent a focus of opposition to the Prime Minister. He will,

quite simply, be the spokesman of the working

class against the intellectual socialist strain in the Labour movement and as such will be the

spearhead of an entirely new dissension for the party in office—the class warfare which has largely eclipsed the old ideological battles.

It is anyone's guess what the middle-class Cabinet will make of this. So used are they to

the old splits between left and right that it will

probably take them some time to comprehend what is happening. The new gulf is between the too-clever-by-half leadership, with its much- vaunted classlessness, its expertise in things like economics which ordinary people have scarcely heard of, and technology which they rightly abhor, its fancy ideas about race and penal re- form—between all this and the ordinary people themselves.

Although one describes this as a new.develop- ment, it would be more accurate to speak of an old conflict resumed. The very first meeting of the Independent Labour Party, held in Bradford at the beginning of the century, witnessed a furious row between George Bernard Shaw and Keir Hardie, on exactly these lines. But until now the trade unionists have been sufficiently well represented in Labour's counsels to tolerate

a leavening of intellectual advice. After the last

war, the ideological rows between the left and right were so intense that alignments tended to igriore who belonged to the trade union working class tradition and who belonged to the middle-class-intellectual complex. Now the Labour party is in very real danger of throwing out the baby with the bath water in its repudia- tion of the cloth cap image.

To pretend that Mr Gunter will consciously and deliberately embark on a course of

sabotage, inspired by class bitterness, would probably be to misjudge the man. Certainly he intends to stomp the country and wow the party conference, but a certain natural indolence might well inhibit him from going further, quite apart from considerations of health. He would dearly love to succeed to the general secretary- ship at Transport House—which, as the rules stand at present, cannot be held by a Member of Parliament—if only to forestall Mr Wilson's nominee, Mr Greenwood, but it is far more likely that he will quietly fade away. Many people supposed that this ambition was his main reason for resigning in the first place, and on Tuesday, when he produced his list of the formidable qualities required for such a post,

it was apparent that opposition to Mr Green- wood was a large part of his message to the Labour faithful. Transport House must be saved as a bastion from which the working class can set about recapturing Labour's leader- ship from the usurpers. If he were approached by the trade unions, he said, he couldn't very well ask them to 'stick the job up their jumper.' If Mr Gunter can convince left-wingers like Mr Cousins of the TGWU and Mr Scanlon of the AEF that class solidarity transcends ideological opposites, then he might just carry the day, but he will have his work cut out. He would cer- tainly have to modify his tune on such matters as the Government's prices and incomes policy if he personally is to be acceptable to the old folks at home from whence he came. One may doubt whether he has either the mental agility or the will.

More than anything else, Mr Gunter's resig- nation should be seen as a personal tragedy. Friends in the Cabinet persuaded him with great difficulty to stay on and fight the good tight from the Ministry of Power. His decision to resign without a word to anyone, turning his back on friend and foe alike, should be seen as a gesture of despair. But the resentment and frustration that he now personifies are both things which are bound to go from strength to strength. There is now no one in the Cabinet who is consciously and deliberately working class.

It would be a mistake to regard Roy Mason, Mr Gunter's successor at the Ministry of Power, as another mediocre Wilson toady, like George Thomas. He is intelligent, articulate and, most important of all, reasonably indepen- dent. But the numerical balance of power has shifted dangerously since the South African arms affair, with the disappearance of George Brown and Ray Gunter and the arrival of the appalling Mr Thomas. The Prime Minister still can't get his way in many things, as the House of Lords controversy in the Cabinet proved. This was interpreted by some commentators as heralding a new Jenkins-Crossman axis. The axis exists, but it is hardly new; your correspon- dent was writing about it as long ago as 19 April. Mr Crossman appears nowadays to con- cern himself less with the social services than with acting as a winged messenger between the Prime Minister and his Chancellor of the Ex- chequer, whose occasional attempts to talk to each other are a great embarrassment to any third party present. It is hard to know how much either of them trusts what Mr Crossman says, but both appear to trust him more than they trust each other. Perhaps he will play the part of Falstaff to Prince Hal in any hypo- thetical Jenkins Cabinet. In the meantime, Mr Wilson must attend to the class revolt. His accent will have to become broader, of course, his clothes less natty. It would be a marvellous irony if the claims through which he got himself accepted by the British people—his classlessness, his cool pro- fessionalism, his economic and technological know-how—were to be the very same as the reasons for his rejection by the Labour party five years later.