Memories
EBBW VALE
the Ministry of Health? There was an American bloke here with recording apparatus, sending the speech direct to America. Must have ie°st thousands. We did the usual wiring for the '°'IdsPeakers, but they did their own. The place w as Packed, with a great queue outside before it :Pened. Not all of them got in.' The old Labour party worker in the committee rooms at Ebbw vale looked at the three of us waiting in the cold tt) interview Michael Foot. Nobody was spending tbkisands on this coverage. Nor had any of r °°t's meetings been crowded out. Reminiscence was in order; nostalgic de la queue. Memories of the great days and the great man, now gone, impart a status to all connected with them : it was something to be messing about with sltldsPeaker wires alongside men making a rraight link with the United States. Everywhere Al the constituency you meet people who regard Zeurin Bevan's death and the probable nature the succession 'as heavy attacks on their own significance and dignity. h.Itven Michael Foot seems over-ready to discuss Ivs Policies from, the point of view of what Nye e!uld have thought of them. Yes, it was true van called unilateralism an emotional spasm, b "t Who knows what his position might be today, (i)ss' that the Government had abandoned Blue deterrent? and changed its line on the independent ‘1.:eterrent? Foot says he believes he would not Ali got the Ebbw Vale nomination if he had arileved in the Bomb; few of the questions on it °Is during the campaign have been hostile. No, 11:Vas not true that Nye had moved to the Right; ki was as Left as ever—as Left, it is implied, as Mr' Foot—to the end. th erhaPs he kow-tows to the aura a little more 'ean he would if Ebbw Vale were not still so him VaPhically and atmospherically strange to ,,ct' He has swotted up the statistics and can tell haul how many men work at Richard Thomas and a,, .dwins. But an outsider in a tough, opinionated _n_ci. intelligent valley community is bound to feel ahandit different. Mrs. Foot, when told her husband hL won the nomination, said she was very South because she had once made a film in youth Wales. The 20,000 majority apart, Mr. re°_t Probably couldn't find a more convincing 'son for settling on Ebbw Vale. Si Brandontiv_ Rhys Williams, Bt., the Conserva- candidate, makes rather a lot of Foot's per- ' v" nal unsuitability for the area. He refers to him always as 'the so-called Labour candidate.' This, you might think, was because of Foot's dif- ferences with the executive. Not at all. Sir Bran- don (Eton and Welsh Guards Officers' Mess) has in mind the non-working-class Foot background. Sir Brandon has decided that Michael Foot is too intellectual for this populace. What is needed is a practical thinking (paternal?) Tory. 'But wasn't Bevan an intellectual?' he is asked. 'An intellec- tual! Wave you seen the house up the road where he was born?' Sir Brandon is not going to display too much intellect for anyone.
Actually, he doesn't like being called Sir Brandon. On the posters his name appears simply as Rhys Williams (which is his surname) and he has all kinds of man o' the people habits. While the Conservative Office people were feeding in an hotel one day last week he went to a tiny cafe a few doors away and sat in an old raincoat with paint on it. It is his belief that he is making a great many friends, chiefly by meeting people in drinking clubs. 'May I shake your hand?' he says to a room full of men. 'They listen to me and I've been told, "Your time will come." I'm getting myself well known, that's the thing,' he says. In a tombola session at Ebbw Vale I met a man who remembers someone tall coming into his club one night and touting for handshakes-- but not who he was or what he was there for Sir Brandon can, however, hope to bring down the Labour majority for, apart from Mr. Foot's various disadvantages, there are this time a Liberal and a Welsh Nationalist standing. Some Labour workers believe the margin might be re- duced by 10,000, but these are men who put on recollections of Nye every morning like a gar- ment. No Liberal has contested Ebbw Vale since 1929. Patrick Lort-Phillips does not agree that it is fairly nonsensical to do so now without the full backing of the party. He, like all the candi- dates except Sir Brandon, is a unilateralist and Mr. Grimond has declined, without any hedging; to speak for him. Mr. Lort-Phillips thinks this is the chance to start the take-over from Labour and says that if he cannot get 4,000 or 5,000 votes it an industrial constituency like Ebbw Vale there is no future for Liberalism. It would be wrong to say there was an atmosphere of despair in his committee rooms and I cannot understand why it is missing.
But a fine though limited pessimism is dis- cernible through the jaunty theorising of the Nationalist, Mr. Emrys Roberts. He was willing, when pushed, to speak about the possible need to abandon parliamentary means of trying to win the party's objectives and turn to passive resis- tance, provoked arrests and hunger strikes. Against this, there was a young man in the Nationalists' campaign headquarters who had recently been won to the cause: 'When the fore- man asks me what I am I say, "Welsh Nation- alist," ' he said. It obviously needed as much courage, and was something of the same kind of avowal, as saying to the foreman, 'I'm saved.'
He and Sir Brandon were the most enthusiastic people I met in Ebbw Vale. Lort-Phillips and a man in the tombola session who won a top line were the most serene. Mr. Roberts and Mr. Foot were the most serious and engaging and it seems odd that one is going to be at the bottom of the poll on November 17 and the other at the top—at the top by, say, 12,000 votes.
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