Political Commentary
By HENRY FAIRLIE IF this were a normal year, it would be just about now that Mr. Harold Macmillan would flick over the pages of his diary in pleasant anticipation of the garden parties he had agreed to open. Bath this year? What's that little quip in Jane Austen? And he would reach for . . . bother, where is the Macmillan edition of Jane Austen? Mr. Macmillan opening a Conservative garden party is one of the happiest events of the political calendar. The lawns stretch out to the copses and the glades, the formal mingling with the informal: the dowagers— why is it that even the young ladies at Conservative garden parties look like dowagers?—look up: and then, from beneath the peeling columns of a lovely Georgian house, this peeling Edwardian drops one brittle joke and silences the murmur of the *memorial mums. For the next twenty minutes it is sheer delight. Here—and what other politician has it today?— is style: the style of the man who accepts his position in the world without question. And when the speech is over, and he has wandered round the stalls and the tea-tables, where does he go when he leaves? Ali ! if only it could be the Gaiety: if only Lily Langtry or Ruby Miller were on again; if only it could be Romanos or the Star and Garter at Richmond. But no, it is 1955. said that this man would not prove to be the shrewdest of party Prime Ministers?), and at the same time give no hostage to any of them. He has left himself entirely free and uncom- mitted, each group given hope and left dangling on a string. Sir Anthony Eden knows how to play his party all right.
Look at the individual appointments. There is Mr. Reginald Maudling, less the protégé of Mr. Butler (though he is cer- tainly that) than the first dimpled child of Butskellism. Mr. Maudling is able, and one could forecast a promising future for him if it were not for the fact that he has never yet said anything which could not equally well have been said by Mr. Gaitskell. There is Lord Home. an able and likeable man, who has carried the burden of the Scottish Office under Mr. James Stuart, but who is outside the normal flow of party politics. There is Dr. Charles Hill, a shrewd appointment as Postmaster- General in the year when commercial television is meant to start operating, and one whose most beneficial effect will be that it will reduce the importance of Mr. Gammans in the House of Commons. And there is Sir Edward Boyle, the most intelligent and most unpredictable of them all, an intellectual Tory of individual wit and charm (and gestures), and with an untapped reserve of striking power. He now becomes Eco- nomic Secretary to the Treasury, which has come to be regarded as the first real step to promotion. He is only thirty- one, and a lot more will be heard of him. Those are the major appointments, and they tell nothing.
They tell nothing, except that their number and their nature suggest that Sir Anthony Eden has decided on an early election.
By the time next week's Spectator is published, the Budget secrets, and with them the secret about the election date, will be out. Every indication; at the moment of writing, is that it is likely to be May 26. There was no need to give Mr. Henry Strauss a peerage just now, but Sir Anthony Eden has done so, and so left Norwich South vacant, a seat which the Con- servatives held in 1951 with a majority of only 1,848 votes.
East Anglia has, since the war, become one of the marginal areas of the country. The party which wins East Anglia is likely to win the election. It seems highly improbable that a new Prime Minister would risk a defeat at a by-election there just after he had taken office; the effect would be damaging.
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