Westminster Commentary
Selwyn Resurgens
By BERNARD LEVIN QUESTION TIME before the Bud- get is always a nerve-racking experience. Some of them, after all, have been up since four in the morning, and the strain is beginning to tell. The laughter is louder and shriller, and the jokes worse than usual, and the degree of attention paid to what is actually being said by any- body rather less. Still, there was the usual crop of strange sights to be seen. The two toppered ones on the Government side—Mr. Nabarro and Sir Colin Thornton-Kemsley, the latter looking curiously shrunken, as though he was wearing the right hat, but somebody else's head—were matched by a most startling appari- tion behind the Labour front benches. It was Mr. Abse, clad in what I presume is customary miner's gala dress down in Pontypool: fawn cutaway with tapered trousers to match, soft brown waistcoat with gold watchchain, silk choker with a pearl tiepin the size of a water- melon, ruby on the left teacup-finger, and what looked remarkably like an orchid in the button- hole, the complete outfit surmounted, in both senses of the word, by a gigantic brown billy- cock a full ten inches high.
Back on the other side, all the Tory back- bench ladies in sight had turned out in an identical shade of light blue, which seemed to indicate bad staff-work somewhere; Lieutenant- colonel Sir Walter Bromley-Davenport (to name but a few) was leaning against the Division Lobby door, Ss if he could hardly wait to indi- cate his confidence in the Government if a vote should be called for; the Member for Woodford sat, bowed and pale, gently caressing his stick; over the road again, Mr. Michael Foot and Mr. Woodrow Wyatt sat side by side, chatting amiably (as Mr. Maurice Wiggin once remarked, if you would like to go back and read that sen- tence again, please do; I'll wait here). Mr. Wilson had clearly been following the sun during the recess; and when the inevitable questions to the Chairman of the Kitchen Committee arrived, Mr. Gaitskell—and may ten thousand angels sing around his bed every night for it—refrained from making his joke about the sausages in the canteen.
And then I noticed a strange and significant sight. The Labour benches were not full. Over on the Government side they were packed rib- crushingly tight, as is usual on Budget Day, but over there one could see little patches of green leather, members here and there half-sprawled on the bench. At first, naturally, I assumed that this was a Labour comment, by way of absenteeism, on the fact that the Chancellor is now Mr. Selwyn Lloyd, and that presumably all those stories I have been hearing lately about Mr. Lloyd being a new man (and goodness knows the old one needed a fairly complete re- treading) were so much public relations. But, of course, this could not be so; the increased elbow- room on the Opposition side of the House is provided by the decrease in the number of mem- bers there. It takes a really full House (which almost never materialises nowadays except for the Budget) to show this, and to remind us that Mr. Gaitskell now has over one hundred fewer followers (if that is the word) than Mr. Mac- millan. To see it visibly demonstrated thus was a considerable shock.
But there was another shock to come, in the person of the new Chancellor. There have of late been many stories circulating to the effect that Mr. Lloyd is now not merely in the running but in the lead for the succession to Number Ten (or, to be precise, the Admiralty). Mr. Macleod has put too many influential backs up by his African policy; it is now clear to everybody (it was clear to my late grandfather, Taper, five years ago) that Mr. Sandys has not got what it takes; Mr. Butler is still Mr. Butler, and unless he be born again will continue to be; Mr. Heath should never have left his little grey home in the Whips' Office; and even nor'-nor'-west the Constitution knows the Earl of Home from a Prime Minister.
So we rub our eyes, and stare, and rub them again, and still the vision will not go away: the vision of Mr. Selwyn Lloyd, after all that, be- coming Prime Minister. For my own part it would not be too much to say that the thought makes my two eyes, like stars, to start from their spheres, and my knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine (see illustration). Yet why not? The mistake so many observers of the scene made on that fateful day in January, 1957, was to assume that Mr. Butler would be Prime Minister because he was nicer than Mr. Macmillan, or because he was cleverer. of because he had a sense of humour, or because his ideas were more attuned to the music of the times, or because he had largely been responsible for the reconstruction of the Tory Party after 1945. But in fact none of these things had any- thing to do with the decision : Tories become Prime Minister (assuming the office is vacant, of course) when they command the confidence of the Tory Party. Mr. Macmillan did, and Mr. Butler didn't. Similarly, when Mr. Macmillan, amid the sound of universal lamentation, is gathered to his forefathers (and if when he gets there he knows which way round a croft is worn, or in what season of the year the haggis may be shot, I shall be extremely surprised) it will be the man the Tories will follow who will lead them.
Now it is far from certain as yet, or even, to date, very likely, that Mr. Lloyd is this man. It is true that he has always avoided offending any particular section of the Tories, that his soldier- ing on in the heat of the day, and the unspeakable humiliations he endured as Foreign Secretary, have caused him to be regarded by many of them with something almost approaching 'affection. And certainly his worst enemy (and we could all name him, could we not?) would never accuse him of being too clever by half. But we have had one example in the past decade of a weak man becoming Prime Minister and ending in disaster; and I think that even the most charitably dis- posed Tory Party would want a little more evidence than anything he has hitherto shown them that Mr. Lloyd would not be another. There may be positive drawbacks to most of his rivals; but the Party might yet swallow hard at one of them rather than appoint a man whom they know to have had, even if he does not still have, nega- tive drawbacks the way some people have mice.
So what better test of the new Chancellor than his first Budget? And it must be said that Mr. Lloyd passed the test. It is true that he still fears to lift up his eyes from his script, from whence cometh his help, and there was one charming Freudian slip when he referred quite distinctly to a method of 'levining—er levying this tax,' But for the rest, this was a new man indeed. Gone was the whine, gone the nervous stammer, gone the pinkness, gone the hangdog, woebegone air, gone the radiated apology for being alive at all. Nor had these been replaced by a false bonhomie, by a cockiness and aggressiveness. Relaxed, con- fident, assured, vigorous, be spoke with hardly a stumble or a pause for his ninety minutes. What is more, or at any rate more difficult to believe, he actually made a number of jokes, and quite good jokes at that. True, they had been prepared and were in the text before him; but even a new Selwyn Lloyd must walk before he can run.
And this was indeed the most significant thing about the speech, and about the man. He showed signs of being in touch with the political atmo- sphere, which is more than I thought I would live to say about him, and goes far towards supporting the theory that whether or not other people see him as a future Prime Minister, he has visions himself. And if he has, he clearly understands, as Mr. Butler never did, that what counts in this race is not whether the crowd think you are winning, and certainly not whether you actually are win- ning (think how far down the course Mr. Mac- millan was when the bell went for the last lap), but whether you have the judges in your pocket. The judges are the Tory Party, and although it would be a little premature to say that Mr. Lloyd has them where he wants them, there can be no doubt now that they must be looking on him with a less lacklustre eye than hitherto. The contents of the Budget, after all, though it may actively have pleased only a few, can hardly have offended anybody very much (anybody on the Tory side, that is; and even over there Mr. Wilson's rage was strictly for export), and for a Chancellor to have made no new enemies by the time he sits down is itself an achievement. As a speech, of course, it was no great shakes; Mr. Lloyd's cliche-rate, while naturally below the all-time record set by Mr. Amory, is well above, say, Mr. Thorneycroft's ('There is much that is good in British industry, but there's quite a lot that is not good enough'). But a Budget speech that was great oratory would be a strange thing indeed. So there Mr. Lloyd is, in a prominent position at the front of the queue for the Premiership, when a short year or two ago (long though they must have seemed to him) the only queue he was in at all was the one for the boneyard. There'll be glad hearts in Hoylake this night.
Previous page
