With Gaitskell Through Durham
By ALAN BRIEN MR. MACMILLAN'S tour of the North-East went from Tees to Wear to Tyne : Mr. Gaitskell's from Wear to Tyne to Tees. Some commentators allege that is the only difference between the two political pilgrimages. As one of the very few reporters to trail both routes with both tribunes of the people, T disagree. For instance, Mr. Macmillan never wore a hat. Much was made of this Spartan forbearance by his entourage. Per- sonally, I do not think it was due to any superior thickness of skull, but simply that top, or topper, people insist on using their right hand to raise their hat when they meet a lady, or a group of gentlemen with a lady, and cannot therefore shake hands at the same time. And every palm rubbed against palm, according to public relations ad- visers, is in some mysterious way more likely to attract a vote than a mere wave of a hat. I noticed, however, that Mr. Macmillan wore a snug brown check cap inside his car. Mr. Gailskell, on the other hand, wore a trilby with a rather gay devil- may-care twist to the brim. He put it on and took it off according to the weather.
' This may not be an important difference (but, at a time when the beginning of the end of the cold war is being confidently attributed to Mr. Macmillan's Moscow white fur hat, such details should perhaps not go unrecorded). And it was not the only difference. Mr. Macmillan preserved throughout the cold, yellowing imperturbability of a frost-bitten peach or a Zen Buddhist sage. At least so far as the accompanying reporters were concerned. He affected to be oblivious of their existence—however breathily they eavesdropped, however flashily they photographed, he carried on the pretence that he was Haroun El Rashid alone with the carpet-sellers in the bazaar. Several times he turned on his heel and walked almost head-on into my cigarette-holder without batting an eyelid. Only once did he forget himself. In a Sunderland shipyard, an eager cameraman walked backwards into the arc of a rotating arm on some giant machine. Mr. Macmillan's eyes popped like organ stops. 'Hey there, watch out!' he commanded. 'Damn fool thing to do,' he mut- tered under his breath. The grinning cameraman snapped the Prime Minister's stern grimace while the lethal arm grazed by the lens of his camera, Mr. Gaitskell could never quite conceal his consciousness that he was on show. He was some- how both nervous and determined at once—like a man treading a path through a minefield. He could not stop recognising the newspapermen who had been with him all day and nodding and chatting to them in a neighbourly way. When he visited a technical school, he was obviously worried that he was intruding on everybody's privacy. 'I'm terribly sorry,' he would say to some boy who was beaming his face in half at the thought . of being reproduced across two columns in the local paper, `I'm terribly sorry, but I'm afraid we have to do this. Do you mind if we just look as if we were discussing this ex- periment of yours for a moment?'
In the press conferences which punctuated his travels, Mr. Gaitskell made no headlines. But he was impressive by his very lack of conceit about his own impressiveness. When he said that he was there 'not to show myself but to see for myself,' he was speaking half the truth. And when he added that he supposed nevertheless that 'it might help if people do in fact see me,' he was almost adding up the truth to 90 per cent. The press, professional experts in what interests people, could sense the occasional frustration of Mr. Gaitskell's advisers at some of his perversely un- newsworthy activities. He seemed genuinely interested in looking over that chilly, unpopulated warehouse near Gateshead. Mr. Gaitskell must surely have realised that patting barricades of Heinz beans and smiling at skyscrapers of Mars bars would never make copy or win votes. Nevertheless, he allowed his inspection of the warehouse to take up some hours in the middle of a tightly packed schedule.
On Mr. Macmillan's tour, Lady Dorothy acted as a kind of reserve regiment which mopped up pockets of publicity missed by the Prime Minister in his forward blitz. Mrs. Gaitskell did not refuse to act as official scavenger to the procession. It just obviously did not occur to her that this might be conceived as a human being's role. She was interested in anything which was interesting, and polite about anything which was not. Her off-the- cuff remarks on what she did manage to see through the scrum would have made a most enter- taining and lively sound track to the three days of more or less dumb-show.
Perhaps the most noticeable difference between the two tours was not in what Mr. Gaitskell or Mr. Macmillan said to people but in what people said to them. The Prime Minister exposed him- self to the swopping of genial nonsense with nameless bystanders in a way which must have been unique in British politics. What can the most powerful man in Britain say to someone who materialises out of a High Street doorway with jaw agape and hand outstretched? 'Good luck. . . . Thank you very much. . . . Glad to meet you.' What can the obscure voter reply? 'God bless you, sir. . . . Good luck. . . . Glad to meet you, sir.' On the only occasion a man did attempt to seize this rare constitutional privi- lege and wrest personal redress from the Queen's First Minister. Mr. Macmillan shied like a horse treading on a firework and made vague pawing motions of self-defence. In his contacts with workers on the job, Mr. Macmillan asked only the questions of a television interviewer who is filling in time. Mr. Oaitskcll was never approached to right any individual wrongs. He, too, put his share of pointless queries and received his share of 'pointless replies. But Mr. Macmillan was always seen as the official champion of those who never had it so good—Santa Claus collecting testimonials from satisfied customers. Mr. Gait- skell was cast by circumstance in the role of Robin Hood—the outlaw chief who is the focus for all grievances. Everywhere the nagging fear of the dole brought men to him aching to be re- assured that the past could not repeat itself. Neither of the two politicians looked or sounded as if he represented Government by the People. But Mr. Macmillan undoubtedly was Govern- ment of the People, while Mr. Gaitskell might just turn out to be Government for the People. The voters of Britain realised that politics was the art of the possible long before the aphorism was invented. Though the Conservative leader now lords it, over endless acres of newsprint in Moscow while the Labour leader farms only a few square feet of type in Durham, who can be sure which will reap the bigger harvest in the autumn?
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