Hoylake Comes Home
By BERNARD LEVIN Instead, he will stand at the despatch box, wrinkling his nose pinkly, stuttering like a berserk machine-gun (it would need the pen of a Taper to describe the occasion when he pronounced the indefinite article twenty-six times in succession before the noun it prefixed made its appearance), and displaying a grasp of the intricacies of finance which for comprehension, breadth of vision, in- sight and sheer knowledge can rarely have been equalled by any member of the Hoylake Urban District Council. Oh, well.
And yet you have only to spit out of the window to be sure of hitting half a dozen people —newspaper editorial-writers, leaders of the Opposition, Tory back-benchers—who profess to be disturbed at the replacement of a nothing by a zero, a minus by a subtraction, a Recorder of Wigan by a brother of Mr. William Douglas Home, a puppet by a puppet. What does it matter, asked Mr. Sydney Silverman, so long as the master ventriloquist remains in the Commons, where Archie Andrews sits? The fact is, Mr. Macmillan long ago decided that foreign policy had become too serious a matter to be left to Foreign Secretaries. When it got to the point of his asking the customary permission of the House to speak twice on the same motion (a procedure normally adopted only when a member wants to correct some mistake made in his speech) so that he could both open and close a Foreign Affairs debate during the whole of which the Foreign Secretary sat on the Front Bench and listened, it was finally clear what Mr. Macmillan regarded Mr. Selwyn Lloyd as being useful for; for taking notes while the Prime Minister was out of the Chamber, doing some real work. You may say that any man with a spine of a consistency rather firmer than that of a pork sausage would have resigned on that occasion, but this would be to miss the point, which is that Mr. Macmillan did not interfere in the Foreign Secretary's handling of foreign affairs, as Sir Anthony Eden did; he made 1)is own foreign policy out of whole cloth, and all Mr. Lloyd had to do was to remove the basting-cotton.
What is more, this worked well for a long time, when Mr. Macmillan's foreign policy emerged from the post-Suez wreck and remained for a considerable time both sensible and ingeni- ous. (Too little credit has gone to him for his work in repairing the Anglo-American alliance; the Tories have been discreet about praising him for it, on the grounds that he was after all largely responsible for destroying it in the first place, and the Opposition, as is the way with Oppositions, does not care to be seen praising the Govern- ment.) Unfortunately, the quality of Mr. Mac- millan's foreign policy has fallen exactly as the quantity has increased; the more initiatives he has taken, the more positive action he has engen- dered, the more wrong headed and dangerous it has become.
In other words, Mr. Silverman is only half right. Of course it does not matter that the Earl of Home is to be called Foreign Secretary ('He is able enough for any post in the Government, even Prime Minister,' said his wife—and I can well believe it) even though he sits in the House of Lords; for he will not actually be Foreign Secretary, any more than his predecessor was. If Mr. Macmillan wants an office-boy with a coronet instead of an office-boy with a CBE, nobody can really pretend that a hair of the Constitution's head is being harmed.
But it is not the Constitution we ought to be worrying about; it is the country. We need a foreign policy, just as we need an economic policy, that will bring us safely through the ice- bergs (and which will start off with the realisation that there is no such thing as a port; that we are doomed to go on dodging icebergs for ever). What we need is a man who combines the offices of Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer—and as a matter of fact, that is pre- cisely what we are going to have, because there is little reason to suppose that Mr. Lloyd will be any better equipped to run the Treasury by him- self than he was to run the Foreign Office, so that Mr. Macmillan will presumably shoulder that burden too.
But we also need the right policy for such a Pooh-Bah to deploy, and this it seems we will not be getting from Mr. Macmillan. The debate on Britain's relations with the European Community was a gloomy occasion. Long ago it became clear that the appointment of the new Chancellor would be an accurate index of the Government's intentions; if we were going to stay firmly out of Europe it would be Mr. Reginald Maudling, if we were going firmly in it would be Sir David Eccles, and if we were going- to shilly-shally about, losing every opportunity to do anything positive at all, getting crosser and more ridiculous as the months went by, and finally deciding to take the plunge when it was too late and the bus had started, it would be Mr. Selwyn Lloyd. It is Mr. Selwyn Lloyd.
But what is worse, in a sense, than the Govern- ment's havering on the subject of Europe is the Opposition's. The performance of the Opposition in the debate was doubly lamentable; first be- cause it means that there is going to be no organ- ised pressure on the Government from inside Parliament to make them take this elementary step towards the middle of the twentieth century, ( and second because it is one more confirmation of the debility of the Labour Party. There are one hundred and fifty-one resolutions on the err:" liminary agenda of the Labour Party urging the nc party towards a policy of unilateral nuclear O.\ armament (the mildest ones do that; others 511.0e Con, upon the Opposition everything up to and Ill', one t eluding a policy of complete neutralism—and ntli, tors. even from a pacifist standpoint, either); there are inters four urging the party to press for Britain's entry had into the Common Market. Lon, Pat comes the reply from the Feet, the Zilliao en the Cousins; bombs are more important that . I economics. So they may be; but the only effect of the adoption by the Labour Party of a• lateralist policy would be to split the party cony pletely and thus ensure that it would never in any foreseeable circumstances be able to present itself to the electorate as a party reasonably likely to provide a government that could do at/phi/1g about bombs or anything else. (The Parliarnew tary Party's belated announcement on Wednes' the day that it is not bound by the decisions of the Annual Conference increases Labour's chances, slightly—say from one in a hundred to one in ninety-three?)' And since nothing done or sIlld, by the British Government, let alone the des', credited ragbag the Labour Party seems to inslr on becoming, is actually going to affect the world situation as far as bombs and the threats of the) use are concerned, it would surely behove comrades to do something practical with their agenda for a change. And short of wrapping 010, sandwiches in it, the most obvious practical use to which it could be put would be to press for a sane European policy. No doubt, at the monien.te European economic integration does not seem particularly appealing policy as far as the &cc' torate is concerned. But it is precisely the kind of long-term issue that the Opposition lacks; once, again Mr. Gaitskell has gone off at half-cock over the appointment of Lord Home, as if thcce, is a genuine constitutional issue involved, and #1k1 it the country would care either way if the were. 'Sticky labels' is the Opposition's only;' answer to the electorate's increasingly insistent demand to know what its policy is, and if Mr. Gaitskell—and who could blame him?—should decide in October that he is sick of it all and resign, and if Mr. Harold Wilson—and it is not, incredibly, absolutely impossible—should be chosen to succeed him, the Opposition would look even more like a low comedian's. act.
Scrutiny of the division list at the end of the Europe debate is a horrid exercise; the onlY1, Labour member to go into the No lobby whir' I; the Liberals was Mr. Desmond Donnelly, and d the Opposition Front Bench, 'led' by Mr. Wilson, actually voted with the Government. No wonder' Mr. Roy Jenkins, whose support for a European policy is well known, has decided in future to r make his contributions to debates on economic policy from the back benches; a man of his irr telligence can hardly continue to associate with the kind of nonsense his Front Bench now speaks I, on the subject, let alone with the kind of beha- viour it indulged in on this occasion in the division lobby. The only subject on which the Labour Party might conceivably make sonic Im- pact in the country, and its leaders marched solemnly in to vote behind the Government!
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