Westminster Commentary
ALL right, all right, all right. Al- though Taper was not as wrong as Mr. Randolph Churchill (well, you wouldn't expect him to be, would you?), and had craftily leapt off the 'Liberals-can't-win' bandwagon long before polling-day at Torrington, he did say, as long ago as July 5,1957 : The fact is, if the Liberals cannot win in North Dorset at this moment, they cannot win any- where, anywhen. The last prophecy I made seems to be paying off handsomely; here, then, is another to bolster my reputation as a modern Nostrodamus. At the next General Election the Liberals may or may not hold the seats they have; they will not gain another. It is written.
Written it was, and before you start jeeering here is worse : after Rochdale I actually said : If Mr. Kennedy and the Liberals, with all his and their natural and unnatural advantages, and with the two major parties in the state they are at the moment, could not win Rochdale, then the bells, alas, have tolled for good.
And what, then, is the meaning of this merry carillon playing 'Devonshire cream and cider'? And who is this small, dapper figure advancing up the House to shake hands with the Speaker? And who is that distinguished Mum up in the Ladies' Gallery, smiling proudly down at her boy, with perhaps just the hint of a tear in her eye? In sooth, it was an affecting scene. Who would not be moved by the sight of half the Parliamentary Liberal Party standing line-abreast at the bar of the HOuse, waiting for a lot of nonsense about H-bomb tests to be got through, while a further third of its strength sat in its place waiting the signal to cheer? At length it came, though not before Sir Robert Boothby, in a gesture as charac- teristically flamboyant as his plum-coloured waist- coat, and as characteristically generous as the tuna beneath it, had risen very deliberately from his place, ambled down the House, and shaken the new Member very warmly by the hand. You could not actually hear our beloved Giant Panda saying, `Blow you, Jack, he's all right,' to, his own party, but you could—shall we say?—sense it. I suppose the only consolation the Tories have when Sir Robert does something like this is that they already know full well what he thinks of them.
Anyway, they moved. At first, Mr. Clement Davies and Mr. Wade (Mr. Grimond and Mr. Holt were flanking Mr. Bonham Carter in the three-steps-bow, three-steps-bow march to the Table) seemed a little shy of cheering. (This, how- ever, was nothing to what the rest of the House was. Talk about not knowing which way to turn; Mr. Heath, to whom laughing comes as easily as breathing does to ordinary people, sat grim and stern, while Mr. Gaitskell, very red in the face, roared with laughter. What he thinks he has to laugh at I should dearly like to know.) When Mr. Bonham Carter had taken the oath, however, the floodgates of Liberal joy were opened wide. `Hurrah,' cried Mr. Davies; 'Hooray,' echoed Mr. Wade. I dare say that Lady Violet's was not the only eye to mist over; here and there strong men plied furtive handkerchiefs, and I myself could scarce refrain. But to what symbolic end, pray, were the blinds slowly lowered just before the ceremony began?
Enough of such meretricious episodes. The fact is, the Liberal Party in the House of Com- mons has overnight increased its strength by 20 per cent., from five to six. The shame of Carmar- then is wiped out, and they can no longer travel together in a London taxi without breaking the regulations. Still, let us have a sense of proportion (Mr. Grimond was admirably cautious when the glad tidings broke; it would do some of his fol- lowers no harm to follow suit). Torrington was, from the Liberal point of view, ideal; the long, hard-dying Radical tradition of the West Country is as strong there as anywhere in the land; the by- election followed hard upon a series of Liberal advances without the hitherto inevitable interven- ing Liberal reverse; the idea had at last got about that a Liberal could win; their candidate was a good one; the Tories made the fatal mistake of trying the 'National-Liberal' dodge on an elec- torate with a high average intelligence; the Labour Party, with the 'Victory for Socialism' squabble, was going through another of its regular meno- pauses; the fillip given to the Tories by the success of Mr. Macmillan's Commonwealth tour bad lost its impetus, and he was seen to be lapsing once more into his role of a superannuated Vincent Crummles; the muffin-man had been compelled, at the urgent bidding of Mr. Royle and his local organisation, to break his promise that he would speak at every by-election (and when the muffin- man breaks his word, what hope can the ordinary man have that any of his colleagues will keep theirs?)—in short, the time, and the place, and the loved one all together, combined to put Mr. Bonham Carter over the top by those 219 votes.
Nor need one, in trying to put his triumph in perspective, carp; there is no evidence whatever that he will make a worse MP than anyone else in the House, and a good deal of evidence that he will make a much better one than most (he will certainly be better than the one he succeeds; I could find nobody who remembered anything at all that Mr. Lambert had ever said, done or been). But I must give him, and the Liberal Party, one word of immediate and local advice; in a word, consolidate. The biggest mistake made by the Labour Party after 1945 was to allow their con- stituency organisations to rest on the laurels of their unexpectedly huge victory. The result was that in 1950 scores of seats were lost that might have been held had not the incumbents grown fat and complacent. It will not be enough for Mr. Bonham Carter to make his mark at Westminster; he must rub his mark well in at Torrington. The Liberal machine down there, ramshackle enough by all accounts, especially when compared to the well-oiled Tory apparatus, must be overhauled, repaired, lovingly tended. Now is the time for Mr. Grimond and Mr. Kennedy and Lady Violet and a few more glamorous Liberal stars (and the new Member, of course) to announce a series of meetings in the constituency; now is the time for the canvassers to go out, evening after evening, collecting support, new members and money; now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party. It would be a sad thing if Mr. Bonham Carter were to sit in the House for a bare eighteen months and then be swept out at the General Election not because the electorate had lost confi- dence in him but because 219 supporters had been allowed to drift away. At least two evenings a week in the constituency must be his target; what if his business be ruined, his health impaired, his pocket emptied? There are more important things.
And there are wider issues. Mr. Macmillan may huff and puff to his moustache's content; the fact remains that Torrington represents not only a bolo-punch of rare quality to the Tories' kidneys but a significant, and hitherto unremarked, change in the British political climate. Much has been made of the fact that a safe Tory seat, with a majority of 9,000, has been lost. What has not been observed is that the loss of seats with majori- ties of that size was a common occurrence before the war. The 'deadly dangerous polarisation' (it's no good; I can't say it as beautifully as Nye) of politics in this country had reached the stage where party managers and political pundits had come to accept the fact that at least three-quarters of the seats in the country were safe beyond any- thing but a miracle; the real struggle took place in the other quarter. Warwick and Leamington gave this theory an almighty wallop, but it could be—and was—argued that much of Sir Anthony Eden's majority was a personal one. Rochdale, for those with eyes to see, nailed the coffin-lid firmly down; for nearly thirty years no Government candidate had taken third place in a by-election in a Government seat. Now Torrington shovels the earth over the remains. From now on anything can happen, and with any luck will. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, and about time too. Next time I hope to see a Trotskyist MP for South Kensington, and a League of Empire Loyalists MP at Hemsworth. (Pause for reflection; I have just noticed that the Attorney-General's majority at South Northants was only 4,158 last time. That, if the present trend should continue, will take him down; I can scarcely speak for emotion.) It is this thoroughly healthy revulsion of the electorate, not only against the two vast, ugly, incompetent, corrupt, selfish, divided, nerveless gangs laughably known as the Conservative and Labour Parties respectively, but against the pat- tern of political behaviour into which it had (seemingly for ever) fallen, that must make life sunny for any decent man who likes to see pom- pous asses. have their trousers—not to mention their seats—removed from time to time. Torring- ton has sent a crisply worded message to Smith Square and Abbey House. 'Cockalorums all,' it runs, 'for too long you have had things your own grimy way. From now on we're having a look-in. Yours faithfully, the voters.' (Pause for further reflection; the Chief Whip had a majority of 4,499 last time in a straight fight; next time he will have a Liberal opponent as well. Laugh? I shall burst a blood-vessel.) But there is something else to be considered. Where do the Liberals go from here? First of all, they go to Ealing; if they could win there, or even come second, Mr. Grimond would have good cause to abandon his caution. None of the Tor- rington bonuses will apply there, and if there is another spectacular Liberal advance it will be because the electors want one. The mood of mingled panic and despair into which, I am re- liably informed, the Tory hierarchy, for all its whistling in the dark, was thrown by Torrington will be as nothing compared to what will hit them in such a case. For it will mean not only that the Liberals must be taken seriously in the sense that their interventions, on any scale, will bring down many a safe Tory; it will mean also that they must be taken seriously in their own right. One of the most amusing sights of the decade has been the prophylactic unanimity with which the Labour and Tory Parties have decided that 'the Liberals have no policy.' As far as I can see from a minutely detailed examination of both of them, the only policy the Labour Party has is to re- nationalise steel and ruin the nation by the impo- sition of an insurance scheme so cock-eyed that it might have been drawn up by a team of profes- sional economists under the supervision of Mr.
R. H. S. Crossman—which I gather it was—while the only policy the Conservatives have is to stay in office until either revolution or the Parliament Act compels them to leave it. And these are the people who are at' acking the Liberals for having no programme!
But what can the Government do about the situation? I see the Economist, among others, has been flying the Alternative Vote kite. A hasty introduction of a system of second preferences, to be applied where no candidate has an absolute majority on the first count, and the Labour Party is dished. 'But,' says the Economist, 'the essential fact is this; that it would cheat Labour of office only if there is a majority of the country that would really prefer to keep Labour out. It would not obstruct a real majority, only an accidental result. It would enable the people to express their real wishes, not to have them distorted.' Now, apart from the fact that such a measure is simplY not practical politics within the foreseeable future, the Economist as usual is barking up its wrong hat. No Government has been elected in this country with a majority of the votes cast since 1935; the Tories in 1951 and 1955 were in minority, just as the Labour Party was in 1945 and 1950 (the Economist is probably under the impression, like a good many other people, that Mr. Attlee had an over-all majority in 1945 at any rate; not so). So its advice to the Tories to intro- duce the Alternative Vote is fallacious as well as impracticable; when it says that the system would give the Tories 'an assurance that thumping Labour majorities in the House of Commons will not again be built on a minority Labour vote in the country' it forgets that it would also give the Tories an assurance that Tory majorities will not be so constructed, either. No, we can forget the Alternative Vote, and concentrate on the Alterna- tive Alternatives. These are to hold an election soon and not to hold an election for some time.
The first is ruled out on the grounds that the Tories would be defeated; the second on the grounds that the Tories would be defeated. The Tories may work that one out for themselves; but since it is unlikely that Mr. Macmillan is going to have any further interest in the matter once defeat is sure, he will obviously stay at Number 10, par- ticularly since the Rent Act must be making him increasingly uneasy at the prospects of fi iding anywhere else to live, for as long as possih!e. He will go on singing reedily, no doubt, to the tune of 'little local difficulties,' but the whole point of Archie Rice's act is that it is only bearable when Sir Laurence Olivier does it; the real thing, which is what we get from the Prime Minister, will empty the theatre pretty quickly. That is his funeral; we who stay on the sidelines munching the baked meats have more important things to think about. So, I should think, has Mr. G., who for all his faults has not made Mr. Macmillan's elementary blunder of treating the electorate as though it consists entirely of idiots; if there is one thing clearer than that the voters are sick of the Tories it is that they are not actually dying with love for the Socialists. The only really surprising thing in the whole situation is that anybody should think that there is something strange in all this.
Previous page
