WILSON IN AMERICA-1

Force de tour

CRABRO

President Nixon, we are told, was a regular trouper over Mr Wilson's visit to Washing- ton last week. A politician to the fingertips, he knows the vote-winning potential of an impressive foreign tour, and has a fellow- feeling for Mr Wilson in the tough fight ahead of him to get himself re-elected. Now it only remains to be seen whether Mr Brezhnev is going to prove a regular trouper too. Somehow he doesn't exactly look the part. Still, you never know: and Mr Wilson is keeping his fingers crossed.

So I thought it might make a modest con- tribution to international relations to try and arrive at a statistical computation of the return on this expenditure of energy by top people, as measured in the public .opinion polls. Mr Macmillan was the first British Prime Minister to turn summiteering into a way of life; and latterly he has become Mr Wilson's model and mentor. So it is perhaps not unreasonable to start with him.

It was 1958 when his summiteering really got going. It began with a NATO summit in Paris, which was followed by a Prime Minis- terial tour of Australia, Pakistan, Ceylon, New Zealand, and India. Then came a visit to Washington, followed by a call on the new President de Gaulle in Paris; a trip to Greece in August; and the year ended with a meeting with Chancellor Adenauer in Bonn. The evidence of a positive return is quite impressive. Starting the year with a modest rating of plus 4 per cent (the sur- plus of those who thought he was doing a good job over those who thought he was doing a bad job), Mr Macmillan's stock had risen to plus 18 by June and to plus 31 in September, a level from which it declined only marginally by the year's end.

However, it is by the standard of 1960 that the advocates of the noble art of top tabling would surely wish to be judged. In retrospect it is hard to see how Mr Mac- millan ever managed to fit in an appearance at the House of Commons at all. January and February saw him blowing the wind of change through Ghana, Nigeria, Rhodesia and South Africa. In March he called in at Rambouillet on his way to Washington. Then he just had time to welcome General de Gaulle on his state visit to London in April before appearing as the metteur en scene at the disastrous Paris summit conference in May. June saw him in Norway, August in Bonn, and in September he was heckled by Mr Khrushchev at the UN. The year ended with a trip to Rome and a meeting with the Pope.

The results were indeed spectacular. His personal popularity rating never dropped below plus 30 throughout the year, and for most of the time the margin of public approval exceeded 50 per cent. Immedi- ately following the Paris summit—and apparently notwithstanding the fact that it had all been something of a fiasco, with Mr Khrushchev walking out after the shoot- ing down of the u2 spy plane—he achieved an all-time high of plus 63 per cent (79 per cent 'approve' to 16 per cent 'dis- approve', with only 5 per cent 'don't know').

But from then on things never seemed quite the same. In 1961 Mr Macmillan paid his second visit to Rambouillet, and spent

almost a month in the western hemisphere, during which he contrived to achieve two separate encounters with President Ken- nedy; and be also secured a visit by the President to London (although this took the form of a twenty-four-hour sojourn with the Radziwills, which hardly com- pared with the state visit to Paris from which the President had just come). The public was unimpressed. Throughout the year the Prime Minister's ratings slipped.

By 1962 there could be little mistaking the evidence that personal diplomacy was sub- ject to the law of diminishing returns. Mr Macmillan continued to tour with apparently unflagging enthusiasm—to Bonn, to Wash- ington and Ottawa, to Paris, to Sweden and Finland, and finally, of course, to Ram- bouillet and Nassau at the year's end, as well as receiving the Commonwealth Prime Ministers in September. But the electorate was not amused. In the weeks following the 'night of the long knives' Mr Macmillan's critics outnumbered his admirers for the first time on his premiership, and his popu- larity never recovered.

On a superficial reading, however, sum- miteers could take some comfort from Mr Wilson's experience. His years of greatest personal popularity, 1965 and 1966, when the excess of his admirers over his critics peaked at 44 per cent in May 1966, were also the years of most energetic globe-trot- ting, including three visits to Washington and two to Moscow; one each to Bonn, Paris, Rome and Ottawa, and the 'Tiger' confrontation with Smithy; and last but certainly not least the Kosygin visit to Lon- don.

It is even possible to produce evidence of immediate popular reaction. The Rhodesian jaunt in October 1965 lifted Mr Wilson's rating from plus 35 to plus 41 in November; the first Moscow trip in February 1966 pro- duced an improvement from –plus 28 to plus 34 in April; the 'Tiger' and Kosygin's visit to London in December led to an advance from plus 9 to plus 11 in January; the Washington visit in June 1966, when President Johnson tried to save the pound by comparing the Prime Minister to Churchill, produced a 1 per cent improve- ment in the ratings the following month. The Nixon visit to London in February 1969 was followed by a substantial drop in the Prime Minister's unpopularity in March (from minus 25 per cent to minus 17 per cent); and even the ludicrous occa- sion when the Prime Minister managed to corner the hapless President for half an hour in a hangar on Mildenhall airfield on his way back from Roumania last August was followed by a 5 per cent drop in his margin of unpopularity in September.

Nevertheless I am afraid that the theory that the British electorate is still impressed by seeing its leader in superior company is very hard to sustain. For the difference between Mr Macmillan and Mr Wilson is that the Conservative leader managed to run far ahead of his party right up to the day of his retirement, and while the Tory party was leading by a respectable margin in the opinion polls throughout 1959 and 1960, Mr Macmillan's summit diplomacy was yielding him unique prestige. Mr Wil- son's fortunes, by contrast, have fluctuated pretty well in line with those of his party (although the swings, as you might expect, have been more extreme), his high tide co- inciding with Labour's, in April-May 1966, and his nadir, in March-May 1968, likewise.

The only conclusion one can draw is that Mr Macmillan was successful itisimpressing the electorate with 'an illusion of global significance by mixing in the right company for a time, but the trick had already been exposed well before his retirement. Nowa- days any dividends that summit diplomacy may yield in popular esteem do not last for more than a single month (and even in the hands of the master, Mr Macmillan him- self, little of the glory seems to have rubbed off on the Government or the party as a whole). So if the Prime Minister fails after all to extract an invitation from the Kremlin this year he can console himself with the thought that it would not have been worth any votes even if he had gone.

However there are occasions when the Russians are happy to try and turn summit diplomacy to their own advantage. Through the good offices of the Russian Ambassador, Mr Wilson last Monday received what was in effect a thinly disguised appeal from the Kremlin to the French, British and American governments to come to the rescue of its Middle East bacon. The Russians are indeed in a delicate predicament. President Nasser seems once again to be approaching the point of combustion. He must know that another frontal assault on Israel would only be repulsed and result, very probably, in the loss of further territory; but he may also feel that his internal position cannot survive the escalation of Israeli air and ground raids over Egyptian territory much longer. Thus his only escape route is to pressurise the Russians into scaring the Western Powers so that they, in turn, will call the Israelis off.

It is not, however, immediately apparent what British interest would be served by try- ing to help the Russians out. For whatever threats they may think it politic to utter, the likelihood of direct Russian intervention in the Middle East remains remote so long as the United States stands de facto guarantor for Israeli survival. The Israelis obviously feel that no American administration would dare withdraw the guarantee under any circumstances, and hence they are unlikely to take much notice of warnings from Washington, let alone London or Paris. Nor are the Palestine guerrillas, for that matter. So if there is to be another round of war- fare, there is nothing the 'Big Four' can do about it. But what it will not do is lead to World War Three. It may well, of course, lead to yet another humiliation for the Rus- sians. But that is another matter.