The shadow of a united, revitalised and confident Labour party under the aggressive leadership of Mr Harold Wilson lay across Blackpool, famous for its beautifully illuminated waterfront, last Tuesday as over 4,000 delegates to the Conservative conference poured in for the annual get-together. Even before they began to grapple with the menacing shadow they received an unexpected blow. Mr Macmillan was taken ill and removed to hospital. Even the 400,000 lights turning the sprawling waterfront into a fairyland could not provide enough distraction for the delegates. It was not an outpouring of affection for Mr Macmillan. They were primarily worried that the task of meeting the Labour challenge had been further complicated.
The news of Mr Macmillan’s illness broke shortly after the joint chairman of the party, Mr Iain McLeod, had told a crowded press conference that Mr Macmillan would make his position “absolutely clear” in his address to the Conservative rally on Saturday. The implication clearly was that in the absence of an agreement in the party over the successor, Mr Macmillan would reiterate his earlier statement that he would lead the Conservatives at the next election. Personally, I do not believe that such a statement by Mr Macmillan would have settled the question finally. Principally interested in power, the Conservatives could not be expected to relish the prospect of being led by one who did not have even an outside chance of being regarded as a winner.
Uncertainty
Talking to-delegates it has been impossible to avoid the impression that Mr Macmillan’s illness has settled his own future, if there was scope for doubt before. He cannot possibly lead the party at the next election. In view of the divergence of views among the leadership and the rank and file, the prospect of finding a successor is going to be neither brief nor painless and the longer the present uncertainty lasts, the bleaker would be the electoral prospects. The Conservatives know it and do not relish it.
Even on the view that Mr Macmillan would have had to go in any case, his illness is a blow to the fortunes of the party because it cannot now hope to create the facade of unity behind him and proceed to settle the question of succession away from the gaze as it were of television cameras. As the delegates discussed the merits and defects of the rival contenders outside the main conference hall, it became only too clear that the days of unanimity were over.
The one great difficulty of the Conservative party is that unlike the Labour party it has no machinery for selecting its leader. The myth has been that everyone recognises a leader when he arrives on the scene and proceeds to elect him. In fact, there had existed a group of powerful men who could more or less settle the question of leadership for the party. With the winds of change blowing even through the knighted ranks of the Conservative party, there is no such group whose word would be law. Men like Lord Salisbury who secured Mr Macmillan’s own succession to Sir Anthony Eden as he then was, are now more an object of ridicule than wielders of power.
The absence of a machinery for the selection of the leader and the rise of democratic tendencies within the party are by no means the only causes of trouble. The choice is indeed difficult though it has to be made. There appeared to be a general agreement among the delegates that Mr Butler possessed the widest experience in government and could be trusted to run the administration on a sound basis. But they expressed grave doubt whether he was the man who could inspire the rank and file and by the same logic the voters. He was considered to be too equivocal a person for that kind of role. Similarly Mr Maudling’s handling of the economic problems received wide appreciation only to be offset by the argument that he could not win the party votes.
Reservations
The popularity of Lord Hailsham with the party activists was apparent from the applause he received when he made his entry into the conference hall on Wednesday, but I found considerable reservations about his capacity for cool judgment among the older delegates. Mr McLeod remains under a cloud on account of the reverses in the bye-elections for which he has been blamed and his part in the Profumo affair. He was one of the five ministers who drafted Mr Profumo’s lying statement to the House of Commons in the early hours of March 22. Mr Edward Heath’s popularity was wholly the result of the artificially generated enthusiasm for entry into the Common Market and has proved ephemeral. His performance in the House of Commons on issues other than Brussels negotiations have attracted adverse comment. That about exhausts the list with the possible exception of Lord Home. He is not unwilling to be drafted though it is difficult to see him in the role of a dynamic leader.
The illness of Mr Macmillan and the consequent feeling of urgency among the delegates about the need to solve the question of succession, a problem they could not directly tackle, made the proceedings of the conference appear somewhat unreal. However, it is doubtful if the conference could have helped much to improve the image of the party even if Mr Macmillan was not taken ill, and the succession issue was not so tangled as it happens to be. A party in power for twelve long years could not outline a programme of radical change without inviting the charge of hypocrisy. The Conservatives could have capitalised either on some folly of the Labour leadership or its failure to rein in its left-wingers. On both these counts Mr Wilson has offered no hostages.
In post-war Britain the Labour party alone had produced ideas whether worthwhile or worthless. Quite unwittingly, Lord Hailsham himself acknowledged it when he said at a rally at Blackpool, “We in the Conservative party have in fact been and will continue to be the instruments of achieving in actual practice many of the things which the left has been clamouring for as something which only they wanted”. He cited the examples of the partial nuclear test ban agreement, colonial freedom, aid to developing countries, increase in pension, national and regional planning, expansion of education and so on. The regional impetus and pressure in each case came from the Labour party.
Two explanations are offered for the failure of the government under Mr Macmillan to initiate imaginative policies in the first three years. First, Mr Macmillan was too preoccupied with foreign affairs even after the collapse of the Paris summit and with his hopes of playing the honest broker between the two superpowers in the cause of peace. Questions to this effect have repeatedly been put to the Prime Minister himself and he naturally rejects the implicit criticism that he functioned as some kind of super-Foreign Secretary and not as Prime Minister.
Extremists
The second explanation is that the tensions created by the process of decolonisation in the Conservative party left Mr Macmillan little room for manoeuvre at home. Mr Macmillan was undoubtedly involved in the fierce struggle to contain and frustrate the right wing extremists headed by Lord Salisbury in his party. It was unprecedented that 100 Conservative members of Parliament were virtually siding with Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the Central African Federation, against their own government on the question of a more liberal constitution for Northern Rhodesia. It was only after the Northern Rhodesian constitutional issue had been settled that Mr Macmillan felt free to reconstitute the Cabinet.
When the present controversies are stilled and Profumo and his dingy companions are forgotten, Mr Macmillan will be remembered for the peaceful liquidation of the empire – Southern Rhodesia is the only problem that he would leave for his successor or successors to tackle – and rescuing the Conservative party from the right wing extremists. He himself attaches, at least publicly, far greater importance to the test ban agreement.
The Times of India, 12 October 1963