Is Eden Through?

...A great deal of the irritation now directed against the Cabinet stems in fact not from its admitted failures in foreign policy, but from its reluctance to face unpopularity at home What the Conservative party wants is a government which will really stand up to the opposition at home, and to Britain's opponents abroad...

...It was, for example, an excess of pointless ingenuity that pushed Eden into making his Guildhall speech on Arab-Israel relations last November, a speech which finally convinced the Israelis that Britain was actively hostile to them...

...Its motto quite evidently is compromise, and compromise is not delivering the goods...

...that in quarters closer to the "radical center" of big business--as represented by the Economist and the Financial Times--the candidacy of Butler should be urged with all the greater energy: Macmillan may gladden the hearts of unbending Tories with his imperial rhetoric, but on the key issue of inflation he seems even less reliable than his principal rival...

...I can find very few people now who even expect decisions from it...

...Each morning at breakfast they open their newspapers confident that there will still be trouble in Cyprus, and that at the last moment the Government has discovered it cannot ban penicillin or streptomycin because it has no legal authority to do so...

...It is true that such blunders have disclosed a certain spinelessness which is painful to a party that prides itself upon its imperial tradition...

...One has only to consider what such a policy would imply in terms of actual cost and potential trouble to feel quite sure that it will not be attempted by the present government...

...But it does not in the least follow that a government committed to full-blooded Toryism would do better in the long run...

...Would it invite Franco to restore democratic liberties at home before asking for British territory...

...It also encompasses an emotional demand for greater rudeness in replying to Bulganin and Khrushchev (and for canceling their projected visit next spring...

...But it took an editorial broadside in the ultra-Conservative, ultra-respectable Daily Telegraph to lend courage to the Opposition...

...No doubt it is ludicrous that a well-meaning, politically uninfluential lawyer like Selwyn Lloyd should act as Foreign Secretary when there is a first-rate Conservative statesman available in the person of Lord Salisbury (who, however, has a mind of his own and would certainly not allow the Prime Minister to run his department for him...

...Henry Fairlie, the darling of the Tory intellectuals, put the matter with his customary asperity in the weekly Spectator: "Day by day the newspapers, even some of those which are normally friendly to the Government, list the almost unbelievable series of mistakes which the Government has committed, and in less reverent places the Government has become a joke...

...No wonder, too...

...The Labor and Liberal papers only came in at the tail end of the hurricane...

...But "firmness" won't either...

...True, when they did so, they managed to think up some fresh epithets...

...There is, of course, no guarantee that it may not be tried by a succeeding Conservative ministry headed by someone like Macmillan...

...This can be demonstrated almost mathematically in regard to Britain's economic difficulties--a demonstration which, unfortunately, cannot be attempted in this space...

...However, the Tories seem bent on overthrowing it...

...The problem is, in fact, insoluble in terms of Conservative thinking, although one cannot expect the Conservatives to see this...

...or dispatching his successor to Jordan, with orders to bring that country into the Baghdad Pact, only to have the whole place go up in flames as a result--whatever this Government touches, one can by now be pretty sure that the object in question will either explode like a firecracker or turn out to have no real existence...

...It is even beginning to seem possible that the Labor party, under its rejuvenated leadership, will shortly look more competent than its rival...

...more important, the Economist, hitherto contemptuous of the Opposition leadership, is becoming almost polite...

...Certain gross blunders could have been avoided...

...From the heights on which it stood after the general election in May, Sir Anthony Eden has led his Government steadily downhill...

...But the broad outlines of Conservative foreign policy, notably in the crucial Middle Eastern region, had been laid down by the Foreign Office bureaucracy, and it would take an earthquake to remove these gentlemen from their strategic seats...

...Tory comrades blast his administration as ineffectual By G. L. Arnold London The month of January 1956 is certain to go down as a testing time for the British Government, the Conservative party, and especially Sir Anthony Eden...

...The present one, wisely or not, shows no sign of wanting to do so...

...Its brand of politics may be uninspiring and futile, but at least its prosaic spirit guards it from adventures...

...A Macmillan-Butler government which tried to apply a full-blooded Tory policy of deflationary austerity (at labor's expense) at home, coupled with greater energy in pursuit of British objectives abroad, would soon run into a tempest compared with which the present troubles would begin to look harmless...

...Or would it not rather rely on backstairs intrigues with some moldering Spanish monarchists...

...If that should happen, a proportion of the floating middle-class vote which deserted Labor after 1950 may begin to drift back...

...One need only consider what a Macmillan government would do if confronted (as any British government shortly will be) with a Spanish drive to get control of Gibraltar...

...It is now common form for political commentators to tell each other and the public that, of course, they never had any confidence whatsoever in Sir Anthony's capacity to govern...

...All three are involved, though at different levels of relevance, in what is surely one of the suddenest political crises in recent memory...

...It has certainly accelerated since he took over as Premier, but for reasons which had little or nothing to do with either his own personality or that of Macmillan, who controlled the department from April to December 1955...

...Whether it is a matter of hurriedly locking the Augean stables of the Ministry of Supply after the horses for rather the tanks) have gone...

...There are no elections to be won just now, and to the deflationist oracles of the Economist, the Financial Times and the Daily Telegraph a drastic pruning of social expenditure (and a "moderate" degree of unemployment) would be welcome...

...It is no less true of foreign affairs...

...It is easy to make capital out of the Foreign Office's record under the Eden regime, but in terms of Conservative politics there simply is no solution to the problem...

...It was, after all, Macmillan's insistence on a high rate of house construction that fed the boom (and won the election...

...Whatever the immediate outcome--and at present the experts are laying even money against a continuation of Sir Anthony's leadership beyond the summer--the political blizzard this month has marked a turning-point in the fortunes of the Conservative Government in office since October 1951...

...This is how the Government looks to an intelligent outsider, bewildered by its seemingly unending capacity for tying itself into undignified knots over a series of problems ranging from illegal arms sales to grotesque departmental squabbles with the Medical Association over a proposed ban on heroin...

...British Conservatism being what it is, the government of Sir Anthony Eden is probably the least disastrous of several alternatives...

...No wonder the Conservative party is in almost open revolt against the Prime Minister...

...Whatever the columnists may say, the downhill slide was already in progress while Churchill was still Prime Minister and Eden had only his own department to look after...

...The cry for "firmness" reflects the Tory right wing's anachronistic hankering (not shared by Butler's supporters in Parliament and in the press) for a return to old-fashioned methods in dealing with Greek nationalism in Cyprus, Arab nationalism in Jordan, and such irritating democratic upstarts as Israel...

...It might produce even greater blunders, and it would certainly fail to make contact with the living forces on the democratic side--those that cannot be disciplined by Major Glubb of the Arab Legion, the prize exhibit of militant Toryism...

...that being so, we had better get ready for a brief period of fireworks...

...Its right wing in particular seems determined to have him replaced by one of his colleagues before the year is out--preferably by Harold Macmillan, who temperamentally stands closer to the Empire-minded Tories than does the other contender, Richard Austen Butler...

...No doubt those who hold these views would likewise welcome sterner language toward the Cairo regime, greater energy in meeting its propaganda drive into East Africa, and redoubled attempts to curb Saudi Arabian intrigues in the Persian Gulf, even at the cost of annoying King Saud's backers in Washington...

...Already the Liberal organs are sharpening their attacks on the Cabinet...

...Personalities can be shuffled...

...To start at the personal level, it is now a commonplace that the crisis witnessed the sudden collapse of the Eden myth, built up so strenuously over a period of twenty years...

...It was contemptible (and highly characteristic) that the Foreign Office, prompted by Downing Street, should have demoted a minor official for being rude about Bulganin during a press conference, instead of standing up for him...

...And the significant thing is that the campaign against the Prime Minister was launched by the right wing of his own parly...

...or sending the Chief of the Imperial General Staff to Cyprus, to hold down a rabble of schoolboys shouting for union with Greece...

...All one can say is that the chances of success seem remote, if only because the Tory right wing is even farther removed from an understanding of the modern world than are the smooth diplomats of the Foreign Office, against whom a good deal of Conservative anger is now concentrated...