England's Boring Election
MANDER, John
ECHOES OF ECHOES England's Boring Elections By John Mander London The British dearly love a good show. They fear nothing in the world more than being bored. "Stop me, if you've heard this...
...There was even dark talk of "Britain's moral decline...
...but he is not what you would call a very nice man...
...The long-term effects of this switch have been important...
...Not only had it kept the world amused, it had shown (foreigners assured us) that Britain actually did have higher standards in politics than other nations...
...These, of course, are imponderables...
...He radiates a calculating professionalism which, while it shows up Sir Alec to disadvantage in many ways, does give Sir Alec the greater human appeal...
...It had become a competition to persuade the electorate that one party could kick Britain into the second half of the 20th century more cheaply and efficiently (and less painfully) than the other...
...From about the beginning of 1964, then, both parties began to speak with remarkably similar voices...
...Nothing in Macmillan's political career became him like his leaving of it...
...But how much does "niceness" matter...
...There was a spate of books analyzing Britain's malaise and suggesting appropriate remedies...
...The two elections are being fought on quite different ground...
...Nothing easier, of course, than to judge the British by their BBC, their Times, their TLS: so admirably fair, so respectable, so staid...
...At the time, to be sure, it was misinterpreted...
...Feed your British newspaper-reader on a diet of U.S., German, or French journals and he'll be, frankly, bored...
...This competition is now at full flood...
...Was it Maudling...
...Speaking with due caution (at this writing, polling day is some three weeks off), let me risk the prediction that the current British election could well be the most boring on record...
...The Tories can argue that they have a tried team of young ministers, whose ability nobody questions...
...It had all been a Grand Spectacular...
...It was plain that it had influenced the British people's political thinking not at all...
...Was it Butler...
...It does not look any longer as if there will be a Goldwater backlash this side of the Atlantic...
...De Gaulle's rejection of Britain from Europe had been a nasty shock...
...There is no doubt that, for the first time since the war, these criticisms of Britain began to have an effect...
...For the moment of danger for the British politician comes when, like Queen Victoria, the British electorate is heard to mutter: "We are not amused...
...But there is no doubt that he does not carry conviction as the leader of a group of young Turks, determined to revolutionize the more backward areas of British life...
...The whole thing, of course, had been stage managed by a political actor-manager not unworthy of Disraeli, Lloyd George, or Churchill: Harold Macmillan...
...Briefly, what seems to have happened is this...
...As of now, the question really is which team will in the end appear to the electorate the less boring...
...Now, on the face of it, this is a curious development...
...The Profumo scandal coincided, more or less by chance, with a mood of dissatisfaction with Britain's performance on the world scene...
...It is not that they are disillusioned with politics, or that they regard one party as being as bad as the other...
...The outcome of the election will depend very largely on which side of this particular argument the British electorate favors...
...In terms of political rhetoric, what we're being offered is not a choice (to coin a phrase), but something more like an echo and the echo of an echo...
...Perhaps, after the fireworks of the Year of Profumo, that is what we all need...
...Actually the whole episode redounded to Britain's credit...
...The complacency of the '50s —the underlying reason for three consecutive Tory victories, in 1951, 1955, 1959—had crumbled with amazing speed...
...Yet, somehow, the voters are bored...
...and both parties insist that their own schemes —unlike their opponents'—have been expertly budgeted, and will cause financial pain to nobody...
...Tight-lipped, tight-fisted, the Englishman certainly isn't credited with a sense of drama...
...Stop me, if you've heard this one," they say, and "I don't want to be a bore, but...
...To the French, Major Thompson and Colonel Bramble have admirable, even lovable characteristics...
...Was it Hailsham...
...Wilson, on the other hand, is all too convincing a modernizer: He lends himself to caricature as a heartless technological commissar...
...Harold Wilson, as all would agree, is a very talented man...
...Britain's poor economic showing, relative to France and Germany, Italy and Japan, was at last causing widespread concern...
...The Socialists can argue that the reasons for Britain's relative backwardness are to be sought in the do-nothing policies of the Tory '50s...
...The Profumo scandal had been an unqualified international success: Even the old maestro had staged nothing like it...
...The real trouble is that they regard one party as being as good as the other...
...The Tory nerve seemed to have cracked: A year before Macmillan had sacrificed a third of his cabinet for the party's sake, now the party was demanding the same sacrifice of him...
...Yet it is this vast majority of Englishmen, after all, that does the voting...
...but they are inarticulate, and therefore bores...
...Both parties are offering ambitious schemes of expansion, in housing, education, and science...
...The Tories now talk of modernization, but can the leopard change his spots...
...Up to the last moment he had kept us amused...
...Nor were the British people—as against the Establishment—so much taken in...
...This isn't, of course, quite how foreigners see us...
...The underlying issues in the American struggle—though Britons sense their importance for America and for the West—are pretty remote from British experience...
...The old wood was drastically cut back...
...The British, actually, are a restless people, easily bored, fickle in their affection...
...Yet what makes, for instance, the British press by far the most lively—though also the most vulgar—in the world today...
...It was the well-liked, inconspicuous fellow nobody'd thought of, and who hadn't really wanted it: Sir Alec DouglasHome...
...The succession of Harold Wilson to the leadership of the Labor party, on the death of Hugh Gaitskell, put a technology-minded modernizer at the head of the opposition party...
...Why change horses in midstream, and risk the unknown terrors of Socialism...
...The past two years have been a period of high drama, to which this election promises to be an anti-climax...
...There are others: snobbery, appeal to women, nuances of personal style...
...But opinion surveys made in recent months show that most Englishmen thought rather differently...
...In October, on the eve of the Tory party conference, Macmillan went...
...He is also a very boring man...
...The choice thus becomes one between the relative competence and plausibility of competing teams of modernizers...
...John Mander, author of Berlin: Hostage for the West (Penguin), is on the editorial staff of Encounter...
...But his going detonated as histrionic and colorful a struggle for power as any in British politics...
...That Profumo lied to Parliament was held to be discreditable...
...There were not really any foreign policy issues likely to stir the electorate...
...Given this new mood, what would the reaction of the parties be...
...In a famous editorial, the Times had written: "It is a moral issue...
...Well, in the end, in the tradition of Conan Doyle, Chesterton, and Agatha Christie, it turned out to be none of them at all...
...The effect of the Johnson-Goldwater engagement, if sufficiently dramatic, could well be to dampen still further the voters' interest in whether the modernization of Britain is to be entrusted to the competent and admirable A, B, and C, or to the admirable and competent X, Y, and Z. The balance may thus, after all, be decided by the personalities of the leaders...
...in the short-term, nothing seemed able to arrest the decline in Tory fortunes...
...that he had had a mistress—and, indeed, how he had her—was held to be venial...
...When the Profumo scandal broke, in summer of last year, the polls were showing Labor 20 points ahead...
...Woe to the politician who bores the great British public, for he shall not be returned...
...It is not just that Wilson steered a sometimes devious course in the great Bevan-Gaitskell controversies of the '50s...
...Sir Alec DouglasHome's weakness is evident: Even if not quite the feudal freak he has been painted, he is not really convincing as a modernizer...
...Easy to forget that the vast majority of Englishmen read the Daily Express, the Daily Mirror, the News of the World—end-products of one of the most unscrupulous, cut-throat commercial struggles-to-survive anywhere...
...The Labor, Conservative and Liberal platforms have become virtually indistinguishable...
...Sir Alec, as all agree, is a very nice man...
...Still, no doubt through no fault of his own, the man lacks personal warmth...
...Two years ago Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, badly floundering, carried through the most ruthless Cabinet purge of modern times...
...The Europe-or-the-Commonwealth controversy had faded out...
...He is modest about his abilities, which are modest...
...he had never once bored us...
...But neither champion is the man to set Downing Street on fire...
...Macmillan's sudden elevation of a new generation of modernizers can be seen now as a shrewd anticipation of this mood...
...And it would be wrong not to recognize the very genuine basis of conviction in Wilson's devotion to science and technology...
...a new generation of "modernizers" —Heath, Maudling, Joseph, Rippon, Boyle—were hastily drafted in...
...Come election time, the politician is expected to put on a good show...
Vol. 47 • September 1964 • No. 20
