GREAT BRITAIN: Tory Triumph

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On the battlefield where he fights best, Winston Churchill blasted the Laborite Opposition with their own weapons last week and sent them, stunned and bleeding, into the parliamentary hills.

While it lasted, the battle was the most dramatic foreign-policy debate in the House of Commons since Neville Chamberlain's rough days after the fall of Norway in 1940. When it was over, Prime Minister Churchill had turned back a Labor Party move to censure him personally for his foreign policy, and had split their ranks with two major explosions. The late Labor government, he revealed, had covertly made the very foreign policy commitment—a promise to join the U.S. in possible extension of the Korean war—for which they were attacking Churchill. And the Labor regime, while campaigning against the Conservatives as warmongers, had secretly developed atomic bombs and a big atomic plant.

Day of Battle. The 625 members of the House of Commons were summoned into session by "three-line whips"—notices underlined three times to indicate a crucial subject. The public galleries were jammed, and outside hundreds of other Britons queued up hoping to get in. Even the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen's husband, took a seat in the Peers' Gallery.

The Prime Minister rose slowly, savoring a minute-long ovation from the government side. His face—pink, smooth and beaming—wore a misleadingly benign, born-yesterday look. But a white handkerchief protruded like a jaunty battle flag above his pocket. Coolly Churchill adjusted his oratorical bombsight and loosed the first blockbuster.

"I wish, first of all," he said innocently, "to draw the attention of the House to the agreement we reached in Washington about the atomic bomb. We reached an agreement about its not being used from the East Anglian base without British consent ... A much more important atomic development is now before us. I was not aware until I took office that not only had the Socialist government made the atomic bomb as a matter of research, but that it had created, at the expense of many scores of millions of pounds, the important plant necessary for its regular production." Britain's bomb, he added casually, was to be tested sometime this year in Australia.

With mock surprise, the Prime Minister wondered why Parliament had not been told about this great development. "The Conservative Opposition would certainly have supported the government . . . Nevertheless, the [Socialists] preferred to conceal this vast operation and its finances from the scrutiny of the House not even obtaining a vote on the principle involved, while, at the same time, with Machiavellian art, keeping open the advantage of accusing their opponents of being warmongers."

The House was rocked by the blow.