World: The Winner

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Lord Home's crest shows a salamander standing in fire. To his friends, it symbolizes his patient, outwardly phlegmatic disposition, not easily touched by the heat of emotion, danger or disaster. As the grim-faced stream of ministers came and went through the black door of No. 10 Downing Street, the watching crowds got no hint of crisis from Lord Home's broad, boyish grin and jaunty stride. The Prime Minister-designate seemed serenely untouched by the jealousies and conspiracies of his riven party. As one Tory said not long ago: "He's never scared. He just looks at you with that damn-your-eyes look and goes right on with what he's doing."

Home's victory may prove to be Pyrrhic. As a millionaire, one of Britain's biggest landowners, an Old Etonian, head of a family whose pedigree predates Magna Carta, he has inevitably caused the revival of an old argument: that the Tories' progressive, democratic goals are mere window dressing for the party of wealth and privilege.

The Labor Party is already in full cry. Describing the Tory selection process as viciously undemocratic, the Laborite Daily Mirror wrote: "Butler has been betrayed, Maudling insulted, Macleod ignored, Heath treated with contempt and Hailsham giggled out of court by the jester in hospital." Deriding the Tories' "aristocratic cabal," Harold Wilson last week took aim and declared scornfully: "In this ruthlessly competitive, scientific, technical, industrial age, a week of intrigues has produced a result based on family and hereditary connections. The leader has emerged—an elegant anachronism."

Many Tories agreed. On the other hand, the ordeal undeniably produced a leader of courage and principle who believes, in Home's own words, that the government should never be content just to do "what people will stand for," but instead should unflinchingly "tell them what they ought to stand for." Says Tory Backbencher Nigel Birch: "His clarity and integrity shine out, and that's what you require in a leader. With his dignity and restraint, Home will show up Harold Wilson for a cheap crackerjack."

Denobilization. The grey-haired, blue-eyed earl has none of the hauteur of many English noblemen, and he has a pugnacious streak that his fragile air belies. In the Cabinet and the country at large, Home's blunt, hardheaded performance as Foreign Secretary has won him a degree of respect accorded to only one of his postwar predecessors, Labor's late Ernie Bevin. Remembering Churchill's innocence of economics and social problems, many politicians believed that Home-Sweet-Home, as Winston called him, could easily fill the same gaps in his experience.