Great Britain: The Season for Foxes

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"You can't have a team," rues a top Tory, "kicking its captain in the middle of the game." Yet that is exactly what has been happening to Conservative Leader Ted Heath. Busy shielding his shins from Tory toes, he has been unable to mount a forceful attack on the Opposition's real opposition, Prime Minister Harold Wilson's ruling Laborites. But last week Heath finally kicked back. When his shadow minister for colonial affairs, dapper, dagger-tongued Angus Maude, wrote in the Spectator that "the Opposition has become a meaningless irrelevance," Heath called him on the carpet of his West End bachelor flat. When Maude emerged 30 minutes later, he announced his resignation from Heath's frontbench.

Wilson promptly seized upon the event to chortle that "the Tory Party is split from top to bottom." Heath took to the telly to explain that "this resignation does not mean that I am against discussion of party policy or criticism, but there is a right and a wrong way of doing things." Few Tories would quarrel with that, but not a few wondered if Heath had "shot the right fox." More than Maude's maunderings, it has been the outspoken speeches of Shadow Defense Minister Enoch Powell opposing the official Tory positions on defense and incomes policy that have set Tory backbenchers—and some frontbenchers as well—to squabbling. Nor has the all-dominant issue of Rhodesia, which has split Tory sympathies three ways, aided Heath's task as captain.

Appropriately, Heath's new show of firmness came as the Gallup poll reported, for the first time since he took over, a slump in Labor's standing, halving the margin of their lead over the Conservatives to 4½%. While Wilson has been preoccupied with foreign affairs, mainly the Rhodesian crisis, the electorate has been increasingly nagged at home: increases in bread prices, wage disputes, inadequate gas supplies during winter cold spells, power failures. This week Parliament reconvenes, and the minor grievances at home will provide the Tories with fresh ammunition. This week, too, voters in Hull go to the polls in a by-election for a seat won by Labor the last time by a scant 1,000-odd votes. The Tories have a fair chance of snatching it away—and reducing Wilson's parliamentary hold to a perilous majority of one.