GREAT BRITAIN: The Art of the Practical

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Mrs. G. Complained. The man who fashioned this dramatic political triumph for Britain's Conservatives sports the languidly aristocratic look and the offhandedly arrogant air of a lordly old Tory of the style of Wellington and Disraeli. But behind the elaborately careless Edwardian manner that provokes both cheers and jeers for "Supermac" and "Macwonder," Harold Macmillan maintains a superbly efficient mastery of the political art of the practical. For all his proud Tory brows and mustache, Macmillan possesses an agile intelligence and free-ranging historical imagination that have enabled him to adjust cheerfully to the limits of Britain's present-day power, and to work to make his country the "senior junior partner in the Western alliance." And domestically Macmillan is an unabashed pragmatist who looks to the right, borrows from the left, and walks grandly through the middle in the immemorial British tradition.

Against this formidable foe, Labor had waged an aggressive "We can do it better" campaign. This display of vigor, reinforced by the unexpectedly effective performance of Labor Leader Hugh Gaitskell, upset Tory plans for a quiet election and turned the three-week campaign into the toughest-talking election battle since Labor's 1945 victory over Winston Churchill. Said Labor's "Nye" Sevan: "I have seen the squint in [Macmillan's] soul." Macmillan himself, harking back to an old description of Hugh Gaitskell as "a desiccated calculating machine," gleefully cracked: "I still think he is rather desiccated, but his reputation as a calculator is gone with the wind. His promises are the gambler's last throw." "There have been a number of personal attacks on me," said Gaitskell, "but I don't complain." "I complain," Mrs. Gaitskell piped up. In his best parade-ground manner, Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, no candidate but deep in the battle, barked: "Anybody who votes Labor should be locked up in a lunatic asylum."

"I'm All Right, Jack." Whether all this slanging had changed any votes was highly questionable. What clearly had swung the election to the Tories, as able Young Tory Labor Minister Iain Macleod had shrewdly predicted, was the growing stake in society possessed by Britain's "new men of property"—car-owning, house-owning young workingmen whose fathers had never been able to save a shilling but who themselves were apt to have a comfortable nest egg in the local Building Society.

In the warm, sunlit autumn of 1959, Britons could unreservedly agree upon one proposition: never had so many of them had so much, with so few misgivings. The careless shrug of prosperity provided the title for Britain's current movie hit, I'm All Right, Jack. New restaurants and coffee bars, supermarkets and service stations were mushrooming in cities; in suburban subdivisions, new houses priced from $6,000 to $12,000 often sold before the foundations were laid. In offices and factories, bulletin boards were gay with postcards from vacationing workers in Rome, Majorca, the Costa Brava.