GREAT BRITAIN: The Art of the Practical

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Moving into 10 Downing Street, Macmillan (who still proclaims, "I believe history will prove us right over Suez") posted a line from The Gondoliers on an office door: "Calm cool deliberation disentangles every knot." Detached, confident, unflappable, the new Prime Minister promptly began to operate on the premise that a cardinal point of British foreign policy nowadays is the amount of influence it can exert over U.S. foreign policy. Back in World War II, sent to North Africa on his first ministerial assignment by Winston Churchill, Macmillan had already accepted the inevitable British transition from senior to junior partner in the Atlantic alliance. "Never forget," he pep-talked junior British officers at Eisenhower's North African headquarters, "that we are the Greeks in their Roman empire." Within five months after Suez, the Prime Minister with the proud Tory look was making the most of his wartime friendship with Ike, and of his own American blood (his mother was Helen Belles of Spencer, Ind.), to re-establish the alliance in a meeting with Ike in Bermuda.

The U.S. rift mended, Macmillan set out to repair his Commonwealth fences with a Far Eastern tour, astonished everybody by getting on splendidly with Nehru. ("I wonder if the Romans ever visited Britain after they left," asked History Buff Macmillan at Delhi.) And last February, sporting a preposterous white astrakhan hat, he flew off to Moscow. There was derision, anger and waspish comment in Western capitals when he returned to London after a series of public humiliations from Nikita Khrushchev, to announce insouciantly that he favored a whole series of East-West summit meetings. Last week, with the West busily engaged in preparations to go to the summit with Khrushchev, he looked a good deal more realistic. So far, Harold Macmillan has been a pretty successful Greek.

The Deflationist. To stop the deadly inflationary drift he faced on Britain's domestic front, Macmillan was ready to take bold risks. Clamping a tight credit pinch on the business economy, he forced the bank rate up to 7%, the highest level in 37 years. These daringly deflationary tactics brought on the heaviest unemployment Britain had known since World War II, and cost Macmillan's Tories by-election after by-election, but they effectively stalled the trade unions' drive for the annual round of handsome wage boosts.

By last spring Macmillan's stern economic medicine was beginning to show results. When Labor M.P.s noisily demanded a debate on unemployment, Iain Macleod was able to drive them to cover by producing figures showing that the number of jobless had shrunk to 1.9% of Britain's labor force. Since then, Britain's prices have remained steady, and the pound holds firm despite the fact that London's bank rate is now down to 4%. British industrial production has been rising steadily since April, is expected to top last year's levels by 5% or 6%, and British exports are also up 6% over 1958.