Great Britain: The Battling Tories

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There was even a Home boom, though the patrician Foreign Secretary is as retiring as Hailsham is assertive, and is relatively little known to the public. The most logical candidate, on ability and experience, was the man who would fill Macmillan's shoes mean while: Rab Butler (see box).

Unlike the Labor Party, the Tories hold no formal elections to choose a leader. Instead, their party officials, senior ministers and elder statesmen go through an elaborate, private process of divination aimed at reaching what is euphemistically called "the consensus" of the party; when they have settled on a candidate who is acceptable to both Cabinet and parliamentary party and looks like a vote getter to boot, the name is presented for routine approval to the Queen. Thus Macmillan's successor will probably not be announced until after Parliament reconvenes Oct. 24 and the Prime Minister formally resigns. In all probability, Macmillan will be given an earldom.

Absurd Aberrations. Until then, the Tory Establishment will echo to some of the fiercest infighting in memory. At week's end Hailsham was the delegates' hero, and had already been offered four constituencies by their obliging members, but he irritated many parliamentary leaders by his bulldozer tactics. Moreover, there is little likelihood that Hailsham will be able to divest himself of his title and be elected for two months; at week's end the London bookies were laying 7 to 4 against his becoming Prime Minister. Maudling (6 to 1 against), who appeared doubtful that the Tories can win in any case, not unhappily began to fade as a serious contender. Lord Home (10 to 1 against) wouldn't say yes and wouldn't say no, but had weighty support among the party's elder statesmen (and, reportedly, Macmillan).

Rab Butler was favored by 40% of Tory voters questioned in a Daily Mail snap poll—second-running Hailsham got 35%—and bookies' odds were 6 to 4 that he would get the job. As Acting Prime Minister, Butler won from grudging colleagues and rivals the initial advantage of giving the windup speech in Macmillan's place. But on the whole, it was a strangely lackluster performance. Capitalizing on the test ban treaty, the one clear triumph for the government in a year of frustration, Butler pledged that Britain would press its allies to "keep up the momentum" of negotiation with the Russians, and hinted at a summit meeting.

In a swipe at Britain's unilateral dis-armers, he said: "The treaty was not achieved by agitators sitting down in the public highway, but by statesmen sitting around the conference table." And he offered some invigorating invective against the "immature nonsense of socialism," which is trying to turn Great Britain into Little England. In a fourth Conservative election victory, said Butler, his party "must reject and repudiate these absurd aberrations of the left-wing mind."