Great Britain: The Lost Leader

As the House of Commons clock ticked toward starting time for the great debate, there were only two empty seats in the jammed, expectant chamber. The first was filled, with four minutes to spare, by Harold Macmillan, who sat down stiffly on the government's front bench, looking as chill and wan as his effigy at Madame Tussaud's.

Two minutes later, a short, plump man in a shabby grey suit bustled expressionlessly down the gangway, sank into the Opposition front bench facing Macmillan, and fingered a cardboard file. As the clock struck, Labor Party Leader Harold Wilson rose to his feet and for a second savored the tingling silence before breaking it with his flat, nasal Yorkshire voice. "This is a debate," he began, "without precedence in the annals of the House."

The two men were the products of two remarkable political careers and also of two Britains: Macmillan, the skillful, courageous and often ruthless patrician who had rescued his country from the debris of Suez and led it into an era of unprecedented prosperity; Harold Wilson, the dry, diligent and often devious son of a provincial chemist who had risen by hard work and chance (including the death of the man he succeeded, Hugh Gaitskell) to the top of the Labor Party. As he faced Macmillan, who had gone to Oxford by family tradition, Harold Wilson, who had gone to Oxford on a scholarship, strove to embody a new, impatient, class-defying England. The moral decay surrounding the Profumo affair, he tried hard to suggest, must be blamed on the Tories. Referring to Christine Keeler's reported $14,000-a-week nightclub contract, Wilson declared: "There is something utterly nauseating about a system of society which pays a harlot 25 times as much as it pays its Prime Minister."

For the rest, Harold Wilson stuck to the security issue and the government's handling of the Profumo case, which he attacked as either dishonest or incompetent, or both.

Let Down. The once unflappable Macmillan fidgeted in his seat and kept dabbing at the pouches beneath his eyes with a crumpled handkerchief. When he rose, he openly played for the sympathy of his colleagues. "What has happened," he said, "has inflicted a deep, bitter and lasting wound on me." Essentially his defense was that he had been grossly deceived by Profumo—an "almost unbelievable" culprit—and badly let down by his subordinates, who failed to keep him informed. From the back benches came a rude gibe of "Nobody ever tells me nuffin!"

By the time Macmillan finished, the House was prepared to acquit him of personal dishonesty and moral turpitude, but he had convicted himself of negligence and naivete—or perhaps simply of a fatal ability to avert his eyes from what he did not wish to see. In the vote following the debate, 27 Conservatives voted against Macmillan or abstained. On all sides there were cries of "Resign, resign," and this is what Macmillan will almost certainly have to do—the only remaining question being when.