Great Britain: Dull No More

GREAT BRITAIN

Using his new signature for the first time, Britain's Prime Minister attached his name and family seal to a document renouncing six ancient peerages. Thus, less than a week after taking office, the 14th Earl of Home became Sir Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, commoner, and so qualified for election to Parliament from a safe Tory seat (Kinross and West Perthshire, Scotland's second-biggest electoral district). Said he: "I don't feel any different." But Britons, who at first were widely skeptical of Lord Home, were already beginning to feel different about Sir Alec.

With firmness and charm he demolished the notion that he is a political innocent and an intellectual lightweight. There were bitter protests, and not only from Labor, when the new Prime Minister postponed Parliament's opening for two weeks (until Nov. 12) so that he might win the by-election and take his place in the House of Commons as leader of the government. Until then, for the first time in history, Britain has a Prime Minister without a seat either in the Lords or Commons, prompting the crack that the denobilized earl is "a Home without a House." In the Commons facing the Prime Minister's empty seat, Labor's Harold Wilson thundered that postponing Parliament's next session to suit Douglas-Home's convenience was tantamount to treating M.P.s like "awkward or refractory tenants" and constituted a "very serious tampering with the rights and duties of the House." Sir Alec (as he prefers to be known) merely sat out his first showdown with Wilson in 10 Downing Street and refused to budge.

New Programs. Tories also took new heart from the P.M.'s shrewd deployment of Cabinet talents. Many Britons still suspect that under his leadership the party may veer away from the progressive policies that have kept it in power for twelve years. Their fears were sharpened by the defection of Iain Macleod, a principal architect of the New Conservatism, who resigned as leader of the House and party co-chairman rather than serve under the new Prime Minister.

But with the support of such popular stalwarts as Minister for Science Lord Hailsham and Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling, both of whom kept their jobs, Douglas-Home has already set in motion new government programs aimed at deflating Labor's claim to be the only reform party. Forestalling Labor's pledge to install a planning czar to direct the economy, Douglas-Home switched Lord Privy Seal Ted Heath, his able, longtime foreign-policy spokesman in the Commons, to an ambitious new Ministry for Industry, Trade and Regional Development. Armed with a long-awaited committee report urgently recommending educational expansion, the government pledged immediate action to double the number of Britain's universities (to 62) by 1980.

One of Douglas-Home's shrewdest appointments, to the crucial job of party chairman, was Labor Minister John Hare, 52, a hardworking, true-blue Tory. As for Sir Alec's defeated rival for the prime ministership, Rab Butler, he had always wanted to be Foreign Secretary (Harold Macmillan denied him the job), and Rab made his debut last week at a Western European Union conference at The Hague with complete professional aplomb.