World: Unexpected Triumph

OUTSIDE No. 10 Downing Street, a crowd of 1,500 Londoners waited expectantly behind lines of blue-suited bobbies. A blue Rover limousine braked to a stop; surging through the police lines, the crowd cheered. Edward ("Ted") Heath, 53, who normally masks his emotions, broke into a triumphant smile. Then, as the crowd fell silent, Britain's new Prime Minister spoke from the steps of 10 Downing Street. Invoking the liberal and unifying concept of Benjamin Disraeli, founder of the modern Conservative Party, Heath said: "To govern is to serve. Our purpose is not to divide but to unite, and where there are difficulties, to bring about reconciliation and to create one nation."

As is the British custom, moving vans arrived at No. 10 with almost indecent haste to cart away the household possessions of defeated Harold Wilson and his wife Mary. Shortly before Heath went in the front door, the Wilsons left swiftly through the back exit. Said Wilson: "She never thought of it as home." In fact, the Wilsons had no real home. Until they found new digs, Heath graciously offered them the use of Chequers, the prime ministerial weekend estate, 40 miles northwest of London.

In one of the great electoral upsets in modern British history, Ted Heath's underdog Conservatives had won a 43-seat margin over the greatly favored Labor Party. The outcome confounded bookmaker, poll taker and political pundit alike. A few days before the election, London's bookies, who are among the world's biggest odds makers, had been giving bets at 6 to 1 on Wilson's triumph. The Gallup and Marplan polls predicted that Labor would win a popular majority of as much as 8.7%, which would have resulted in a 150-seat majority in Commons. One opinion sampling showed that 67% of the population were convinced that Wilson would win. British sociologists wrote reasoned dissertations suggesting that Wilson had created an enduring Socialist majority, and many Britons went along with the idea.

Small Turnout

They were all wrong. When the very first election results trickled into London last week, the computers at once flashed the prediction of a Tory triumph. As the night wore on, district after district reported an average 5% swing to the Conservatives. The next day, as Heath drove to Buckingham Palace, kissed the hand of Queen Elizabeth II and accepted her commission to form a government, the British nation appeared stunned by what it had wrought. "Heath has done a Truman," declared the Guardian, recalling the former President's 1948 upset of Thomas E. Dewey.

What on earth had happened? For one thing, the mood of the country proved to be markedly different from the findings of most analysts. The Tory cause was aided by two fears that haunt Britain's lower and middle classes: the rising cost of living and the specter of racial tension, a theme vehemently exploited by Tory Rightist Enoch Powell (see box, page 21). But the most important factor was the drop in the electoral turnout, which was the lowest in postwar history; small turnouts almost invariably hurt Labor and favor the better-organized and more strongly motivated Tories.