BRITAIN: Wilson's First Hundred Hours

With practiced aplomb, Harold Wilson last week took charge of Britain as if he had been swept into power by a landslide. Shortly before 8:30 last Monday night, a black Rover drew up in front of No. 10 Downing Street; the crowd that had gathered outside gave an approving cheer. Pausing on the doorstep, the new Prime Minister impatiently waved aside the applause. "We have a job to do," he said in his flat Yorkshire accent. "We can only do it as one people, and I am going right in to start that job now."

Thus did Wilson, with his wife Mary at his side, return after an absence of nearly four years to 10 Downing Street, the official home of British Prime Ministers.* The country's electoral drama, the most suspenseful in memory, had begun four days before when British voters failed to give either Wilson's Labor Party or Prime Minister Edward Heath's incumbent Tories a majority in Parliament. In a last-ditch effort to stay in power, Heath tried to lure the resurgent Liberal Party (see following story) into a coalition government. But that proposal was essentially an exercise in wishful thinking on Heath's part. It quickly became clear that the Liberals had no intention of trading in their first real surge of popularity in half a century for the tag-end of a coalition with the Tories. After a caucus of Liberal M.P.s, Thorpe dispatched a polite thanks-but-no-thanks letter to the Prime Minister.

A short while later, Heath, looking tired and drawn, drove to Buckingham Palace and tendered his resignation to Queen Elizabeth II. Six minutes later, at 7:18 p.m., Harold Wilson arrived and, according to the palace bulletin, "accepted Her Majesty's offer" to form a new government. By the time the Wilsons arrived at Downing Street, Heath had packed his bachelor bags and gone to spend the night in a borrowed flat.

In some respects, Wilson's homecoming was reminiscent of 1964 when, the youngest British Prime Minister of the century at 48, he had assumed office with a bare majority of four seats in the Commons. This time he found himself leading Britain's first minority government in 45 years—a certain challenge to his celebrated agility at political tightrope walking. He also inherited Britain's worst economic crisis since World War II, including a state of emergency that had darkened the country for four months, a three-day work week and a month-old coal strike that severely impaired industrial production and a $9.1 billion balance of payments deficit, the largest in British history.

Marathon Session. There was no glib talk this time of Labor's first hundred days, but Wilson set out to make his first hundred hours count. The first item on the agenda was to get the coal miners back to work— and back to work they went. Even before he was sworn in, Wilson's new Employment Secretary, Michael Foot, summoned officials of the National Union of Mineworkers and the government's National Pay Board. In a marathon twelve-hour bargaining session, they managed to hammer out an agreement that had eluded Heath's government for five months.