One of the facts to come to the surface of the murky waters of the Profumo affair is that there is now a serious split in the Conservative party, at any rate in Parliament, over who should lead them at the next election..
For some time Tory M.P.s have been harbouring considerable dissatisfaction with Mr. Macmillan's leadership. Men like Nigel Birch, Lord Lambton and Sir Harry Legge-Bourke have made no secret of the fact that in their opinion they stand a better chance of coining back to Westminster next time under a new, younger leader. It seems safe to assume that this feeling is more widely held than the number of abstentions in the Profumo debate would indicate. There is some fairly sound evidence that many Conservative M.P.s agreed to go into the government lobby thad night only after their doubts had been stilled by a promise that Mr. Macmillan would resign as soon as it was possible for him to do so without losing too much political dignity. If this is true, then Mr. Macmillan's television announcement that he still hopes to be the Tory leader in the next election was a very fast one to be pulled. It was a typically shrewd move by a master at the game of staying in power. But more of that later.
For the moment, let us observe that another of the blows which Mr. Profumo dealt his party was that he deprived them of their cherished image of unity. It has long been a useful electoral move for the Tories to publicise the searing splits in the Labour Party and indeed Labour has had their share of them. These splits have also provided the Tories with some useful bogy men—particularly, of course, the late Aneurin Bevan. In contrast, the Conservative Party has usually seemed like a haven of peace. Nobody asking awkward questions. Nobody getting at the leader. No splits, at any rate on the surface. But now all that is gone. And to heighten the Tories' discomfort, the Labour Party now seems to be calmly united. Mr. Wilson has trod craftily since he became leader of the Opposition; his admonition to the 1922 Committee to call off their attacks on Mr. Macmillan, was typical, of his aptitude for political warfare. At this distance, Mr. Wilson seems to be one of the cleverest of Labour's post-war leaders. He seems to have pacified his Party, although he has undoubtedly been helped in this by the fact that Labour's electoral hopes are so high. Nothing concentrates the mind of a capitalist political party so much as the realisation that power is almost within their grasp. It is anybody’s guess how long this will last. If, after all their lip-smacking over the gallup polls and the by-elections, Labour lose the next election, Wilson may well get the blame and find his grip on his office considerably weaker. For the moment, it seems to he getting stronger as the days go by.
Despite the Tory split, it was always on the cards that Macmillan would not in fact go over Profumo. Clever indeed was the question, put in another context by The Economist, ". . . may the Government, or rather the Prime Minister, of Britain be about to be overthrown by a 21-year- old trollop? " How many M.P.s would answer yes to that question?
Perhaps not many Tory M.P,s would realise that in any case it was beside the point. Apart from the distressing—for the Tories—thought of Miss Keeler giving Mr. Macmillan the sack, there was the urgent question of who to replace Mr. Macmillan with. The Prime Minister has cleverly pushed all of his likely rivals out of the running. Men like Butler, Hailsham and Macleod, all of whom were once well fancied for the succession, have been sidetracked and in some ways discredited. If Britain had succeeded in the application to join the Common Market, Edward Heath may have been in line for the job. As it is, however . . . Selwyn Lloyd has been banished and into the bargain he has been held in check, his energy diverted into work like his recent instigation into Conservative Party organisation. The strongest challenger now seems to be Mr. Maudling but apart from anything else, he would operate under the handicap of leading a government full of aspirants for his job.
The fact is that Mr. Macmillan has never allowed a Crown Prince to rise from the Tory ranks. When Churchill was Prime Minister there was no serious doubt that when he went he would be succeeded by Anthony Eden. Churchill was firmly enough in the saddle to be able to tolerate this situation. In contrast, Macmillan's rule has seen a number of potential challengers rise only to fall again into comparative obscurity. This may yet be the fate of the genial Mr. Maudling. Macmillan has played this card—a strong one—for all he is worth, together with the other trumps he holds— his unprecedented election successes and the threat to dissolve Parliament, with the implied follow-up that this would mean throwing a lot of potentially rebellious Tory M.P.s to the electoral wolves. We may be sure that nothing is more calculated to dampen the fires of revolt in the well-cared-for bellies of Conservative members.
If Macmillan pulled out all his aces in the Profumo battle, it can only be because he was literally fighting for his political life. The last few years have seen his government facing a series of crises, many of which he has been able to dismiss with an audaciously airy phrase. Thorneycroft's resignation was “ alittle local difficulty." Selwyn Lloyd went because, perhaps, he was "tired." He has even tried the same trick in his latest crisis. “ I see," he said, a couple of weeks after the Profumo debate, "the Gallup Poll is going up again. These things come and go." Yet this was surely his gravest hour, with a lot of the Tory press after him and no end of whispers of even worse to come, when we knew the identity of the naked butler and of one or two other curious figures.
Perhaps the crucial point in the Profumo crisis was when the news got out that Mr. Enoch Powell and Sir Edward Boyle were considering resigning over the way the affair had been handled. This was dangerous news, because these two men could have been the gathering points for other rebellious Tories. In The Spectator of June 21st Henry Fairlie, who wrote up the story of the threatened resignations for the Daily Express, contributed a dramatic article which claimed that the story was given to him by a Conservative Member of Parliament, " . . . a source which not only was reliable but made the story credible. . .” Fairlie also gave his opinion that the impending resignations were leaked as part of a deliberate political move by his informant, a move to get Mr. Macmillan out.
This story, if true, is an indication of how deep is the split in the Tory party and how tricky was the situation which Macmillan faced. This is in no way diminished by the fact that Mr. Fairlie's informant, plotting against Macmillan on one hand, supported him in the voting on that fateful night. Mr. Fairlie, indeed, is as impressed by this as we would expect an experienced political journalist to be. “(It) only shows,” he commented, " that politicians are politicians.”
Should we, then, leave the matter there, so casually and with such a worldly cynicism? The row which is going on now in the Conservative Party, and which has been going on for so long in the Labour Party, is about one thing: power. They are all of them fighting over which policies and which leaders may give them the best chance of persuading enough people to vote for them to return them to power at a future election. It does not matter if they have no Intention of carrying out their policies. It does not matter if the leader they choose is dishonest or callous as many, in the past, we know have been. Provided they deliver the goods the policies and the leader get the support they need.
And the goods—the votes—come from the very people who have nothing to gain either way in the struggle for power. The majority of voters in this and every other capitalist country are members of the working class. They are the people who have to spend their entire lives working to build the wealth of capitalism and who make possible the very luxuries and privileges which power struggles are about. They organise and administer capitalism in all its aspects and at every level. Without their work, capitalism could not carry on. Yet although they hold this powerful position, the working class never exert it to the full. They could get rid of capitalism; yet they accept it as part of the natural order of things. Although they may not like some of the effects of capitalism, the working class generally think that there is little or nothing that can be done about them. If they lose confidence in one capitalist party they are content to put another to govern in its place. They accept the notion that capitalism’s leaders are as effective as the leaders themselves like to think. They pine for strong leaders, or clever leaders, or peaceful and humane leaders. They never reflect upon the fact that, no matter who is at the head of capitalism, it ticks over as unpleasantly as ever.
This is the human material with which Macmillan and the other politicians work. These are the people who fall for the smooth slogans and the big ads., the people who are convinced that they have never had it so good. These are the people who are fed with the newspaper revelations of the latest sordid sexual adventures of public figures. Is it any wonder that capitalism's leaders are hard and ruthless men?
One day the full story of the Profumo affair will be written and it will not make pleasant reading. It will be a story, familiar enough to us now, of lies (not just Profumo's) and double dealing. And by the time it is on the bookstalls there will have been many more scandals, many more political deals, much more ruthless struggling for power. It will probably be a best seller.
Ivan.
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