Tory Triumph

On the battlefield where he fights best, Winston Churchill blasted the Laborite Opposition with their own weapons last week and sent them, stunned and bleeding, into the parliamentary hills.

While it lasted, the battle was the most dramatic foreign-policy debate in the House of Commons since Neville Chamberlain's rough days after the fall of Norway in 1940. When it was over, Prime Minister Churchill had turned back a Labor Party move to censure him personally for his foreign policy, and had split their ranks with two major explosions. The late Labor government, he revealed, had covertly made the very foreign policy commitment--a promise to join the U.S. in possible extension of the Korean war--for which they were attacking Churchill. And the Labor regime, while campaigning against the Conservatives as warmongers, had secretly developed atomic bombs and a big atomic plant.

Day of Battle. The 625 members of the House of Commons were summoned into session by "three-line whips"--notices underlined three times to indicate a crucial subject. The public galleries were jammed, and outside hundreds of other Britons queued up hoping to get in. Even the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen's husband, took a seat in the Peers' Gallery.

The Prime Minister rose slowly, savoring a minute-long ovation from the government side. His face--pink, smooth and beaming--wore a misleadingly benign, born-yesterday look. But a white handkerchief protruded like a jaunty battle flag above his pocket. Coolly Churchill adjusted his oratorical bombsight and loosed the first blockbuster.

"I wish, first of all," he said innocently, "to draw the attention of the House to the agreement we reached in Washington about the atomic bomb. We reached an agreement about its not being used from the East Anglian base without British consent ... A much more important atomic development is now before us. I was not aware until I took office that not only had the Socialist government made the atomic bomb as a matter of research, but that it had created, at the expense of many scores of millions of pounds, the important plant necessary for its regular production." Britain's bomb, he added casually, was to be tested sometime this year in Australia.

With mock surprise, the Prime Minister wondered why Parliament had not been told about this great development. "The Conservative Opposition would certainly have supported the government . . . Nevertheless, the [Socialists] preferred to conceal this vast operation and its finances from the scrutiny of the House not even obtaining a vote on the principle involved, while, at the same time, with Machiavellian art, keeping open the advantage of accusing their opponents of being warmongers."

The House was rocked by the blow.

Stunting in the Clouds. The Tory benchers sent up an exultant roar. On the Opposition side, Labor Chieftain Clement Attlee jumped up to protest that he had always kept Churchill advised of the atomic development--but this brought only another scalding dash of sarcasm. "It does seem to me," Churchill gloated, "that some of the late government's followers hardly relished their success in this sphere . . . Indeed, the right honorable gentleman, the Leader of the Opposition, is in the position of one who 'did good by stealth and blushed to find it fame.'"

The benches on both sides were in uproar. Tories peppered the Laborites with derisive cries. Churchill calmly circled his target, stunted a bit in the fleecy clouds of rhetoric, and then sighted in for an even more devastating attack.

"I made it plain a month ago," said he, "that I was opposed to action that would involve us or our allies of the United Nations in a war in China ... I have never departed from [that view] either publicly or privately." There had been nothing inconsistent in his promise to Congress that, if the Reds made and then broke a truce, Britain's reaction would be "prompt, resolute and effective."

Churchill paused. "But let me now give the House some account of what happened about Korea under the late government.

"On the first occasion in May of last year, before the truce negotiations began ... the late Foreign Secretary [Laborite Herbert Morrison] replied to an inquiry that His Majesty's government had decided that in the event of heavy air attacks from bases in China upon the United Nations forces in Korea, they would associate themselves with action not confined to Korea."

In the karrumph of that explosion, the Laborite case crumpled into shards. "Yah! Yah!" exulted the Tories. "Tricks! Tricks!" exclaimed the Opposition. Clement Attlee, who usually slumps deep in his seat, doodling, squirmed and slumped even lower. Cockney-born Herbert Morrison, the man who laid the censure motion before the House, sputtered like an alarm clock in a bucket of soapsuds. But not all of the Laborites lost their heads in the detonation.

In the din, the chunky, moon-faced member from the Welsh coal fields of Ebbw Vale, Left-Wing Laborite Aneurin Bevan, popped to his feet in the fourth row. "Is the right honorable gentleman quoting direct from Cabinet papers?" he asked silkily. "If he is, then I move the papers be laid." Quick-witted Nye Bevan had seized on an old House of Commons rule that a Cabinet document must be produced if it is quoted from in debate. It was a clever move. It might embarrass Churchill, in which case Bevan would be credited with saving the day for Labor. On the other hand, should Churchill furnish the papers, Nye Bevan would have documentation for his own fight to overturn Labor's moderate leadership.

Nothing Out of Order. The House vibrated with the procedural wrangle. Churchill held his ground, explaining that he was merely summarizing, not quoting, from the Labor Cabinet paper. Hapless Herbert Morrison yelped in pain, "I think it is unusual, doubtful in taste and constitutional propriety for the Prime Minis. ter to delve into the papers of his predecessors." But the House Speaker waved him down. Nye Bevan pounded in like the surf. Churchill's report, he cried, "may be a lying summary."

"No! No!" shouted the Tories.

"How do we know it is otherwise," said Bevan, "because there is nothing in the right honorable gentleman's career that would guard us against that."

"Withdraw! Withdraw!" the Tories demanded.

"I do not propose to withdraw; I have said nothing which is out of order."

After Labor's commitment in May, Churchill said, Labor had made another in September. It had agreed with the U.S. that in the event of a breakdown of Korean truce talks and a resumption of large-scale fighting, "certain action should be taken." This action, it was agreed, would be automatic, and would not even require prior Anglo-American consultation.

"Let me make it clear," said he, "that we conformed, in principle, to the policy of our predecessors. Indeed, in some respects it might be said that we did not commit ourselves as far as they had done."

In effect, Churchill was deliberately forfeiting what credit he had won in the U.S. for a readiness to be bolder in Asia than the Socialists had been. The fact is, Churchill said, "there is no change in our policy. Nothing could be more foolish than for the armies of the U.S. or the U.N. to become engulfed in the vast areas of China," he continued, and "few adventures could be less successful or fruitful than for Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek to plunge on to the mainland." As a closing shot, he said: "The prospects of a truce being reached and respected in Korea will depend to a large extent upon the unity between Great Britain and the U.S.," on "all who seek to weaken or divide us being repulsed and condemned as they will be tonight . . ."

The Battle Lost. It was 6 p.m. when Winston Churchill sat down. The leaders of the Opposition, the battle already lost, writhed silently in their parliamentary Coventry. But not Rebel Bevan.

Virulent, cajoling, sarcastic, he went at the Prime Minister with a barbed compliment ("I freely admit that [he] is the most articulate Englishman that has ever lived . . . How did it come about that he was so much misunderstood?") and also with his coalminer's pickax: "His ego now fills the whole cosmos." Violently he played the Bevanite line that Britain's rearmament and her U.S. alliance carry her toward war. ". . . Behind the guise and fac,ade of the United Nations, the Americans are waging an ideological war with weapons against the Soviet Union."

Mission Accomplished. With his fiery forensics, stabbing forefinger and bobbing forelock, Nye Bevan gripped most of the House--but not always, to his chagrin, Winston Churchill. "I do not know what the Right Honorable . . . Prime Minister sees to laugh at," he cried at one point.

"I can assure the right honorable gentleman that I was not laughing at him," replied Churchill cooly. "My attention was caught by the overcrowding of the front bench . . ."

"The right honorable gentleman now suffers from certain physical disabilities," snapped Bevan, "and he ought not to reinforce them by inattention." "Withdraw!" shouted the Tories, offended by this reference to Churchill's partial deafness. Bevan refused.

"We do not want any differences of opinion between us and the U.S. to encourage hopes of a [Communist] military adventure anywhere," concluded Nye Bevan, "but we do not want such subservience to American opinion . . . that there is no hope for them except through another blood bath."

But it was Winston Churchill's day. When the vote came at 10 o'clock at night, six stormy hours after the start of the debate, the House upheld the Prime Minister and his foreign policy, 318 to 285. To the triumphant shouts of his supporters, the happy bombardier waddled off to No. 10 Downing Street to inscribe in the Churchillian logbook a familiar notation: Mission accomplished.

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