Lion Caged

On a hot Saturday afternoon, when most government ministers and their staffs had scattered for the traditional long weekend, a sparse announcement issued from No. 10 Downing St.:

"In consequence of the attached medical report, the Prime Minister, after consultation with the President of the United States and the French Prime Minister, has postponed the Bermuda conference."

"At Least a Month." The attached medical report, signed by the old P.M.'s own medical adviser. Lord Moran, and by Sir Russell Brain, Harley Street neurologist and president of the Royal College of Physicians, was short and unspecific: "The Prime Minister has had no respite for a long time from his very arduous duties, and is in need of a complete rest. We have therefore advised him to abandon his journey to Bermuda and to lighten his duties for at least a month."

That was all. But it was enough to jolt Britain's weekend quiet. Sir Winston is going on 79. He has been shouldering the extra burden of being his own Foreign Secretary. There was also the frantic go-around of the coronation. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, convalescing in the U.S. from a bile-duct operation, would not be back on the job for at least another four months, and there was no assurance that when he did get back he would be able to operate at full steam. Wan, irritable and sometimes forgetful of late, Sir Winston, it appeared, had simply worn himself down.

With their No. 1 man out of commission as well as their No. 2 man, the Tories had to drop the mantle of responsibility on someone else. Churchill's choice was one of the party's younger but more impressive figures, 50-year-old Richard Austen ("Rab") Butler, the able and coldly aloof Chancellor of the Exchequer. So-called theoretician of the Tory Party, Rab Butler was born in India, the son of a British civil servant, became a Cambridge don after chalking up a brilliant scholastic record there, married the heiress of the wealthy Courtauld textile empire, entered Parliament at 26. He has built up a strong party following among the younger, more liberal Conservatives, acquired impressive public backing with his two austerity-relaxing budgets and his emphasis on "trade, not aid" as the road to recovery.

While Churchill is away. Rab Butler will handle the top-level paper work and Tory cabinet meetings. In the House of Commons he will be assisted by Captain Harry Crookshank, the Conservatives' able House leader, and the party's frail Grey Eminence, Lord Salisbury, will be acting Foreign Secretary.

Impatient Patient. How ill was Sir Winston? Having survived front-line skirmishes and capture in the Boer War. three serious bouts with pneumonia, a collision with a New York taxicab (in 1931), not to mention most of the 20th century's great military and political crises, he apparently was not taking his illness too seriously. He had to be bulldozed into taking a rest at his country home. Chartwell, and, on his very first weekend there, presided over a jolly luncheon party which included Lord Beaverbrook. "Well, at least I've pushed that fellow Christie off the front page," said Churchill (see below). After lunch, when he asked Lord Moran if a Cointreau was permitted, the doctor replied: "Do you want it or do you need it?" Replied Sir Winston: "I neither want it nor need it, but I should think it pretty hazardous to interfere with the ineradicable habit of a lifetime."

His good spirits gave rise to suggestions that the Prime Minister's illness might be more diplomatic than real, but the talk ignored the reputation of the doctors involved and Churchill's vast pride in his ability to carry on. On top of that, acting Prime Minister Butler quickly let it be known that he was proposing that representatives of the Big Three get together very soon anyway to tackle problems that were supposed to come up at Bermuda.

Time to Retire? Inside the Tory Party, however, the Prime Minister's enforced rest brought out into the open a strong undercurrent of feeling that he should ease up, share his leadership or even retire. "Far from taking on additional burdens," editorialized the London Times this week. "Sir Winston Churchill should be seeking to lighten his normal load . . . His service to the nation must now come from his incomparable experience, the sweep of his judgment and his flashes of vision, not from a detailed application, however stimulating, to departmental affairs."

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