"On with the Job"

"Keep the Tories tame!" urged Lon don's pro-Labor Daily Mirror as election day neared. "A bloated majority for the Tories would be a national disaster."

It was Labor's white flag. A few guns kept firing and a few final grenades arced through the political air. But Labor, divided and dispirited, had already fallen back to the simple hope of averting a Conservative landslide.

In calm profusion, Britons went to the polls. The result was a sharp and decisive victory for Great Britain's Conservative Party and the first solidly entrenched Brit ish government in the past five years. In smartly winning his gamble on a well-timed quick election, Sir Anthony Eden won his own five-year mandate to govern Great Britain under the banners of en lightened Toryism, and his Conservatives more than trebled the thin parliamentary majority Eden had inherited from Sir Winston Churchill.

Out of 630 seats in the House of Commons, the Tories and their allies won 344, Labor sank to 277. The election jolted the huge party of Labor into a need for a painful, perhaps explosive overhaul of its leadership. It all but destroyed the last, best hope of the once-mighty Liberal Party, which won only six of the no seats it contested.

Healthy Majority. It was no landslide, but the victory gave Prime Minister Eden a majority of 59 seats, and a working ma jority of 67 seats over the Laborite Opposition. It meant an end to years of narrow majorities, nerve-racking party discipline and last-minute scrabbling in the corridors to squeeze crucial measures through Parliament. For the first time in 90 years, the party in power was re-elected with an increased majority.

It was the widest majority won by any right-wing government since Stanley Baldwin's National Government swept in on a platform of peace and a majority of 247 in 1935. "It seems that the country has said to us, 'Get on with the job,' " said Sir Anthony Eden, the man who had waited so long in the lee of Sir Winston Churchill for his own chance to govern.

All the Conservative mainstays -- Chancellor of the Exchequer "Rab" Butler, Foreign Secretary Harold Macmillan, La bor Minister Sir Walter Monckton -- returned, most of them with bigger pluralities. Eden himself carried his Warwick and Leamington constituency by 3,663 votes more than he had in 1951. "Thank you so much," said the Prime Minister, in clipped Oxford accent, to droves of well-wishers at the Shire Hall.

In Woodford outside London, a familiar old party arrived at the vote-counting, slightly teary-eyed and fumbling for a misplaced cigar, to learn that his plurality, while down almost 3,000 from 1951, was still a robust 15,808. "We wish you a long and happy life," said his defeated Laborite opponent. "I've already had that," grunted So-year-old Sir Winston Churchill.

A Lot of Harm. At Transport House, Labor Party headquarters in London's Smith Square, only one top leader put in an appearance to take in firsthand a night long story of setbacks. Worn and haggard from a campaign that brought him back with 2,000 fewer votes in his own constituency of Walthamstow West, Labor's Clement Attlee at 72 was a sad figure, his face bereft of its usual suggestion of tart strength, his hands poked disconsolately into the pockets of his raincoat. His own career as party leader was now in jeopardy. This was the first time since 1931 that Labor had failed to add to its popular vote in an election. "Voting is like the waves on the beach," Attlee philosophized to a TIME correspondent. "They come higher and higher and then there's one that doesn't come as high--but then it is usually followed by one that comes up even higher still." But Clem Attlee's thin voice did not carry conviction. "Differences within our ranks," he said. "That has done us a lot of harm." The man responsible for the "differences," Rebel Aneurin Bevan, was ready to blame Labor's defeat on the party leadership's milksopping me-tooism, though his own divisive tactics and his class-hating rancor probably drove away more votes than his flaming oratory brought out. Bevan himself dropped more than 2,000 in his own coal-mining stomping ground at Ebbw Vale, and two of his disciples--Editor Michael Foot and Geoffrey Bing--were beaten.

But the basic fact of the election was that Labor failed to deliver its vote. In 1951, when losing to Churchill, Labor actually got a bigger popular vote. This year 1,842,889 fewer voters went to the polls, and three-fourths of the absentees, according to the experts, were people who usually vote Socialist. Even so, Labor got 46.3% of the less than 27,000,000 votes. It represents a strong sentiment in the nation, but it lacks leadership, and its leadership lacks a program. Cockney Herbert Morrison, 67, a cheerful and clever but not very profound man, is in line for Attlee's leadership; after him comes the aggressive and younger (49) Hugh Gaitskell, who is able but brittle, admired but not loved. Both are violently anti-Bevan.

Key to Victory. The Conservatives, for all their rejoicing, saw the significance beneath the statistics. They had had just about everything on their side--prosperity, the neatly timed Big Four talks, a well-financed party machine, popular leaders, and the good fortune to be in office during, in the words of the London Economist, "one of those rare periods of British history when it has been easier to govern than to oppose." Yet the voting swing to the Conservative Party was less than 2%. The Tories' white-haired campaign manager, avuncular old Lord Woolton, acknowledged that "the low poll" was the key to victory. He quoted a taxi driver in Stockport: "I had nothing to grumble about." Lord Woolton's conclusion was realistic: "A large number of people have not voted Conservative but have abstained from voting."

If past resentments of the Tories lingered, there were plenty of signs that the present leadership intends to deserve well of the future. Anthony Eden has found a new self-confidence. Chancellor Butler has kept the Welfare State but has adjusted his budgets to restore incentives to private enterprise. Foreign Secretary Macmillan (whose son and son-in-law were elected along with him to Parliament) is a wartime friend of Eisenhower's, and a firm believer in the Anglo-American partnership. The Tories have problems ahead --including, two days after the election, a nationwide railway strike--but they also have at last a comfortable majority and a prospering, confident nation.

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