Getting Ready to Go

At 72, Clement Richard Attlee is getting ready to retire as leader of the British Labor Party. "I have had a long innings," the pipe-smoking ex-Premier told a London columnist last week. "I shall be glad when I can hand over to a younger man." Attlee had a slight stroke recently, and he is troubled by a persistent eczema. Intimates say that he looks fit enough, but is growing testy and has occasional periods of forgetfulness. As its next leader, the divided Labor Party, which went down to crushing defeat in this year's general election, has just about decided on Cockney Herbert Morrison, Attlee's longtime lieutenant and a seasoned party organizer. But Herb Morrison, at 67, is destined to be a stopgap party chief.

What Labor needs in the long run, said Attlee, is a leader "brought up in the present age and not, as I was, in the Victorian age." It was a polite way of suggesting that Morrison would be expected to make way for a younger man before the next election, probably in 1960. Two such candidates are radical "Nye" Bevan, 57, the tough and noisy non-Victorian from the Welsh coalpits, and moderate Economist Hugh Gaitskell, 49, the scholarly-looking favorite of the big trade unions. Gaitskell is by far the stronger candidate. A skillful debater whose economic ideas are so similar to those of Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer "Rab" Butler that Britons have coined a single phrase for them (Butskellism), he trounced Bevan at last year's election for party treasurer and is a cinch to do the same again at the next Labor conference in October. But Gaitskell is no hail-fellow well-met among the horny-handed men of Britain's labor unions. "If Labor is to retain its old spirit," explained one of its kingmakers, "it must have a good earthy leader--not a polished ex-Oxford don."

Some anti-Gaitskell Laborites think that just such a man is Alfred Robens, 44, a burly, longtime trade unionist with a flat North-Country accent and a broad-humored Lancashire wife. A veteran parliamentarian and nimble committeeman, "Alf" served as Minister of Labor in the last Socialist government, and was designated "Foreign Secretary" in the "shadow Cabinet" that would theoretically take over from the Tories if Labor wins the next election. There is talk of grooming Robens for bigger things.

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