Fox & Hounds

Out of the shadows behind the Speaker's chair, a tall, lank figure made his way to the front bench, flopped down, and put his long legs up on the table. Sir Anthony Eden was making his first appearance in the House of Commons since his collapse at the height of the Suez crisis. Some Tories put up a polite cheer. One or two rose but hastily subsided when they realized no one else was joining them. Other Tories sat mutely staring straight in front of them. The Labor benches kept a stony silence, leaving the Tory welcome starkly revealed in all its thinness.

In succeeding days, Eden coped doggedly with a barrage of harassing questions from the Opposition, a lonely man flanked by a depressed and worried party. Like hounds worrying a fox, Laborites pressed their charge that there had been collusion between Britain. France and Israel in the attack on Suez.

Eden parried and dodged, then said flatly, thumping the dispatch box angrily: "To say that Her Majesty's government was engaged in some dishonorable activity is completely untrue, and I must emphatically deny it." Liberal Leader Joseph Grimond, still not satisfied, demanded to know whether the government could categorically deny that it had had information that Israel was going to attack Egypt. The House rang with cries of "Answer, answer." Finally Eden got to his feet. "There was not foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt--there was not," he insisted. "But there was something else. There was--we knew it perfectly well--a risk of it, and in the event of risk of it, certain discussions and conversations took place, as I think was absolutely right ..."

All week long Eden assured his fellow Tories that the country backed him, insisted that he would have no misgivings about winning a general election even if it came tomorrow, but was determined not to call an election for two years. His optimistic thesis was jarred by a by-election to fill the seat of ex-Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anthony Nutting, who had resigned in protest over Eden's Suez policies. Melton Mowbray is in the heart of Toryland, a section of fox-hunting squires and prosperous Leicestershire farmers. In the 1955 election, Nutting, who lived in the district, won 61% of the votes. This year, as added insurance, the government sent down a batch of top-level speakers to plead the Tory case. At week's end the returns came in. The Tory candidate (the woman head of a pottery works in distant Yorkshire) won the seat. But the Tory vote had dropped by an alarming 7%, the Tory majority from 1955's 10,780 to a modest 2,362.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.