The Way of the Squire

Less than a year ago, the attitude of most Tory politicians to their leader, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, was respectful but restrained: a fine man in the House of Commons, they said, but hardly a man to appeal to the people. He looked too sedately Edwardian; people did not know what to make of him. Then, partly as a result of his U.S. visit and the widespread rebroadcast of a humanizing TV appearance with Ed Murrow, the British public--and Tory leaders too--began to see their chief in a new light. >>

Last week, after completing a getting-to-know-you tour of Britain's grimy industrial Midlands--the first by a Prime Minister since Churchill's V-fingered tours in World War II--Macmillan confirmed the fact that he is something fresh and original in British politics. As one disgruntled Laborite reporter observed while suffering through a factory workers' ovation for the P.M.: "Why, they're doing everything but touching their forelocks."

Rope and Chains. It was not that the Prime Minister had gone unduly democratic. Always the courtly squire in the artistocratically rumpled suit, he responded to crowds with a wave that seldom took his arm above his shoulder, and they liked him for not trying to be what he was not. Accompanied by his Lady (who is a daughter of the late ninth Duke of Devonshire, and showed herself pleasantly old-shoeish), Macmillan neatly dodged political questions, mumbled his way through a string of "Splendids," "Jolly goods," and "God bless you alls." Instead of putting people off, his very proper U-ness was apparently just the thing to put giggling factory girls and suntanned Shropshire lads at their ease. He showed endless interest in everything from a boys' rope-swinging exercise in a Worcester gym class to the manufacture of chains in Walsall.

Fed up with "life in that Vatican City called Downing Street," Macmillan had announced that he was "out to have some fun." In Wolverhampton, while Lady Macmillan unpacked the bags at the hotel, he popped up at a local Butchers' Association ball, announced that he could not "resist a good band." Next day, his pants rolled up, he tramped through the Kidderminster cattle market, chuckled loudly when a runaway pig scampered between his legs (being photographed with pigs was a specialty of a previous Tory Prime Minister. Stanley Baldwin). Later Macmillan dropped in at the Half Moon for a spot of ale. Near Shrewsbury he donned a pair of hastily bought gum boots for a plowing and hedging contest, sloshed over 17 acres, talking farming all the way.

The Man Nobody Knew. Back at "Vatican City," the Prime Minister had every reason to be pleased with his lot. With the Laborites in near disarray, Tory stock was going up, the nation's gold and dollar reserves were at a seven-year high of more than $3 billion, and not even Britain's fear of war over Quemoy had produced much of a public clamor. The man nobody thought could ever be popular had brought his party a long way from the dark days of Suez. Said one happy Tory last week: "We're well on our way to having a Father Figure."

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