The Great Lloyd Flap

GREAT BRITAIN The Great Lloyd Flap

Casting about for something to enliven a newsless paper one night last week, Sir William Haley, editor of the prestigious Times of London, decided to convert a gossipy background article by his youngish new political correspondent into the day's leading news story. Next morning 250,000 Britons ("The top people read the Times") learned to their intense fascination that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had lately taken Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd's arm "in a paternal grip" and proposed that Lloyd move down to a lesser government job within the next "several months."

In Geneva there was consternation--and something at last to talk about. Bitterly, Selwyn Lloyd commented that the story could not fail to have a "bad effect on the British delegation's standing with other delegations." In London Laborite Nye Bevan wryly remarked that if Labor had said such a thing, "we should have been accused of unpatriotically stabbing the Foreign Secretary in the back in the course of international negotiations."

The Times story made headlines and talk the world over among those who assume (erroneously) that the Times is the unofficial mouthpiece of British governments, as it had been, to its subsequent shame, in the days of Munich. To make matters worse, the Lloyd story had a certain plausibility. Once hailed as one of the Tory Party's coming stars ("a young man who never puts a foot wrong"), plump, pedestrian Selwyn Lloyd, 54, was all but ruined politically by being Foreign Secretary at the time of the Suez invasion, and by his disingenuous attempts to justify Suez afterward. For a long time, it was said, Harold Macmillan only kept him on as a sop to the militant Suez rebels on the Tory backbenches. But of late; Lloyd's competent diplomatic performance at Geneva had helped soften the memory of his uninspired speeches in Commons.

For Prime Minister Macmillan there was nothing to do but fire off a cable to Lloyd assuring him of full support and confidence, and in Parliament to remark carefully in passing that "the Foreign Secretary and I hope to carry on our work together for a long time."

If the Times was wrong, who had misinformed it? The wits of May fair could not decide whether the culprit was someone who wanted to get rid of Selwyn Lloyd or ensure his continuance in office. The simplest explanation was that the august Times of London--by blowing up run-of-the-mill speculation--had goofed, and the lesson of it was that the once mighty Thunderer is really now, as so many Fleet Streeters call it, old Aunty of Printing House Square. The further consequence of the flap was that plodding Selwyn Lloyd could now consider himself more secure in his job.

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