The Choleric Lords

Britain's most aristocratic kingmaker is Robert Arthur James Gascoyne-Cecil, 67, fifth Marquess of Salisbury. Lean, bony-faced, speaking with a slight Edwardian lisp, Salisbury has roamed the inner chambers of power for three decades. At his urging, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden resigned in protest against Chamberlain's appeasement of Mussolini and Hitler. Salisbury was a strong proponent of Eden's ill-fated intervention in Suez. In 1957 Salisbury resigned from Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's government because he thought that Britain had gotten "too soft" in dealing with the rebellion in Cyprus.

Since then, Salisbury has sulked, turning a smoldering Tory eye on Macmillan's "liberal" policy of giving independence to the African colonies, and on Macmillan's witty, untitled Colonial Secretary. Iain Macleod, 47, the Tory most talked about as a future Prime Minister.

Giving voice to the sentiments echoed in many of Britain's Tory shires and manor houses, as well as in the colonies, Salisbury a month ago helped line up 97 Tory M.P.s behind a motion urging Macleod to "go slow" in Africa.

Last week, rising in the House of Lords, Salisbury tilted his long nose at a more aristocratic angle than ever and launched an attack on Macleod. "Rhodesia was the most British, in the fullest sense of that word, of any of the realms and territories of the British Crown. Now, within the space of a few months, those feelings have given way to ... suspicion, contempt, almost hatred of the home government." The "main responsibility" for this state of affairs, he charged, must rest on Macleod, "a man of most unusual intellectual brilliance" but also one who "has been too clever by half." Macleod's trouble, Salisbury suggested with lordly disdain, might lie in his fondness for bridge, a pastime at which he earned his living for two years as a bridge expert on the London Sunday Times. He understood, said the marquess -- rather like a man searching for a kind word to say about cannibalism -- that "it's not considered immoral, or even bad form, to outwit one's opponents at bridge." The "completely outwitted" white settlers could only conclude that "it was the nationalist African leaders whom the Colonial Secretary regarded as his partners, and the white community and loyal Africans that he regarded as his opponents."

Great Possessions. Pale with anger, the bewigged Lord Chancellor, Viscount Kilmuir, rose to Macleod's defense, calling Salisbury's speech "the most bitter attack I have ever known on a Minister in my 26 years in Parliament." Next came Lord Hailsham, 53, Tory campaign manager in the last election, who referred scathingly to Salisbury's "great possessions which, here and in Africa, give him the right to speak about affairs." (Salisbury, the capital of Southern Rhodesia, is named after his grandfather.) Hailsham went on: "My lords, we cannot all have great possessions, but we can all be proud of our personal honor. It was that which I thought the noble marquess was seeking to take away from my right honorable friend."

Salisbury had brought into the open a deeply felt split among the Tories. His is the voice of the past, but it could do damage to Harold Macmillan in the present, and it undoubtedly did something to dim the future luster of Iain Macleod.

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