Wooing the Middle Class

When 244 Labor members of Parliament voted secretly last week to name a new Labor Party leader, they did so for the first time in eleven years with some confidence that they might also be picking Britain's next Prime Minister. The prospect seemed to have influenced the voting considerably. In the first round of electing a successor to the late Hugh Gaitskell, Harold Wilson, 46, last week won an unexpectedly handsome lead over his two opponents. He got 115 votes; Gaitskell's deputy, Acting Leader George Brown, an early favorite, got 88; and a third candidate, James Callaghan, who was automatically eliminated, got 41. Only eight votes short of the outright majority needed for victory on the first ballot, Wilson became an odds-on favorite to defeat Brown in this week's runoff.

In voting for portly, pipe-puffing Wilson, a onetime Oxford don who draws most of his support from the left and was one of Hugh Gaitskell's archrivals, Labor M.P.s apparently had in mind not his ruthless opportunism but the fact that he, like Gaitskell, is a middle-class intellectual. By contrast with earthy George Brown, a plain-spoken lorry driver's son, many Laborites believe that Harold Wilson will have more appeal for middle-class voters, who have become increasingly disenchanted with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. An effective president of the Board of Trade for 3 1/2 years in the last Labor government, Wilson, at 31, was the youngest Cabinet minister appointed in 165 years.

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