Doffing the Cloth Cap

Prime Minister Harold Wilson had just finished talking about how the rest of the world envied the British "for our tolerance, for our individual liberty, for our stability" when--splat!--a young Conservative hit him with an egg. At other rallies, the Prime Minister caught a soft-boiled egg on his shoulder and a hard-boiled egg on his ear, and his wife Mary was hit by a bag of talcum powder. So it went, as Britain plunged into a three-week national election campaign.

At least the egg throwers showed interest in the proceedings. Traditionally, Britons in June are preoccupied by far different concerns--horse racing at Ascot, the Derby at Epsom, lovemaking in Green Park, picnics on the moors and sunning at Brighton. This year, England's soccer team is defending its world championship in the tourney at Mexico City, and many voters seem far more interested in what happens there than in the June 18 vote. "I get the feeling," said a visitor, "that the two leading candidates are Bobby Moore and Nijinsky [England's soccer captain and the Epsom Derby winner, respectively]."

Perhaps the single most stimulating parliamentary candidate is Actress Diane Hart, 43, an Independent, now under heavy attack for playing a brothel madam in the new film Two Women --and for wearing a see-through nightie in the role. Undoubtedly the most derivative candidate is one Edward James Robert Lambert Heath, who used to be plain old James Robert Lambert, a 28-year-old schoolteacher. He changed his name by deed poll (a simple court procedure costing $6) to aggravate Conservative Party Leader Edward ("Ted") Heath. Since both Edward Heaths are running in suburban London's Bexley constituency, the voters may be confused. The original Edward Heath is not amused. In 1966 he won Bexley by a slim margin and if enough voters are befuddled by the prank, Ted could be in trouble. Even Wilson urged Lambert/ Heath to withdraw.

No Argy-Bargy. Wilson's Labor Party is running on its record over the past 51 years, chiefly on the economic successes that saw Britain's balance of payments go from chronic deficits to healthy surpluses and that brought wage increases to millions. Where the Tory campaign motto looks ahead to A BETTER TOMORROW, Labor's takes pride in past accomplishments as well: NOW BRITAIN'S STRONG LET'S MAKE IT GREAT TO LIVE IN. While Tories stress the lawand-order theme, Laborites, convinced that the electorate is surfeited with crisis and contention, deliberately keep the party's themes low-key and low-decibel. "I don't think they want a lot of change and disturbance and argy-bargy," Wilson said as the campaign opened. "I think they want quiet, strong government."

Wilson himself is Labor's strongest asset. With his wit, unflappability and easy manner with voters in pubs as well as on podiums, the perpetually pipe-smoking Wilson, 54, stands in strong contrast to Heath, 53, a somewhat starchy bachelor with an uneven, often irritable manner. Opinion polls reflect Labor's edge. At week's end Labor led by as much as 5.5%, which would translate into about a 60-seat majority in the House of Commons.

All the Same. If that lead stands up, some political theorists argue that Labor will remain Britain's majority party for decades. It is not that there are vast policy differences with the Conservatives. During a Wilson speech in Cardiff last week, a voice from the back of the hall shouted, "They're all the same!" But there are sharp differences in party image.

The Tories, to many voters, remain the party of officers and gentlemen, of tweedy squires and hereditary lords, of big business and big industry, the beautiful people of the society pages and the consummate clubmen who, as an 18th century member of Boodle's put it, still like to sit behind the tall windows and "watch the damn'd people get wet." As one Tory said, "I accept that we draw most of our party from the 'haves'. But if we got rid of them, what would we replace them with? A lot of people in Britain prefer to be represented by a country squire." Small businessmen vote Tory. So does roughly one-third of the working class; political scientists describe it as part of the "doff-the-cap" syndrome, a hangover from the days when workingmen were traditionally subservient.

Move to the Middle. Labor, with all its intellectuals and despite the cap-dof-fers, essentially remains the workingman's party, and some estimates say as many as 70% of British voters are of the working class. To many younger Britons, Labor seems more relevant to contemporary British society--particularly in view of the Tories' surprising ineptitude in areas where they should be expert, such as business management and the application of technology. It is with the young, moreover, that Labor's strength continues to grow. Labor, in fact, seems to be outbreeding the Tories; Labor voters tend to have more children. Last fall, Political Scientists David Butler of Oxford and Donald Stokes of Michigan published a statistics-crammed book arguing that a voter's decision is most influenced by how his parents voted. More older people vote Tory today, they contend, because their political attitudes were formed in the long-ago Conservative era. But these voters are dying out, and there is a growing corps of younger voters whose parents voted Labor in 1945, 1950 and again in 1951. A recent Times of London poll indicated that 58.3% of 18-and 19-year-olds prefer Labor. With 2,800,000 voters in the 18-to-21 range on the rolls for the first time, that could be a decisive factor.

Butler and Stokes underplay the fact that with growing social mobility, many will leave the working class, move to the suburbs and adopt middle-class Tory voting habits. No politician is more aware of this possibility than Wilson, who has sought with considerable success to shake Labor's cloth-cap image and move into the middle ground.

"Wilson's greatest achievement," says one Laborite, "has been to allay the suspicions about the party of those voters in the middle. Hitherto they had regarded Labor as too strident and shrill." Some critics complain Labor has all but abandoned its old idealism and has adopted a more conservative approach to government. As Labor M.P. Chris topher Mayhew writes in his book, Party Games: "The older and the younger generation of natural leftists have, in fact, lost hope in the Labor Party. The older generation feels that much of our purpose has been fulfilled; the younger generation feels that we are at best irrelevant and at worst indistinguishable from the despised Establishment."

State Crutches. Despite such criticism, Labor has charted a number of programs designed to change the quality of British life in the coming decade, particularly in education. The party has promised to build more elementary schools. At present, about 70% of British schoolchildren are denied, at the age of eleven, the chance for broader secondary-school or higher education. They finish their schooling at 15. Labor intends to alleviate this problem. It also plans to move toward more regional autonomy, answering the growing distaste for centralized planning now cropping up in the provinces.

Labor naturally plans to take full credit for creating what has by now become an old stand-by--the welfare state. Most Britons, says a Labor strategist, "are proud that if you break your leg, a state ambulance picks you up, takes you to a state hospital, where state doctors put a state cast on your leg, pay your hospital bills, and when it's all over, provide you with state crutches." For the politicians, that sort of aid might come in very handy: at week's end young Tories increased their barrages of eggs and tomatoes at Wilson to a point where his wife was forced to drop out of the campaigning to change her spattered clothes. "I'm very glad you [Tories] are fighting this election on law and order," gibed Wilson, "because we have now seen what you mean by it."

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