Successful Visit

Press, Volume CII, Issue 30103, 10 April 1963, Page 14

Successful Visit

Mr Harold Wilson has come through his first real test as leader of the British Labour Party with his prestige overseas much enhanced. Detectable behind President Kennedy’s diplomatic words at his press

conference —that he could see no reason why the United States’ relationship with Britain should change if a Labour Government were elected—was more than a hint of approval for the party and for Mr Wilson, who seems certain to become Prime Minister of Britain within the next 18 months unless there is a dramatic swing in the Government’s fortunes. Mr Wilson went to Washington with a mixed reputation: on the one hand, intellectual ability, experience and youth, political acumen and toughness: on the other hand, evasion, compromise, and Left-wing bias. No-one will ever know whether his election as leader of the party was the result of political nimbleness or of his very considerable qualities of leadership. His actions in first opposing Mr Gaitskell over the plan to discard the party’s general commitment to nation-

alisation, and then standing against him after the party had voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament against the wishes of the leadership. did little to enhance his prestige on either side of the Atlantic. But in a world that changes with bewildering rapidity—particularly on policy on defence—consistency is not the only yardstick with which to measure statesmanship. Mr Wilson’s task in Washington was to convince the Americans that as the leader of a British Government he would be able to hold Britain (or perhaps, more to the point, his party) closely attached to the North Atlantic Alliance; and it is clear that he has succeeded. President Kennedy, too, no doubt, will look forward to working with a man whose age, outlook, and foreign policy views coincide more closely with his own and with those of the Social Democrat leaders of Western Europe —Messrs Brandt, Fanfani and Spaak—than with those (to quote the “ Economist ”) of the “ dominant and in- “ creasingly tiresome veterans on the Right”.