As I Hear... Unparliamentary?

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30610, 28 November 1964, Page 18

As I Hear... Unparliamentary?

[By

J.H.E.S ]

T CAN’T help thinking that A Mr Wilson made an exceedingly bad first impression as Prime Minister by precipitating that angry debate over a narrowly successful Conservative candidate’s alleged use of the black-white racial issue. I can’t help thinking that he made it a bad impression hard to efface, when he described the Conservative M.P. as a “political leper.” The result was such a prolonged uproar as obliged the Speaker to say he would suspend the sitting if it did not cease. One wonders why he did not call on Mr Wilson to withdraw a phrase unquestionably offensive in personal and political application. Perhaps the rules of the House of Commons differ from ours? We have a long list of proscribed terms and epithets. “Leper” may be among them; but perhaps nobody, in our House, ever anticipated Mr Wilson in the use of It.

Mind, of the facts about the campaign in this electorate I know nothing . . . even after having read the few sentences about it in the cables. My point is that, whether they tell in Mr Wilson’s favour or not, he made a capital error in speaking, as Prime Minister, and at this early stage of his Ministry, with a violence that might have been excused in a back-bencher but was not excusable in him. The Prime Minister is more than a party man; more than a member of Parliament. He is the Queen’s First Minister, responsible as such for maintaining, if not ruling, the temper and the order and the sanity of the House of Commons. ☆ ☆ ☆

I think of Mr Wilson’s predecessors. Nobody would consider Mr Churchill, in his Prime Ministership, as a mild sweet-tempered man. But the severest phrase I remember his using was applied to Adolf Hitler; and its severity and its simplicity were one. Mr Churchill described him as “that bad man.” Mr Attlee has left us, I think, not a single opprobrious phrase to match or approach Bevan’s “vermin” to type the Tories: only the memory of a man singularly calm and quiet. But he left us this memory, too: that he served Mr Churchill, during the Second World War, with perfect loyalty and perfect competence. Then when the Coalition dissolved, and Attlee displaced Churchill, they met often in front-to-front controversy. At this time I followed the news very closely, in air-mail editions

of English papers as well as in our own: and it amazed me to find that cool Clement Attlee never came off secondbest: not, anyhow, on any major issue, great as his antagonist was. 1 take one example: the grant of independence to India and Pakistan. As might have been expected, Churchill raged against this abdication of empire. But thhe logic of events was too strong. Now this is the remarkable, the memorable fact, though I cannot trace it to its source in Hansard, that Churchill presently acknowledged his error. The Government had been right to decide as it did, and he had been wrong. I don’t know anything that more notably exhibits Churchill’s stature and integrity in politics than this candid confession. ☆ ☆ ☆

And how lamentably rare such plain confessions and withdrawals and departures from the party line are! I remember Chief Justice Alverstone’s vote, with his American colleagues, against his Canadian ones, on the Alaska Boundary issue, in 1903, when the dispute was submitted to arbitration under his chairmanship. 1 remember that Mr Nash and Mr Mason crossed the floor to vote with Mr Hanan on his bill to amend the Indecent Publications Act; an event notable because Mr Nash and Mr Mason were veteran members of the Labour (and Opposition) party, and because both had special qualifications to judge the issues, Mr Nash as an old hand in the bookselling trade and Mr Mason as a man of law and Mr Hanan's predecessor in the Ministry responsible. This is the sort of thing I admire in public affairs, and I wish the occasions to admire it were more frequent But, to go back to Mr Wilson briefly, he has not provoked a greater hubbub than was occasioned in the old House of Commons, notoriously a bad chamber for sound, when somebody charged ministers with being “unfaithful pastors.” Work it out The plosives “p” and “b” are hard to distinguish . . . the shindy was tremendous. But that is nothing to the straight personal slam in the old Irish House, when a member of the Opposition assailed not only the Minister in front of him but the whole of his tribe, “from the toothless hag who is grinning in the gallery to the lily-livered poltroon who is shivering on the flure.”

I doubt if Sir Ronald Algia would let that by.