Cruel to Lepers

In a crystal coach drawn by six white horses, Queen Elizabeth rode in state last week to the Palace of Westminster for the ceremonial opening of a new Parliament. Seldom has that arcane ritual seemed more at odds with reality. Elizabeth's "most gracious speech from the throne," written for the monarch by the first Labor government in her eleven-year reign, was a catalogue of welfare statism that immediately challenged the Tories' disposition to let the new administration "play itself in." Gambling its slender, five-seat majority in the House of Commons, Labor declared its determination to renationalize the steel industry, one of the few issues likely to rally the nine Liberal M.P.s behind the solidly opposed Tories in coming months.

As it turned out, the Commons had been in session hardly an hour when it was convulsed by an interparty melee that was as un-English as it was unprecedented. It had nothing to do with steel.

"Squalid Campaign." Early in his first speech as Prime Minister, Harold Wilson expressed his regret that Foreign Secretary Patrick Gordon Walker, who was unseated in last month's general election, could not take part in the debate (he will probably be re-elected from a safe Labor constituency by year's end). Stung by chuckles from the Opposition benches, Wilson looked up from his notes and tore into a vitriolic attack on his predecessor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, as well as on Peter Griffiths, the Tory candidate who defeated Gordon Walker at Smethwick, a Midlands industrial suburb that has colored immigrants.

Over a rising storm of protest from the Opposition, Wilson declared that Griffiths had won Smethwick with "an utterly squalid campaign" based on racial prejudice. Charging that the Tories would bear "a lasting brand of shame" for Sir Alec's reluctance to condemn such tactics, Wilson shouted that Griffiths should "serve his term here as a parliamentary leper." After a shocked pause, surging, howling, gesticulating M.P.s from both sides of the House silenced Wilson for 15 tumultuous minutes. Never before had a new Prime Minister stirred such hostility in the Commons. Amid shouts of "Shame!" and "Disgraceful!" 25 Opposition M.P.s stalked out; a motion to censure Wilson was later signed by 50 Tories.

Pies into Pence. Even in the heat of debate, Wilson's attack on Home was hardly warranted: the Tory leader had specifically deplored racism during the campaign. For that matter, few M.P.s believed that Wilson, who is one of the coolest, wiliest tacticians in the Labor Party, delivered such a diatribe on the spur of the moment.

In fact, over the next few months, Wilson's aim may be deliberately to provoke impassioned Tory opposition to Labor's vote-catching legislative goals, which range from free medicine under the National Health Service to bigger welfare benefits for a sixth of the population. Then, before pie-in-the-sky turns into shillings-and-pence in taxation, Wilson may go back to the people for a less precarious mandate. Meanwhile, four Labor backbenchers filed a tongue-in-cheek motion censuring the Prime Minister for describing Smethwick's M.P. as a "leper." Wilson, they declared, had thus cast "a cruel and unmerited slight on lepers."

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