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This intake of youth is the most important factor in the new Toryism. Nearly 100 young or youngish new Tory M.P.s invaded the House of Commons after the 1950 elections. I have talked with many of them, and found them impressive. Dynamic and free of prejudice, they surely represent the most hopeful element in British politics today. Coming from the middle classes rather than the great families, they have not yet inspired the confidence of the mass of workers. Given the chance, that should be only a question of time.
The biggest question about Toryism today is whether the "Young Turks" will soon be having a decisive say in making party policy. They are not conservative, for they seek change. They are not reactionary, for they do not want their party to return to what it was before. They are creators, architects of a new Britain which can merge the best of her traditions with the lessons learned from the past. The young Tories are typified by David Eccles (TIME, Oct. 8), himself the most talked-about young Tory, and one of the most impressive.
The man who said, "The ownership of property . . . comes as a reward for work; it's no longer a passport to the good graces of the Tory Party," is the son of a surgeon and married to the daughter of the late Viscount Dawson of Penn, who used to sign George V's medical bulletins. Eccles' wife, Sybil, is dark, intelligent, and rated about the party's best woman speaker.
Eccles, 47, has a quality that is much rarer in Britain than in the U.S.: a rather studied personality adapted to the role he wants to play in life. Tall and incredibly good-looking — a TV natural — his manner has just the right combination of good form and easy friendliness. He certainly knows how to put things so that the cloth-capped worker will understand them, and has a gift for the happy phrase. Eccles on wage controls: "... I have been against the wage freeze. Bad chancellors resort to it as drunkards cling to lampposts, not to light themselves on their way but to conceal their own instability." Some of the older Tories look down their noses at Eccles as a brash publicity hunter. The truth is that he is a very good man whose reputation is likely to spread all over the world in the next decade.
Ernest Marples is another booming young Tory.
Aged 44, short, wavy-haired and precise of speech, he was born in a worker's home in Manchester. He came to London to seek his fortune, and before he was 40 had found it — building apartments. He had sworn not to enter politics until he was financially independent —"so I should never be tempted to take a post or make a speech because my job depended on it" — and was elected an M.P. in 1945.
A man of drive and considerable assurance — the success type, if ever there was one — Marples is today the enlightened managing director of a big London civil engineering and building business. Marples' specialty is housing. The Tories, with the re-introduction of free enterprise, aim to build 300,000 houses a year. In the big debate on housing last fall, Churchill called on Marples, whose success against the formidable Bevan on that occasion gave him a political standing overnight.
Far less spectacular than Eccles or Marples is a quiet, relatively unknown, 47-year-old lawyer named John Selwyn Lloyd.