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If Britain Does Not Join. Complacent British industry drastically needs to cut costs, improve design, and sell as aggressively as its European competitors. Most of all, Britain needs a bigger, more dynamic market than the Commonwealth, in which fewer than 90 million citizens have any real purchasing power. Even Australia, Britain's best Commonwealth customer, has a population only slightly larger than Paris and Rome combined. Despite high tariffs on British imports, Europeans already have a healthy appetite for marmalade and Jaguars, Wedgwood china and Scotch whisky (which chic Frenchmen fancy in le long drink}. British sweaters and men's shoes, chocolates and cloth—but not what Parisians call "weedytweedy"—also rate high with Continentals. The British, in turn, have shown a growing desire for Continental products and even customs. British import duties make the Volkswagen $370 more expensive than the slickly styled, British-made Ford Anglia, but more and more Englishmen are buying the sturdy German car. Increasingly, the British are drinking French aperitifs, wearing bulky Italian sweaters, puffing Dutch cigars.
To cries of "betrayal" from Sydney and Ottawa, Macmillan's men reply that Britain can best lead the Commonwealth from within the Common Market, where she can help to lower tariffs, pare discriminatory internal taxes, and channel Europe's fast-growing investment funds to underdeveloped nations. The only alternative to Britain's membership, as Macmillan, Heath & Co. see it, would be to relinquish all claims to big-power status and resign herself, like 18th century Venice, to continued isolation and impoverishment.
This fate, and Heath's attitude toward it, was prophetically expressed when in 1934, as a teen-age member of his school debating society, young Heath proposed the motion that "This House Deplores the Whither-ance of Britain" (as usual, he won the debate).
Negotiator at Work. To prevent the whither-ance. or withering, of Britain today, Ted Heath, though not an economist by vocation, has made himself one. Even the "high priests," as Britain's negotiators call members of the nine-man Common Market Commission, have ruefully acknowledged error when Heath has challenged an imprecise interpretation of the Treaty of Rome, which is virtually sacred writ on the Rue des Quatre Bras.
In Brussels, where he has discovered a gourmet's haven called Comme Chez Soi far off the beaten track, Heath gives small, elegant dinner parties for individual delegations. Says one recent guest: "He starts doing business immediately, asking questions all the time: 'Why do you do this?' 'Why do you want that?' By dessert he knows exactly what he wants to know." Though many were skeptical of Britain's motives at first, Heath has convinced Common Market officials of his government's deep commitment to membership in the community. "If this is not so," remarked a Belgian official, "then Heath is a truly marvelous actor."
A left-of-center Tory in domestic issues, Heath is regarded by fellow M.P.s as an "unflappable," honorable, totally dedicated politician who has ruthlessly eliminated from his personal life any interest or pleasure that would