Word: alec
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Since he took office last October, Sir Alec has tried to weave together two political styles: a modern theme based on technological efficiency and planning, and the traditional belief that any amateur with a proper classical education and enought gritty pluck can govern...
...lackluster record has not been the only factor weakening Sir Alec's modernization theme. The presence of the fourteenth Earl of Home ("an elegant anachronism" in the words of Labour's leader Harold Wilson) at the head of a government drawn largely from England's exclusive public schools does not inspire a belief in Conservative renovation...
...undistinguished, amateurish compromise, a member for years of the dreary House of Lords who would wilt under the heat of Commons debate. His main advantage was his aloofness from Harold Macmillan's weaknesses: the Common Market fiasco, the Profumo affair, the Skybolt fizzle, the Vassall scandal. But Sir Alec has cut a surprisingly effective figure, even against Harold Wilson, one of the House's sharpest debaters...
...staunch Tory, Sir Alec can always be counted on for sharp criticism of Labour's nationalization proposals and for somewhat softer attacks on its planning ideas--for the Tories have their plans too. As a former Foreign Minister Sir Alec has made foreign and defense policy his chief issue. He promises to retain an independent nuclear deterrent, even if it is only the U.S.'s Polaris submarines. And he would dearly like to bring about some kind of rapprochement between Russia and the United States, like the one that helped Macmillan so much in 1959. But popularity polls show little...
...Otherwise, Labour no longer seeks to control the commanding heights of the economy. Instead, it plans to plan. Wilson, personally cold, a former economics don, is the personification of a technically trained middle class, held down (as Labour pictures it) by old-school-tie Establishmentarians like Sir Alec Douglas Home...