New York, June 10-The joy should not be confined to Great Britain, if there is joy to be got from the exercise, by a plurality, of mature political sense. The reverberations of Mrs. Thatcher’s victory will be heard in great and small echo chambers up and down the chanceries of Europe and the United States. What happened on Thursday is by no means of parochial interest.
You remember Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the Viscount Stansgate? He is the highly educated gentleman who was in the forefront of the left-wing of the Labour Party. Over the years he did a kind of aristocratic striptease, an his effort to achieve an adamite austerity. First he dropped the title. Then he dropped Wedgwood. Then he shortened his Christian name—he was no longer Anthony, just plain Tony. Somewhere along the line 1 remarked that his march toward proletarianization left him only the elimination of the second “n” in his surname. Well, on Thursday, the voters took Tony Benn’s seat away from him, after 33 years.
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