After his death in December 1986, the British media overflowed with favourable tributes to former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. His official biographer Alistair Horne said, in his second volume detailing the life of the 1st Earl of Stockton, that when he died, the coverage of Macmillan rivalled that of Winston Churchill, with the effusive eulogies coming from as far as France and the US.1 The Independent called Macmillan a ‘Giant of post-war politics’ and the Daily Mail referred to him as ‘Supermac… the Super Statesman’. But at the time of the Profumo Affair, the press wasn’t as kind.
Harold Macmillan was born in 1894 in Cadogan Place, London. His father Maurice was part of the Macmillan publishing house, his mother the daughter of an American doctor. He attended Eton, where he was elected a King’s Scholar, and was an Oxford undergraduate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his family business, he was literary-minded and very well read. Writing in 1989, Alistair Horne describes him as perhaps the most intelligent PM that Britain has ever had, and the cleverest of the twentieth century. He lists Macmillan’s chief characteristics as religious faith, patriotism, humanity, humour, intelligence, mental toughness and courage.2
Macmillan had volunteered for service in the First World War, just twenty months into his student days. Davenport-Hines says understanding the younger Macmillan’s war experiences is essential to understanding the man he became, where his courage was proved but his nerves were left in pieces.3 Like anyone witnessing war, he was profoundly affected emotionally, and he was also left with physical reminders, specifically intermittent pain, a walk that was more of a shuffle and a weak right hand that affected his handshake and writing.4 But being seriously wounded during the war may have helped Macmillan command a certain respect among voters. And it was a badge of honour only Macmillan and one other Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, could claim in three centuries.5
By 1924, Macmillan was the MP for Stockton-on-Tees and was said to be horrified at the unemployment and privation of north-east England, forming a group of Tory MPs lobbying for the region. He was considered progressive and rebellious, resigning the party whip when Baldwin’s government lifted sanctions on Mussolini’s Italy after its invasion of Abyssinia. Macmillan then re-joined the party when Chamberlain took the reins in 1937. He continued to be outspoken and wrote a treatise that criticised Conservative economics, calling them ‘callous and complacent’, instead arguing for a more consensual, corporatist and expansive approach.6
When he became PM in 1940, Churchill chose Macmillan for the role of Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Supply. Macmillan was now 46 years old and apparently already felt he’d left it late to rise much higher in politics. Nevertheless, two years later he took on the role of Minister Resident at Allied Headquarters in Algiers and towards the end of the war headed the Allied Control Commission in Italy. Despite his ultimate success in his later years, illness, mortality and death seem to have deeply affected Macmillan. Horne says Macmillan was shocked by the appearance of Pope John XXIII, who had terminal cancer, when he had an audience with him in February 1963. He was also so moved by the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskell, the leader of the Labour Party, who died aged 56 from complications of a lupus flare-up, that he moved the adjournment of the House of Commons out of respect.
Macmillan married Lady Dorothy Cavendish in a Westminster church in 1920. He was seven years her senior and they had met while Macmillan was serving as aide-de-camp for her father, the Duke of Devonshire. They had a house in London’s Chester Square and later a Sussex residence. They had four children, one son and three daughters. However, their marriage was not a strong one, and by 1929, Dorothy was involved in an ongoing affair with MP Robert Boothby. Dorothy had hoped to provoke her husband into agreeing to end the marriage by declaring her youngest daughter was in fact fathered by Boothby. But divorce was not an option for Macmillan, who believed it would prevent him from ever entering the Cabinet. Instead, the Macmillans remained married, and Dorothy continued her affair with Boothby until her death in 1966.
In an interesting coincidence, Nancy Astor became involved in the Macmillan marriage in 1932, after Boothby gave Dorothy an ultimatum that they must be married or end their affair. Boothby visited Cliveden for support while Nancy Astor offered Dorothy the use of a property in Kent during the crisis. With her husband refusing to instigate divorce, and Boothby in no position to ruin his political career and financial security by eloping with her, Dorothy was forced to negotiate a compromise agreement with the two men in her life. Macmillan accepted the continuation of the affair, and the lovers would continue, knowing they would never live life as a married couple. Thirty years later, Macmillan would not be in any mood to throw a lifeline to the friends of the son of the very house that had offered support to his wife and her lover.
Alistair Horne says that, although he showed it to few, Macmillan was haunted by ghosts and tragedy, having lost many friends and family by his old age, including those that died in the trenches, and that his past continued to affect him. Horne also believes that he leant on his religion to get his through testing times, including the physical pain from his war wounds and the loneliness he experienced.7 Throughout his life, Macmillan, battered by his broken marriage, suffered from depression and was plagued with self-doubt, says Horne.8
Macmillan became Prime Minister on Thursday, 10 January 1957, a time when Horne tells us Britain was still reeling from the shock of the Suez crisis. He was 63. He’d come from his role as Chancellor of the Exchequer, with many assuming the Tory government might not last many more weeks. He celebrated his appointment the next evening with Chief Whip Edward Heath at the Turf Club, downing either champagne and oysters or game pie, depending on which account you read. He might be forgiven for thinking it was the culmination of a great career.
Davenport-Hines says that while Macmillan embraced change, he also valued the status quo, planning his government so that it was balanced and no one individual MP stood out from the others.9 He also says he lived frugally, that Lord Hailsham described Macmillan’s Cabinets as being run like ‘dining clubs’, and that overall, the Prime Minister came across as having a British nobleman personality. Once in office, Macmillan was said to begin to attend the Derby, cricket matches and other events that the party faithful would expect of him. By 1962, Davenport-Hines says, Macmillan was trying to align his party with the ideals of modernisation and the Opposition as backward-looking.10
Alistair Horne says that when 1962 was over, Macmillan recorded it as a difficult year.11 He’d faced the reshuffle that became known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, the Berlin partition, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and tense meetings with Charles de Gaulle at Rambouillet and John F. Kennedy at Nassau. Macmillan had done all of this while he endured endless ribbing by popular cartoonists and satirists of the time. A stage revue called Beyond the Fringe, which had debuted at Edinburgh Fringe in 1960, and then went on to play in the West End, was hugely successful and saw Peter Cook play Macmillan. In the show, Cook’s Macmillan suffered from senility and couldn’t pronounce ‘Conservative Party’ coherently.
He was not without his critics inside the party too. In June 1962, after the loss of a by-election in Orpington, Reginald Maudling seemingly criticised the PM for not facing the problems of the 1960s. In June 1962, the Tory MP for Ludlow, Jasper More, said he thought it was time Macmillan moved to the Upper House. Macmillan also fell foul of the Monday Club, formed in 1961, which called for his resignation. In January 1962, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, the 5th Marquess of Salisbury, became the Club’s first president. The Marquess had previously resigned from Macmillan’s Cabinet over the Prime Minister’s liberal direction and, like others in the Club, held the firm belief that Macmillan had taken the party in the wrong political direction – too far to the left.
By 1963, Macmillan headed a Cabinet with the youngest average age for a century. Yet it seems many members of the government still couldn’t accept homosexuality and the idea that some people sought out, and enjoyed, casual sex with various partners, and maybe even more than one partner at the same time. And that some of those people might even be women!
While illicit love affairs may have affected his personal life and sensibilities, it was spy scandals that plagued Macmillan’s professional life. And then when sex and espionage combined in one big story, things went from bad to worse.
Three years into Macmillan’s premiership, in 1961, and thanks to a tip-off from a CIA source, arrests began in what became known as the Portland Spy Ring. After the spies were convicted, Macmillan immediately set up an investigation into the affair headed up by retired judge Sir Charles Romer. This wasn’t enough to stop people calling for the resignation of the man in charge of the Admiralty, Lord Carrington, where the leaks had taken place.
To add salt to the wounds, Polish defector Michael Goleniewski then exposed intelligence officer George Blake as a double agent. Blake was born in Rotterdam of a naturalised British father and a Dutch mother. He’d served in the Dutch resistance and the Royal Navy before joining intelligence but the influence on him by his older cousin Henri Curiel, co-founder of the Egyptian Communist Party, had been overlooked.12 Blake’s position had allowed him to betray around forty British and American agents working in the field over the ten years he was an active spy, and he received a maximum sentence of forty-two years in prison. When he was interrogated, Blake admitted he had betrayed his country for ideological rather than financial motives, offering his services to his captors during his internment in the Korean War. The involvement of American names had meant Macmillan had even had to discuss the infiltration with Kennedy at the same time he was hoping to rebuild the ‘Special Relationship’.
Since the Romer Report had criticised the Admiralty department where Harry Houghton had passed secrets to the Portland spies, Macmillan set up a second enquiry to investigate British security. This committee, under Lord Radcliffe, published its results in January 1962, calling for improved vetting of staff and a continued use of press-gagging D-notices. It also pointed to communist penetration within the civil service and trades unions, although overall, Horne says Macmillan was satisfied the report hadn’t shown any deep-rooted problems that needed addressing. The press also seemed happy with the report findings at that point.13
But one blind spot in Macmillan’s approach to the question of spies, however, was his relationship with the Director General of MI5, Sir Roger Hollis. As this time, both the heads of MI5 and MI6 had right of direct access to the Prime Minister to be used at their discretion. This communication would have been of great use during the Profumo Affair when one of the criticisms levelled at Macmillan was that he either didn’t know what his ministers were up to, or that he knew Profumo was a liar, and did nothing about it. Macmillan, however, was dismissive of Hollis and thought of him as insignificant.14 Hollis would in fact become very significant.
Then came the John Vassall case. This time, the Admiralty had afforded a socially isolated homosexual the opportunity to be blackmailed into handing over sensitive documents in Moscow. Hollis told Macmillan the traitor had been caught, but instead of praise, Macmillan had chastised him. The Prime Minister explained he’d rather the spy had been discovered and then controlled than exposed. Now Macmillan expected more questions in the House and criticism in the media. Hollis perhaps learnt a lesson here about using his access to the PM, a lesson that would come back to bite the premier.
Now Macmillan was forced to balance dividing his energy between the Vassall case and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vassall was successfully charged and sentenced, but rumours began to circulate linking minister Tam Galbraith sexually with Vassall, mainly because the two had, rather unusually for boss and worker, exchanged letters by post. Galbraith was vindicated but because of the rumours, he resigned, and his resignation was accepted. Accounts differ as to whether he went willingly, or was pushed, but Horne says Macmillan later admitted that ‘allowing Galbraith to resign had been a serious mistake’.15
A further smaller spy case followed Vassall’s exposure. Barbara Fell, who worked at the Central Office of Information, was caught handing over confidential documents to her boyfriend, who was an official at the Yugoslavian Embassy. She was sentenced to two years in prison, which she served in Holloway, Hill Hall in Essex and Askham Grange in Yorkshire. Some felt her treatment was a harsh response given that the papers she handed over did not risk national security, but that she was made an example of because of the climate and what had come before.
But there was more. In 1955, when Macmillan was Foreign Secretary, Harold ‘Kim’ Philby was under suspicion of being the ‘Third Man’. It was known that someone had tipped off Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in time for them to flee to Russia, but due to lack of evidence, it was Macmillan himself who told the Commons that there was no reason to suspect Philby was a traitor. However, in January 1963, Philby defected and finally admitted his role as a double agent. It was announced by Edward Heath for the Foreign Office in March to uproar in the press and an uncomfortable session in the Commons.16
The government were now also aware of British art historian Anthony Blunt, who was recruited for MI5 in 1940, and eventually confessed to being a Russian spy in 1964 when offered immunity from prosecution, after Macmillan’s resignation. He had been under suspicion in some quarters since 1950 but despite that he was on good terms with Sir Dick White, who had been Director General (DG) at both MI5 and MI6, even spending Christmas with him at Victor Rothchild’s home. As part of the deal, Blunt’s spying was kept an official secret for fifteen years.
Reports were also coming in about Graham Mitchell, the Deputy Director General of MI5, who had been observed meeting a ‘foreigner’ in the park. Mitchell had worked for MI5 since 1939, because having had polio, he was considered unfit for military service. It was Mitchell who had led the investigation into how much information Burgess and Maclean had passed on while undercover, perhaps not coincidently, some suggest, the 1955 White Paper that failed to identify Philby. Before a case against Mitchell could be built, he suddenly resigned. This suggested yet another insider had warned him in time. Mitchell had been appointed Deputy DG by DG Roger Hollis himself.
The seemingly unending revelations about problems with national security and homosexuality were clearly a worry for Macmillan as head of the government.17 Horne says it was this background that had set the scene where the Profumo Affair then unfolded.18