The Prime Minister sat up in his hospital bed. He was feeling much better than he had for the last week. He looked down at the draft resignation letter a junior aide had helped him craft prior to going into the operating theatre the day before:
I regret to inform Your Majesty that I have reached the decision, having been taken gravely ill, that I cannot hope to continue to conduct Your Majesty’s business for any extended period. Accordingly, I now tender my resignation with the assurance that I shall ever be
Your Majesty’s faithful and obedient servant, Harold Macmillan1
Macmillan stared at the letter for a while, casting his mind back to earlier, happier, times in the summer when his government had signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. In the afterglow of that diplomatic triumph, he had deftly handled a potentially hazardous meeting of the Tory backbench 1922 Committee. He picked up his diary by his hospital bed:
27 July 1963: Our MPs are now coming in heavily to support me and other ministers. This confuses the Opposition and is also a healthy sign generally.2
He skipped to a later entry:
2 August 1963: The Daily Mail opinion poll has shown a tremendous swing back towards us. Only six per cent or so behind Labour (instead of eighteen or twenty per cent) and I have risen equally or more in public favour.3
And then there had been that long conversation in October with his son, Maurice, after which he had written:
6 October 1963: I am beginning to move (at the last minute) towards staying on – for another two or three years. Maurice says that although it would be difficult to win for a fourth time, yet it might be done, by a sort of emotional wave of feeling … After all, we have brought them both Prosperity and Peace.4
Macmillan gazed back at his resignation letter to the Queen. What a difference twenty-four hours had made. The previous morning, he had experienced excruciating pain in both his stomach and his lower back. During a visit to the gentlemen’s room, his urine had turned to blood. He could remember thinking, ‘Blazes, my damned prostate has gone!’ Just to cap it all, his doctor, Sir John Richardson, was on holiday in Windermere. His wife Dorothy had hastily called Dr King-Lewis, and, after a short examination, he had diagnosed renal colic. Though in tremendous pain, the Prime Minister had managed a relieved smile on hearing the news – no problems with my prostate then, he thought. The doctor suggested immediate surgery, telephoning Alec Badenoch, the country’s most eminent consultant urologist. Badenoch had conducted a quick lithotomy to remove the offending kidney stone.
While the operation had taken place, the King Edward VII Officers’ Hospital switchboard had received calls from a succession of Conservative MPs, objecting to the potential leadership of any of Reginald Maudling, Alec Douglas-Home, Rab Butler or Lord Hailsham.5
Macmillan reflected for a while on the merits of these four potential successors. While Maudling’s tax-cutting Budget in the spring of 1963 had proved popular, his star as Chancellor of the Exchequer had waned somewhat over the summer. The trusted figure of Lord Home held the best chance of uniting the party, but he had indicated that he wouldn’t in any circumstances seek the leadership. Rab Butler could be quickly discounted: he was one of life’s cardinals, forever destined never to become Pope.6 Perhaps his family friend, Lord Hailsham, was Macmillan’s spiritual heir? They were fellow puritans, Hailsham having famously declared of the Profumo affair, in a stormy interview with Robert McKenzie, that: ‘A great party is not to be brought down because of a scandal by a woman of easy virtue and a proved liar.’7
An aide came in to inform Macmillan that Hailsham had precipitously renounced his peerage on the eve of the Conservative Party conference at Blackpool.8 There were even reports that his campaign team had already been formed, and that ghastly ‘Q’ buttons were being pressed upon unsuspecting delegates at the Winter Gardens.9 On hearing the news, Macmillan had been furious at such undignified behaviour. No, he thought, I’m damned if I’m going to be forced out of office, all for the sake of a kidney stone. He reflected on the lack of an obvious successor. The only advice he trusted had been from Alec Home back in September. He flicked through his diary:
18 September 1963: He [Home] fears that there will be complete disunity in the Party and that great troubles will follow. I may be forced to stay. I replied ‘In that case I shall be “drafted” – not a “limpet”’. I don’t want it to be thought that I am just clinging on.10
Reading that diary entry clinched it. Macmillan’s autumn of uncharacteristic procrastination was over. He crumpled his resignation letter into a ball and cast it into a wastepaper basket. ‘Supermac’ would outfox his critics one last time.
After a meeting with his aides, the Prime Minister resolved to put paid to the leadership hopes of his potential successors. A visit from Her Majesty to the hospital would be guaranteed to take the edge off Maudling’s party conference speech. Photographers could be tipped off beforehand to snap the Queen as she left the hospital. Perhaps a photograph of Her Majesty by his bedside? No, that would be vulgar. A shot of the Queen leaving the hospital would suffice. In his delicate state, it would be unwise to travel up to Blackpool for the conference for a couple of days, but the Prime Minister resolved, without prior warning, to address the party faithful in the closing speech.
A few days later, on Saturday, 12 October 1963, Macmillan ambled up on to the stage at the Winter Gardens to a thunderous reception from Tory delegates, many of whom were mightily relieved after the febrile atmosphere of the previous week. When the applause finally died away to just a few stray hoots from the crowd, the Prime Minister began:
Well, my Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, it appears as if, as Mark Twain once said, ‘the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.’ [Sustained applause.] I do most sincerely apologise for being otherwise detained earlier this week. You can imagine it: the excruciating pain, the cries of anguish, the sheer agony [pause] especially after I informed Mr Wilson this morning that I was carrying on [laughter]. But it was remarkable how quickly ‘Nye’s Little Dog’11 was brought to heel [more laughter]. You see, I simply had to emerge from my hospital bed to preserve the good life which we have enjoyed for the last decade and more.
In today’s Britain, people are basking in a degree of comfort and well-being such as I and my comrades could not have dreamed of when we slogged through the mud of Flanders nearly fifty years ago. This change in our fortunes has been brought about, not by discarding our moral and religious values, as Mr Wilson would have us do, but by having the courage to grasp what is new and fresh, so that a constant process of renewal and reinvigoration takes place in our national life. This change won’t come about, as Mr Wilson falsely promised last week, by means of ‘white heat’ or a Socialist-style ‘revolution’. No, this is a silent, Conservative revolution, creating opportunities for living the good life, a life of prosperity and freedom.12
It became known as Macmillan’s ‘Good Life’ speech, earning him the longest standing ovation in the history of Conservative conferences. For a few months, the Prime Minister drew level in the polls with Harold Wilson.
Some commentators considered that Supermac’s greatest moment came in the aftermath of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Macmillan’s grief was genuine; it was as though he had lost a close relative. Perhaps fortunately, the Prime Minister had the weekend in which to compose himself, but when the House of Commons returned on the following Monday, he found the right words to speak for the whole nation:
When that terrible news came on Friday, everyone in this country – and, I think, in every country – felt stunned by the shock of what seemed to us – to each one of us – a personal bereavement, and to the whole of humanity, struggling in this world of darkness, the sudden and cruel extinction of a shining light.13
Macmillan recalled the President’s visit to Birch Grove, the Prime Minister’s country house, that summer:
From the very first moment that the President’s helicopter flew in and landed in the park until his departure there was a feeling of excitement combined with gaiety which has left an indelible memory for all concerned … I can see him now, stepping out from the machine, this splendid, young, gay figure, followed by his team of devoted adherents. Never has a man been so well or loyally served.14
Three-quarters of an hour into the Prime Minister’s eulogy, a few wicked Conservative MPs from the 1959 intake placed bets with one another on whether or not Macmillan, now in typical rambling mode, would ingratiate himself with Jackie Kennedy.
Our thoughts at this time are, of course, with Jack’s wife, Jackie. She has, as we all know, shown the most wonderful courage to the outer world in these last few tragic days.15
Several large five-pound notes surreptitiously changed hands on the Tory backbenches.
~
For all his latent, if outdated, charm, had Macmillan not retired in 1963, the final outcome of the following year’s general election would have been largely the same – a narrow win for Harold Wilson and the Labour Party. From the middle of 1962, Macmillan had lost his sureness of political touch, becoming mired in a glutinous mixture of sackings and sleaze.
The Prime Minister’s disastrous ‘night of the long knives’ Cabinet reshuffle of July 1962 was, in the words of D. R. Thorpe, ‘one of the most damaging errors of Macmillan’s premiership, and he was never to recover the initiative’.16 Normally possessing the most acute of political antennae, the Prime Minister had erroneously believed there was a conspiracy against him. In particular, his decision to sack Selwyn Lloyd – a loyalist if ever there was one – as Chancellor seemed unnecessarily savage. The event even provoked Anthony Eden to complain that Lloyd had been badly treated, a rare example (back then, at least) of a former Prime Minister intervening to savage the incumbent.17
That autumn, the Vassall Case revealed openly for the first time the Prime Minister’s inability to deal with matters of a sexual nature – often blamed on his wife Dorothy’s long-standing affair with Tory MP Bob Boothby, about which Macmillan did nothing. So when it came to allegations of a homosexual affair between Thomas Galbraith, a former Civil Lord at the Admiralty, and a civil servant, John Vassall, a Soviet spy, the Prime Minister sat back, doing nothing to dissuade Galbraith from resignation, and reinstating him just a few months later. The ensuing debate in the House of Commons in November 1962 was badly mishandled, particularly in the government’s failure to agree to a full public inquiry.18 Moreover, the subsequent imprisonment of two journalists the following March for failing to reveal their sources about Vassall19 meant that Macmillan lost the support of the press. The fact that the newspapers had turned against the Prime Minister in a big way meant that they were ready to pounce when the Profumo Affair erupted a few weeks later.
During the famous Profumo debate in the House of Commons in July 1963, Macmillan attempted to give what he referred to as ‘a full and detailed account of my connection with this unhappy story’. Indeed, at times it seemed as if any crimes during the affair had been personally committed against the person of the Prime Minister. Referring to John Profumo’s lies about his affair with Christine Keeler, Macmillan opined:
For what greater moral crime can there be than to deceive those naturally inclined to trust one, those who have worked with one, served one, and are one’s colleagues? … I find it difficult to tell the House what a blow it has been to me, for it seems to have undermined one of the very foundations upon which political life has been conducted.20
Despite such candour, Macmillan showed himself to be wholly out of touch with changing morals in society with his revealing admission that: ‘I do not live among young people much myself’.21 Donald Johnson, the maverick Conservative MP for Carlisle, one of twenty-six Tories to abstain over the Profumo affair, summed up the mood of many: ‘I have encountered nobody but Rip Van Winkle still living in the days of Harold Macmillan.’22 The press reaction the following day was even more damning: ‘Mac: The End’ (Daily Mail); ‘The Stag at Bay’ (Daily Mirror); ‘The Lost Leader’ (Daily Herald); and most surprisingly ‘A Broken Man Close to Tears’ (Daily Telegraph).23
In a very real sense, Macmillan had already played his biggest policy ace and lost, in the shape of General de Gaulle’s veto of Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community in January 1963. In Volume Two of his official biography of his grandfather, Alistair Horne argues that de Gaulle’s veto was ‘a devastating blow’, claiming that ‘the central plank of the government’s policy had just broken and Macmillan had nothing to put in its place in order to fight a viable and victorious election campaign’.24 Although elections are rarely won and lost on matters of foreign policy, in this instance the Prime Minister’s foreign and domestic policies were intimately linked. As Macmillan famously recorded in his diary at the time of de Gaulle’s veto:
28 January 1963: All our policies at home and abroad are in ruins … our popularity as a Government is rapidly declining. We have lost everything, except our courage and determination.25
~
De Gaulle’s veto left Macmillan without a clear narrative with which to take his party into the 1964 election, which he contrived to delay until the last possible moment. Instead, he settled back into his rather tired old mantra, that the Conservatives had brought ‘prosperity and peace’.
Set against Harold Wilson’s message of change after ‘thirteen wasted years’, Macmillan began to give the air of a politician whose time was up. Privately, leading figures in the Labour Party had been delighted at Macmillan’s decision to carry on as Prime Minister. As Richard Crossman had foreseen as early as June 1963, ‘As long as he [Wilson] has Macmillan opposite him, old, effete, worn out, a cynical dilettante, the contrast between Harold’s character and Macmillan’s is an overwhelming advantage to Harold and the Labour Party.’26 Although a sizable grouping of Tory backbenchers, especially from the 1959 intake – apart from a few mavericks like Humphry Berkeley,27 MP for Lancaster – shared this view, the bulk of the party realised that there was no clear successor and that the election was too near for a last-minute change at the helm.
Meanwhile, the political satirists, led by That Was the Week that Was, mercilessly lampooned Macmillan’s hangdog Edwardian persona.28 Television audiences were treated to fresh sketches from the comedian Peter Cook, the most memorable featuring the Prime Minister on the grouse moor, accidentally shooting a peasant instead of a pheasant. This new brand of political satire was especially powerful because it had the express aim of wounding the ruling elite. As Jonathan Miller, one of the four members of Beyond the Fringe, remarked at the opening of the Establishment Club, ‘the air resounds with the armourer’s hammer. When battle is joined one can only hope that blood will be drawn.’29
There was therefore a real sense that whereas 1959 had represented Macmillan at the peak of his powers, from 1962 onwards the Prime Minister had ‘seemed left behind by the tide’. As Anthony Sampson later observed, Macmillan ‘could not convey any sense of excitement or optimism for the future generation, for he did not feel it.’30
As the 1964 election approached, in private the incumbent Prime Minister increasingly complained of tiredness, having served in Number 10 for over eight years. Meanwhile, the British economy was now being overtaken by the country’s European rivals, and the balance of payments figures continued to worsen, showing a deficit of £98 million in late September 1964. Wilson, the trained economist, went on the offensive, claiming during an election campaign speech in Norwich that ‘Britain is obtaining prosperity on the slate’.31 For the rest of the election campaign, Wilson mercilessly hammered the Tories’ ‘broken record’ on the economy, a charge that seemed to stick, especially after Reginald Maudling, the Chancellor, had been forced to own up to a £800 million loan from the International Monetary Fund the previous autumn.
As polling day neared, Wilson successfully portrayed Macmillan as an ‘old Edwardian politician no longer suited to the jet age’. It was a jibe that stuck. Journalists had a field day when Macmillan was photographed apparently asleep outside a country hotel in Tewkesbury. The Prime Minister’s attempts to laugh it off as a ‘well-earned catnap’ could not disguise the age and energy gap between the two rival candidates. In a speech the following day, Harold Wilson referred to ‘the tired old men who govern us from the grouse moors’, calling for ‘a new, dynamic leadership that can take Britain into a modern era, one that will make all the people proud’. The Tory air of defeatism was not helped when Rab Butler referred to a ‘strong undercurrent of [sic] Labour’, when two opinion polls were published both showing a healthy Labour lead.32
Wilson won the general election in 1964 with a slender overall majority of thirteen. Macmillan was badly bruised, and voices in the Conservative Party increasingly blamed their defeat on ‘The Old Limpet’.
The new Prime Minister proved a master conjuror, juggling competing personalities in his new government, and playing the world statesman when the Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith made his Unilateral Declaration of Independence in November 1965. Macmillan carried on as a lame-duck Leader of the Opposition before stumbling badly over Rhodesia, making the fateful decision to support Wilson’s stance on oil sanctions against the Smith regime. MPs on the Tory right, many of whom still had not forgiven Macmillan for his retreat from Africa, engaged in open revolt in the House of Commons. On 21 December 1965, only a third of the Parliamentary Conservative Party reluctantly supported Wilson’s oil sanctions order in the division lobbies, while a damaging 95 Conservatives voted against. Including abstentions (numbering around 80), the bulk of the Tory party was now ranged against Macmillan.33
This time round, Macmillan knew his time was up. Rather than go quietly, however, he could not resist conniving to ensure that Rab Butler was once again denied the Tory leadership. It was part of his DNA to interfere in this way. All that his decision not to retire in 1963 had done was to postpone the inevitable attempt to fix his succession.
For Macmillan, the priority became preventing a rout at the hands of Wilson, who, with his paper-thin majority and the Tories in disarray, was liable to call an election at any time. Macmillan quickly weighed up the merits of his potential successors. All along, he had considered Butler ‘a dreary figure who would lead the Party to inevitable defeat or to a worse defeat than was necessary’.34 His time had come and gone. Although Reginald Maudling was still a serious contender, Macmillan thought him too laid back: what was required was a natural campaigner, capable of rousing the party faithful.
Macmillan’s first choice was therefore Quintin Hogg, the darling of the Tory associations from his time as Party Chairman in the late 1950s. Although Hogg’s campaigning style was considered ‘too American’ by some of the old guard in the party, it was felt that something had to be done to counter Wilson’s slick political style. Although Macmillan feared deep down that Hogg might have wobbled had he ever held the premiership, leading the party in opposition played to his strengths as a combative politician.35 The old Tory ‘magic circle’ was therefore pressed into action, soundings were taken, and Hogg duly ‘emerged’ as leader.
The fact that the Conservative MPs had failed to elect their new leader led to howls of protest from Iain Macleod, who penned an angry letter in the Spectator in January 1966, attacking the ‘customary processes of consultation’. Newer MPs muttered their disgust that the young technocrat Edward Heath had been overlooked for the leadership. The Tories’ penchant for picking toffs had been preserved for a little longer.
Sensing Tory disarray, Wilson called an early election in the spring of 1966, winning a landslide majority of 102. His application to join the EEC, however, was rebuffed by de Gaulle in November 1967. Hogg chose not to stay on as Conservative leader. Although he was not directly to blame for the Tory defeat, he recognised the problems that his appointment to the post caused in the modern age. Before standing down, he hurriedly reformed his party’s leadership election system so that Conservative MPs could now vote in a secret ballot.
The Conservative leadership election was held just before Christmas 1967. In the first round of voting, Reginald Maudling narrowly defeated Edward Heath by 126 votes to 120, with Enoch Powell winning a creditable 46 votes on the back of a strong anti-immigration and anti-EEC platform. Heath’s support had dwindled now that Britain’s European entry was seen as a non-starter. Meanwhile, Maudling’s star had risen again, following an unexpected leak in The Times from Richard Crossman’s unpublished diaries, in which Harold Wilson had apparently commented in June 1963: ‘The one thing I am really frightened of is Maudling.’36
In the second round, tactical voting held sway, with almost all of Powell’s supporters switching to Maudling in order to stymie Heath’s chances. The final result was Maudling 170 against Heath on 122. A despondent Ted Heath told awaiting reporters that, ‘While I accept the result, and wish my new leader well, I fear that Britain’s best hope of joining the Common Market has just been snuffed out’. Heath then announced his retirement from frontbench politics, aiming to pursue a career in sailing instead. The grammar-school generation of Tory MPs had suffered a rebuff from which they would never recover.
The outcome of the 1964 election remains of interest to political scientists and historians alike as it was decided by the slenderest of political margins.37 In the real world, Harold Wilson only scraped home with an overall majority of three. Labour’s total number of votes actually fell for the third election running, and Wilson amassed the lowest popular share of the vote (44.1 per cent) of any majority government since 1922.38 Given the closeness of the result, it has therefore proved fascinating to speculate if Macmillan would have won that election had he not been forced to retire through ill health in October 1963. There will be plenty of people who will disagree with the crystal-ball gazing outlined here, most prominently Richard Lamb, biographer of Macmillan, who is adamant that:
Nearly all political observers agree that if Macmillan had remained leader, which his health in fact permitted, or had Rab Butler been Prime Minister, their mastery of politics and debate and their political skills and experience would have given them a marked superiority over the astute but less consistent Harold Wilson, and brought the Tories to power for better or worse for a fourth term of office.39
Such a view overestimates Butler’s leadership skills and understates Macmillan’s waning power, while denigrating Wilson’s undoubted political skills. If anything, Wilson’s decision to play the class card against Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the ‘Fourteenth Earl’, would have worked even better against Macmillan, because at least under the former’s leadership the Tories were able to draw a line under their past failings in government. If nothing else, Home had an untainted and honourable sense of duty about him, qualities which mattered more to voters brought up to be deferential than they do today.
Perhaps the most intriguing ‘what if’ connected with Macmillan staying on a little longer after his likely election defeat is that the antiquated system for selecting the Conservative leadership would have not been reformed in 1965, but two years later. My view is that Macmillan was a serial manoeuverer who, no matter when he stepped down, would have tried to interfere in his own succession. In that sense, Iain Macleod’s outcry against the ‘customary processes of consultation’ in January 1964 would merely have been delayed for a couple more years.
What is much harder to predict is which Conservative leader would have been elected in the wholly different political circumstances of 1967, as opposed to 1965. That Edward Heath might have not have been elected to lead the Conservative Party raises all sorts of fascinating questions over the resolutely grammar-school type of leader that followed in his wake – not least, Margaret Thatcher. Just as profoundly, had Heath not been elected in 1965, would Britain ever have joined the European Economic Community? Surely that would make another interesting political ‘what if’.
1 Adapted from Harold Macmillan’s actual resignation letter, dated 18 October 1963. See D. R. Thorpe, Supermac. The Life of Harold Macmillan (Chatto & Windus, 2010) p. 621.
2 Harold Macmillan, At the End of the Day, 1961–1963 (Macmillan, 1973), p. 487.
3 Ibid., p. 487.
4 Ibid., p. 497.
5 In real life, it was the Buckingham Palace switchboard which started receiving calls from senior Tories when it emerged that Macmillan was in hospital; Thorpe, Supermac, p. 561.
6 Butler had used the Papal analogy about himself as early as July 1963; Anthony Howard, RAB. The Life of R.A. Butler (Jonathan Cape, 1985) p. 304.
7 Thorpe, Supermac, p. 541.
8 The Peerages Act, passed in the summer of 1963, allowed existing and new hereditary peers to renounce their peerages. A Tory ‘revolt’ in the Lords ensured that the Act came into effect immediately, thus allowing Lord Hailsham the possibility of challenging for the Tory leadership before a general election.
9 Geoffrey Lewis, Lord Hailsham. A Life (Jonathan Cape, 1997), p. 224.
10 Macmillan, At the End of the Day, p. 494.
11 Hugh Dalton’s contemptuous tag for Harold Wilson, following his resignation from the government alongside his mentor, Aneurin (‘Nye’) Bevan, over the introduction of prescription charges in April 1951.
12 Adapted from Macmillan’s farewell message to conference delegates, reproduced in Macmillan, At the End of the Day, pp. 505–07.
13 HC Debs, 25 November 1963, Vol. 685, col. 42.
14 Macmillan, At the End of the Day, p. 472.
15 Adapted from a Macmillan letter to Jacqueline Kennedy, dated 18 February 1964; Thorpe, Supermac, p. 586.
16 Ibid., p. 522.
17 Ibid., p. 525.
18 Macmillan instead established the Radcliffe Tribunal, comprised of three civil servants.
19 The two jailed journalists were Reginald Foster of the Daily Sketch and Brendan Mulholland of the Daily Mail.
20 HC Debs, 17 June 1963, Vol. 679, cols. 55–56.
21 The full extent of Macmillan’s detachment from reality is always missed in this truncated quote. The Prime Minister was responding to being laughed at, having tried to explain to an incredulous House that Profumo’s letter to Christine Keeler, beginning with ‘Darling’, was ‘a term of no great significance’. HC Debs, 17 June 1963, Vol. 679, col. 65.
22 Quoted in John Ramsden, An Appetite for Power: A History of the Conservative Party since 1830 (Harper Collins, 1998), p. 192.
23 Howard, Butler, pp. 303–04.
24 Macmillan had briefly explored the possibility of holding an election in the spring of 1963; Alistair Horne, Macmillan, 1957–1986, Volume II of the Official Biography (Macmillan, 1989), pp. 447, 449.
25 Macmillan, At the End of the Day, p. 367.
26 Quoted in Thorpe, Supermac, p. 548.
27 In the spring of 1963, Berkeley made a speech calling for the Conservative leadership rules to be reformed. In July 1970, he applied to join the Labour Party, having been defeated as a Tory MP at the 1966 election. Humphry Berkeley, Crossing the Floor (George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1972).
28 Anthony Sampson, Macmillan. A Study in Ambiguity (Pelican Books, 1968), p. 233.
29 Horne, Macmillan, 1957–1986, p. 454.
30 Sampson, Macmillan, p. 234.
31 David Butler and Anthony King, The British General Election of 1964 (Macmillan, 1965), p. 134.
32 Ibid., p. 118.
33 In real life, the Conservative three-way split on the issue of Rhodesian oil sanctions inflicted considerable political damage on the fledgling leadership of Edward Heath. Mark Stuart, ‘A Party in Three Pieces: The Conservative Split over Rhodesian Oil Sanctions, 1965’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring 2002), pp. 51–88.
34 Thorpe, Supermac, p. 624.
35 On 4 October 1963, Macmillan’s son-in-law, Julian Amery, had asked Macmillan if Hailsham would make a good Prime Minister. Macmillan had supposedly replied, ‘Dear boy, that is secondary. The thing is, can he win an election?’ Quoted in Lewis, Hailsham, p. 217.
36 Quoted in Thorpe, Supermac, p. 548.
37 For a revisionist view, see Steven Fielding, ‘Rethinking Labour’s 1964 Campaign’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 21, No. 3 (September 2007), pp. 309–24.
38 Butler and King, The British General Election of 1964, p. 297.
39 Richard Lamb, The Macmillan Years, 1957–1963: The Emerging Truth (John Murray, 1995), p. 501.