Hope and Glory

8 Never Had It So Good 1955–63

A CONSUMER CULTURE

Economics and politics aside, in the post-war years the British people had a ‘special relationship’ with American popular culture, disseminated by Hollywood. Even in the extremes of the dollar shortage, attempts to restrict imports of American films, whether by taxes or quotas, did not work. The Second World War reinforced Hollywood’s pre-existing dominance in the British market. It was a prime example of an American industry stepping in to supply consumer demand while British resources were diverted to supplying war priorities. Making feature films did not generally qualify as such – especially not films like Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), in fact a very gentle satire but one which, like the Daily Mirror’s populist campaigns, touched a raw nerve with the war cabinet. There was no such objection, of course, to In Which We Serve (1942), a nicely orchestrated anthem to the stiff upper lip, directed jointly by Noël Coward and David Lean, with a propaganda value that was the more effective for remaining implicit. Almost at the close of the war, it was clearly worth demobilizing Laurence Olivier, the most thrilling actor of his generation, to make his heroic version of Henry V (1945), which surely spoke for others, still awaiting ‘demob’, in saying that ‘there ne’er arrived from France more happy men’.

Not that Hollywood was ideologically unsound. Even before the USA became an ally, the ingenuous democratic message of a film like Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939) was clearly directed against the dictators, and Casablanca (1943) became a classic partly because the romantic entanglement enacted between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman tugged against the primacy of an anti-fascist struggle. It is a safe bet, however, that the millions who attended cinemas during the blackout or under conditions of post-war austerity were seeking escape, not least from propaganda. Hollywood showed them a new world where there was no food rationing and no shortage of nylons: often an opulent lifestyle, yet not that of the status-bound upper classes in Britain, but one in which automobiles and refrigerators were as much of a common culture as smoking cigarettes (the other irreducible drain on post-war dollars).

The sheer firepower of Hollywood should not obscure the fact that, during and after the war, British films acquired a reputation for quality, not just a cynical notoriety as cheaply made ‘quota quickies’. There had, of course, been isolated successes previously. The young British director, Alfred Hitchcock, made his reputation as a master of suspense with a notable adaptation of Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1935) and went on, in The Lady Vanishes (1938), to evoke a sinister sense of the Europe of the dictators, cross-cut with a quintessentially English comic sub-plot about the latest score in the test match. The best British films succeeded by offering something subtly different from Hollywood. David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) turned a one-act play by Noël Coward into a beautifully realized account of a potentially adulterous passion, thwarted by social constraints. Understated in its playing by Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson, set in the buffet of a British railway junction, its matter-of-fact manner was belied by a Rachmaninov soundtrack. The other enduring classic, financed by the new National Film Corporation, was surely Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). It was set in post-war Vienna under allied occupation, literally opening the lid on the sewers of an exploitative black market in drugs which compromised personal loyalties as well as official regulations. The beguiling zither theme which cleverly signalled the appearance of Harry Lime (Orson Welles) worked with Graham Greene’s economical screenplay to build suspense and imprint some memorable images.

Pre-war British comedies had often relied on putting a stage comic, like George Formby, on to the screen. In the late 1940s and early 1950s the Ealing film studios created a niche for a much more subtle genre, built around rather whimsical plots but with many well-observed satirical shafts which found their mark. It was here that the versatile talents of Alec Guinness, an actor whose anti-heroic style transferred more easily to film than Olivier’s, found full appreciation, notably in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), where he played all those members of an aristocratic family who stood as heirs between a distant relative and his succession to the estate. The black comedy of their successive demise, which inevitably required a suitably moral ending, was sustained to the last frame. The same sort of tension between a conventionally urbane format and more subversive social comment animates Alexander Mackendrick’s The Man in the White Suit (1951), notably when the meritocratic and public-spirited inventor is checked by a combination of management and unions against a perceived threat of innovation – a parable for British industry reiterated a decade later in the Boulting brothers’ production of I’m All Right, Jack (1959). Passport to Pimlico (1949), with its populist celebration of an idealized local community in London, dates from Ealing’s prime, as does The Lavender Hill Mob (1951), with its innocent portrayal of British bobbies and villains playing their allotted parts in a battle of wits. But The Lady killers (1955), though not the least, was almost the last in this genre. The British film industry, sustained neither by effective state subsidy nor by a buoyant home market, was disproportionately hurt by a decline in the cinema habit.

The peak of cinema attendances (1635 million) was reached in 1946, which implies an average not far short of once a week for everyone over the age of fifteen. Ten years later British cinemas still had seating capacity for 4 million, but actual attendance had slipped by a third. The real avalanche, however, was just beginning; by 1962 cinema attendance had collapsed to less than a quarter of its peak level. This major change in social habits was both complemented and explained, of course, by the growth of television over the same period. By the 1960s a third of the population would normally be watching television in the evening, whereas fewer than one in five adults attended a cinema once a month.

When the BBC resumed its television service in 1946, there were only 15,000 licence-holders, concentrated in London; by 1956 there were over 5 million, and by then 98 per cent of the country was able to receive television. This represented a major investment by the BBC, sheltered by its monopoly, in making a leap towards a mass audience for the new medium. It was a shift of priorities not much to the taste of the BBC’s post-war director-general, Sir William Haley, who initially refused to have a television set at home and kept his office in Broadcasting House rather than the Television Centre.

Haley’s monument was the creation of the Third Programme, as a highbrow radio channel with a varied menu of classical music, drama and talks. It succeeded partly because it was satisfied with an audience of a quarter of a million on a good night. T. S. Eliot, with his frankly elitist view of culture, was one happy contributor. There was much to admire in the output of the Third – Dylan Thomas’s voice-play of small-town Wales, Under Milk Wood (1954), was one highlight. But there was too some feeling that the Third’s forbidding format did not reach out to the public whom it might have attracted. Its programming was premised on a listener who would transcend the division of labour within high culture by patronizing opera, drama, and ‘talks’, all in one evening. Though the proposal which came in 1970 to turn it into Radio Three, concentrating on a ‘stream of music’, aroused vociferous regrets from faithful listeners, the new channel was to fill a more distinct and – with Promenade Concerts, for example – more appealing slot.

There was no escaping the fact that the golden age of radio lay back in the 1940s. The Light Programme had had a vast audience in a pre-television era, and its comedy shows continued to provide stock national catchphrases. Educating Archie was a radio show in which the eponymous hero was a ventriloquist’s dummy – an extraordinary illustration of suspension of disbelief on someone’s part. Moreover, there was still innovation within this format in the early 1950s, and The Goon Show stands in an apostolic succession between the mildly anarchic forays of ITMA and the fully fledged surrealism which Monty Python’s Flying Circus later brought to television. The two media were bridged, until his early death, by Tony Hancock, whose evocations of the lower-middle-class proprieties of Railway Cuttings, East Cheam, were perfectly conveyed: creating ’ancock as a projection of himself, with aspirations as elusive as aspirates. By the 1960s the Light Programme was dying on its feet, a bygone idiom in entertainment; its relics were embalmed in the new Radio Two, whereas Radio One was frankly pitched at the teenage audience. Finally, the BBC’s Radio Four, child of the Home Service, became the surviving descendant of Reith’s original National Programme.

In a television age, the BBC made its reputation all over again in its coverage of major national events, which reinforced its image as the most august of public corporations and the voice of the establishment. The Queen’s Coronation in June 1953 showed the way. Here was a pageant of national renewal, spoken of as inaugurating a new Elizabethan age, presented for the first time as a television spectacular. With more than a year to prepare, this provided a unique sales pitch for new sets and was the moment when the television audience started to leap into the millions. It showed how the monarchy could be projected through the new medium, with a smooth voice-over from the doyen of commentators, Richard Dimbleby, who became little less than a national institution himself.

Even so, the BBC was not safe; the Conservatives’ zeal to introduce market solutions into the public sector was denied other outlets under Churchill, but, still mindful of Reith’s power to keep him off the air, he had little time for the BBC. A committee on broadcasting under Beveridge had advised against commercial broadcasting; but a dissenting report from a Conservative backbencher, Selwyn Lloyd, kept the issue open and in 1954 legislation was passed setting up a rival television network, financed through advertising. This was, however, by no means complete deregulation. The Independent Television Authority (ITA) had powers to control the output of the commercial stations and to limit advertising; sponsorship was not to be introduced for another thirty years. In many ways this concept of ‘independent’ television was an extension rather than an outright repudiation of the ethos of public-service broadcasting.

Commercial television, indeed, at first had a hard time in generating profits. Sir Kenneth Clark, the urbane art historian who became chairman of the ITA, had to talk up its prospects in 1957 with claims that over 70 per cent preferred the new channel – which only meant that this was the proportion of new television sets which were equipped to receive both it and the BBC. Even in 1960 only 6 million sets out of the current total of 10 million could receive ITV. Once over this hump, the companies benefited from the fact that this was a tightly regulated market; the Canadian newspaper tycoon Roy Thomson, who bought Scottish Television at the bottom of the market, was shrewd as well as candid in calling a television franchise ‘a licence to print money’. The popularity ratings of television programmes could not be disregarded by ITV once they were selling this time to advertisers, nor by the BBC once it was locked into competition for viewers to justify the licence fee.

ITV won the initial battles in the ratings war. Nearly two-thirds of the population over sixteen claimed to watch it regularly in 1961; the only snag was that its viewers were more likely to be C2s. (skilled workers) rather than more affluent middle-class customers. The big draws were game shows – Double Your Money, Take Your Pick, Beat the Clock – of a kind which the BBC had previously disdained; its own pre-eminence in drama and documentaries was hardly challenged. Yet it would be unfair to say that ITV simply debased standards. Granada, with a Manchester-based franchise, was notably creative among the early commercial companies. Independent Television News, a central service which the companies were forced to support, brought innovative techniques of presentation to Britain, making newscasters like Robin Day and Ludovic Kennedy into a new sort of television personality. Imitation by the BBC was the most ratings-conscious form of flattery. The fact is that during the 1960s competition and cross-fertilization between the networks revitalized the BBC, which claimed its market share back from ITV, once the appeal of novelty wore off.

With two popular networks, television simply became the mass medium. In 1964 BBC2 was opened as a third channel, with a more highbrow pitch (though hardly a televised Third Programme) and in 1967 it began broadcasting in colour. In 1969, by which time nine out of ten households held a licence, television occupied nearly a quarter of the leisure time of both men and women in England and Wales, more than twice as much as gardening, its greatest single competitor. Significantly, both were home-based activities. On the whole, television was not introduced into pubs in England (as in Ireland, for example) but provided a private setting for the enjoyment of a range of leisure pursuits which had previously taken place outside the home. Thus people did not watch fewer films, but more; they simply stopped going out to the cinema and started watching older films at home on television. Soon new releases were to become more quickly available in a routine way, which altered the financing of films.

Likewise television did not kill commercial sport; but whereas in 1949 the English League soccer clubs had had over 40 million paying customers on the terraces of their grounds, within twenty years a third of them had disappeared. Again, what had happened was that television stole the show – or rather had to pay the Football Association for the rights. When England staged (and won) the World Cup in 1966, the popularity of television soccer was confirmed. Moreover, the Cinderella spectator sport of Rugby Union came to benefit from the televising of international matches; the Wimbledon tennis championship proved well suited to the small screen; and as new camera techniques were developed for showing test cricket, armchair spectators were given a privileged view of the action at the crease. When England at last won the Ashes from the Australian tourists in 1953, viewers who had missed Bradman at least had a chance to catch the last stand of the great England batsmen, Hutton and Compton. Even sporting contests which presented less obvious opportunities – golf, snooker, sheepdog trials – came to acquire a mass following through television.

At the time of the debate over commercial television, fears of the Americanization of the medium had been widespread, the more so since competition from Hollywood was currently throttling the British film industry. It is obviously true that the new British franchise-holders picked up many tricks from the longer experience of commercial television in the USA; true too that screening old Hollywood movies was a cheap way of filling the slots between the advertisements. Yet, though the small relative size of the British market may have provided an in adequate base for its film industry to rival American productions, the same was not true in television. On the small screen far more of the output was home-produced.

Above all, the impact of television was to emphasize the importance of the private household. To some extent this was directly at the expense of older face-to-face contacts. Richard Hoggart achieved a deserved success with his book The Uses of Literacy (1957), a sensitive (and learned) evocation of the street-based, northern working-class community in which he grew up. Writing on the eve of the introduction of commercial television, he castigated the (virtually synonymous) Americanization and trivialization of popular culture; the world we had lost, with all its failings, was one fit for this eloquent elegy. In this vein, it might be held that the immensely popular television soap opera, Coronation Street, which Granada introduced in 1962, with its sepiatinted portrayal of a traditional Lancashire working-class community, came to provide a vicarious substitute for the real thing. Yet the remaking of the English working class was a long and continuing historical process, one hardly confined to the sudden advent of consumerism in the 1950s.

Resuming the trend of the inter-war period, newly affluent households were buying not only television sets but a range of appliances which made homes more attractive and convenient to run: vacuum cleaners, washing machines, electric heaters and cookers. In real terms consumer expenditure rose by 45 per cent between 1952 and 1964. The largest items were food, drink and tobacco; but whereas they naturally came to take a smaller proportion of a larger income, the share of consumer durables more than doubled, with most of the increase in the years up to 1959. In 1952 there were 2½ million private cars on the road, barely more than in 1939; by 1959 there were 5 million, since consumer spending on cars and motor cycles had meanwhile quadrupled. A snapshot at this point might suggest that car ownership remained a middle-class status symbol in a way that television ownership no longer was. In fact, from the time of the Coronation the increase in vehicle licences tracked the increase in television licences, but at a lower level – at virtually any moment until the end of the 1960s two out of three households which had a television also had a car. Moreover 1959 saw a record jump of 200,000 in motor-cycle registrations, giving a 1 3/4-million total which did not decline until the late-1960s. This was the golden age of the motor bike, poised between the artisan image of the bumbling family sidecar and a shockingly fast youth culture based on new teenage affluence.

It was inescapably apparent that more people could now afford a decent standard of living. Average weekly earnings, which had been £7 10s (£7.50) a week in 1950, had climbed to over £11 pounds by 1955; this was a rise of 50 per cent over a period in which the cost of living rose by 30 per cent. By 1964 average wages were to be over £18 a week, rising at an annual rate double that of prices. Moreover, unlike the situation before the war, these gains were not restricted through mass unemployment, since there was now a tight labour market where almost everyone of working age could find a job. From the introduction of the new National Insurance scheme in 1948 until 1970, in only eight years out of twenty-three did the number of registered unemployed average as much as 2 per cent. Full employment was, as Beveridge had said, the real underpinning of social security, providing against want not through state benefits but by letting people benefit from their own exertions. For those with bitter memories of the prolonged slump before the war, this marked an epoch. ‘Let’s be frank about it,’ Harold Macmillan told a meeting in 1957, ‘most of our people have never had it so good.’

EDEN’S WAR

The Conservatives had thought themselves lucky to get back into office in 1951 and were accordingly content to acquiesce in a political agenda largely set by their opponents. For a year or two there were by-election swings against the Government which underlined the precariousness of its position, though only one seat was actually lost. By the time Eden took over, the prospects looked much brighter, with swings towards the Government in recent by-elections in comfortable London suburban seats like Sutton and Cheam, Orpington and Twickenham. The general election in May 1955 was one of the most predictable of the century. Its novelty lay in being the first television election, though the politicians had yet to learn how to handle the medium effectively. The Conservatives, fighting on the slogan ‘Conservative Freedom Works’, never looked like losing. The Gallup Poll slightly exaggerated their advantage, showing them with over half of the popular vote, whereas although they came close (49.7 per cent) they narrowly failed to achieve this elusive distinction. They made net gains of about twenty seats from Labour, almost entirely in England, and continued to benefit marginally from redistribution, thus increasing their parliamentary majority to over sixty.

Yet Labour was still polling impressively, only 3 per cent behind the Conservatives. With a margin as narrow as this, it is hard to accept that the Labour Party’s own self-inflicted wounds were unimportant in denying it office. Splits in the party seemed endemic and were impossible to conceal. Bevan remained the darling of Labour’s left-wing constituency parties which consistently elected his supporters to the party’s national executive committee, where they ritually confronted the power brokers of the big trade unions, whose block votes ultimately controlled the party. Arthur Deakin, Bevin’s successor in the Transport Workers, emerged as a key figure, mobilizing an alliance between the mineworkers (NUM), his own union (TGWU) and the other ‘General Workers’ union (GMWU), later supported by the engineers (AEU). They appeared to the Bevanites simply as right-wingers, intent on betraying Labour’s socialist aspirations; the Bevanites in turn were regarded at best as wild, at worst as fellow-travellers – a potent charge in the cold-war atmosphere (especially given the large number of Roman Catholics in the Labour movement). Bevan himself, though critical of the Soviet Union, was not enamoured of the USA either, German rearmament, supported by the leadership as a means of strengthening Nato, found its loudest opponents among the Bevanites; and it was Bevan’s opposition to the official line of support for the South East-Asia Treaty Organization (Seato) which caused him to lose the party whip as an MP, and almost provoked his expulsion from party membership – all this only two months before the 1955 general election. The fierce disciplinarians in the party were clearly intent on imposing trade-union norms of solidarity; they had found, moreover, a capable agent in Gaitskell.

It may have been convenient but it is hardly accurate to call Gaitskell a right-winger too. His vision was that of a social democrat seeking a relevant role for Labour once it had exhausted its historic mission by mid-century – an analysis that was to be developed by his disciple Anthony Crosland in The Future of Socialism (1956). It sketched a strategy for furthering social equality through managed growth in a mixed economy rather than identifying socialism with further measures of nationalization. What Deakin saw in Gaitskell, however, was simply a politician of Bevan’s generation (eight years younger indeed) who was prepared to stand up to him – and to stand against him, initially for the Treasurership of the Labour Party, which Gaitskell won, thanks to the block votes in 1954. Following Attlee’s retirement and Morrison’s eclipse, Gaitskell defeated Bevan for the party leadership in December 1955.

Gaitskell did not want a continued feud with the Bevanites – why on earth should he? – but the rifts in the party were difficult to heal. The policy differences were slight but the personal animosities between Bevanites and Gaitskellites ran deep. Harold Wilson, whose resignation with Bevan in 1951 had identified him as a Bevanite, in fact had little patience with the ideological posturing of either side and had already made his peace with the leadership. Bevan too was now welcomed back into the shadow cabinet, where he somewhat uneasily tried to reconcile himself to working under, or at least with, Gaitskell. Within a year they had established a surprisingly effective partnership – brought together this time, rather than driven apart, by a defining crisis in foreign policy.

Eden, of course, was intent on running his own foreign policy, a field where his credentials were backed by cabinet experience stretching back twenty years. His problem, it was generally supposed, would not lie abroad but in putting his stamp upon domestic policy. Here he could fairly claim that his subordinates let him down. Butler’s spring Budget in 1955, reducing income tax before the general election, had to be followed by an autumn Budget, to stave off a renewed sterling crisis through a fiscal squeeze, which clawed back double the amount of revenue disbursed only months previously. Whether seen as sharp practice or incompetence – Butler was deeply shadowed by bereavement following his wife’s death – this meant that he would have to be moved. Eden’s own interventions were driven more by social conscience than free-market ideology. Having scotched Robot, he still vetoed the abolition of bread subsidies, in his efforts to establish his authority over his cabinet.

Willy-nilly, the make-or-break issues of Eden’s premiership lay in foreign affairs. Churchill’s notion of Britain standing at the intersection of three circles – and refusing on principle to choose between them – still provided the guiding assumption in British foreign policy. Macmillan had become Foreign Secretary, following his brief tenure of the Ministry of Defence: a difficult man to place, with too many big ideas, not least about his own role. If he was the most serious Europhile in the cabinet, this says a lot about the lack of seriousness of the rest, for Macmillan was no more ready than them to give Europe real priority. ‘The Empire must always have first preference,’ he still proclaimed: ‘Europe must come second.’ There was to be no challenge, therefore, to the ingrained scepticism which the Foreign Office manifested towards the developing process of western European integration.

The Coal and Steel community which Britain had refused to join in 1950 had meanwhile done wonders for its six continental members. In June 1955 they held a conference at Messina, at which an agenda for establishing a wider economic union, and devising appropriate European institutions, was accepted. Britain was warmly invited to participate in the negotiations which ensued, but first hesitated, then prevaricated, and ultimately withdrew. The other six pressed ahead despite the empty chair. The problem for Britain did not come from the USA, with which a specially rocky relationship currently prevailed, encapsulated in Eden’s distate for the moralistic Secretary of State, Dulles. It was, indeed, US policy to encourage British participation; and it was the Foreign Office which kept up the constant disparagement of the European initiative in its communications to the State Department. The Commonwealth was a more serious obstacle. As late as 1948 the four Dominions accounted for 25 per cent of British trade; Australia took half its imports from Britain. These were bonds forged in peace and war. If they now shackled Britain, however, it was surely because the sterling area was regarded as a viable means of maintaining British interests into the late twentieth century. By comparison with these global, great-power pretensions, symbolized alike by sterlings role and by a concomitant geopolitical strategy, what was on the table after Messina seemed pitifully inadequate. The Foreign Office thus succeeded in catching the mood of the British public in watching with sceptical condescension while the six European countries set about pooling their inferior resources in a common market.

Eden had bigger fish to fry. A month after the British withdrawal from the Messina process, in December 1955, he moved Macmillan to the Treasury and in his place appointed the hitherto obscure Selwyn Lloyd as Foreign Secretary. Lloyd, with his tidy legal mind, proved an excellent henchman: not only a loyal lieutenant (with a loyalty that was as unflagging as it was unrequited) but a meticulous staff officer who would implement the orders from above. High policy, as he realized, would be made by an inner circle increasingly concentrated around the prime minister – ironically reminiscent of the policy-making methods of Neville Chamberlain, the first prime minister whom Eden had served.

But the content of that policy, at all costs, would be different. Stung by taunts in the Tory press about his lack of decisiveness, Eden was determined to appear as Churchill’s successor in a full sense, with no taint of appeasement. Eden’s personal staff knew all about his fierce temper, recently exacerbated in the aftermath of unsuccessful surgery, which made him feverish at times of stress. In the summer of 1956 the stress duly came when the Egyptian leader Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Britain’s historic route to the east. Blowing hot and cold alternately, Eden responded testily to a frustrating course of events, involving France, Israel, the USA and the United Nations. Soon the prime minister’s staff observed that he was ‘violently anti-Nasser, whom he compares to Mussolini’.

It may not have been a very apt comparison but Eden was not alone in making it; Gaitskell used similar language in the House of Commons in August. Determination to learn the lessons of appeasement had run through every post-war crisis. It may not have shown deep historical insight to invest Stalin with the potential territorial ambitions of Hitler; but it was surely plausible, as a rational response prompted by caution. To cast Nasser in the same role, however, seems either unimaginative or over-imaginative; and Eden’s constant ruminations about a Russian link look paranoid rather than prescient. The fact was that Egypt wanted to build a dam on the Nile at Aswan and did not much care whether it was paid for by dollars or roubles – or canal dues. The real issue was what response from Britain was appropriate.

There had been an earlier Middle East crisis in 1951, in the dying months of the Labour Government. The assets of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (better known after 1954 simply as BP) at Abadan had been nationalized. A student of nationalization measures himself, Morrison considered that the appropriate response for a socialist Foreign Secretary was to send a gunboat. Gaitskell was one of those in the cabinet who stopped this, on the grounds that lack of British resources or of American support made it deeply unprofitable to antagonize the Arab world for no good reason. This was not very glorious, and the Tories duly made political capital out of Abadan – another reason why they were moved to behave differently over Suez in 1956.

The long British occupation of Egypt had recently been terminated, the canal zone evacuated in favour of the base in Cyprus. With the treaties governing the canal running rapidly towards extinction, Britain’s legal rights were at best a wasting asset. The cabinet meeting held immediately after nationalization in July 1956 was advised that Britain would be on weak ground in claiming that Nasser had acted illegally. What occupied the prime minister for much of the next three months was the attempt to find a respectable public reason for the use of force, to which, in private, he increasingly inclined. The more Eden used diplomacy to clear the ground for intervention, the more the situation deteriorated. Initially it took time to formulate contingency plans for military operations to be launched from Cyprus, but, once the armed forces were prepared, there was an inbuilt momentum for action. Those who were bent on intervention were increasingly impatient over the time-wasting pantomime at the United Nations, ostensibly aimed at a diplomatic settlement. Macmillan, in whose diary Nasser and Hitler became indistinguishable, was a crucial voice for intervention. Forced to dissimulate his real feelings when dealing with the Americans, because of their insistence on maintaining a line of high moral rectitude, his own cynicism led him to a gross misjudgement of the likely American response ‘I know Ike,’ Macmillan assured his colleagues. ‘He will lie doggo!’

At the United Nations Lloyd’s line, innocently enough, was all about protection of the rights of international canal-users. While he was away, however, Eden concocted a war plan with the French, who were already in touch with Israel (and not ashamed of it). When Israel attacked Egypt, Britain and France would have their excuse to intervene, in the guise of peacemakers; the backstairs collusion which engineered this was largely designed to secure the acquiescence of the United States in a British ‘police action’. At first it went according to plan. Israel duly attacked Egypt on 29 October; Eden promptly announced an ultimatum, addressed to both sides, backed by a threat to intervene, thus pre-empting action through the United Nations. The United Nations, unimpressed, lumbered into action with a resolution branding Britain and France as aggressors, backed by the threat of oil sanctions. The support of a united Commonwealth was lacking; Australia was in favour, Canada against. Moreover, President Eisenhower, running for re-election in the USA, flexed his muscles. Not only did Ike fail to lie doggo; he even failed to suspend his critical faculties when asked to believe the British fairy story. Macmillan’s cheerful predictions were quickly forgotten, at least by their author, now a beleaguered Chancellor of the Exchequer, counting the cost of his fine words. Once US support for the pound was withdrawn, there was a devastating drop in the sterling area’s currency reserves, which a chastened Macmillan certainly did not minimize in his reports to his colleagues.

By now Suez had become a divisive political issue in Britain. Nasser, to be sure, had few open defenders. His enemy, Israel, evoked more mixed feelings. The Foreign Office, despite its traditional pro-Arab line, simply acted on the maxim that my enemy’s enemy is my friend. The real friends of Israel in Britain had obviously been those Zionists, especially strong in the Labour Party, who had campaigned for a Jewish national home in the first place. Only eight years old, Israel owed its creation not to Britain but to the activities, including terrorism, of the Jews themselves. The way that Bevin had operated the post-war UN mandate in Palestine had satisfied nobody: neither the victims of the Jewish holocaust who wanted to immigrate freely, nor the Palestinians who were displaced, nor the UN, nor the left-wing Zionists, whose frustration at the whole drift of Bevin’s foreign policy was vented on this issue. Declining to serve any longer as whipping boy, Bevin truly did execute a policy of scuttle in 1948, leaving the Jews free to make their new state by force of arms. Israel, as the living symbol of atonement for the Jews’ historic sufferings, was still a great left-wing cause; few yet acknowledged that the atonement was at the Palestinians’ expense. Many people in the Labour Party remained emotionally committed to Israel’s success, and the British Government’s fervent denials that the two countries were acting together made it easier to maintain a distinction between them.

Whatever their other shades of difference, virtually the whole of the opposition in Britain condemned Eden’s unilateral use of force. It was the moment when middle-class liberal opinion turned anti-Conservative, promising the Liberal Party a political future after all. One symbol was the anti-Suez stance of the Sunday newspaper, the Observer, at the price of a significant slice of its former Conservative readers. By contrast, there are few signs that Labour’s working-class supporters were much moved by an issue so redolent of the middle-class politics of conscience of an earlier era. Eden and Gaitskell each thought that the other had misled him; now they were bitterly at odds, Eden accused of betraying a lifetime’s commitment to the United Nations, Labour more straightforwardly branded as unpatriotic. Bevan unleashed his oratory in a great open-air protest meeting in Trafalgar Square. Gaitskell successfully claimed the right to reply on television to the prime minister’s broadcast announcing hostilities, thus provoking not only another internal crisis over the autonomy of the BBC but also allegations from Conservatives of its lack of loyalty. The party was almost solid for Suez, sceptics like Butler quelling their doubts once the adventure was begun.

The Conservatives, however, were to become divided once the cabinet abruptly decided to quit. The tension between the actual and the avowed aims of the British Government was not just a moral flaw in its case: it became a disabling inconsistency in its strategy. Its purported casus belli disappeared within days, since Israel achieved an inconvensently quick victory and Egypt stopped fighting. Eden’s story, such as it was, now collapsed. Having pretended to go to war for this reason, Eden had to pretend to be pleased with this result when it was agreed to withdraw British troops in favour of a UN force. Meanwhile, on the ground, none of the real military objectives had been secured by the time of the ceasefire. The canal itself lay immobilized by Egyptian blockships. Above all, Nasser lived to fight another day. British war aims, never very clear in the first place, had been wrapped in the layers of ambiguity necessary to sustain the subterfuge, with damaging effects on Anglo-American relations. Once the cover story was blown, the British appeared doubly guilty – not only of aggression against Egypt but guilty too of calculated deceit of their great ally.

As a military operation Suez was a sideshow. There was little loss of life on the Egyptian side and even less on the British – the offstage death of a British soldier at Suez in John Osborne’s The Entertainer (1957) had a significance that was clearly not statistical. Nonetheless it is surely a mistake to play down the importance of Suez. Great powers can no doubt get away with actions far worse than anything Britain did in 1956, which is hardly the most infamous date in its long history of international self-assertion. At exactly the time of Suez the Soviet Union sent in its tanks to crush a struggle for self-government in Hungary, and did so with an impunity which is only partly explained by the opportune diversion staged by the western imperialist nations. What Suez demonstrated with brutal frankness was that Britain was no longer in the great-power league, was no longer capable of playing by its rules, and simply looked absurd when it tried to cheat.

This was a sad conclusion to Eden’s long career as an international statesman. The crisis finished him; his precarious health gave way. While the withdrawal of British troops was taking place, the prime minister himself withdrew to the West Indies for recuperation. During his absence, Butler, who had always doubted the wisdom of Suez, sought to minimize the damage through tact and conciliation. As an old appeaser, these had always been his methods – or so too many Tories, still smarting from their reverses, came to think. The real beneficiary of Suez was Macmillan who, like his hero Churchill after Narvik, walked away unscathed from a disaster that was partly of his own making. What Macmillan grasped was that retreat was certainly necessary; but that it should take place under cover of a mien of effrontery. The anti-American right wing on the Conservative benches, who thought the only mistake lay in calling off the operation, liked Macmillan’s style. When it became clear, on Eden’s return in January 1957, that he could not continue as prime minister, the expectation was still that Butler would succeed. But the informal processes used to sound out the cabinet, in supplying advice to the Queen, showed strong backing for Macmillan. He became prime minister of the United Kingdom in January 1957, just two months before the Treaty of Rome was signed by the six countries which established a European Economic Community (EEC).

‘SUPERMAC’

Against the odds, the succession had passed to an older man and it was to be Macmillan rather than Butler who set his stamp on the late 1950s. The two of them worked warily together. Butler, as Home Secretary, took the title of deputy prime minister, which was accurate in that he was the second man in the government, only inaccurate in implying that he would automatically get the reversion. At the Home Office he was a reassuring figure, capable of blandly defending his department from the authoritarian instincts of many grassroots Tories, as ritually displayed at party conferences. Faced with a social rather than an economic agenda, he was actually more of a Butskellite at the Home Office than at the Treasury.

It was Butler, more than anyone else, who had given Conservative domestic policy its post-war facelift; Butler whose liberal credentials had worked against him in the aftermath of Suez, while Macmillan was initially acclaimed by the imperialist, anti-American right-wingers of the Suez Group. Yet there was little real difference of outlook between the two rivals, and the right wing was to find itself marginalized once more as Government policy unfolded, at home and abroad. Since Macmillan’s métier was dissimulation it took time for this to become apparent. Prime minister was a part which Macmillan had long wanted to play, and play it he did, returning at intervals to a favourite author, Trollope, for inspiration as well as recreation. His Edwardian grand manner teetered on the edge of self-parody but proved a highly effective mask for a fine intellect, cynically weighing the odds. Though acutely nervous before some of his parliamentary appearances, in public his air of ‘unflappability’ became part of his legend.

The first priority was to rebuild the alliance with the USA. Macmillan shamelessly exploited his old friendship with Eisenhower, fortunately a man of cool temperament who did not bear grudges. A well-managed conference at Bermuda effected a public reconciliation. This reliance on personal diplomacy was to become characteristic; and it was loyally accepted by Lloyd, who remained as Foreign Secretary since Macmillan shrewdly judged that it would look too much like an apology for Suez if he were to be removed. Macmillan took up where Churchill had left off in his pursuit of a summit conference, at which, it was still assumed, Britain would be represented. His visit to Moscow in 1959 may have played some part in reaching an agreement on banning nuclear-weapons testing but its main impact, shortly before a general election, was in enhancing Macmillan’s own image as world statesman. His white fur hat made for good pictures.

Britain’s own nuclear capability, with its hydrogen bomb now being tested in the Pacific, was given high priority. Following Bermuda, it was to be made operational through US cooperation; and US missiles were in turn to be granted the unrestricted use of British bases. Indeed, a nuclear strategy became the basis of the White Paper which the Defence Secretary, Duncan Sandys, presented in 1957, declaring a doctrine of massive retaliation in the event of a Soviet invasion of western Europe. The attraction of such a policy, despite its appalling risks, was that it enabled a significant reduction in Britain’s conventional defences, the cost of which remained onerous. The ending of national service was foreshadowed and, when this was implemented a couple of years later, it resulted in a halving of the number of British armed forces. It is sometimes claimed that this retrenchment did not materialize over the next five years, but in real terms there was a significant economy. All told the claim of defence spending, which had pre-empted almost 10 per cent of GNP in the mid-1950s, was cut back to 6 per cent by 1964. There is a political paradox here; for despite the Conservatives’ rhetoric about their unique commitment to defending the country, it was a Labour Government which had put guns before butter – a priority which was now reversed. The simple appeal of this shift in resources is not hard to see when, out of every £100 of total national earnings, three or four pounds which had previously gone in taxes to pay for arms were left in the taxpayers’ own pockets.

In this major reassessment, Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent became a (relatively) cheap substitute for the imperial ambitions which had proved so expensive at Suez. Sterling had proved to be Britain’s weak link; cutting overseas commitments would reduce the strain on the balance of payments. Cyprus was an obvious example. The agitation for union with Greece had been unequivocally resisted by the British, who pleaded that they could ‘never’ leave because of the likelihood of communal violence between ethnic Greeks and Turks, and who sought to implicate the Greek orthodox archbishop, Makarios, in the terrorist campaign that was raging. But Suez showed that the game was up. In 1957 Makarios was released from gaol; in 1960 he became leader of an independent state, and the British base was run down.

In Cyprus ‘never’ turned out to mean six years; and Britain’s African empire was soon switched to the new timescale. Learning from Attlee’s experience in India, Macmillan put a good face upon an accelerating transfer of power to well-disposed successor regimes. This strategy had originally been the brainchild of Sir Andrew Cohen, a highly influential colonial administrator and diplomat. Here at least the British could read the writing on the wall, and acted more adroitly in winding up their empire than did other European countries like France, Belgium or Portugal. Nkrumah in the Gold Coast, like Nehru before him, in an almost complicitous process, first earned his nationalist credentials in gaol and subsequently became leader of an independent state. Thus in 1957 Ghana became the first black African republic in the Commonwealth; but such an outcome was easier to achieve in west Africa than in colonies with a higher density of white settlement.

That the transition was not free from conflict and bloodshed was shown in Kenya, where the British attempt in the early 1950s to demonize the Mau Mau movement, and link it to the imprisoned nationalist leader Jomo Kenyatta, had left a legacy of brutality which was exposed by the death of a number of prisoners at Hola Camp in 1959. It was the old story of colonial racism and irregularities, instinctively covered up by the men on the spot lest tender consciences in faraway Westminster become carried away by the horror of it. The scandal was a bad moment for the Government, not a major setback. Macmillan was determined to speed up the process of decolonization and appointed Ian Macleod as Colonial Secretary in 1959 with this brief. Macleod was a tough operator, the rising star of the liberal wing of the party, and in a couple of years he effectively worked himself out of a job. Nigeria went in 1960; Sierra Leone, Gambia, Uganda soon followed. With Kenyatta duly transformed from terrorist to responsible leader, Kenya became independent in 1963.

Only in central Africa did the policy of scuttle falter. Rickety federations across the globe had become a temporary monument to geopolitical schemes scribbled on the backs of Colonial Office envelopes – in the West Indies, in Malaya, above all the Central African Federation, set up in 1953. This lumped together Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, both overwhelmingly black, with (Southern) Rhodesia, where a white supremacist government on the South African model had long been firmly entrenched. But by 1960 it was apparent that the tail could not wag the dog in this way. Macmillan, in a widely reported speech to the South African parliament in Cape Town, spoke of ‘a wind of change’. When Monckton (‘the oilcan’) was sent as elder statesman to report on the viability of the Central African Federation, it was reminiscent of sending Runciman to report on the viability of Czechoslovakia; it signalled to the white settlers that a sell-out was imminent, albeit one implemented in accordance with the wishes of the majority in the disputed territories. Monckton’s recommendation that Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia be free to secede spelt the doom of the Federation. It was left to Butler to preside over its obsequies in 1963, which he did with his inimitable lugubrious charm, thus paving the way for the independence of Malawi (Nyasaland) and Zambia (Northern Rhodesia). Apart from the intractable problem of Rhodesia, decolonization might be considered appeasement’s finest hour.

Such imagery held no appeal, however, for Macmillan, whose diary reveals a man whose vision had been decisively formed in a previous era. On his visits to the Dominions he still talked of ‘the old country’ – even in South Africa. No wind of change was going to blow South Africa out of the multiracial Commonwealth which had emerged from his own policies, not if he could help it. Macmillan may have thought the doctrinal attachment to apartheid misguided, but when the crunch came in 1961 he bitterly reproached Canada for breaking ranks with the ‘Whites’ in the moves to expel South Africa from membership. In the Middle East, it was the same story, with little comprehension of the authenticity of Arab nationalism, which spelt the end of docile client relationships with the west (or the east). The refusal to admit that Suez was misguided, symbolized by the prolonged attempt to cover up the collusion with Israel, was not just an understandable, disingenuous, face-saving piece of rigmarole for the benefit of his more dimwitted supporters: it was indicative of Macmillan’s own outlook. He still stereotyped Nasser as Hitler in a fez.

Macmillan’s deep ambiguity was a priceless political asset. It helped him quell the Conservative right wing, which was rarely confronted with the fact that the prime minister’s policies were out of kilter with his rhetoric. There is little evidence that Suez as such hurt the Tories electorally, since they were already well behind Labour before it happened. Still, the by-elections were bad for the Government, which lost the socially marginal London suburb of North Lewisham to Labour in February 1957. Twelve months later, the Conservatives lost the old cotton town of Rochdale to Labour, not because the Labour vote increased but because, boosted by the candidacy of the television star Ludovic Kennedy, the Liberals, who had not even stood in the previous general election, took 36 per cent of the votes, almost all from the Conservatives. Only a month later, when Mark Bonham Carter, Asquith’s grandson, captured the Devon seat of Torrington from the Conservatives, it looked like a Liberal revival, or at least an exhumation. By midsummer 1958, the Conservatives had lost a total of four seats, two to the Liberals and two to Labour.

This sort of collapse in the mid-term Government vote was to become a commonplace of the electoral cycle; but it had not been an early feature of post-war politics; until 1957 only one seat had changed hands in a by-election – and that had been a Government gain.¹ Macmillan thus needed all his sang-froid in his first two years as prime minister. His achievement was first to impose his authority on his Government as Eden had never succeeded in doing; then, with an increasingly sure touch, to capture public opinion.

Faced with rising unemployment – albeit within a range where 2 per cent began to look high – Macmillan chose to jettison his Chancellor of the Exchequer rather than his own broadly Keynesian priorities. Memories of dole queues in Stockton, his pre-war constituency, not only animated Macmillan: they became familiar to the Treasury knights, who had served him while he was Chancellor, as a code word for expansionary measures, whatever the inflationary risk. In January 1957 the vacancy at the Treasury was filled by Peter Thorneycroft, whose attachment to sound money was well known, backed by two junior ministers of even more severe outlook, Nigel Birch and Enoch Powell. Perhaps Macmillan saw this as a manoeuvre to calm anxieties, especially in the City, about inflationary pressures – the retail price index in 1957 showed an increase of nearly 4 per cent over the previous twelve months. At all events, so long as the trade figures remained reassuring, with exports currently at record levels, the Treasury was content to take a relaxed view.

In the summer of 1957, however, a sterling crisis arrived out of the blue, fuelled by fears that Government spending was out of control, and prompting talk of devaluation. Fortified by Birch and Powell, Thorneycroft staked out a strategy for controlling the money supply and for pegging the level of public spending. He got his way to the extent of a two-point jump in bank-rate, to 7 per cent, the highest level since the Lloyd George Coalition turned to deflation in 1920. In the cabinet, however, Macleod, who had been a free-spending Minister of Health and currently nursed the sensitive Labour portfolio, led the resistance to measures which might increase unemployment to 3 per cent, recently accepted as the official definition of full employment. Thorneycroft’s proposal to end the allowance payable for a second child in a family was opposed by Macleod on political grounds, since this had been the one part of the welfare state enacted by a Conservative Government; and he was to remain a champion of family allowances.

If Macleod made the running, he had crucial support from Butler – who had either forgotten about Robot, or perhaps remembered, it was difficult to be sure – and, above all, from the prime minister, who manipulated the agenda so that, by January 1958, Thorneycroft was left isolated; the final difference was a matter of £50 million of cuts, which most people found trivial. Like Bevan, he had failed to broaden the issue of his resignation; like Bevan, he took two other ministers with him. Unlike the Bevanite crisis, however, the departure of the entire Treasury team did not signal the onset of damaging consequences for a divided party. Thorneycroft went quietly; both he and Powell were to return to office a couple of years later. Macmillan, flying off on a Commonwealth visit, paused at Heathrow to deliver a patiently rehearsed throwaway line about ‘little local difficulties’.

Derick Heathcoat Amory, an easygoing west-country squire, became the next Chancellor. He inherited a plum situation, which he simply allowed to ripen. The modest curb on public spending and the credit squeeze had reined in any inflationary pressure; the cost of living was to rise by barely 1 per cent in either of the next two years. The terms of trade, moreover, again sharply turned in Britain’s favour with a 7 per cent drop in import prices in 1958, thus easing the balance of payments. By November 1958 bank-rate was down to 4 per cent, by now a sensitive point for those with mortgages, and in the 1959 Budget Heathcoat Amory felt justified in making sweeping tax cuts, notably a reduction in the standard rate of income tax from 8s 6d (42.5 per cent) to 7s 9d (38.75 per cent), a new post-war low, not reduced further until the Thatcher era. The economy, which had been stagnant in 1958, grew in real terms by 4 per cent in 1959 and by nearly 6 per cent in 1960.

It was on this tide of consumer prosperity that Macmillan’s reputation was buoyed up. In November 1958 the London Evening Standard printed a cartoon; its economical draughtsmanship and its distinctive sharp brush strokes proclaimed it as by Vicky, whose left-wing stance, like that of Low before him, was licensed on grounds of sheer talent by a tolerant Beaverbrook. Was it a plane, was it a bird? It was, of course, ‘Supermac’, with the bravura of Macmillan’s padded torso countered by the bathos of his penny-round spectacles, dangling from one outstretched hand. It was a memorable image, brilliant propaganda – not, as it turned out, against Macmillan but, with a steady shift of perceptions in his favour, decidely to his advantage. His apparent mastery of the political situation meant that, within three years of Suez, he was able to claim a convincing mandate from the electorate. Folk myth has him campaigning on the slogan, ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ The phrase which actually appeared on the hoardings was: ‘Life’s better with the Conservatives. Don’t let Labour ruin it.’

The 1959 crop of by-elections held few terrors for the Conservatives; the opinion polls showed them moving into a narrow but fairly steady lead over Labour, and once more, in an era of stable party loyalties, the polls were proved right. In the general election which Macmillan called in October, the Conservatives maintained their share of the vote, again just short of 50 per cent, with Labour now a clear 5 per cent behind. The Liberals’ by-election advances fell away, though with over 200 candidates they doubled their vote to 6 per cent (and kept their six MPs). As in 1955, the Conservative gains came in England, notably in the prosperous west Midlands, the home of the booming car industry. Conversely, they lost ground not only in Lancashire, where the cotton industry was on its last legs, but also in Scotland – the beginning of a political divergence which was to become increasingly significant.

Purely political explanations for Labour’s defeat focused on Gaitskell’s last-minute pledge not to increase the basic rate of income tax; but, like Churchill’s supposed gaffes in 1945, the effect is difficult to discern in the polls. Up to polling day, the general view was that Labour had fought a good campaign, with more professional presentation of its broadcasts on television by rising centrist politicians like Anthony Wedgwood Benn, who had worked in the medium. It could be claimed that Labour now looked like an alternative government, with Bevan as a responsible shadow Foreign Secretary, no longer easily dismissed as a left-wing bogeyman, and Harold Wilson, no longer quite so disgracefully young, a highly competent shadow Chancellor. The Bevanites were now working to a Gaitskellite brief which played down nationalization in favour of other interventionist measures on the supply side, while sketching a social programme to be financed through economic growth, and promising no great upsets in foreign policy.

There was little enough here to lose an election for Labour; yet lost it was. The Conservatives had now advanced in four general elections running; the electoral pendulum had ceased to swing. The revisionist right of the Labour Party sought to turn the techniques of market research to political advantage, and a widely cited analysis appeared under the significant title, Must Labour Lose? Had affluence under a bipartisan welfare state simply robbed Labour of its constituency? With the benefit of hindsight, this does not seem a silly question but it may imply a premature answer. Sociological trends were indeed against Labour, eroding its traditional working-class bedrock, but such geological processes are slow to show their full effects. For example, it should be remembered that the miners who, more than anyone else, had pioneered labour representation still numbered 660,000 in 1959, a decline of only 5 per cent since 1951. Trade-union membership held steady at just over half the male workforce and just under a quarter of the women. Such symbols of the traditional working class as cloth caps, whippets, brown ale, even the TUC’s own Daily Herald, all survived the 1950s and only subsequently yielded, cohort by cohort, to shell-suits, rottweilers, lager and Murdoch’s Sun. It is simplistic to regard Labour’s electoral decline as predetermined, least of all by sociology.

A crude economic explanation works somewhat better, since organized workers, notably in the currently prosperous motor trade, could become affluent under the free collective bargaining which the Government offered. This did not transform them into members of the middle class, still less convert them overnight into loyal Conservatives. Instead they remained militant in their commitment to their unions, which were viewed instrumentally as the means of securing fatter pay packets. Government was increasingly judged by the same criterion: whether it held out the prospect of a better standard of living, through its impact on jobs and prices (in that order).

The idea that there was a trade-off between unemployment and inflation, which was given academic respectability with the ‘Phillips curve’ in 1958, had important implications for the workings of the democratic system. Government, it seemed, could control the economic cycle through doses of reflation; and, given the British prime minister’s prerogative of choosing an election date, such stimulation might be coordinated with the electoral cycle. As the issue of economic management became increasingly central to electoral behaviour, two readings of the situation were plausible. One was a piece of economic determinism, reassuring for a party already long established in power: to wonder how on earth a decently competent Government could ever lose an election again. The other reading allowed more for the role of immediate political contingency: to wonder whether even Supermac could continue – as was now required by a more fickle electorate – to provide unfailing proofs of his irreplaceable virtuosity.

ANGRY

The consumer society, which had seemed to nourish mere relief and complacency in the mid-1950s, in turn fed its own restless dissatisfactions, once its comforts came to be taken for granted. The title of J. K. Galbraith’s book The Affluent Society (1958) introduced a subsequently inescapable term, a reminder that Europe was now going down a road already familiar in North America – with a disjunction between private affluence and public squalor as the unappealing feature which Galbraith highlighted. Earlier, Crosland’s The Future of Socialism (1956) had offered a congruent message: that ‘Keynesianism’, let alone ‘Butskellism’, was not enough; within the new framework of consensus, there were stark choices to be faced about the priority given to social spending as against ever-increasing private consumption. This was a revisionist interpretation of socialism, which Crosland offered as a social-democratic strategy for a modernized Labour Party (though his opponents in the party certainly had a point in saying that it was hardly traditional socialism at all). These two books were widely influential in shaping attitudes on the left.

There were more strident voices which caught the current mood. In John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger (1956) Jimmy Porter’s impassioned cry is that there ‘aren’t any good, brave causes left’ – as though affluence had robbed the rising generation of the fine opportunities for expressing their moral indignation that Jarrow or Spain had provided in the 1930s. Osborne’s work, dramatically powerful but ideologically incoherent, was seized upon by journalists as typifying a generation of ‘Angry Young Men’, who were hastily parcelled together as a literary movement. Colin Wilson, with a beard and sandals, obviously looked the part; and his philosophically pretentious literary study, The Outsider (1956), enjoyed an otherwise inexplicable hour of heady fame. It was savaged in a review by Kingsley Amis, whose down-to-earth satire on academic life, Lucky Jim (1954), had already won a following a couple of years previously; but that did not stop the media from conscripting Amis too as an ‘AΥΜ’ Other supposed members – the poet and novelist John Wain, and John Braine, with his north-country romance of upward social mobility, Room at the Top (1957) – were even more disparate.

How angry were they – and about what? Osborne became notorious for challenging the stifling social mores of upper-middle-class England. In this he was abetted by his influential champion, Kenneth Tynan, the young dramatic critic of the Observer, who directed his fire at the ‘well-made play’, long the vehicle of West End successes for Noel Coward and, above all, Terence Rattigan. For example, in The Winslow Boy (1946), both in the theatre and in Anthony Asquith’s smoothly directed film (1950) – one of his many happy adaptations of Rattigan’s plays – the conventions of courtroom drama had rarely been exploited to such good effect, gripping audiences who knew that this was what they liked. Goaded by Tynan, Rattigan jumped to the defence of his public, appealing to his mythical ‘Aunt Edna’ as against a supposed avant-garde.

These contrasting aesthetic stereotypes obscured the fact that it was hardly literary innovation which distinguished the Angry Young Men. After Look Back in Anger, Osborne went on to stage a brilliant evocation of British decline through exploiting the idiom of the music hall in The Entertainer (1957). ‘Don’t clap too hard – it’s a very old building,’ quips the ageing star, Archie Rice, who could easily have stood in for Macmillan, as Vicky quickly spotted in another inimitable cartoon. But had Osborne really strayed far outside the range of Coward’s dramatic conventions – Cavalcade (1931), for example – or only his social and political conventions?

Kingsley Amis, who was to write a string of versatile novels, nothing if not well-made, found his oeuvre even more easily assimilated over the next forty years by an establishment he had once scorned. By stages the conventionally left-wing asperities of Take A Girl Like You (1960) were subtly modulated. In Girl, 20 (1971) facile marxisant stereotyping – ‘You are an imperialist racist fascist’ – is observed with wry disdain. By the time of Stanley and the Women (1984), fashionable feminist nostrums come to supply the sand in Amis’s oyster. Politically this represented a sharp shift to the rebarbative right. In the public persona which he projected, Amis ended up as a latter-day Evelyn Waugh, albeit without the religion, offering his public an impeccable performance as Exasperated Old Buffer. Amis self-consciously reached out, if not to Aunt Edna, then to a ‘middlebrow’ reading public, exhibiting his own virtuosity by publishing one novel, The Riverside Villas Murder (1973), in the idiom of the classic whodunit, and another, Colonel Sun (1968), in the style of Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond.

Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie were long the big names in detective fiction, a staple of the now struggling commercial libraries, like Boots the Chemist, and later of the burgeoning paperback imprints. Sayers, who died in 1957, had quit the genre twenty years earlier when her fictional sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, solved the last of his baffling cases. Several had been set against backdrops Sayers, the thwarted academic, knew well from her own career: the advertising agency in Murder Must Advertise (1933) or the Oxford college in Gaudy Night (1935). Nonchalant, aristocratic, scholarly, and accompanied by his faithful manservant, Lord Peter had outshone plodding professional policemen like the true amateur he was; but he could hardly have survived in post-war Britain.

By contrast, Agatha Christie maintained an astonishing popularity from her first thriller, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) until her death in 1976 (by which time her play The Mousetrap had completed the first quarter-century of its run in the West End). Her books showed her perfunctory about characterization, instead opting to pit her wits against her readers in solving the finite puzzles of her tightly constructed plots. For her purposes, such stylized settings as country houses isolated by fresh snow supplied the necessary rules of the game, not a whimsical, sub-Brideshead social context. Her detectives – whether Hercule Poirot, the retired Belgian policeman, or Miss Marpie, the underrated little old lady – were not easily pigeonholed in the conventional hierarchies; and the relatively classless nature of Christie’s appeal kept her wide readership comfortable.

Bond was to become the basis of some of the most profitable British films ever made, replete with gadgets, gloss and glamour. Conversely, it was ‘kitchen-sink’ realism which originally heralded a ‘new wave’ in British cinema, paralleling that in France. The film version of Room at the Top (1959) put a sharper edge on Braine’s social comment on the class system, as well as introducing a frankness in its treatment of sex hitherto lacking in British films. Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) was another class-conscious account of the industrial north, juxtaposing the alienating experience of Arthur Seaton’s workday week with his wild weekend binges of booze and sex. Under the direction of Karel Reisz, and with a fine performance from Albert Finney, there was a faithful translation in the film version (1960), which was produced by Woodfall Films, a new company formed by John Osborne and Tony Richardson. The Woodfall film of The Entertainer (1960), directed by Richardson and keeping Olivier in the starring role, eventually succeeded in getting Osborne’s own work across to cinema audiences, after an initial disappointment with the filmed Look Back in Anger (1958): its choler, bile and spleen dissipated on celluloid, despite having Richard Burton in the leading role.

The anger welling up irrepressibly in Osborne was as difficult to miss as its target was difficult to identify. Sometimes called the new Shaw, Osborne lacked the coherence of the Shavian political vision: instead Osborne’s was a highly visceral, highly polemical impulse which led him to proclaim his hatred as much for Gaitskell as for Macmillan.

The cause which most effectively appealed to this inchoate, unfocused mood of frustration and protest was surely the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Its rise came not only post-Suez but post-Hungary, since the consequent exodus of many intellectuals from the ‘old-left’ Communist Party saw the inception of a ‘new left’. The Communists, of course, applauded the Soviet bomb, as a workers’ bomb; but the new left was comprehensively anti-bomb – Soviet, American, but above all, nearest to home, against the British bomb. The proliferation of nuclear weapons in the early 1950s caused widespread anxiety about their capacity to devastate and pollute the world; and with good reason. As Macmillan well appreciated, there would have been even greater alarm about nuclear contamination had he not suppressed reports of more than one accident at the plutonium-processing plant at Windscale (Sellafield) in Cumbria.

The orthodox argument exploited the paradox that, precisely because its use was unthinkable, the bomb’s deterrent effect would be able to preserve peace, through a balance of terror and a mutual assurance of destruction (MAD). The Defence White Paper of 1957 brought this debate to a head, not least at the Labour Party conference that autumn at Brighton. Many of the old Bevanites were by now pressing for Labour to repudiate a nuclear strategy altogether; but they had to suffer the public defection of their erstwhile hero. Bevan, speaking as shadow Foreign Secretary, declined the prospect of going ‘naked into the conference chamber’; when he summarily dismissed his old comrades’ motion as ‘an emotional spasm’, it was a thrilling piece of theatre. It consolidated the post-Suez axis at the top of the Labour Party; it killed some of Bevan’s oldest political friendships; but it did not kill CND.

After Brighton, CND emerged as a pressure group outside the ordinary party political structure, with the support of big names like Bertrand Russell, J. B. Priestley, A. J. P. Taylor and (of course) John Osborne, as well as Bevanites like Michael Foot and the trade-union leader Frank Cousins. Where CND initially succeeded was through the simplicity of its message – ‘Ban the Bomb’ – which used the language of protest rather than calculation. In reposing such faith in the worldwide moral effect of a British renunciation of nuclear weapons, the unilateralists surely harboured their own great-power illusions. At Easter 1958 there was a march from London to Aldermaston, the weapons research station in Berkshire; the next year the march made even more impact on public opinion, partly because it now started out from Aldermaston and picked up vast numbers on its last leg into Trafalgar Square. Pacifist in inspiration, the Aldermaston marches remained pacific in method, notable as good-tempered annual festivals for all the family. The distinctive CND logo soon became familiar through lapel badges and graffiti.

This was brought out by the Labour Party conference in 1959. In the aftermath of electoral defeat, Gaitskell made the radical proposal to amend Clause IV of the party’s constitution, which had defined its rationale in terms of common ownership. In Germany the SPD (the social democrats) had done essentially the same thing at their Bad Godesberg conference earlier that year. In Britain, however, revisionism was not so easy to accept. Bevan, now a stricken man, within months of his death, sought reconciliation within the party, but could not save the leadership from a rebuff. The support of the big unions, which had been Gaitskell’s mainstay, had come adrift. In particular he could no longer rely on the TGWU once Deakin’s right-wing regime had been replaced (after a short interregnum) by the election of the left-winger Cousins as general secretary. Gaitskell had to accept their rejection of his revisionist agenda, moreover, because within months he was faced with a bigger crisis.

By 1960 the unilateralists had won enough union support, as well as left-wing constituency parties, to carry their policy motion at the party conference, in the face of Gaitskell’s impassioned plea that this was incompatible with British membership of Nato. He isolated this commitment (rather than Britain’s own bomb) as the crucial issue in imploring his supporters to ‘fight and fight and fight again to save the party we love’. The Parliamentary Labour Party was now at odds with conference decisions but Gaitskell succeeded in getting conference to reverse itself the following year. This was partly the product of a grassroots campaign in the constituencies; but chiefly it was due to the fact that three out of the six biggest unions changed sides between 1960 and 1961 – voting for the status quo, just as they had over Clause IV. The effect of these vicissitudes on Gaitskell’s own position was potent, partly because his role had been dramatized by television coverage of the party conferences, at time when moves to broadcast parliament had not yet been successful. By 1962 his public image was incontestably that of a strong and decisive leader – whereas it was Macmillan who was by now reeling from crisis to crisis.

The basic trouble was the economy. The boom which peaked in 1959 and 1960, with growth between 4 and 5 per cent, was unsustainable. Heathcoat Amory’s measures had stimulated domestic consumption, so that imports were growing nearly twice as fast as exports. Macmillan, belatedly recognizing the symptoms of overheating, once more sought a new Chancellor and drafted in Selwyn Lloyd, who had served him faithfully at the Foreign Office. (The appointment of the Earl of Home as the new Foreign Secretary seemed less significant at the time.) Lloyd began cautiously, showing understandable reluctance to choke economic growth through dear money, and bank-rate wobbled for over a year, before the weakness of sterling dictated the full severity of a 7 per cent rate in July 1961.

This time round, though, a monetary squeeze was not left to work alone. In his 1961 Budget Lloyd had armed himself with new powers to vary revenue duties; these ‘regulators’ permitted a new flexibility in the fine tuning of the economy. Thus in July Lloyd was able to reinforce his monetary squeeze with an immediate fiscal squeeze. Moreover, he backed this package with a ‘pay pause’ – the first attempt since Cripps to devise direct controls on inflationary wage settlements.

The outcry was enormous, not least because of the anomalies the policy created. In particular, it froze new settlements in the public sector while merely subjecting the private sector to restraint by exhortation. Partly to cope with such issues, the Government now moved to set up a National Incomes Commission, but, since it was boycotted by the TUC, this did little to win assent for the new policy. TUC cooperation was secured, however, for the creation of another tripartite body, representing unions, employers and Government: the National Economic Development Council (NEDC). The Treasury was steadily abandoning its ‘hands-off’ approach to economic management, and this sort of coordination of information was a tentative exercise in indicative planning, if hardly dirigiste.

Not only was the language French but both the inspiration and the stimulus were likewise European, and with good reason. The fact was that the EEC had proved successful despite its lack of British participation. Indeed it was Britain’s attempt to organize a rival grouping of seven countries within a European Free Trade Area (EFTA) which already looked sad. The Seven, which included countries like Denmark and Ireland, overwhelmingly dependent on the UK market for their food exports, was a loose free-trading association of the kind which Britain could easily accept; but it failed to get access to the common market established by the Six, which – inward-looking, corporatist, cartelized, over-regulated, protectionist, or whatever – was now the dynamic force.

In 1953 the Six between them had accounted for only 10 per cent of British imports, compared with 14 per cent from Australia and New Zealand, which in turn took over 12 per cent of British exports, slightly in excess of the European share. By 1960, however, nearly 15 per cent of British imports came from the EEC, only 8 per cent from the antipodean Dominions; and the EEC now took 16 per cent of British exports, while Australia and New Zealand took only two-thirds as much. Commonwealth preferences simply meant that the British economy was now facing the wrong way, with its back turned on the expanding markets it most needed if it was to keep pace with the growth of international trade. British exports had claimed around 16 per cent of world trade in manufactures in the mid-1950s; by 1960 this share was under 13 per cent (and it was to drop below 10 per cent by 1966).

Macmillan, who had always professed a sneaking sympathy for European integration, decided that there was nothing for it but to swallow his pride and sneak no longer. In the summer of 1961 he persuaded the cabinet to apply for membership of the EEC. The Community structures which Britain might have hoped to mould after Messina were instead naturally setting in a shape not much to Britain’s liking; in particular, the Common Agricultural Policy, with its petty protectionism and gross farm subsidies, flew in the face of Britain’s historic bias towards free trade in food. Special arrangements to ease the transition for Australia and New Zealand were clearly necessary; Canada, long since in the dollar area, did not pose the same problem. These were difficulties which Edward Heath, as Minister for European Affairs at the Foreign Office, was commissioned to resolve. Heath, a former chief whip, was an able recruit to the cabinet, a committed Europhile ever since his entry to Parliament in 1950, and an obviously appropriate figure to represent Britain’s new commitment in the protracted negotiations which now began in Brussels. The real obstacle to British membership was not in Brussels but in Paris, where President de Gaulle took a lofty view of his duty to judge the European credentials of the Anglo-Saxons, with whom he had always experienced such difficulties. But Macmillan felt confident that he could exploit a long-standing personal relationship here, just as he had with Eisenhower.

Macmillan’s difficulties were compounded by the fact that he had launched his European initiative, not from strength but to retrieve an already weak position. The Government’s popularity, following the pay pause, had plummeted. The Liberals had been picking up votes in the 1961 by-elections. In March 1962 they almost toppled the mountainous Conservative majority in Blackpool North; the next day, they fulfilled their wildest dreams in capturing Orpington in Kent, a byword for deepest Tory suburbia. This was the biggest by-election upset since the war; the spectre of Orpington Man suddenly stalked the Conservative benches in parliament. Macmillan’s response was designed to give his Government a new lease of life by removing the main target of its unpopularity – Selwyn Lloyd. But in executing this piece of selective ruthlessness, he lost his nerve, and sought to cover it with a major reconstruction of the cabinet in July, in which no fewer than six other ministers were also sacked. This ‘night of the long knives’ stored up further resentments, without turning the tide in public opinion.

Though there was no repetition of Orpington, Liberal intervention was now clearly helping Labour, which snatched three seats from the Conservatives before the year was out. The prospect of a Labour Government, unsettling in itself, had a particular European dimension since the party seemed generally sceptical about the whole idea. The Liberals were the only party straightforwardly in favour of entering the common market, but they would not be calling the shots. Formally Labour reserved its position, but in October 1962 Gaitskell again baffled observers who thought that he lacked emotion, this time by telling the Labour Party conference that entry to the EEC would mean ‘the end of a thousand years of history’. This passionate stand may have been inspired by concern for the Commonwealth, and it did not commit a future Labour Government, but it hardly made for a pro-European atmosphere.

Just as the Bevanites had felt betrayed by Bevan five years previously, so the younger Gaitskellites like Roy Jenkins, among the keenest of Europhiles, were now discomfited. Conversely, Gaitskell received unwontedly warm tributes from the left wing whom he had so recently worsted. In January 1963, however, after a routine illness had suddenly taken a critical turn, Gaitskell died, aged fifty-six. There were sufficient doubts about the personal qualities of his deputy George Brown to provoke another Gaitskellite, James Callaghan, to stand as well for the leadership; and the result was the election of neither, but of Harold Wilson, the ex-Bevanite.

By the time Wilson took over as leader of the Opposition, the Government was in deeper trouble than ever. Macmillan had raised the stakes over defence policy by insisting that Britain keep its own independent nuclear weapons, even though it had become totally dependent on the USA for any means of delivering them. This was the problem, largely self-imposed, which confronted him in his dealings with President Kennedy, whom he met at Nassau in December 1962. The British had relied upon a half-promise that the American Skybolt rocket would be supplied; but when the Kennedy administration decided to cancel it as operationally unsound – ‘pile of junk’ was one expression used – Macmillan was left politically exposed. He played the few cards in his hand with brilliant finesse, invoking his recent support for the USA in the Cuban missile crisis in one breath, his memories of the Somme in the next. What he got from a reluctant Kennedy was an agreement to supply the UK with the Polaris-submarine missile-launching system, which could be duly armed with British nuclear warheads. Whether this strike force could be called independent of the USA, which supplied the indispensable technology, was disputable; but the Nassau conference undoubtedly proclaimed a strong symbolic message about the ‘special relationship’.

How far Macmillan had calculated (or miscalculated) on de Gaulle’s response (or lack of response) is not clear. De Gaulle might well have blocked British entry in any event; but Nassau provided him with an object lesson in Britain’s preference for a transatlantic relationship over a European commitment. Macmillan had proved strategically mistaken in supposing that he need not choose. De Gaulle’s veto, announced in Paris in January 1963, effectively ended the negotiations over British entry to the EEC, and Heath sadly made his way home.

Ruefully, secretly, Macmillan recognized that this rebuff removed the keystone in his policy arch; yet there is every sign that he fully intended to fight another election. Nor was his resolve broken by the eruption of the Profumo scandal in the summer of 1963. Though provoking a riot of colourful rumour and innuendo, as it gradually came out that the Minister of War had been sharing a girlfriend with (among others) an attaché at the Soviet embassy, it led only to Profumo’s resignation, not the prime minister’s. The reason for Macmillan’s departure in October was not, therefore, the debilitated state of his Government, but his own misdiagnosed medical condition. A prostate operation temporarily laid him low; and before he turned the corner – which he shortly did, to such good effect that he was to remain a public figure for the next quarter-century – he had set the wheels in motion for resignation.

Since the drama was played out at just the time the Conservatives were assembling for their party conference, the leadership struggle was conducted in the glare of publicity, importing some of the razzmatazz of an American party convention into the incongruous setting of Blackpool. Once more the Tory Party turned towards Butler; once more they turned away – or, as critics like Macleod maintained, were purposely turned away from Butler in favour of less-qualified candidates, through the operation of a ‘magic circle’. Under recent legislation, permitting hereditary peers to renounce their titles, two new candidates emerged. One was obviously Lord Hailsham, whose flagrant bid for the premiership, however, lost him the support of the bedridden incumbent, who inclined instead towards Lord Home, the Foreign Secretary, whom almost everyone had forgotten. Macmillan advised the Queen that the majority of the cabinet preferred Home. Macleod and Powell not only decided that they would not serve under him: they told Butler so, thus, in Powell’s image, handing Butler a loaded revolver, which, characteristically, he chose not to use. Thus Macmillan had his way to the end; Lord Home became prime minister as Sir Alec Douglas-Home, and Butler yet again took second place in the new Government, this time serving as Foreign Secretary during the tail-end of a parliament which now had only a year to run.