The Conservative Party

Winston Churchill, as we have seen, barely acknowledged his role as Conservative Party leader in the war, and, indeed, Neville Chamberlain retained the title until his death in October 1940, five months after Churchill succeeded to the premiership. But, when the wartime Coalition Government broke up in May 1945, Churchill’s gloves were off. His last ten years in power, as Opposition Leader until 1951 and then as Prime Minister, have been judged harshly by historians. He has been derided for being an anachronism, ‘ga-ga’ or even drunk much of the time. He was none of these, although the publication of the diaries of his doctor, Lord Moran, shortly after his death in 1965 made many believe he was. Churchill’s peacetime leadership, we argue, is the most underrated of all Tory leaderships in the century. Churchill provided the perfect figure around which the party could adjust to the demands of the postwar world: no one else in the party could have performed this role.

If Churchill held the party together and personified it during this transitional phase, Harold Macmillan, Prime Minister in 1957–63, articulated a new vision of the party as one which could outdo Labour on welfare provision, which calmly oversaw the end of the empire and the spreading of ownership of property, if not yet of shares, and promoted the possession of consumer durables among lower-middle-class and working-class families.

None of the other leaders of these years, Anthony Eden (1955–7), Alec Douglas-Home (1963–5) or Edward Heath (1965–75), ever defined the party. That was their problem. Under them, the party lost five general elections and won only two, under Eden in May 1955 before his deficiencies as Prime Minister had had a chance to be displayed, and one by Heath in June 1970, just. Only at the end of this period did the party find another figure, capable of defining the party and taking it forward, and it was to be one of the most surprising leaders in the history of the party, neither an establishment figure, nor a conservative, nor a man.

Churchill’s abrogation of the job as party leader during the war meant that, when the European war concluded, the party lacked a policy on which to fight an election, a unified team of ministers, or an organisation in the country. Churchill returned to the political fray with a vengeance once the Coalition government broke up and normal party politics recommenced in May 1945. He castigated Labour for abandoning the Coalition before the war with Japan was complete, and cautioned against voting for Labour, which, he argued, would divide Britain along ideological lines. He alone could lead the country in the national interest. Churchill believed that gratitude to him as war leader would carry the day, and he decided to call an early election for 5 July, a full month before the atomic bombs in Japan ended the war in the Far East, to capitalise on this belief.

The party, however, failed to convince the middle classes in particular of the merits of its case. Memories of the party’s failure in the 1930s to stand up to the dictators, Churchill’s overblown rhetoric in the campaign (with talk of the socialists introducing a ‘Gestapo’ into Britain) and the steady domestic record of Labour ministers in the Coalition made Labour appear the more credible force. Although the Tory party managed to gain just under 40 per cent of the vote, the strength of the Labour challenge meant that Labour had almost a clean run, winning 393 MPs. The figure for the Tories eventually rose to just 213 once various independent and ‘National’ MPs opted to accept the Tory Whip. It was a shattering defeat, comparable in the twentieth century only to 1906 and 1997. The swing against the Tories during the war had gone so far that no campaign in 1945, however brilliant, could recover the ground.

Churchill’s leadership was denigrated not least by the ambitious figure of R.A. Butler, who in a variety of forums for reasons of self-aggrandisement made out that the real work in opposition was overseen by him at the head of the Conservative Research Department, not by Eden or Macmillan or anyone else, while Churchill was preoccupied with foreign affairs (such as his ‘iron curtain’ speech at Fulton, Missouri in 1946) and with writing his six volumes of self-justificatory War Memoirs. Butler and his like further argued that Churchill’s leadership of the party consisted of little more than hosting irregular lunches for the shadow Cabinet at London’s Savoy Hotel. Many of these same shadow ministers wanted him to quit, not least for leading the party so badly to a shattering general election defeat. They also wanted someone who would listen to them more – even be able to boss. For a year after 1945, exhausted and depressed, Churchill dithered, but from 1946 he was adamant that he would stay. Attempts by senior Tories to manoeuvre him out were a constant theme of the years 1947–55, but he eventually departed of his own accord. In refusing to be shifted by his lieutenants, he proved himself a shrewder judge and a better servant of the Tory party interest than those who tried to depose him. Much to the chagrin of his detractors, he became an increasingly loved and admired figure in the party after 1945, a sentiment that reached a high point in the extraordinary public acclaim on his 80th birthday on 30 November 1954.

For much of this period until 1950, Churchill remained above the fray. He was a benign presence around which the party could regroup and the shadow Cabinet find a cohesion it had lacked since 1940. He fought to keep the Conservatives in the centre ground of politics, a continuation of the tone of his leadership of the Coalition government. He even sought to change the name ‘Conservative’ to another, such as ‘Union Party’, to highlight its broad appeal, and he tried to unite the party with the Liberals in an anti-socialist alliance. His shadow ministers resisted such a move fiercely, though he did succeed in merging the Conservative and National Liberal parties in 1947.

Even though he played no active part in it, Churchill’s centrist beliefs were echoed in the work on policy reformulation overseen by Butler. The work of the Post-War Problems Central Committee since 1941 had paved the way. At first, Churchill had not wanted such work to continue after 1945, as he preferred to wait for Labour to destroy itself; he did not want policy work undertaken that could be seen as divisive or alienate potential voters or MPs from other parties taking the Tory Whip. But he bowed under pressure from the party. The Industrial Policy Committee was thus set up under Butler in 1946. Its work has been praised by Ramsden as ‘one of the key moments of Conservative Party history’, akin to Peel’s drafting of the Tamworth Manifesto in 1834. Peel had accepted the reforms of 1830–4 but said ‘no more’: so too did the Industrial Charter accept the Attlee government’s establishment of the National Health Service and the nationalisation of rail, coal, gas, and so forth, but it refused to let it go any further and abandon the ‘mixed economy’, which blended public with private ownership. The party’s right wing fought to defeat the new approach, but was seen off at the party conference in Brighton in October 1947. The battle for the heart of the party had been won, bar a few right-wingers, most of whom were extinct volcanoes. Many of the key figures of the Industrial Charter – Butler himself, Harold Macmillan, Derick Heathcoat Amory, Reginald Maudling and Iain Macleod – were to play major roles in implementing these centrist, consensual policies over the following fifteen years.

Butler’s leadership was vital in ensuring that the work of the Conservative Research Department (revived in 1946) received more recognition than earlier bodies, such as the Unionist Social Reform Committee, overlooked by Bonar Law, which had pressed for fresh, positive policies during 1911–14. Macmillan too was becoming an increasingly central figure. He had published an important if little-noticed book, The Middle Way, in 1938, arguing for a halfway position between outright capitalism and socialism (a stance which at the time placed him on the left of the party). In his later Memoirs he summed up the achievement after 1945: ‘We had to convince the great postwar electorate that we accepted the need for full employment in the welfare state: we accepted equally the need for central planning and even, in times of scarcity, physical control. We had to devise and publicise a position between the old Liberalism and the new Socialism.’ Macmillan perfectly encapsulated the position the Tory party held for thirty years after 1945. In his final sentence, change the words ‘Liberalism’ to ‘Labour’ and ‘Socialism’ to ‘Right’ and one also has the rationale behind, and explanation for, Labour’s unique electoral success after 1997. Macmillan, not Blair, first championed the ‘third way’.

The Conservative thinking bore fruit in the policy statement, The Right Road for Britain, in 1949 and in the manifesto for the 1950 general election, This is the Road . Thanks to an overhaul in party organisation, the party was much better equipped to fight this election than it had been in 1945. Call-up of agents and party workers had been partly responsible for the damage to organisation during the war, but matters began to improve dramatically when the retailer, Lord Woolton (who had been Minister for Food in the war), was appointed party chairman in July 1946, building on the underrated work of his predecessor, Ralph Assheton. By 1948, Central Office was fully operational again, and constituency and regional personnel and structures were reviving. A drive was made for new members, and by 1951 a figure approaching an extraordinary 2.8 million had been reached, with the Young Conservatives, set up in July 1946, a flourishing arm. Churchill’s popularity provided a major reason for the increase in membership – another and under-recognised indicator of his importance as party head. After his departure, party membership indicatively began to fall.

Modernisation of candidate selection was overseen by David Maxwell-Fyfe, the future Home Secretary, who oversaw a report published in 1949 arguing that those of moderate means should not be debarred from becoming parliamentary candidates. This partly fulfilled Baldwin’s dream in his ‘new Conservatism’ of 1924 of broadening the social base of the parliamentary party – although it was to be another twenty and more years before the party’s social base showed clear signs of being genuinely widened. Political education was given a higher profile too after 1945, with the Conservative Political Centre (CPC) running courses and producing literature for the party membership to debate and disseminate. Quintin Hogg (Lord Hailsham) was commissioned to write the influential ‘Penguin Special’ book The Case for Conservatism . It was all part of a move to win intellectuals back to the party. The party’s finances were revitalised too under Woolton, and its propaganda and media arms revolutionised. He began a fund for a new home for party headquarters, eventually to be opened in Smith Square, Westminster, in 1958.

The work of Butler and Woolton played its part, as did new constituency boundaries and postal voting, in the major Conservative recovery in the February 1950 general election. Although their share of the popular vote rose by less than 4 per cent, the Tories won back eighty-four seats, slashing Labour’s overall majority from 146 to six. Churchill, sensing victory in his nostrils, became more active over the eighteen months of the second Attlee government. He tried unsuccessfully to convince the party of the value of a Con-Lib Pact. In the October 1951 election, the Liberals, without a pact and short of money to fight another general election so soon after 1950, would field only 109 candidates, of whom just six were successful with only 2.5 per cent of the popular vote, the Liberals’ twentieth-century nadir. The absence of a Liberal candidate in so many constituencies (in contrast to 1950) meant anti-socialist voters often backed the Tory candidate, helping to explain why a further twenty-eight seats were gained, giving the Tories a majority of seventeen. Ironically, the October 1951 general election saw Labour obtain 200,000 more votes than the Conservatives, and 48.8 per cent of the popular vote, the highest degree of public support in its history.

Churchill, once again in Downing Street, had a final opportunity to stamp his mark on his party and country. His appointments showed what the character of his government would be. He appointed Butler as Chancellor of the Exchequer rather than the more red-blooded capitalist, Oliver Lyttelton, and the emollient Walter Monckton as Minister of Labour rather than David Maxwell-Fyfe, who had alarmed the trade unions with talk about their financial links to Labour. Right-wingers, such as former party chairman Ralph Assheton, Richard Law (son of Bonar Law) and Charles Waterhouse, were kept on the backbenches, while elder statesmen like Harry Crookshank and Lord Swinton were denied the ear of the leader they sought.

In area after area, Churchill, albeit with some wobbles, embedded a moderate, progressive Conservatism, which defined the party for a generation. In economic policy, the government was committed to maintaining full employment, in both rhetoric and practice – and unemployment never rose above half a million. Norman Macrae of The Economist coined the phrase ‘Mr Butskell’ to indicate the similarity of policies between the Labour Chancellor Hugh Gaitskell (1950–1) and Butler. Historians like Harriet Jones have since questioned the extent of continuity of policy after 1951, and indeed the whole notion of a Labour-Conservative broad ‘consensus’ on policy between 1945 and 1975 pointing out how radical Labour was in power after 1945, and moves like the Tories’ failed plan to make sterling convertible in 1952. But the fact is that, if one looks at the policies that governments of both parties pursued in power (as opposed to what they said in opposition), then continuity rather than abrupt reversal is what one sees across broad swathes of policy.

In industrial relations, the Industrial Charter complimented the trade unions on their ‘great and vital part to play in industry’. The record of the unions in the Second World War, when they had loyally served the war effort, had been decisive in changing Tory thinking. After 1951 Monckton, with Churchill’s warm encouragement, ensured that industrial harmony reigned: fewer days were lost in strikes each year under Churchill’s premiership than under Attlee’s. (Monckton became known as the ‘oil can’ for his easing of disputes.) The right grumbled about ‘union appeasement’, and later praised Thatcher’s tough stance. But the task after 1951 was to show that the Conservatives, with the memories of the 1920s and 1930s still fresh, could work with the unions, especially as Labour before 1951 had predicted industrial anarchy if the Conservatives were to be elected to power.

After 1951, Churchill’s only ‘denationalisation’ (as privatisation was then called) was two of the industries nationalised by Labour: iron and steel, and road haulage. The Tories argued that neither was a natural monopoly; in contrast, the other industries nationalised by Labour had suffered from years of under-investment, were ripe for a new national organisation, and were not viable standing on their own in a free market. In broadcasting, however, Churchill refused to back Attlee’s move in 1950 to renew the BBC’s monopoly, and under his leadership independent television first went on air in 1954.

Acceptance of the Attlee government’s social policy was more problematic for the Conservatives. Despite the party’s record of introducing social policy in the 1920s and 1930s, the Industrial Charter and other policy statements in opposition after 1945 had not produced a clear party line on welfare. The dominant view up to 1951 was in favour of selectivity and means testing. But, once in office, and boosted by the money flowing into the Exchequer in the affluent 1950s, the Tories were happy to finance a free and universal welfare state out of general taxation even at the cost of some mild inflation. Tough choices did not have to be made. Again, their acceptance of the welfare state owed much to Churchill. In housing, he even went beyond Labour. Appointing Macmillan in 1951 with an active brief as Minister of Housing, by 1953 the government had met its target of building 300,000 new houses a year. In the period up to 1964, the proportion of families owning their own houses doubled to almost half the population. The housing boom was facilitated by a relaxation of controls on building which was in tune with the Conservatives’ wish to abandon Labour’s unnecessary restrictions, summed up in the Tories’ 1951 election slogan ‘Set the People Free’.

In foreign policy, Churchill was the dominant force. Eden had disliked his staunchly anti-Soviet Union and pro-US line after 1945, but the deepening of the Cold War meant that Eden had to bow to Churchill’s line. Churchill’s warm espousal of a ‘United States of Europe’ proved to amount to little in policy terms after 1951, and Britain stood apart from plans to unite Europe in defence and economic federations. On the Empire, Churchill’s unhappiness with India’s independence in 1947 was echoed by his backing after 1951 for quelling insurgents fighting for independence in Malaya and Kenya. But he did not prove the reactionary leader resisting moves to self-government across the Empire that Labour had predicted. Most tellingly, he eventually backed, at a key meeting of the 1922 Committee, Eden’s policy on pulling troops out of Egypt including, fatefully, the Suez zone. By siding with Eden rather than the pro-imperial right-wing caucus, Churchill had shown that, even on the policy most dear to his heart, he would move with the times. Even the cause of the ‘Empire free trade’, the last gasp of Joseph Chamberlain’s 1903 policy, was killed off under his premiership, despite protests from Leo Amery and the old guard at successive party conferences.

In his response to Stalin’s death in March 1953, Churchill also laid another ghost to rest, namely, that he would be a belligerent Prime Minister (the Daily Mirror, the Labour-supporting newspaper, had deployed the scare tactic on election day in 1951 with a headline ‘Whose Finger on the Trigger?’, implying that Churchill would lead the country back into war, possibly even a nuclear one). Yet Churchill saw Stalin’s death as conferring a unique historic opportunity, as the last survivor of the wartime Big Three (Roosevelt, Stalin and himself), to bring about a new understanding between the two sides in the Cold War. Although unsuccessful, largely because he was thwarted by America’s Eisenhower administration, he nevertheless anticipated the thaw of the late 1950s and the detente policy of the 1970s. Here again, Churchill was ahead of his time.

But time was one commodity Churchill did not have himself. He suffered a serious stroke in mid-1953, after minor strokes in 1949 and 1952. He kept giving Anthony Eden, his nominated successor since 1942, dates for his retirement: Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in June 1953, his 80th birthday in November 1954. But he ultimately left in April 1955 at a moment of his choosing.

Tony Blair later had doubts about whether Gordon Brown, his long-serving heir apparent, was really up to the job. In Churchill’s case, his doubts proved fully justified. At first, however, all looked well for Eden. He called an election in May 1955, weeks after his succession. Boosted by the aura of success at home and abroad, the Conservatives reached a postwar record in terms of the proportion of votes, with 49.7 per cent voting for the party, which translated into a very satisfactory majority of fifty-five. Eden was elated to have won his own mandate. But very soon his premiership came under attack, most vehemently from Churchill’s son, Randolph, as well as from the Daily Telegraph, which famously bemoaned the absence of ‘the smack of firm government’ under his leadership. A deteriorating economy and a botched second budget in October 1955 did not help him. He became gloomy and defensive, exacerbated by what historians have since found out to be severe ill-health, requiring high levels of medication. He appeared neither knowledgeable nor comfortable with domestic policy. But it was his speciality, foreign policy, that was to be his undoing, as discussed in the box on the next two pages.

EDEN AND SUEZ 1956

Anthony Eden had first come to public prominence as the debonair, handsome and young Foreign Secretary appointed in December 1935 in the National Government. He resigned nominally over appeasement in February 1938, to be succeeded by Halifax, though vanity had as much to do with his decision as policy disagreement. He returned as Foreign Secretary in December 1940, but remained overshadowed by Churchill. As Churchill’s designated successor, he effectively led the party for much of the 1945–51 period, and was an impressive Foreign Secretary from 1951 to 1955, with a particularly notable year in 1954 when he helped oversee a settlement at Geneva of the crisis in Vietnam, which held for a few years.

It is ironic, given his expertise, that that it was a foreign crisis that would break his premiership and his reputation, though recent biographers, notably Richard Thorpe, have tried to rehabilitate him. In July 1956 Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian leader, nationalised the Suez Canal. Since Disraeli’s purchase, Britain had retained a substantial share in the international company based in Paris which owned the Canal. The legality of Nasser’s action in international law was unclear, denying Eden an easy way out. The United Nations proved unhelpful in offering him an acceptable solution avoiding the need for war.

Eden was in a dilemma. Do nothing, and he would be hounded, possibly from office, by the party’s right wing, who had not forgiven him for withdrawing from Egypt in 1954. But if he went for a military response, without UN backing, and without even any guarantee of American support, he risked isolation on the world stage. His conjuring up of images of Nasser as the new Hitler or Mussolini carried little weight abroad, but more at home above all in the Conservative Party, which at its annual conference in October 1956 bayed for a military success. Eden had already let himself become embroiled in a secret plan in association with France and Israel: an Israeli attack on Egypt was to be halted by an Anglo-French invasion to keep the warring parties apart. The plan was as flawed as it was naive, but it was Eden’s lying to his Cabinet about any such ‘collusion’ with Israel that so damaged his good name.

America did not come to Britain’s defence when hostilities began, as Eden had hoped. Rather, Eisenhower, in the midst of his re-election in early November, effectively pulled the plug on the operation by withdrawing American support for sterling, and ensured that Britain and France retreated in humiliation to make way for a UN force. Eden, his health having crumbled, resigned in January 1957. He died almost exactly twenty years later to the day, carrying to his grave the conviction that he was right on Suez.

Macmillan had been one of the strongest advocates of a military response to Nasser in 1956. His confident line, in contrast to Butler’s vacillating, was one factor that led the Cabinet to back him, not Butler, for the succession. He took over a divided and demoralised party, and a government widely expected to fall after a few weeks following what remains Britain’s greatest humiliation of the last one hundred years. Yet he went on to revive the party, to lead it to one of the greatest victories of the century, and to become the leader who personified a whole period of Tory rule.

Macmillan proved the perfect leader for the age, as Baldwin and Churchill had done before him. His Etonian and Grenadier Guards background and marriage to the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire connected him backwards to the aristocratic tradition of the Salisburys and Churchills, while his family’s humble origins in a Scottish croft pointed forward to the meritocratic background of Heath, Thatcher and Major. With his languid, Edwardian style, he epitomised a bygone age, yet he was the first British Prime Minister to master television (as effectively as Baldwin had earlier mastered the radio and newsreel), he championed British power on the world stage, yet realised Britain had to relinquish its empire, seek its place in the European Community, and would have to depend on the United States for its nuclear technology; and he inflated the economy to pay for the burgeoning welfare state, yet also realised that government, industry and the social services (though not the unions) had to modernise and become more efficient.

His formative experiences as an officer in the trenches in the First World War (one shared with Churchill and Eden, but with no later Tory leader) inclined him towards a paternalistic attitude to those in his care, while his experience after 1924 as MP for the economically deprived Stockton-on-Tees constituency led him to see at first hand the suffering caused by depression and unemployment. Such experience informed his book The Middle Way, and, once in Number 10, he resolved that he would not let Treasury conservatism dampen the economy and cause unemployment, even at the risk of causing some inflation – ‘a little inflation never hurt anyone’, he used to say. He thus stood up to Peter Thorneycroft, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, in the public spending round for 1958–9, the last before the general election of 1959. Macmillan refused to let Thorneycroft pull in the fiscal belt too tightly, which prompted Thorneycroft’s resignation along with his junior Treasury ministers, including Enoch Powell, who was thought to have emboldened Thorneycroft into being so uncompromising. The amount in dispute, a mere £50 million out of a total spend of £6 billion, seemed trivial, but it was the episode later highlighted by Powell, Thorneycroft and indeed Thatcher (who later appointed Thorneycroft her party chairman) as the shameful moment when Keynesian thinking triumphed over monetarism. The analogy was, of course, stretched too far, but it does reveal Macmillan’s determination, for electoral and policy reasons, to avoid anything smacking of right-wing retrenchment. His staged response to the dismissals as ‘little local difficulties’ also showed his early mastery of ‘soundbites’.

Macmillan was at the height of his power between 1957 and 1959. He held back on modernising policies which he knew would create shock waves until after the general election was safely won. For the time being, he exuded reassurance and calm, but also a toughness that surprised his Cabinet, as when he saw off the resignation of Lord Salisbury (the premier’s grandson) in March 1957, ostensibly in protest at the release from jail of the pro-independence Archbishop Makarios in the British colony of Cyprus.

The lesson Macmillan absorbed from Suez was that Britain should never again uncouple itself from the United States, and, trading on his wartime relationship with Eisenhower, he immediately set to work rebuilding their previous bond. His strategy for dealing with Suez was to ignore it: no enquiries, no recriminations, no discussion. Macmillan drew attention away from the Middle East by his tour of the Commonwealth in 1958 and his visit to Moscow in 1959. At the latter, his intuitive understanding of the media was seen in his donning a large white fur hat. This was the image everyone remembered long after the substance was forgotten. Just before the 1959 general election, Eisenhower shamelessly bolstered the Conservative cause by taking part in a joint broadcast with Macmillan from Number 10, illustrating vividly the total rehabilitation of Britain in the world community and the utter irrelevance of Suez.

Macmillan felt confident as the election approached. His own standing ran high, helped ironically by a cynical cartoon by Vicky in 1958 in the Evening Standard which dubbed him ‘Supermac’, a name immediately latched on to by his supporters as a term of approval, even reverence. Heathcoat Amory, Thorneycroft’s more biddable successor as Chancellor, produced a tax-cutting budget in 1959, and the Tories were able to trade on the spread of affluence and consumer goods – televisions, washing machines, cars, even holidays abroad – to almost all sections of society. ‘You’ve never had it so good’, Macmillan had earlier intoned in 1957 (albeit not in those exact words). It became a slogan that was joined at the 1959 election by another, reminiscent of the red-scare tactics of old, ‘Don’t let Labour ruin it’. An extensive press and poster campaign, the most sophisticated in party history thanks to the advertising agency – Colman, Prentis and Varley – helped ram the message home. Labour offered little incentive for the electorate to switch allegiance: Hugh Gaitskell had succeeded Attlee as leader in December 1955, but proved no more able to lead a united party, nor one offering policies capable of persuading a settled electorate to switch its strong allegiances.

In the general election that Macmillan called for October 1959, the proportion of the country voting Tory dropped marginally from 49.7 per cent to 49.3 per cent, but the numbers of voters, due to more taking part, rose by nearly half a million, and the Conservative majority rose to over 100. The party won 365 seats to Labour’s 258 and the Liberals’ 6. It was the only time in the twentieth century that a party was elected three times in succession with increasing numbers of MPs, and was a spectacular vindication for Macmillan’s style of leadership since 1957. Questions began to be asked whether Labour, at least with its current organisation and brand of policies, could ever win again, so out of tune did it appear to be with the heartland of Britain. One political socialist wrote a book entitled Must Labour Lose? As Macmillan’s and the Tories’ ratings rose still higher in 1960, and the party took a seat from Labour that March in a by-election in Yorkshire, it appeared that he would carry all before him.

With the recovery from Suez confirmed by the general election, Macmillan could now embark on the bolder half of his premiership, which he always knew would make enemies in the party. He pushed for more rapid progress to self-government in the Empire, heralded by the appointment of Iain Macleod as Colonial Secretary in October 1959 and his speech in Cape Town in February 1960 in which he spoke of a ‘wind of change’ sweeping through Africa in favour of black majority rule. (The right-wing, pro-empire and anti-immigration Monday Club took its name from the day that Macmillan delivered his speech.) At home, he opted for the corporatist policy of bringing representatives of industry and the unions together with government to agree and plan common objectives, so putting to an end, he hoped, years of futile dispute between capital and labour. These ideas bore fruit in the National Economic Development Council and the National Incomes Commission of 1961–2. This strategy proved a blind alley, however, due in part to the unions’ inability to see the broader picture, and was tried unsuccessfully subsequently by both the Wilson and Heath governments. Macmillan established a variety of inquiries, of which the best-known were the Robbins inquiry into higher education (which prompted a huge expansion of universities) and the Buchanan inquiry into urban traffic (from which little changed, though railways were rationalised after the Beeching Report). Local government was reorganised, with the Greater London Council replacing the London County Council in 1963.

In April 1961 Macmillan opened discussions about the possibility of Britain joining the European Economic Community (EEC). Always a keen European, Macmillan was concerned that Britain had earlier missed the opportunity of joining the original six EEC nations who signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957. With party opposition coming in particular from the farming interest and the pro-Commonwealth lobby, Macmillan trod stealthily. Macmillan saw British entry as the cornerstone policy of his second term. So when President de Gaulle vetoed Britain’s entry in January 1963, his foreign and to some extent his domestic policies were suddenly in tatters. He had hoped to rejuvenate his government by his dismissal of seven Cabinet Ministers in the so-called ‘Night of the Long Knives’ reshuffle of July 1962. But not even this brave, even foolhardy, move gave Macmillan the lift or the fresh image for his government he sought.

Hard though Macmillan swam, he could not prevail against a tide flowing ever more strongly against him. The end of the 1950s heralded one of those periodic cultural shifts which are as hard to predict as they are to explain. The weight of intellectual opinion, offended by Suez, began turning away from the government. Bookshops suddenly became full of volumes critical of government policy, the state of Britain and its institutions. As in the late nineteenth century, concern spread that Britain’s competitors, Germany, the United States, Japan and France, were doing much better economically, and that Britain’s economy and political class were stagnant.

Macmillan himself began to look old and out of touch, an image accentuated by the advent of John F. Kennedy as President of the United States from January 1961. Macmillan began to be parodied as an aristocrat fit just for shooting grouse on moors in the north. In December 1959 Hugh Greene took over as Director-General of the BBC and quickly established a regime far less deferential to government. The satirical magazine, Private Eye, the television comedy That Was The Week That Was and the review Beyond the Fringe all date from, and encapsulate the mood of, these times. The year 1962 was particularly damaging for the government, with the most days lost through strikes since the general strike in 1926 and the loss of Orpington in Kent to the Liberals in a celebrated by-election. Then in 1963 came the Profumo scandal, which was badly handled by a prime minister who appeared both gullible and incompetent. Macmillan loyally if credulously backed his War Minister, Profumo, who subsequently admitted he had lied to the House of Commons about his affair with the prostitute Christine Keeler. The episode contributed to an aroma of distrust and decay.

Macmillan’s continued leadership had been called into question, but it was a breakdown of his health that made him finally decide to resign. The leadership contest that followed, described in Chapter 6, took place during the week of the annual party conference at Blackpool in October 1963. Macmillan fought from his hospital bed to thwart Butler’s last hopes of inheriting the crown for which he yearned. From a highly charged contest, the Earl of Home emerged as a compromise candidate who, in an earlier guise, had been Neville Chamberlain’s Parliamentary Private Secretary during the Munich crisis.

Not since 1902, with Salisbury, had a prime minister sat in the House of Lords, and a rushed by-election saw the new leader reincarnated into the Commons as Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the third Etonian Tory leader in a row. He was handicapped by two of the ablest Conservative ministers, Macleod and Powell, refusing to serve under him, and the government then went on to alienate many supporters by Heath abolishing resale price maintenance. Despite a valiant year of fighting, it succumbed to Labour in the general election of October 1964. Not even a ‘dash for growth’ under Maudling, the new Chancellor, succeeded in wooing voters back to the cause. What was remarkable about the election, discussed on the next two pages, however, was how close the Conservatives in fact came to winning it. Labour achieved less than 1 per cent more of the popular vote, winning just 317 seats to the Tories’ 304. Douglas-Home clung on as opposition leader for another nine months before being pushed aside. An era of Tory dominance, in electoral terms the most emphatic in its history, thus came to an end. Labour dismissed the period 1951–64 as ‘thirteen wasted years’, which was overly harsh and ignored the many achievements and modernisations carried through; Labour’s own record of office in 1964–70, moreover, showed that it, no more than the Tories, posessed all the solutions to Britain’s underlying problems.

ALEC DOUGLAS-HOME’S DEPARTURE 1964

Alec Douglas-Home received politics’ equivalent to a hospital pass in rugby when he succeeded Harold Macmillan as premier in October 1963. The Tory party had already been in office for twelve years, and the next general election could not be more than twelve months away. The country and the media were growing tired of the Tories, their strongest policies had been enacted, and some of their most able lieutenants were burnt out or refusing to serve.

Yet Alec Douglas-Home brought the Tories back to within a whisker of beating Harold Wilson’s Labour Party in the October 1964 general election. He battled hard for a year, preparing his party for the election, and worked tirelessly during the campaign. Party apparatchiks, deciding that his aristocratic appearance and oddly shaped head were a liability on television, saw that he would best serve the party by travelling around the country in person. Face to face, few could resist his charm.

Unpublished diaries provide a vivid portrait of the emotional last hours of Tory rule after thirteen years. Alec and Elizabeth Douglas-Home arrived back at Downing Street at 9.30 p.m. on election day, Thursday 15 October, from Perth. They gathered around a television in the corner (‘white’) drawing-room with their staff to listen to the first results.

A moment of belief that they could win came with the retaining of Billericay: immediately ‘everyone rushed for the drink’. The ‘garden room girls’ (Number 10’s secretarial team) were following the news two floors below, all dressed in blue and all nervous: ‘They were glued to the television damning Harold Wilson for all they were worth, as were the drivers, messengers and detectives.’ But as the night wore on, the news turned bad. Elizabeth Home, ever thoughtful, went up in the lift to the third floor to give the switchboard girls a drink.

Before dawn, and believing they had lost, the Homes retired to bed. Yet the news that greeted them the next morning, Friday 16 October, was not discouraging: Labour had still to secure the magical figure of 316 seats needed for a majority, and the morning’s results were going less well for Labour. A lunch party for a dozen, including Cabinet ministers Ted Heath and Reginald Maudling, was held on Number 10’s first floor.

In the early afternoon, after a tantalising period when Labour remained fixed on 315 seats, the target was passed, and Labour finished up with an overall majority of four. As one diarist wrote, ‘Many spirits fell again when Sir Alec had to go off to the Palace. As he went out [into Downing Street] everyone booed. Poor Lady Home was taking photos out of the window – it must have hurt her horribly and I hate them for it, especially as loud cheers accompanied Mr Wilson’s arrival at 4 p. m. As if defeat was not enough, in the middle of the afternoon we heard China had exploded her first atom bomb.’ News of the fall of the moderate Soviet leader, Khrushchev, also began to circulate. To the stunned and exhausted figures in Number 10, it must have appeared as if a brave new socialist era had truly dawned.

Trapped upstairs, with Wilson now ensconced in the Cabinet room believing that his predecessor had left the building, the Homes decided to make their getaway by the back door. Slipping down the grand staircase like furtive refugees, they passed the Cabinet floor, now in the hands of ‘the enemy’, and at the door to the garden were met by some of the staff. It was customary for the outgoing prime minister to write a letter of good wishes to the incomer. Sir Alec, having written in his own hand ‘To the Prime Minister’, handed the letter to Jane Parsons (the head of the Garden Room girls), which ‘nearly finished her’. In the room directly above, the official team, which only hours earlier had ministered to Alec Home, were now helping plan Harold Wilson’s new government. The Homes stole silently and unnoticed across the Number 10 garden to the gate in the back wall and out into Horse Guards Parade.

So rushed was their departure that Elizabeth Home and her secretary, Lorne Roper-Caldbeck, had to return to the flat on Monday 19 October, after a weekend at Chequers, to complete the packing. It was a race against the clock, but they were helped by the Number 10 staff; the affection the Homes had inspired after only a year in Number 10 was extraordinary. Lady Home saw their enforced departure as a ‘splendid opportunity to throw out unvalued possessions’, including a large store of her husband’s medicines. While she was doing so, Mary Wilson, although still living in Hampstead Garden suburb, was asked up to the flat by Lady Home. She looked ‘very miserable and was on the verge of tears. What a prospect it must all be for her!’

The building was already bubbling with gossip, above all about Marcia Williams seizing the room adjoining the Cabinet room for her office. In a final act of defiance, the Homes’ secretaries left their Tory posters in the room in the flat that they had used as their office. Of all transfers of power since 1945, the 1964 transition was the most polarised and aroused the most mutual animosity and suspicion.

This passage is adapted from Anthony Seldon’s Number Ten: The Illustrated History.

It is easy to understand the Tories electoral success during 1951–64. As the Liberal vote never exceeded 6 per cent, the real battle was between only two parties, with the century’s high point in the two-party system coming in 1951 when Labour and the Conservatives won 97 per cent of the popular vote between them. The middle classes voted solidly (over 75 per cent) for the Tories in the general elections, but over half the Conservative voting strength came from the working classes, who felt their interests were better served by voting for them. The three successive Tory leaders who won the elections (Churchill, Eden and Macmillan) were all very popular figures at the time the contests took place: in contrast, Attlee in 1951 and 1955 appeared uncharismatic and jaded, and Gaitskell, his successor, had little chance against the known, experienced Macmillan in 1959. Indicatively, the young Harold Wilson, who succeeded Gaitskell after his death in January 1963, proved the leader to capture the mood and the popular imagination in the 1964 election.

The Tory dominance was not only down to its superior leaders. The Tories were better organised and funded for much of the period, and exploited more successfully the new propaganda tools of television and advertising. The Tories’ programmes for office also chimed more sonorously with the electorate. In the 1951 election Labour’s attempt to play the ‘blue-scare’ card backfired, whereas the Tories’ promise of freedom and an end to austerity suited a nation weary of rationing and controls. In 1955 and 1959, they had a solid record in office to present to the electorate. The public wanted growth, welfare and full employment: the Tories duly delivered them. Economists will long debate whether the economy was strong despite rather than because of Tory economic policy, but there is no doubt that the Tories benefited from it electorally. By 1964, however, Labour, whose policies in the 1950s had appeared radical and unclear, now appeared to offer more of what the electorate wanted. The Conservatives had little fight to offer in their manifesto, Prosperity with a Purpose, which had a defensive tone absent from their three preceding manifestos.

Electoral circumstances also worked in the Tories’ favour in the 1950s elections. Boundary changes coming into operation in 1950 cost Labour perhaps twenty-five seats, while the new postal vote scheme may have cost them another ten. Above all, the Conservatives benefited, as they had for much of their history, from the support of the most powerful voices in society, the press proprietors, opinion-formers and captains of industry and finance. By 1963–4, even they were beginning to tire of the Conservatives and to believe that, in Harold Wilson, Britain had found the man the nation now needed.

To dismiss Heath’s ten-year leadership as a blind alley may seem harsh. He had more hinterland than most Tory leaders in the twentieth century, being a musician and a conductor of deep learning and some talent, a committed yachtsman who sailed to success in Australia’s Sydney to Hobart race in 1969, and a writer with more feeling for language and his audience than many politicians turned authors. He was singly unfortunate to come to the leadership at the end of one long period of Tory ascendancy, to have a party divided over economic and industrial relations policy, and at a time of widespread international student and labour unrest, of the ‘troubles’ beginning again in Northern Ireland, and of war in the Middle East leading to a quadrupling of oil prices.

Yet a blind alley his leadership was. He lost three of the four general elections he fought, a record almost as poor as Balfour’s. He was bright, energetic and tenacious, but he lacked many of the qualities of leadership, including charm and ease of communication: the often fierce loyalty he aroused in close subordinates was not reciprocated among a wider audience. He never won the party’s affection when leader (though he had been highly popular when first elected an MP in 1950), and he presided over a steep fall in party membership. For all his extensive work rethinking policy in opposition, he advanced it little in office beyond Macmillan’s positions of 1961–3, and he eschewed attempts to lead the party in the fresh direction identified by Mrs Thatcher, rebuffing those, especially after February 1974, who attempted to articulate these ideas. He was indeed more open to the ideas of civil servants (and was often closer to them personally) than he was to the party, to intellectuals or commentators. Most telling of all, many of his policy achievements during 1970–4 were undone during the years after his fall from power in February 1974, save in one main area, taking Britain into the EEC, which had been the cause of thirty years of division within the party.

None foresaw such an unhappy record when in August 1965 Heath beat Maudling (just) and Powell (easily) for the leadership of the party in its first electoral contest among MPs. He was selected as the candidate most likely, with his classless background and fine intellect, to match Wilson in debate and broad appeal. His early years as leader were not helped by his being the first in many years to come to power when the party was out of office, but he imposed his authority on the party by consolidating in 1965 the biggest policy review in its history, which at its height involved thirty separate committees or working groups. With the likelihood of Wilson calling an early general election, the findings were published quickly, enabling the party to boast at the March 1966 general election that it had 131 specific policy proposals, in a programme entitled Action Not Words . The electorate was as uncomprehending of the verbiage as it was unimpressed by the ideas, and accorded Wilson a landslide majority of ninety-six. Although the Tories were ahead in the polls for much of the ensuing four years, Heath had a hard time, and the quality of his leadership was repeatedly questioned. Policy review work resumed at a great tempo, but the final reworking of policy in the manifesto for the June 1970 general election, A Better Tomorrow, departed little in broad substance from the rushed work of 1965. Much was made early in the year, following a conference of the shadow cabinet at the Selsdon Park Hotel in south London, about Heath taking the party in a more ideological, right-wing direction. A new ‘Selsdon group’ was formed on its back. In fact, the conference, convened to approve the overall policy, was not heralding any right-wing strategic shift, in part because the shadow Cabinet was fundamentally undecided on the key issue of the day, economic and incomes policy.

Heath’s government, ironically in view of all the preparation over the previous five years, did not know where it was going, in fact, on many other key issues. Even without the crises in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, the Cabinet, which remained unusually leak-free and loyal, would have struggled to know where exactly it was steering Britain – except into Europe, Heath’s pet project. The second rebuff of British entry by de Gaulle, to Wilson in 1967, made Heath even more determined to succeed, and he was helped immeasurably by loyal colleagues and by Chief Whip Francis Pym’s insistence on a free vote. Heath’s dream was fulfilled on 1 January 1973.

Heath was badly weakened by the death only one month after the 1970 general election of his ablest lieutenant, Macleod, whom he had made his Chancellor of the Exchequer. His successor, Anthony Barber, lacked many of his qualities and political feel. In Heath’s first eighteen months, the strongly anti-union Industrial Relations Act was passed, and a host of measures passed to free up the economy. But when unemployment reached the psychologically important figure of one million in January 1972, Heath lost confidence in the pro-capitalist policies he had been pursuing since the election. Too much has been made of his embarking on a complete ‘U-turn’ in 1972, but the Industry Act of 1972, which afforded considerable potential for intervention in industry, marked a real change in direction; and the government also became actively involved in managing prices and incomes. The trade unions were not to be pacified, however, and, with the oil price rises in the autumn of 1973, and the miners spoiling for a fight to kill off the ‘anti-union government’, Heath called an election in February 1974 (which he was sure he would win) to seek a mandate to deal with the industrial crisis, hoping he would keep everyone focused on the core question ‘who governs Britain?’ The answer in the election was inconclusive. The Tories won more votes but fewer seats than Labour. Heath failed to do a deal with the Liberals to form a government, and when they turned him down he tried with the Ulster Unionists. When they also rejected his overtures, he left Wilson to form a minority Labour government. In a second general election in October 1974, Wilson won a small overall majority and Heath suffered a third and final defeat. Four months later he was gone. For Heath, it was a bitter and undeserved end. He was not much missed. There never was a Heath Tory party.