Harold Macmillan’s appearance–the hooded eyes, the moustache, the irregular and discoloured teeth, the element of parody in dress sense–frequently gave rise to a feeling of distrust. Impressions that he cut a risible figure were disconcertingly replaced by the sense that the joke, whatever it was, might after all be at the mocker’s expense, that Macmillan had contrived his appearance, voice, manner as a comedic mask behind which to conceal either a different self, or, like the Sphinx, the secret of emptiness, the secret that there was no secret to hide.
Visiting a collective farm outside Kiev, he donned plus fours, ‘as if he were at Chatsworth’.1 Such a game would no doubt have delighted the son-in-law of the 9th Duke of Devonshire (which Macmillan was), and yet true blue Tories, who saw him always as one who was eager to sell the pass, remembered that he advised his nephew, the 11th Duke, to abandon Chatsworth.2 He sensibly ignored the advice. Macmillan, to those of instinctively conservative reaction, is the Prime Minister who would not do anything to save the Doric arch at Euston Station, allowing the plansters, as John Betjeman called them, to demolish that magnificent Greek-revival London terminus, and erect a characterless, ugly replacement. His lofty comment was ‘only dying countries tried to preserve the symbols of their past’.3
Then again, hardened monetarists look back upon the Keynesian Macmillan era as one of disaster. Macmillan’s worst economic memories were of Stockton-on-Tees, his first constituency in the 1930s, when he had seen the terrible effects of economic recession. ‘It was his instinct to be rebellious against the restrictive actions of the Treasury–he never liked the Treasury. “What is wrong with inflation, Derry?” I’d reply, “You’re thinking of your constituents in the 1930s?” “Yes–I’m thinking of the under-use of resources–let’s over-use them!” He believed in import controls, but the Treasury wouldn’t let him.’4 These are the recollections of his second Chancellor of the Exchequer, Derick Heathcoat-Amory. His first Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, resigned on 6 January 1958, together with the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, Nigel Birch, and the Financial Secretary, J. Enoch Powell. They had all urged, following a disastrous run on the pound, that there must be swingeing cuts in welfare and public spending if disastrous inflation were to be avoided. Macmillan, who was about to go on a long tour of the Commonwealth when the Treasury men hatched their attack, dismissed it as ‘a little local difficulty’.5 Later he would even pretend not to remember Thorneycroft’s identity–‘that man who looked like an English butler, with the nice Italian wife–I forget his name’. Some believed that Macmillan had come to power, not merely by the normal Machiavellian ploys of lobbying and undermining his rivals, but by making secret deals with the Americans. One of his fiercest critics, Alan Clark, in The Tories,6 went so far as to say that ‘Macmillan’s contact with George Humphrey (US Secretary of the Treasury) bordered on the treasonable…Macmillan now set about mobilising his American contacts.’
Shadier than his dealings with the Americans in 1956 had been Macmillan’s unaccountable role in the handing over of White Russians and Cossacks to the Soviet authorities at Klagenfurt (British-occupied Austria) in May 1945. By the terms of the Yalta Agreement, the Soviets had no claims upon Russian émigrés who had escaped their wrecked country after the Revolution and Civil War. Into this category most certainly fell three White Army generals (Krasnov, Shkuro and Kilech-Ghirey), together with a number of people such as Olga Rotova, a Yugoslav citizen, who had never been Soviet citizens, being held by 36 Infantry Brigade commanded by Brigadier Geoffrey Musson–under the overall control of Lieutenant General Charles Keightley, of the 5 Corps of the 8th Army. Churchill, as Prime Minister, and Lord Alexander of Tunis (Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean) had specifically ordered Keightley not to surrender the Cossacks and non-Soviet citizens to the Red Army. Harold Macmillan flew in to Klagenfurt from Caserta on 13 May 1945 to discuss Soviet proposals. He was the government minister resident at AFHQ (Allied Force Headquarters). The next day, evidently on Macmillan’s instructions, Keightley lied to Alexander, in a telegram, saying the 40,000 or so contained a ‘large number of Soviet nationals’ whom they had been forced to repatriate. On 26 May Brigadier Musson ordered all his battalion commanders holding Cossacks in the Drau Valley to send all their Cossacks back, regardless of citizenship. The Cossacks were ‘handed over’ with violence and entirely against not only their will but international law. Together with their wives and children, they were forced into trucks at bayonet point. ‘It was a great grief to me’, Macmillan recorded in his memoirs, ‘that there was no other course open.’
In 1957, Khrushchev allowed a tiny trickle of Cossacks who had managed to survive the camps in the Arctic Circle and Siberia to leave Russia. Only a few score, of the thousands imprisoned, came out, clutching their non-Russian passports. One of them, Captain Anatol Petrovsky, wrote, appealing to the Prime Minister, reminding him that the British Military Command had known he was not a Soviet citizen when they handed him over for twelve years of starvation, freezing cold and enforced slavery in the mines of Siberia and Vorkuta. He was by then living as an invalid and a displaced person and wondered if the Prime Minister would be prepared to compensate him. He received an impersonal reply from the Foreign Office: ‘I am directed to refer to your letter of the 4th of September to the Prime Minister…A thorough examination of the facts led to the conclusion that no action could be taken to assist the persons named in your letter.7
Those who vilified Macmillan’s memory did so usually from a position of the doctrinal right. They often attributed to him powers which perhaps no British politician at this date actually possessed. Because they regretted the increased power of America; the dissolution of the British Empire in Africa; the failure of Britain to prevent the collapse of Iraq, or the heightening of conflict in the Middle East between Jew and Arab, between ‘moderate’ or pro-Western Arabs and Islamists; the loss of Cyprus as a Mediterranean British base; and the segregation of the island into Greek and Turkish halves; they attributed these ills to the deviousness or anti-Toryism of the Prime Minister. Likewise, at home, the chaos of labour relations, the inflationary wage demands made by trades union ‘barons’, the ‘liberalisation’ of life in areas as diverse as capital punishment, or sexual mores, were blamed on ‘Supermac’, either because he was too weak to prevent them, or because he anarchistically or seditiously wished to undermine the country by promoting them. Another way of seeing him, however, this man of masks, was as one who regretted the loss of old values, but who did not really believe in the power of politics alone to preserve them.
Macmillan’s premiership lasted from January 1958 to October 1963. It was a period of quite extraordinarily rapid change, both in Britain and abroad. He resigned hurriedly because he believed that a minor prostate condition was potentially fatal. His estimation of himself was captured in his judgement–‘That illness was a sad blow for me. Without being conceited, it was a catastrophe for the party.’8 Much was made of the fact that, even from his hospital bed, Macmillan attempted to control the succession. The two likeliest contenders were the irrepressibly foolish Quintin Hogg, who had inherited the title of Lord Hailsham from his father, the founder of the London Polytechnic, and R. A. Butler, Macmillan’s Home Secretary. At the last minute, ‘Supermac’ lost faith in Hogg, and told the Queen that she should appoint the 14th Earl of Home as the new Prime Minister.
Whatever Mac saw in Home, it is clear what he saw in Hogg. ‘Those who clamour for Butler and Home are really not so much shocked by Hogg’s oddities as by his honesty. He belongs both to this strange modern age of space and science and to the great past–of classical learning and Christian life. This is what they instinctively dislike.’9
This is a description that could also be applied to Harold Macmillan. In old age, with a characteristic mixture of Edwardian drawl and simple camp, he meditated upon the sad marriage of Quintin Hogg, whose wife betrayed him during the war with a member of the Free French. ‘He came back on leave, and found her in bed–both of them, so it was a hard thing for him, such a sweet boy. No, he’s suffered…he was a gentleman and a Christian.’10
Macmillan’s own life was clouded by a wife’s infidelity. Unlike Hogg, who put away his own wife instantly, citing the Gospel of Matthew in his defence–‘Saving for the cause of adultery!’11–Mac turned a blind eye to the long love affair with his fellow Conservative MP Bob Boothby.
Although ‘everyone knew’ about the liaison, he was late in coming to the news. When a friend, during a railway journey in 1929, made an allusion to Lady Dorothy and Boothby which was inescapable in its meaning, Macmillan was on the point of reaching for the luggage in the rack above his head. The news so surprised him that he fell backwards on to the carriage floor and fainted.12
Boothby was popular with the public, largely because of his association with Churchill. He had been among the Conservative MPs who stood beside ‘Winston’ in the wilderness years of the 1930s and who opposed the policy of appeasing the brigand states of Europe. In the 1950s and 1960s as television became popular, he was a natural for discussions and chat shows. His spotted bow ties and aristocratic method of delivery reminded audiences of his Churchillian credentials. He was a character, a cove, a card. The development of eroticism in his life, he described in his twilit years to an old friend–‘I began with handkerchieves, progressed to boys, then found women attractive, then back to boys again, and now I find consolation once more with handkerchieves.’13 This remark was made after his marriage, in August 1967, to Wanda Senna, the daughter of a Sardinian import-export wholesaler. ‘I don’t need friends. I’ve got lots of friends. What I want is a wife,’ the sixty-seven-year-old told the thirty-four-year-old beauty. His first marriage, in 1935, to Diana Cavendish, had lasted a matter of months, until his affair with Dorothy Macmillan (a cousin of his wife’s) became known. The association with the East End gang leader Ronnie Kray demonstrated the range of Boothby’s social and erotic sympathies. ‘Once you get into the clutches of that family, by God, you haven’t a hope. They are the most tenacious family in Britain.’ He was speaking in 1973 to a Sunday Times journalist, Susan Barnes, who married the Foreign Secretary Antony Crosland. But he was referring to the Cavendishes rather than to the Krays.14 The Krays, as Ronnie’s obituarist was to put it, ‘brought to the hitherto parochial British criminal scene a taste of American organised crime’.15 The twin brothers, Reggie and Ronnie, controlled pubs and clubs by protection rackets. They were skilled blackmailers and, as amateur boxing champions, adepts of violence. They never lost a fight until they turned professional at sixteen. In 1950 they were charged with brutal assault and then–a common feature of cases involving the brothers–the witnesses retracted their statements. They were eventually to be put on trial for the murder of George Cornell and Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie. They had lured McVitie to a flat in Stoke Newington in October 1967. Urged on by psychopathic Ronnie, Reggie stabbed McVitie, pinning him to the floor through the throat. The violence of the attack caused McVitie’s liver to fall out. The twins were imprisoned at Parkhurst; Ronnie, having been certified insane, was transferred to Broadmoor.
From his prison cell in 1988 Reg was able to become as moralistic as any Disgusted Reader of a conservative broadsheet. ‘It’s a different world now to what it was in 1969 when we went down. It’s a different criminal world too–it’s far more deadly. Then it was dog eat dog–criminals waging war against other criminals. Old ladies didn’t get attacked by vicious thugs in those days. Young girls didn’t get raped in broad daylight. Coppers didn’t get kicked and punched and spat on at football matches. There was a kind of respect for people in those days.’ So much respect, indeed, was there, that even when on the run from the police in 1968, Reggie had found the time to go to the Starlight Club in Highbury, demanded £1,000 on the spot from a man called Fields, and, when he didn’t pay up, ‘shot him through the leg and left one of the Firm to smash his face in’.16 Ah, happy, innocent days.
Before and after their imprisonment, the Krays enjoyed mingling with the more raffish figures in showbiz and on the fringes of society. Blonde women such as Diana Dors (her husband, Alan Lake, was another criminal) and Barbara Windsor, were part of their circle, though never a temptation to Ronnie. ‘I’m not a poof; I’m a homosexual,’ he would explain. He seduced the East End boys he recruited as spies and he held parties which were regarded as ‘sophisticated’. It was at one such party that Ronnie Kray encountered Bob Boothby.
On 11 July 1964 the Sunday Mirror proprietor Cecil King, editor-in-chief Hugh Cudlipp and editor Reginald Payne published a banner headline: ‘Peer and a Gangster: Yard Probe Public Men at Seaside Parties’. The paper announced that ‘a top level Scotland Yard investigation into the alleged homosexual relationship between a prominent peer and a leading thug in the London underworld has been ordered by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Joseph Simpson’.17 On the Monday following, there arrived a photograph of Boothby in his flat sitting on his sofa next to Kray. The following Sunday the paper published the photograph.
Boothby tried to bluff it out. He even went so far as to ask the openly gay MP Tom Driberg the identity of the well-known peer who was alleged to have had an affair with the well-known thug. ‘I’m sorry, Bob, it’s you’ was the reply.18 Boothby went to see Gerald Gardiner QC, a future Lord Chancellor, who advised him to consult the Mr Tulkinghorn of our times, Arnold Goodman. We can only assume that Boothby lied to both his legal advisers. On 31 July he wrote the following letter to The Times:
Sir,
On July 17th I returned to London from France and I found, to my amazement, that Parliament, Fleet Street and other informed quarters in London were seething with rumours that I have a homosexual relationship with a leading thug in the underworld involved in a West End protection racket; that I have been to ‘all-male’ Mayfair parties with him; that I have been photographed with him in a compromising position on a sofa; that a homosexual relationship exists between me, some East End gangsters and a number of clergymen in Brighton; that some people who know of these relationships are being blackmailed; and that Scotland Yard have for months been watching meetings between me and the underworld thug, and have investigated all these matters and reported on them to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.
I have, for many years, appeared on radio and television programmes; and, for this reason alone, my name might reasonably be described as ‘a household name’, as it has been in the Sunday Mirror. On many occasions I have been photographed, at their request, with people who have claimed to be ‘fans’ of mine; and on one occasion I was photographed, with my full consent, in my flat (which is also my office) with a gentleman who came to see me, accompanied by two friends, in order to ask me to take an active part in a business venture which seemed to me to be of interest and importance. After careful consideration I turned down this request, on the ground that my existing commitments prevented me from taking on anything more, and my letter of refusal is in his possession.
I have since been told that some years ago the person concerned was convicted of a criminal offence; but I knew then, and know now, nothing of this. So far as I am concerned, anyone is welcome to see or to publish any photographs that have ever been taken of me.
I am satisfied that the source of all these sinister rumours is the Sunday Mirror and the Daily Mirror. I am not a homosexual.* I have not been to a Mayfair party of any kind for more than 20 years.* I have met the man who is alleged to be a ‘king of the underworld’ only three times, on business matters;* and then by appointment in my flat, at his request, and in the company of other people.
I have never been to a party in Brighton with gangsters–still less clergymen. No one has ever tried to blackmail me. The police say that they have not watched any meetings, or conducted any investigations, or made any reports to the Home Secretary connected with me. In short, the whole affair is a tissue of atrocious lies.
I am not by nature thin-skinned; but this sort of thing makes a mockery of any decent kind of life, public or private, in what is still supposed to be a civilised country. It is, in my submission, intolerable that any man should be put into the cruel dilemma of having either to remain silent while such rumours spread, or considerably to increase the circulation of certain newspapers by publicly denying them. If either the Sunday Mirror or the Daily Mirror is in possession of a shred of evidence–documentary or photographic–against me, let them print it and take the consequences. I am sending a copy of this to both.
Your obedient servant
Boothby
(*In the previous paragraphs, the phrases followed by an asterisk are demonstrable falsehoods.)
In 1964 £40,000, one of the largest sums ever paid in compensation for a libel, was paid to Boothby and the editor of the Sunday Mirror was sacked. It was a good demonstration of the powers of the libel laws to intimidate journalists. After the debacle of the Profumo affair, issuing writs for libel was the most usual way employed by rich villains to muzzle the press. The cost of bringing such proceedings to court, and the possibility that, even if the case were successful, a judge might not award full costs, guaranteed that only the rich and powerful could use this law to protect themselves. Boothby won his case by committing perjury.19 He wrote to his QC, Gerald Gardiner, on 10 August 1964–‘We were lucky in having Mr Goodman’s help, as he is one of the shrewdest bargainers in the business. It is, I think, the fastest and largest settlement of the kind ever made. So it should have been.’20
Whether you believe that Ronnie Kray and Boothby had no sexual relationship, there were many who would raise an eyebrow at Ron’s description: ‘It was strictly a business relationship which later became a friendship–a friendship based on the fact that we had both been so badly smeared by the national press.’21 It was a bizarre business relationship. It was a good example of how small Britain was, and how, as in the roman-fleuve of Anthony Powell, the unlikeliest characters turned out to know one another. Not that Powell ever touched upon the criminal underworld. For that the reader would be directed to the raffish novels of Simon Raven. Nevertheless, a colourful figure such as Boothby, even if he did not attend very many of the Krays’ parties, provides a link between, on the one hand, a Prime Minister and one of the great ducal families, with, on the other hand, hatchet men and protection racketeers.
The relationship with Dorothy Macmillan had begun as long ago as 1929 and remained the dominant one throughout her life. ‘It was Dorothy who seduced Boothby and dominated him. He not only fulfilled her sexually, but gave her the fun, glamour and exciting company that her husband was unable to do.’22 Though Lady Dorothy begged her husband for a divorce he refused to allow her emotional satisfaction to come in the way of his political career. But, by the time that ambition had been satisfied and Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister (aged sixty-three), Macmillan and his wife had become friends, and indeed, they returned from the Commonwealth tour of 1958 as a sort of Darby and Joan. None would have guessed, from her substantial appearance (comparisons were made with the comic actress Margaret Rutherford) or her aristocratic contempt for conventions, of the strange emotional secrets the Macmillans shared. At Birch Grove, the Macmillans’ country house, the police patrolled the gardens by night before the visit of General de Gaulle, and were disturbed to note a light bobbing about outside the house. They were surprised to find the Prime Minister’s wife, wearing only a slip and gumboots, a miner’s lamp on her forehead and two hot-water bottles strapped to her ample midriff–‘I got a bit behind with the bedding out’.23 Confronted by CND demonstrators, she leaned from her car window to tell them what she thought. ‘Where did you learn that language, m’lady?’ asked her chauffeur. ‘From the grooms.’ As with her husband, however, there was surely a strong element of self-consciousness in all the cultivated eccentricities, as when she turned up in a television studio wearing her old tweed skirt beneath, but a clean silk shirt, adorned with important Cavendish jewels on her top–the only part, as she observed, which would be seen by the audiences at home.
It was surely the playfulness of the Macmillans which made them charming. When J. Enoch Powell scornfully dismissed Harold Macmillan as an actor manager, he was observing a set of qualities which he disliked, but which are probably necessary in public life. What mysteriously seems to have happened to Britain during the Macmillan era is that the artifices by which, hitherto, public life was carried on, were stripped away–in the names of truth, or subversion, or the unmasking of hypocrisy, or simple mischief. It was the time when the Island of Apollo truly became the Island of Dionysus. The Macmillans, with their divergent public and private masks, their firm sense of a distinction between the two, were appropriate rulers during such a transition, yet they could not have envisaged in their wildest nightmares in 1957, the things which would come to pass by 1963.
In foreign policy Macmillan faced three enormous and unavoidable questions, which can be summarised in three words–America, Commonwealth, Europe. The Suez debacle had left Anglo-American relations all but shattered. For Macmillan, whose mother was American, and who had enjoyed the comradeship of General Eisenhower during the Second World War, the Anglo-American alliance was the natural bedrock on which Britain’s foreign policy must be constructed, the more so since the Empire was in rapid dissolution, and her position vis-à-vis Europe was, at best, ambivalent. It was obvious that, since the end of the Second World War, Britain had all but lost its status as a world power. If it was to maintain any position of influence in the world, any sense of itself as worthy of its place on the Security Council of the United Nations, it could only do so as a special ally of the United States.
These are the years (Eisenhower’s presidency lasted until 1961, when he was succeeded by John F. Kennedy) when the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union very nearly escalated into actual war; and when the ever-volatile Middle East saw crises which, in the case of the Lebanon, literally demanded American intervention, and in the cases of Egypt, Israel and Iraq and Jordan required American steerage against Russian intervention. They were delicate times in which Britain had no capacity, post-Suez, to act directly, but in which the restraining word here, the patient extra negotiation there, the piece of local or diplomatic experience in another area could be seen, with hindsight, to have made a difference.
Macmillan’s meeting with Eisenhower in Bermuda within weeks of taking office went some way towards overcoming the distrust which had grown up between the two nations over Suez. When, the following year, events in the Middle East became inflamed, the British and the Americans were able to work together; or, if not together, more closely than would have seemed possible during Eden’s premiership. In May 1958, the President of the Lebanon, Camille Camoun, appealed for American help. Inspired by Nasser of Egypt, and with Russian armaments imported from Syria, the anti-Western opposition parties threatened Camoun’s government, and the Lebanon, with civil war. The strongest ally the West had in the Middle East was Iraq, whose young King Faisal had been educated in Britain (like his Old Harrovian cousin the King of Jordan). In July, Faisal was killed at the age of twenty-three. It looked as if the Kingdom of Jordan would likewise be overthrown by a combination of Soviet-inspired communism, discontented Islamism and Nasser-induced bloody-mindedness. Within six hours the US 6th fleet was heading for Beirut. ‘You are doing a Suez on me,’ quipped Macmillan to Eisenhower by telephone.24
It was a good, bitter joke, underlying the essential irrationality of American foreign policy over the previous two years. Either they did accept the British (roughly speaking Imperialist) attitude to the region, namely that the West had a need, or even a duty, to police the Middle East, keeping its more ‘extremist’ elements under control, or they should have been prepared to leave it alone, with the inevitable consequence that the fledgling State of Israel would be devoured in its nest. The Foreign Office in London urged Macmillan to befriend the new government in Iraq, partly for the sake of peace, partly to ensure the West’s continued access to the oil fields south of Basra. But it required some sleight of hand to be able to do this while retaining the friendship of Jordan, whose grief-stricken King, mourning the death of his royal cousin in Baghdad, felt let down by the British. Macmillan kept the 2 Parachute Brigade at Amman airport throughout the crisis to assure King Hussein that Britain would support Jordan against a comparable revolution to the one which toppled Faisal, but the American support for this particular part of the summer’s Middle Eastern crises was lukewarm. Fifty years and more after those events, Britain and America had still not satisfactorily decided upon their role in the Middle East. The summer of 1958, however, in which Ike ‘did a Suez’ and intervened in the Lebanon to keep at bay the insurgents, had quickened the American sense of the nature of the problem.
The brinkmanship in American relations with Russia was, as far as world peace was concerned, more immediately alarming. In Eisenhower’s last year in office, East and West seemed close to an agreement on the reduction in nuclear armaments. Khrushchev, the Russian leader, wanted to play the double game of reducing arms, and punishing the West by constant and not unjustified observations about the ever-increasing proliferation of American missile stations all over Northern Europe and the Mediterranean, and of the burgeoning espionage industry. John le Carré’s novels of moral ambivalence and mutual distrust were the best things to emerge from the murky history of Cold War diplomacy. The closer the spymaster George Smiley came to unearthing Karla, his opposite number in Moscow, the finer seemed the lines, not only between the dirty tricks one side was prepared to play on the other, but also between the moral worth of either side’s set of values. Indeed, the achievement of le Carré, best seen in retrospect when the Cold War was over, was the implication that what we were confronting here was an extraordinary case of displacement. While politicians on both sides moved from one particular summit meeting or diplomatic crisis to another; while agents in the field pulled off yet one more dirty trick, or double-crossed another opposite number, their activities, whose puerility seemed well coloured by the affinity so many of the English spies felt with school, and prep school at that, became emblematic of cultural identity crisis on both sides. Macmillan had the sense that there were not going to be many more politicians who could straddle ‘this strange modern age of space and science’ and ‘the great past–of classical learning and Christian life’. If learning and Christianity were to be scuppered, what would come in their place? What stories would the West be able to tell itself, if it could not claim that its political institutions were the inspiration of Demosthenes, and its religious strength from the Church by law established? A similar sense, however, as the West would learn from reading the novels of Solzhenitsyn, possessed the Soviet mind, a sense that their creeds–in this case Marxist-Leninism–were based on a chimera in which nobody really believed. To hide from themselves their lack of self-belief, the superpowers moved to yet more violent displays of fundamentalist strength, as though the evaporation of faith–in the classical past, in Christianity, or in dialectical materialism–was not the fault of doubt within the soul, but from outside infiltration, the enemy at the gates.
In America’s case, the gate at which the enemy lurked was Cuba. In the New Year of 1959, Fidel Castro had ousted the right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar and established, only a few miles across the water from Florida, a Marxist-Leninist state, equipped, armed and financed from Moscow. The new President, John F. Kennedy, fulfilling a plan which had been hatched by his predecessor, organised a landing at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba of a brigade of anti-Castro Cuban dissidents, trained in Florida. There were 1,500 men armed with American tanks and guns. They lasted just forty-eight hours before being captured by Castro’s crack troops. By October of the following year, the Russians had installed medium-range offensive missiles in Cuba, with a range of 1,500 to 2,000 miles, and Kennedy contemplated an air strike to remove them. There was even talk of a full-scale invasion of Cuba to ‘finish with Castro once and for all’. In the last week of October 1962, it looked as if the USA and the Soviet Union were preparing the ultimate horror, nuclear war, prompting Bertrand Russell’s verdict that ‘Kennedy and Macmillan are the wickedest people in the story of man’. Had the Russians not dismantled their missile bases in Cuba, the unthinkable holocaust could have happened. But if we are right in our analysis of what was going on in the psyche of both sides, a nuclear war was never going to happen. Armageddon occurs because the Reign of the Saints and the True Believers is about to begin, when differing certainties come to blows in the Last Battle. But the Cold War was fought not between fundamentalisms but between self-doubters posing as fundamentalists; not between certainties but between uncertainties. Both sides in the poker game knew they had almost worthless hands.
Cold War, bluff, confrontation, spying, arrests, threats, glooms, silences were to characterise the times, not battles, which had scarred the 1930s, the time of certainties.
The emblem of the pointless stalemate was the Berlin Wall.
Although many Western intellectuals persisted in the belief that communism was a plausible economic-political philosophy and the Soviet Union its worthy guardian, those who were obliged to live beneath its murky shadow took a different view. As early as 1949,59,245 East Germans had left the German Democratic Republic for the West. By 1953,331,390 had left, and in Berlin, isolated behind the Iron Curtain, but, in its French, English and American sectors part of the Free West, the refugee crisis was not only a visible disgrace to the government of Walter Ulbricht, but also an administrative catastrophe. Who would heal, who would administer, who would teach the East Germans when, for example, 5,000 doctors and dentists had left the country by 1961, hundreds of scientists, many academics (the entire Law Faculty of the University of Leipzig)? In 1961 even Miss East Germany defected to the West. How could they stop the flow?
In spite of the West’s enormous Intelligence Service, and its innumerable agents and double agents in the East, not one of them guessed what Ulbricht was going to do, even when, during a news conference about the refugee crisis, he darkly quipped, ‘No one is going to build a wall.’25
In the early hours of 13 August 1961 Soviet and East German troops moved around the city, and the Westerners became conscious that some form of blockade was being erected at the inter-Berlin border. As light dawned, it became clear that a barbed-wire barrier had been erected, soon to be followed by the great concrete wall itself. Willy Brandt, Mayor of West Berlin, who had been on a train to Hanover the previous night, hurried back to the city by plane and went directly from Tempelhof to Potsdamer Platz. As he walked about among the quiet, shocked crowds, he was persistently asked, ‘When are the Americans going to come?’ The Wall was in flagrant violation of the Four Power status of post-war Berlin, as agreed by the United Nations. West Germans feared that the building of the Wall would be the prelude to the Soviet invasion of West Germany itself–a groundless fear as hindsight knows. It was assumed by the Germans that some action would be taken by the Western powers. Macmillan was telephoned the day after the Wall went up. He was having a golfing holiday in Scotland at the time, and he did not think it necessary to cut short his pleasure. ‘Nobody is going to fight over Berlin,’ he remarked. Nor would Adenauer leave Bonn to show solidarity with the people of Berlin.
President Kennedy, who sent his deputy president Lyndon Baines Johnson on a visit to Germany shortly after the Wall had been built, did not get around to visiting until June 1963, by which time East Germany was firmly and safely behind its concrete prison wall. His speechwriter was able to come up with a quotable sound bite: ‘All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin, and therefore as a free man, I take pride in the words, Ich bin ein Berliner.’ Only he wasn’t a Berliner, and those who were might have welcomed more support at the time. When Willy Brandt publicly declared the contents of his letter to Kennedy, back in 1961, imploring the West to do something, Kennedy was furious. THE WEST DOES NOTHING complained the newspaper Bild. Crowds of demonstrators massed in West Berlin displaying banners which read WE APPEAL TO THE WORLD… But it suited the world (or so the world supposed) to have a divided Germany. Still haunted by the spectres of the two world wars, the Western powers continued to believe, in the absence of a scintilla of evidence, that a strengthened Germany would turn into a militaristic Germany, or that a united Germany would somehow ‘threaten’ the West. The Soviets had urged restraint upon the East German authorities, which is why they asked for the Wall to be a barbed-wire barrier in the first instance in case American tanks and troops were moved in. Then, in all likelihood, the Soviets would have backed away. But Erich Honecker, First Secretary of the East German Communist Party, was a man who had clocked the Western idea. He had urged from the beginning that the Wall should be unassailable, and built of concrete. Nothing quite like it had ever been seen in history. Kennedy thought that the Wall was ‘a hell of a lot better than a war’. Apparently that was what most people supposed. The Americans and British, who, either separately or together, were prepared to rattle sabres in small countries such as the Lebanon or Jordan, had reverted to the old appeasement policies of the 1930s when it came to a power with muscle.
‘The Berlin Wall’, wrote the greatest historian of that city, ‘sealed off the last escape route from what had now become a giant 100,000-squarekilometre prison called the German Democratic Republic.’ In the le Carréish balancing game played by the foreign ministries and governments of Washington and London it was considered ‘suitable’, ‘acceptable’, ‘preferable’ that millions of human beings should be compelled to live in poverty, fear and servitude.
Macmillan was a much-travelled Prime Minister who saw his role primarily in terms of foreign affairs. Indeed, like subsequent Prime Ministers, he could even savour foreign problems, the more intractable or dangerous the better, since they enhanced his self-estimation as a statesman, whereas problems at home, ranging from day-to-day wage disputes with trades unions, to more general matters such as the implosion and ultimate collapse of Western culture itself, were less attractive. Within weeks of taking office, as has been said, he was off to Bermuda to ‘mend the fences’ with President Eisenhower. Six weeks during the wintry early months of 1958 were devoted to a tour of the Commonwealth–starting in India where, to Anthony Sampson, one of the journalists in his entourage, ‘he seemed an apparition from the imperial past’, with his dark blue suit in the blazing heat of Delhi airport, his Old Etonian tie and his shy, stilted manner. In fact, the Commonwealth tour was in many senses restorative. Always hypochondriac and prone to winter colds, he could escape the English winter. After a long period of estrangement from his wife he could become her friend, dependent, as the tour went on, to Pakistan, Ceylon, New Zealand and Australia, upon her exuberant and aristocratic ability to talk to strangers, and able to enjoy her company without the ever painful phenomenon of her disappearing, for a part of each month, to be with her lover Boothby.
Politically, moreover, the Commonwealth tour was wonderfully easy. Indeed, it was more in the nature of a royal progress than a political tour, since none of the problems facing the countries he visited were ones to which the British Prime Minister was being asked to provide a solution. India and Pakistan, sure enough, had their local difficulties, but since independence more than a decade ago, they were not looking to Westminster for the impossible business of decisions. As for the white Dominions of New Zealand and Australia, they possessed, at this date, almost no inhabitants who wished to be independent of the British Crown. They were parodies of Britain itself, without any of the threats to Britain’s happiness or security–threats such as a collapse of labour relations, or housing shortages.
Never slow to note newspaper items about himself which could be construed in a favourable connotation, Macmillan quoted in his memoirs from a journalist–‘Whatever Macmillan may have done for the Commonwealth, the Commonwealth has certainly done for Macmillan.’
But it was not in the independent states of the Indian subcontinent, nor in the happily self-governing white Dominions, that the problems of British colonialism, or post-colonialism, were to be found. These boiled and festered in the vast continent upon which, until he became Prime Minister, Macmillan had never set foot: Africa.
Chronologically, the colonies of West Africa were the first to go the way of India and Pakistan, and achieve self-government. To many Africans at the time, as to the huge majority of everyone else in the world once history had unfolded, it was a transparent demographical fact that one day, majority rule, and rule by the indigenous population, would follow. In the late 1950s, however, this notion was by no means obvious, and was indeed hotly contested, especially in three African areas–in the huge, fertile, mineral-rich and beautiful East African Kenya; in the southern-central cluster known as the Central African Federation–Southern and Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland–and South Africa. The more right-wing members of Macmillan’s own Cabinet, most notably Lord Salisbury, as well as the white inhabitants of these regions, all believed that it was desirable, and possible, for white minority rule to continue in these areas. Successive British governments since the Second World War had displayed conflicting and contradictory policies over the matter. In 1957, then, the Gold Coast was granted independence and, as the newly named country of Ghana, it enjoyed an in many ways successful decade under the premiership of Dr Kwame Nkrumah, with a single-chamber, elected parliamentary system, and with local government conducted in four regional assemblies. Nigeria became independent in 1960, and in spite of much more complex tribal and religious divisions than those in Ghana, it enjoyed a measure of stability under Sir Abubakar Balewa. Sierra Leone, effectively independent since 1958, became formally so in 1961.
Kenyan nationalists, on the other side of the continent, could look forward to no such smooth handover of power from the hands of the white men. It had been the policy of the post-war Labour government in Westminster, as of the Conservative governments, to treat Kenya rather as if it were Australia or New Zealand, a fertile land in which whites from the old country could be encouraged to settle. British ex-servicemen had received money from Attlee’s, Churchill’s and Eden’s exchequers to help them establish farms in Kenya. The colonisation of this hugely rich country was not, then, the inheritance of some casually made Victorian decision to settle the land with Europeans. It was a living colony, and the Imperialist expansion in East Africa was going on even as the British withdrew from India and from West Africa.
The resistance movement to all this came from the Kikuyu tribe, which formed about 20 percent of the Kenyan population. Under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta, they had pursued a course of terror, in the hope of driving the whites from Africa out of sheer horror. The secret Kikuyu society which committed itself to his murderous policy bore the name of Mau Mau.
The government in London had begun to recognise that Kenyan independence, and the end of white supremacy, was an inevitability, but they could not bring themselves to admit as much, either to the inhabitants of Kenya or to their own right wing. The Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, as late as January 1959, could hold a conference in London in which he promised independence to the two other East African colonies–Tanganyika (independent 1961) and Uganda (1962)–while claiming that Kenyan independence would either not happen at all or was a long way off. Later that year, at Hola detention camp in Kenya, eleven Mau Mau detainees were beaten to death by the warders. It was initially claimed that they had died from lack of water. Lennox-Boyd was sacked and replaced by Iain Macleod, a very different sort of Conservative, who enraged his colleagues, and the white Kenyans, by stating the obvious–that Jomo Kenyatta the terrorist would be released from prison, and that majority rule in that country would soon become an inevitability. Kenya became independent on 12 December 1963. Some white settlers were richly compensated by British taxpayers’ money and came home. Most of the 30,000 Europeans (compared with the five and a quarter million Africans) decided to stay on, unharmed by Kenyatta or his former Mau Mau fighters.
The weight of sheer majority, or the Law of Time, would make it inevitable that Africa would be ruled by Africans. But even this fact, becoming obvious to Macmillan and those around him, was not immediately apparent to those who lived in African countries, particularly those in the southern part of the continent. And here, if one is to paint a fair picture of history, it is necessary to think not of two groups–Africans who wanted independence at any cost, and white supremacists–but a third, comprising Africans and Europeans who found, particularly for example in Southern Rhodesia, that a system of law and order, in which more and more Africans were being educated, and entering upon responsibilities formerly exercised by whites, was perhaps preferable to a violent or sudden transition from all-European to all-African government.
And then again, further south there was the unique and extreme example of South Africa. When Macmillan arrived on the last lap of his African tour at Durban, he found sunburnt, happy whites, waving Union Jacks as they came from their tennis courts and their swimming pools. But he also found a group of black protesters who, adapting his own famous political cliché at home, carried banners which read, ‘We’ve never had it so bad’.
As the move towards African independence spread across the continent, the southern African countries hardened in their colonial attitudes. In Rhodesia, the Law and Order Maintenance Bill, passed in 1960, greatly strengthened the hand of what was in effect an all-white one-party system of government, giving the authorities powers of press censorship which by European standards would have been fascist, and allowing brutal police treatment of suspects. In South Africa, things were more extreme. Though sixty years had passed since the Boer War, the old Dutch Boer religion had not gone away. Nor had resentment among the Afrikaans population at being pushed around by the British. South Africa was poised to leave the Commonwealth. Even as Macmillan visited them, Nelson Mandela with 155 others was on trial for treason. A month after Macmillan’s visit, sixty-seven black demonstrators were shot at Sharpeville. And the danger, ever-present in Macmillan’s mind (not least because so many members of his own party at home supported the right-wing line), was that Southern Rhodesia would follow the South African line and move towards white-ruled independence.
Speaking to the all-white South African Parliament in words written for him by a diplomat called David Hunt, Macmillan once again demonstrated the blurb writer’s zest for the memorable cliché, with his famous Wind of Change speech:
Ever since the break-up of the Roman Empire one of the constant facts of political life in Europe has been the emergence of independent nations…
Today the same thing is happening in Africa, and the most striking of all the impressions I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of this African national consciousness. In different places it takes different forms, but it is happening everywhere. The wind of change is blowing through this continent, and, whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact and our national policies must take account of it.
To say that there was an element of humbug in the speech is not to deny that Macmillan, in common with many liberal-minded Englishmen of the period, was genuinely shocked by the system of apartheid, whereby, as in the United States, segregation between human beings on the grounds of skin pigmentation was formally written into the system. In Britain, segregation existed, and would go on existing, through the invisible veils of class snobbery, economic segregation and taboo. Macmillan and his kind would have been amazed had a group of blacks turned up on one of their shooting parties or at Pratt’s Club, but the many unwritten rules of English society made such an event impossible to envisage. Therefore, when he met old Dr Verwoerd, the President of South Africa, who spelt such things out in print and made them into fixed laws, Macmillan was shocked, having the not especially original insight that for Verwoerd apartheid was ‘more than a political philosophy, it was a religion; a religion based on the Old Testament rather than on the New’.26 The Commonwealth Immigrants Bill, drawn up in February 1962, began with the assertion that ‘Immigration officers will of course carry out their duties without regard to the race, colour or religion of Commonwealth citizens who may seek to enter the country’, but no one had any doubt as to its aim, namely to limit the number of black people coming into the country. It was a piece of fine old British hypocrisy from first page to last, since it was carefully designed to keep out the blacks, while not being seen to do so. In the words of Macmillan’s official biographer, Alastair Horne, ‘one of the principal complications…was how to preserve non-discrimination while not closing the door on members of the “white” Commonwealth’.27
Quite apart from the ideological problems facing the Commonwealth, its economic relationship with the former mother country was to be the serious underlying question of the Macmillan years. Would trade with the Commonwealth be enough to sustain economic growth at home and allow Macmillan to purvey to the British people a situation in which, he could tell them they had ‘never had it so good’?
When attacked for the cliché, and for the philosophy which lay behind it, by no less a person than Dr Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, Macmillan responded hotly and with passion. Fisher, at a sermon in Croydon of all places, said that it was ‘a dreadful’ phrase, and added some humbug of his own in which he wondered, ‘will it always stay good if we do not keep our minds on the love of God?’28
Macmillan retorted, in a private letter:
I also share your view as a Churchman that the material condition of a people must by no means be the only criterion. Unless it has the spiritual values it will fail. Nevertheless it is the function of Governments to try to improve material conditions and I have always thought that the Church had supported us in this effort.
The attack on poverty, the attempts to clear the slums, to deal with low wages, to remove unemployment, all these were always impressed upon me by your great predecessor Dr Temple, as truly Christian duties. At any rate, when I put my mind back to the conditions of the great slums, with three million unemployed, with the means test, with the state of health and housing conditions, and indeed with the general level in which many of our people were condemned to live, I rejoice that it is now so good…
On my African tour [he was writing from Nigeria] I am more and more impressed by the need which I have always put strongly before the country, especially at the last General Election, for the ‘good neighbour’ policy, that is that they should use their growing material strength for the assistance of development overseas, especially in the Commonwealth. But I have also reminded them that they cannot do this out of poverty. They can only do it out of wealth.29
The burgeoning prosperity of post-war Europe, and the large free-trade area of the Common Market, was not something from which Britain could afford to exclude itself. Indeed, for some British observers, it was vital, if economic prosperity was to continue in Britain, that membership of the Common Market be sought as soon as possible. For others, however, Europe was a spectre to be dreaded: from the left, it was seen as a capitalist club, and from the right as a federalist trap which would neuter national sovereignty.
The Treaty of Rome was signed on 25 March 1957, at a moment when Britain was still reeling from the Suez debacle and the new Prime Minister was primarily concerned with repairing the wreckage of Anglo-American relations.
The signatories to the original treaty were those who, in different ways, had suffered defeat in the Second World War, who had known at first hand, and at far greater cost than the victors, the devastating effects of war, but who had also known, before the war, a much greater degree of short-term economic success than the laissez-faire economy of Britain. Germany (now only West Germany) and Italy had both had what could be termed state-enforced Keynesianism which had led to the conquest of unemployment, and a programme of public works–the building of modern road systems, railways and infrastructure which had no comparison in Britain. It was the aim of the former fascist countries of Italy and Germany, together with their satellites Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands (which had been largely fascist in sympathy in the 1930s), to recover what had been achieved in the 1930s, without, naturally, a revival of the repressive structures of the police state. The other great inspiration of the European idealists was to bring about peace between France and Germany, whose conflicts since 1870 had led to the loss of so much European life. Here, once more, France, which had effectively been governed from Berlin from 1940 to 1944–half directly under German occupation and half, in so-called Vichy France, under the satrapy of Marshal Pétain. Clearly, it was impossible so soon after the war to admit that the arrangement had been advantageous to France, especially since France was now under the benign dictatorship of General de Gaulle, whose Free French gesture had done little to further the defeat of the Third Reich but much to hearten those Frenchmen and women who felt the humiliations of the 1940–44 years. So it was that de Gaulle signed up to the Treaty of Rome, seeing it as a convenient way of enjoying the economic advantages of federalism while telling his electorate, and perhaps actually believing, that the new Common Market, with its ultimate aim of laying ‘the foundation of an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’, was really a way of France dominating Europe without using military force.
It was perhaps not surprising that the basically fascist idea of a United Europe was not pursued by many British politicians in their election manifestos of 1959, the first election after the Treaty of Rome was signed. The only British politician who embraced the idea of ‘Europe a Nation’ with public enthusiasm was Sir Oswald Mosley, a fringe figure since his imprisonment during the Second World War under the 18B regulations, and, being natural flypaper for the crackpots, not a man likely to be brought back into the fold of either main party, even if he had shown signs of wishing this. Nevertheless, he was the first British politician to make public use of those arguments which would later be familiar on the lips of the ‘pro-Europeans’ in British politics, namely that in a competitive economic world it was no longer viable for small nation states to ‘go it alone’. In Europe: Faith and Plan–A Way Out from the Coming Crises–Mosley asked, ‘Can these relatively small, isolated, individual nations of Western Europe face for fifteen years on world markets the competition of America’s normal production surplus, plus the deliberate market-breaking dumping of the Soviets at below European production costs?’ No, because ‘they are dependent on external supplies of raw materials for their industries…they are forced to pay for these necessities by exports sold in open competition in world markets, under conditions where they have no influence whatever’.30
The Macmillan government knew this as clearly as anyone, just as they were aware that from its very first beginnings, when the French and Germans turned potential industrial rivalry into a partnership which easily outstripped British coal and steel (hampered by industrial disputes and all the disadvantages of state-owned industry). The French and German Coal and Steel agreement, the brainchild of French Foreign Minister Robert Schumann and Jean Monnet, was the basis of an economic idea which was ineluctable for the Europeans.
For some parts of British industry, the advantages of joining in such a Common Market were, would be, huge. In other areas, where Britain was in touch with a bigger world market, there was no advantage, or positive disadvantage, which is why both sides of the political debate in Britain, between pro- and anti-Europeans, can always be made to sound perfectly plausible. Equally, however, the political-cum-mythological arguments for the Island Race to allow itself to be subsumed into a European Federalist idea, with loss of sovereignty and ‘Britishness’, has always been understandably abhorrent to the majority of British voters.
These differences would run like a great seismic fault line through the whole political history of Britain for the next half-century, dividing parties and individual minds (for most of the prominent British politicians changed their minds at least once about whether they were or were not Europeans).
Macmillan, as ever Janus-like, looked back to a time when Britain had ‘influence in Europe’ (that is, the period when he himself was in Italy at the end of the war watching a little wistfully as the Americans swept slowly through France and Germany but too slowly to stop Stalin swallowing up all the countries of Eastern Europe). A natural Francophile who had fought at the Battle of the Somme, he wanted to check what he feared would be undue German influence in Europe, and, naturally, it was a blow to him that General de Gaulle vetoed the British application to join the Common Market in 1962. He attributed this, probably quite rightly, not to any economic arguments, but to the fact that de Gaulle could not quite forgive Britain for its personal kindness to himself during the Second World War (Churchill had not only allowed de Gaulle to set up his Free French organisation in London but had actually suggested the medieval arrangement that the governments of France and Britain should become one). Nor could de Gaulle tolerate a memory of France’s humiliations in 1940. ‘Things would have been easier,’ he opined, ‘if Southern England had been occupied by the Nazis–if we’d had Lloyd George for Pétain, then we would have been equal[i.e., with the French]…that’s why [de Gaulle] found Adenauer, who’d also been occupied, an easier ally than me…I may be cynical, but I fear it’s true–if Hitler had danced in London, we’d have had no trouble with de Gaulle.’31
Throughout Europe (though not, curiously enough, in the United States) societies in the last fifty years have followed a pattern: as prosperity increases, the conventions and rules of society have relaxed. Capital punishment was abolished; corporal punishment, whether of criminals or of children in schools or at home, came to be frowned upon; greater tolerance was shown towards sexual deviancy; abortion became more easily available; religious belief, or at any rate adherence to religious organisations, declined. R. A. Butler, thought by many to be the lost leader of the Conservative Party, or Macmillan’s obvious successor when the time came, became Home Secretary in 1957. When he did so he was not an abolitionist, but he became so. (His wife, Molly, had been an abolitionist ever since her first husband, High Sheriff of Essex, had borne responsibility for hangings.32
Butler was a canny if ultimately unsuccessful politician. He inherited the Homicide Act, 1957, from his predecessor, one which he described as ‘rather curious’ since it restricted the death penalty not to degrees of murder but to the imagined deterrent effect which any particular hanging would be deemed to have on the maintenance of law and order. He refused, for political reasons, to reopen the case of Timothy Evans, who had been hanged for the murder of his wife and child, and he refused to question, though he was deeply disturbed by, the case of Derek Bentley, who was hanged for a murder committed by his younger accomplice, Christopher Craig. Butler could see that to bring up the issue of capital punishment before an election was political folly. The majority of the public, in common with the right wing of the Conservative Party, loved hangings, and would not be impressed by a party which promised to abolish them. Therefore the whole matter was deferred throughout Macmillan’s term of office. Butler and Macmillan, progressivists at heart (though Macmillan favoured capital punishment, he knew its abolition was one day an inevitability), therefore allowed hangings to continue, a good example in miniature of the untroubled attitude which politicians have towards life and death, when weighing in the balance a fellow mortal’s existence and their own chance of re-election. Indeed, when Henry Brooke took over as Home Secretary there was no certainty at all that the death penalty would be abolished in the foreseeable future.
It was not until the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 that law permitted homosexual acts between two males, in private, and over the age of twenty-one. Abortion was still in most cases very difficult to obtain and was the preserve of the back-street amateur, with her knitting needles and bottles of gin. Divorce was difficult to obtain. Harold Macmillan managed to pay lip service to the march of progress without, on home territory, having to do much to expedite its advance.
There were two areas, however, in which historians can see that Macmillan’s government definitely defined the future of Britain on the domestic front. The first was in the area of immigration, the second of transport.
Although the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act was, as has been said, grossly hypocritical in regard to race, and although its aim was to limit the immigration into Britain by those who were called in those days ‘coloured’, the limits it imposed were slight and ineffectual. Harold Macmillan told his diary he had never seen the Commons ‘in so hysterical a mood’ since Suez when the Bill was debated. The Labour Party (who three years later, when themselves in power, brought in a much more restrictive Bill to curb immigration) claimed to be deeply shocked. Gaitskell called it a ‘cruel and brutal anti-colour legislation’. (‘Gaitskell is the kind of cad that only a gentleman can be,’ thought Macmillan.33) For J. Enoch Powell and the right-wing conservatives, the Bill did not go nearly far enough in preventing West Indians and Asians from entering Britain. (There were fewer Africans in those days.)
Short of unimaginable acts of transportation which would indeed have been ‘cruel and brutal’, it is impossible to see how the process of immigration could, in fact, have been reversed. Aeroplanes and comparatively cheap travel had been invented. They could not be uninvented. There was a general movement of peoples across the face of the globe, and not just a move from Commonwealth countries to Britain. The increase of prosperity at home meant an increase in the labour market. The National Health Service, London Transport, British Railways and other huge employers had already, by the Macmillan era, come to depend upon cheap immigrant labour. But a mighty change it was, poised to alter the character of all the big British cities.
The second change which took place in the Macmillan era was the conscious decision by the government for Britain to stop being a railway nation and to become a car nation.
Here there truly was a choice, and the politicians unquestionably made the wrong one.
One of the great achievements of the Victorians, and a key reason for their economic domination of the world, was the setting up of a railway network which linked every part of the United Kingdom. At the peak of railway travel in 1914 there were over 20,000 miles of railways in Britain.34 After the nationalisation of the railways by the Labour Party during the first Attlee government, there was obviously a fall in the profitability of the railways. Much of the stock was out of date. The British Transport Commission, chaired from 1953 to 1961 by General Sir Brian Robertson, proposed, surely sensibly, a wholesale modernisation of the railways.
Politicians, however, only see the short term. They were worried by repeated labour disputes on the railways. They saw that more and more freight was now carried by road, and they thought that the answer to this was not to improve the rail service but to follow the inevitably calamitous route of building more roads. (They did not see the truth that the more roads you build, the more traffic clogs them, with all the environmental calamities which follow.) Macmillan’s Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, believed that the British Transport Commission was ‘incompetent’ and that General Sir Brian Robertson should be sacked, to be replaced by a man who had ‘one of the most able and fertile brains in the industrial and commercial world’–Dr Richard Beeching. Beeching was already in the pay of those who wished to make a huge killing by building a vast series of Autobahns all over Britain. Whether or not this was known to Macmillan, the Prime Minister met Beeching à deux on 10 May 1961.35 He asked Beeching about the possibility of selling off railway property ‘to finance modernisation’. Beeching was put in charge of modernising the railways. The trades unions were quite understandably and rightly immediately opposed to him. They were never consulted either by Macmillan or by Beeching about the proposals he had in mind. First, the closure of railway workshops where rolling stock and locomotives were made and repaired–the men who worked there never so much as warned in advance.
Beeching, who had now abolished the BTC and been declared Head of British Railways, told the Cabinet that they should be prepared to axe 70,000 jobs in the railways. ‘Most of this reduction would be effected by normal wastage and control of recruitment.’ On 27 March 1963, the Beeching Plan for the Railways was on sale at Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, and Ernest Marples was crowing to the Commons that his government would provide ‘an efficient, economic and well-balanced transport system for Great Britain’. The Beeching Plan, when put into effect, was to lead to the reduction of railway mileage from 17,500 in 1963 to 11,000 in 1975, only a little more than half the railway capacity enjoyed by Britain at the outbreak of the Great War.
Not only was rail travel comparatively cheap and environmentally friendly; not only were the fuels necessary to maintain it (coal in the 1950s and in the 1960s, diesel and electricity) all easily obtainable and limited within a government budget, but the railway network did link up Britain in a way which roads somehow do not, without destroying everything in their path. The journey by train from a city centre to a provincial town, changing to a branch line and emerging at the wooden, gas-lit platform of some remote ‘halt’ was, of course, the work of engineers and planners. But in spite of the deep hostility felt by some countrymen and old Tories to the development of the railways in the nineteenth century, the remarkable thing about the trains (which, of course, only passed through country districts every hour or so) was how tolerantly they left nature intact. To make comparable journeys by car requires roads, it requires garages built on by-passes, and it requires the noisy, ugly, polluting means of transport to be taken from the crowded city centre or town to the formerly unsullied bit of country. Beeching, and Macmillan with him, had made no corner of Britain entirely safe from the car. Railways could pass through hillside, fields and villages without, miraculously, destroying them and in most cases the coming of the railway (as evoked in the poetry of Edward Thomas or the crime novels of Michael Innes) actually seemed at home in the world of nature, as was witnessed by many a remote signal box or level crossing, heavy, in summer, with cow parsley and rose-bay willow herb, or swathed in autumn by cow-breathed fogs and river mist. After Macmillan, there were few parts of England where the noise of bird-song and insects chirruping is not drowned by the destructive hum of the distant Autobahn.
Commenting on his own preferred recreation, grouse-shooting, Macmillan commented, ‘I think one of the reasons why one loves a holiday on the moors is that, in a confused and changing world, the picture in one’s mind is not spoilt.
‘If you go to Venice or Florence or Assisi you might as well be at Victoria Station–masses of tourists, chiefly Germans in shorts. If you go to Yorkshire or Scotland, the hills, the keepers, the farmers, the farmers’ sons, the drivers are all the same; and (except for the coming of the Land Rover, etc) there is a sense of continuity.’36 It is probably still possible to find such tranquillity in the Highlands of Scotland, and in parts of Yorkshire. In Macmillan’s day, it was available to many British people in their own back gardens, and certainly in the landscapes of Devon, Gloucestershire, Suffolk, Lancashire, most of which have been irreparably ruined by roads–what he wistfully calls ‘the coming of the Land Rover, etc’.
In the end, Macmillan’s hypochondria, his sense of his own decay, allied to periods of self-doubt and black depression, became not merely a reason for his standing down, but also an emblem of what was happening to Britain itself. Macmillan was the ideal, the most expressive possibly, leader for Britain at this period, for a Britain which both had genuine links with the past, but links which were also fraudulent; a Britain which was genuinely cynical, yet wistfully holding on to faith; a Britain which was the sick man of Europe, but which was also a self-doubting hypochondriac who would make old bones.
Meanwhile, two duller, but equally devastating threads of destiny were being woven by the Norns to the Conservative Party’s undoing. Both had to do with the party of Opposition.
The first was the sudden death of Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, on 18 January 1963. He was fifty-six years old. The disease which killed him, lupus erythematosus, had come upon him quite unexpectedly. As the ‘right-wing’ Labour leader, witty, eloquent, passionate, he looked bound to win the next election from the Conservatives. But would he have done so (‘Gaitskell is the kind of cad that only a gentleman can be’)? Would he really have given the impression, as his successor so audibly and visibly was able to do when the time came, that a vote for Labour was a vote not merely for a different party in government but in effect for a completely different Britain? After Gaitskell’s death, the choice for the Labour leadership was between the right-wing candidate, a working-class man called George Brown, and a former Oxford don of lower-middle-class origins, James Harold Wilson. They chose Wilson, though both Wilson and Brown were well qualified to pick up Macmillan’s comic mantle.
There was now absolutely no danger of the public feeling that the Labour Party was led, like the Conservatives, by a ‘toff’, and since these class matters were coming more and more to the fore, this was a vital ingredient in the Conservatives’ downfall.
The Macmillan government, largely composed of uninspired old men, looked as if it was losing electoral support. At a by-election in March 1962, the Liberal candidate, Eric Lubbock, won the safe Tory seat of Orpington by 7,855. Another by-election loomed, this time in Leicester, and during the night when the poll was being counted, Macmillan panicked, deciding that there was a plot against him. (‘Butler,’ he told Selwyn Lloyd, with no evidence whatever, ‘had been plotting to divide the party on the Common Market and bring him [Macmillan] down.’) So Macmillan sacked Lloyd as Chancellor, and six other Cabinet ministers, bringing in some slightly younger blood–Keith Joseph, Edward Boyle and William Deedes among them. The ruthlessness of Macmillan’s gesture was immediately likened to Hitler’s suppression of the Rohm supporters in the SA in 1934 and dubbed the Night of the Long Knives. Gilbert Longden MP (Conservative) during a censure debate on 26 July congratulated the Prime Minister on keeping his head, when all around him were losing theirs. It was obvious that the Conservatives were ready for a spell in Opposition, and this would have been the case even if Macmillan’s government had not been assailed by the three phenomena usually blamed for his demise–the exposure of a cypher clerk in the British Embassy in Moscow, John Vassall, as a homosexual and a secret Soviet agent; the scandal of John Profumo, Secretary of State for War, being revealed to have had a brief affair with a young woman, Christine Keeler. Another key event occurred on 31 July, just before the summer recess of 1963. The Peerage Bill became law, as a result of the agitations of the former Viscount Stansgate. When Anthony Wedgwood Benn, MP for Bristol, inherited a viscountcy from his father, he was anxious to be rid of it to continue his political career in the Commons. This was the first step in the transformation of this moderate Social Democrat Anthony Wedgwood Benn to Tony Benn, Trotskyite firebrand, darling of radio audiences and People’s Friend. It also enabled other hereditary peers to nurse the undignified political aspirations which had hitherto been open only to commoners. Quintin Hogg, who had inherited the title bestowed on his father for founding the London Polytechnic (Viscount Hailsham), and the 14th Earl of Home, who was able to perform the office of Foreign Secretary from the House of Lords, were both now in a position to succeed Macmillan, since it was felt in these progressive times that, although such Prime Ministers as Lord Liverpool, Lord Salisbury and Lord Rosebery had all managed to exercise their duties from the Upper House, it was no longer appropriate in the age of the Beatles and What’s My Line?
When Macmillan developed very mild prostate troubles, he resigned immediately. The Conservatives had no processes for electing their leader but, if questioned, the majority would have supposed that, just as the choice last time had been between Wab or Hawold, so now it would be the turn of Wab with Quintin Hogg as a clownish alternative. They had not reckoned upon Macmillan from his hospital bed concocting the story for the Queen that the majority of people in the party wanted Lord Home, who would soon be transmogrified into Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Nor perhaps had anyone quite reckoned on Home’s charm and political astuteness, neither of which was lost upon the television-viewing electorate. The 1964 election was a close-run thing. If a mere nine hundred people in eight marginal constituencies had voted Conservative instead of Labour, then Douglas-Home’s government would have survived.37