Small Rooms: How Governments Were Run in the Fifties
Churchill was about to be seventy-seven when he returned to office, which was an older age then than it is now. When he observed to his private secretary that he had never known a prime minister so old, the well-read civil servant replied that actually Churchill had – William Ewart Gladstone. Like Gladstone, he would still be Prime Minister in his eighties. (The Grand Old Man of the nineteenth century lasted a few years longer than the Grand Old Boy of the twentieth century perhaps because Gladstone had neither led Britain through a world war nor fuelled himself the while on brandy and cigars.) The Conservatives had radically overhauled their organization and policies during the Attlee years, in a way the party was unable or unwilling to do after later defeats. They had moved decisively towards the consensus for a Welfare State, a more centrist position than ever before, and they had very effectively played on the grimness and occasional absurdities of the rationing years. Having promised the unexciting agenda of ‘several years of solid, stable administration’, Churchill formed a government of cronies and old muckers, reluctant generals and businessmen. The best people were his wartime allies Eden, Macmillan and the education reformer, ‘Rab’ Butler.
Politics in the fifties, at least on the Tory side, was unimaginably different from politics today. There were the same rackety campaigning offices, the same ambitious young researchers dreaming of becoming ministers themselves and the same underlying ruthless struggle for personal power. But many more people were party members, the backbench MPs were more independent-minded, with more status in the country, yet far lazier, too; and above all, the top of government was small social circle which operated well out of the way of lenses, microphones or diarists. Churchill himself spent an alarming amount of his time playing the card game bezique and travelling, often slowly on ocean liners and, as would Eden and Macmillan, put great strain on the notion of genuine cabinet discussion, provoking ferocious rows, walk-outs and threatened resignations. When Churchill and his Chancellor, Rab Butler, hatched a complicated plot to save the pound, ministers were presented with a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum and furiously protested. When Churchill fired off an invitation to a summit with the Soviets after Stalin’s death, sending it while sailing in mid-Atlantic, his cabinet was equally outraged and eventually forced a climbdown. When Eden bitterly protested in cabinet that Churchill was breaking yet another promise about his retirement, other ministers complained that here was an important story about which they had been told nothing. Yet Eden’s Suez plot was hatched without important ministers having any clear idea of what was really happening. And Macmillan governed by playing ministers off against one another, expertly avoiding full and frank discussions in cabinet.
Most of the key political moments of these years take place like scenes on a small stage, in rooms containing a handful of people who know one another too well. As in Shakespeare, there are crowd scenes too – the rallies against Eden; the first Aldermaston marches; race riots and trade union mass meetings for yet another strike. But in terms of day-to-day power, they are noises off. Instead we have Macmillan visiting Churchill in the latter stages of his prime ministership, to find the old man in characteristic Number Ten pose, sitting in bed with a green budgerigar on his head: ‘He had the cage on his bed (from which the bird had come out) and a cigar in his hand. A whisky and soda was by his side – of this the little bird took sips later on. Miss Portal sat by the bed – he was dictating.’
Eighteen months later, there will be the cosy private dinner in Number Ten, interrupted when Eden gets his first message about the nationalization of the Suez Canal, and is told he must hit Nasser quickly and hard, by one of his guests, the regent of Iraq, Nuri El Said. This guest will later be a victim of Eden’s failure, having his guts ripped out by the Baghdad mob and dragged, still living, through the streets attached to the back bumper of his car. Later still, there will be the famous procession of ministers being asked privately, one by one, who should succeed Eden by the drawling aristocratic kingmaker, Salisbury, ‘Wab or Hawold?’ They choose Macmillan. Edward Heath, the chief whip, has to go and break the news to Rab Butler that, though almost every newspaper says he will be the new Prime Minister, they are all wrong and he has lost out. Again, two men in a dramatically lit room overlooking Horse Guards Parade: ‘As I entered, his face lit up with its familiar, charming smile…there was nothing I could do to soften the blow. “I’m sorry, Rab,” I said, “It’s Harold.” He looked utterly dumbfounded.’ After that, Macmillan’s first move is to summon Heath to dinner, to reshape the government. They have to barge through a crowd of journalists – Downing Street in those days being completely open to the public – and Heath is tripped up by one, tumbling into the car which races up Whitehall to Macmillan’s haunt, the Turf Club. There another member of the club, sitting at the bar with the evening newspaper announcing the identity of the new Prime Minister, looks up, sees him and politely asks whether he had had any good shooting lately. No, laments Macmillan. Pity says the clubman. As he and Heath turn towards the dining room for oysters and steak, the man politely drawls, ‘Oh, by the way – congratulations.’
Much later Macmillan finally decides he too must retire. He has had great pain and difficulty pissing and wrongly thinks it might be cancer. Another small room: sitting in his hospital bed wearing pale blue pyjamas, with a silk shirt and cardigan (but without a bird on his head) he tells the Queen. Later, he suggests she should summon Alec Douglas-Home to replace him. There are literally dozens of similar examples of how political life was carried on among the top Tories during this period. Of course, there have been many Labour cabals, from the paranoid huddles in Harold Wilson’s Downing Street to the notorious Blair and Brown deal at Granita restaurant in Islington in 1994. But nothing quite matched the tight little world of the Churchill and Macmillan era. If they were not dining in the Commons or a handful of gentlemen’s clubs in St James’s – Macmillan belonged to five clubs – they were shooting grouse together or meeting in villas in the south of France. It is sometimes said that Churchill’s government, stuffed with old friends and relatives, was unusual. But of Macmillan’s all-male cabinet, a mere two out of sixteen had not been to a grand public school, with Eton the most heavily represented. Astonishingly, within months of his becoming Prime Minister, Macmillan was leading a government in which thirty-five ministers out of eighty-five, including seven in the cabinet, were related to him by marriage.
There were outsiders too, including Powell, Heath and later Margaret Thatcher. Ernie Marples, a former sergeant-major and building contractor who would help create Britain’s first motorways, was another self-made man in the government; so was Reggie Bevins of Liverpool. Most of them felt awkward and ill-at-ease, not quite officer class in the Conservative hierarchy of the fifties. The social make-up of the Tory administrations contributed to their weakness and eventually the collapse of their authority. The charmed circle of intermarried grandees were so much the country’s traditional ruling order that their natural instinct was to play down crisis. Not in front of the servants, children or voters seemed to be their private motto. Because all was not well, this would fatally destroy their authority. In the ‘satire boom’, rule by toffs would be discredited. Their silent struggles for power would eventually spill into the public domain, giving us political catchphrases like ‘Establishment’ and ‘magic circle’. Sex scandals and spying scandals would persuade people that there really was something rotten in the old order. Rather as New Labour connived with the press in the 1990s to mock John Major’s administration to death, so Harold Wilson and old Labour would join hands with Private Eye and playwrights to despatch the last government of grandees.