Conclusion: A Country of Cliques is Over
The story of Britain in the years after the fall of Attlee’s New Jerusalem, and before the sixties really began to swing is the story of a country still run by cliques and in-groups, rather than by visionary individuals, still less the masses. Understand the networks, the clubs and the personal associations and you understand the system. For the Tories, public school and Oxbridge links, even family ones, had provided the fusebox of power. Post-war growth had given clique politics a good run. But this Britain eventually failed. It failed over Suez, over the growing signs of economic failure, in its late attempt to copy French central planning and in its inability to grasp the new culture and society growing up all around it. The symbols of that failure were the spy scandals, the Profumo affair and the rising froth of satirical laughter. Macmillan had finished it off, bloodily, on ‘the Night of the Long Knives’. Before this act of almost domestic butchery there was still a notion that the chaps at the Turf Club, the old families with their stalking and salmon rivers, that web of Old Etonian cronies, could maintain British authority and self-confidence, despite the local difficulties of a disintegrating Empire and a weak economy; that they could hang together. Patently, they could not.
The final stage in the collapse of the old authority came with Macmillan’s illness and resignation, and the stitch-up which eventually put the bony, amiable, slightly bemused Lord Home of the Hirsel into Number Ten as the fourth Tory Prime Minister in a row. Much of British politics still came down to class, which threw up many ironies. In this case it was the long, ultimately successful legal fight by a Labour leftwinger, Lord Stansgate, better known as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, better known still as Tony Benn, to disclaim or throw off his peerage. His success in court electrified the Tory struggle. There were Tories in the Commons who were popular candidates to replace Macmillan, above all Rab Butler. Yet the new ability to fling off a coronet and become a commoner and thus possibly an MP in the Commons, meant two other prominent Conservatives could now take part in the race. One was Lord Hailsham, a clever, popular but ultimately rather undignified man, favoured by Macmillan. The other was Lord Home. Macmillan was far less ill than he thought but the news that he would go turned the Tory conference of October 1963, normally a placid and deferential gathering, into wild and hysterical seaside hustings. Lord Hailsham made it clear he would renounce his peerage but then discredited himself with a display of crude and exhibitionistic self-promotion. Macmillan quickly dropped him as favourite, some suggest because he did not want a successor who would be there for long, just in case he could manage a comeback. Rab Butler made a poor speech, leading some to wonder if he really wanted to be prime minister; he was a great mind, and much admired by the brighter Tories, but he lacked the slightest evidence of killer instinct. Enoch Powell, one of his supporters, said they had put the gun in his hands, but he refused to fire it. Macmillan coldly dismissed him as lacking ‘the last six inches of steel’. Up in London, Macmillan was still ill in bed and arranged for the various grandees of the party to ‘take soundings’ among the MPs, party workers, peers and constituency chairmen. This highly unscientific survey produced Lord Home’s name and he was duly proposed by Macmillan, invited by the Queen, accepted, renounced his peerage, won a by-election in a then-tame Scottish Tory constituency and duly entered Number Ten. Fast work milord.
Widely liked but self-effacing, Lord Home, Macmillan’s Foreign Secretary, had a political career which led right back to the Chamberlain government and the Munich appeasement of Hitler. This did not and should not have counted against him entirely. Butler had also been an appeaser; so had, for a while, Hailsham; indeed, so had most of the Tory Party at the time. But Home seemed utterly against the spirit of the new decade. He was the ultimate grouse-moor Tory, but without Macmillan’s wily toughness. Not just a toff but worse, a nice toff. The idea outraged many Tories, notably Hailsham and the liberal Iain Macleod. Powell was equally livid and both men refused to serve under Home, who was described by press commentators at the time as ‘a cretin’ and ‘this half-witted Earl’. In a famous article in the Spectator, Iain Macleod as editor attacked the choice as a stitch-up by the Conservative Party’s ‘magic circle’. He narrated the key soundings, involving Macmillan and functionaries such as Lords Dilhorne, Poole and St Aldwyn, pointing out in a devastating aside: ‘Eight of the nine men mentioned in the last sentence went to Eton.’
As it happened, Alec Douglas-Home went on to be a tougher opponent than Harold Wilson had expected. An Etonian schoolboy contemporary, the writer Cyril Connolly, had described the new Prime Minister as ‘the kind of graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy who is showered with favours and crowned with all the laurels…In the eighteenth century he would have become prime minister before he was thirty: as it was he appeared honourably ineligible for the struggle for life.’ Home proved Connolly wrong, at least in getting to the premier position and in being ready to fight for it. Later, he would return as Heath’s Foreign Secretary in 1970-4 and lived long to be a much-liked grand old man of Toryism. Yet he never overcame the handicap of being a symbol of the old ways. As Prime Minister in the early sixties he was out of time, an immaculately turned out anachronism. Macmillan unwittingly pointed this out in a draft of his resignation letter to the Queen, in which he cheerfully described Home as ‘clearly a man who represents the old, governing class at its best’. By 1964, that class was bust. Wilson put it well: ‘We are living in the jet age but we are governed by an Edwardian establishment mentality.’
Though in theory opposed to this fusty clique-ridden world, behind the clothing and language, Labour leaders were not quite as different as they liked to appear. That party too was a cluster of competing clubs and networks, whose own connections to business were chance friendships which would later cause much embarrassment. The trade unions were still mostly in the hands of the old right-wing leaders who manipulated and wire-pulled to stay in office; Whitehall was run by a tiny elite of clubmen, the hyper-educated classicists from Oxbridge in their striped trousers and stiff collars who knew they were cleverer than any elite, anywhere else. The Liberals, under their charismatic leader Jo Grimond, stood outside the inner clubs of fifties power which was no doubt why they began to have some spectacular by-election successes towards the end of the Tory years, particularly in Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. They were seen as somehow modern and classless, though in fact Grimond was another Old Etonian who was intertwined in the once-grand family alliances of strangely dead Liberal England. In Scotland and Wales, the Nationalist parties were just beginning to challenge the paternalists. But when Anthony Sampson published Anatomy of Britain he had illustrated it with a sprawling diagram of intersecting circles to show the closed and nepotistic system under which the country was organized. It was probably the most influential piece of journalism of his long career and as potent in its way as the coining of the word ‘Establishment’ by another journalist, Henry Fairlie, at around the same time.
Of course, all advanced societies have Establishments. France swapped her great Catholic families for the intellectual elites of the de Gaulle era; German industrialists cooperated cosily together in their assault on world markets; even the United States has its Ivy League colleges and grand families interlinked from Wall Street to Washington. But in democracies elites require prestige to survive. They need to have spread their successes widely enough to retain authority. The British elites of the early sixties failed this test. Despite the new tycoons and the cluster of truly innovative big companies, Britain’s output was growing far more slowly than other comparable countries and her share of world markets was shrivelling at a terrifying speed. Despite outside shocks, from Indian independence to Suez, from the sterling crises and the failure of weapons systems, to France’s rejection of her application for Common Market membership, the country had made no radical change of direction. Privately, civil servants and politicians acknowledged that there were profound problems, and agonized about what should be done. Publicly, under Macmillan and Douglas-Home, there was a complacent front of self-congratulation and business as usual.
Was this because we had been happier than other nations in our age of lost content? No revolution, invasion or wartime defeat had shaken the British as they acquired their new cars and explored their new supermarkets; British political scandals were a branch of light entertainment compared to the darker struggles convulsing Italy, France or Eastern Europe. And when Britain finally made a change, it turned out to be a surprisingly modest and ineffective one. Outside politics and the economy, a new country was breaking through – brightly coloured, fashionable, less masculine. For a brief flicker, it seemed to be matched by the arrival of a new government too. An alternative assessment came from Crossman as he contemplated the funeral gathering for Sir Winston Churchill in Westminster Hall at the end of January 1965: ‘But, oh, what a faded, declining establishment surrounded me. Aged marshals, grey, dreary ladies, decadent Marlboroughs and Churchills. It was a dying congregation gathered there and I am afraid the Labour Cabinet didn’t look too distinguished, either. It felt like the end of an epoch, possibly even the end of a nation.’