Harold Macmillan by Charles Williams
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25
By most standards of contemporary political measurement, Harold Macmillan, first Earl of Stockton-on-Tees, was one of the most successful, interestingly ambivalent, enigmatically attractive, albeit distinctively devious, peacetime Tory Prime Ministers of the 20th century. Vicky’s brilliant and legendary cartoon invention of Supermac was not just a product from the fertile mind of a uniquely creative cartoonist – it was also accurate reporting. He was a Supermac – with all the dubious ambiguities that such a character suggests. He was also a man who became a living political watershed.
Harold Macmillan was the last great figure to reflect old-style Tory grandee paternalism that embraced a genuine, if sentimental, Victorian affection for the working classes, although, in fact, was often little more than a guilt complex. Yet with Macmillan it was also an integral manifestation of his own, often political, inner conflict and uncertainty, frequently reflecting surprisingly radical, even leftish, views.
With his departure from the scene in the early 1960s, the Conservative Party moved, through the confusion of the Edward Heath period, to Thatcherism – a period of brutal indifference to, and even contempt for, the entire Macmillan tradition. When the old master decried the manner in which Margaret Thatcher was “selling off the family silver” that was not merely a token criticism of policies that Macmillan found objectionable and even absurd. It was a recognition that the old Tory Party, of which he was the last icon, was dead.
This new biography, by a Labour peer, Lord Charles Williams of Elvel, brings the Macmillan era back to life in vivid style. It is a first-class biography and a substantial development of research from the authorised two-volume Life of Harold Macmillan produced by Alastair Horne 20 years ago. In fact, I rate this the best Macmillan biography we have so far had from the dozen or so written.
If I have a complaint about the book, it is that Williams fails sufficiently to reflect on the significance of the leap from Macmillan Toryism to Thatcherism. The Labour parallel was the leap from Harold Wilson and James Callaghan to Tony Blair, which has been justified by the Blairite claim that the disappearance of the old industrial working class made the old Labour Party redundant. Thatcher’s argument was a touch similar, as she destroyed Macmillan’s Tory Party and prepared the way for Blair. The tapestry of the Macmillan story covers much of what has already been written, but with added research: his successes as Housing Minister in the post-war Churchill government; his rise in Anthony Eden’s Government first to Foreign Secretary and then Chancellor of the Exchequer – crucially, the post he held during the Suez campaign.
It was Chancellor Macmillan who effectively brought the Suez period to its disastrous climax by telling the Cabinet that the Americans were about to scuttle the pound and ruin Britain’s economy if Eden continued his war. That was a lie and Macmillan knew it – which Williams reveals with important new material. Macmillan knew the game was up and exaggerated to help remove Eden. He then jockeyed Rab Butler out of a merited succession to Number 10, thereafter destroying his chances. It was brutal, cynical politicking, to be sure.
But agaisnt all this was Supermac’s remarkably courageous radical moves such as his “Wind of Change” speech in South Africa – a crucial factor in demolishing apartheid. The mix of the devious, ruthless Macmillan alongside the lurking radicalism is well crafted by Williams.
Yet most fascinating of all is the way he describes in great detail, pathos and sympathy the extraordinary emotional tragedy that haunted much of Macmillan’s political career: the longstanding and torrid affair his wife, Dorothy Cavendish, daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, had with one of her husband’s closest political allies, Bob Boothby, the Tory MP for East Aberdeenshire. It was an amazing affair, never publicised nor mentioned in the press, which became a whispered humiliating topic of gossip throughout Macmillan’s parliamentary career and personal life and which came close to destroying his fragile health. The astonishing aspect to this extraordinary personal crisis is that he managed somehow to survive it and ultimately reach Downing Street as Prime Minister on January 10 1957. By then the romance between Dorothy and Boothby had subsided, although it never actually died out completely, despite Boothby having married.
The relationship began in 1929 after Macmillan was defeated in his Stockton constituency. Dorothy seduced Boothby – a willing and indeed enthusiastic “victim”. Boothby thought little about snatching the wife of his then close friend, a fellow Tory MP and Old Etonian. The Macmillans had been married for nine years when the affair started. Dorothy had already produced three of Macmillan’s children. Then came a fourth, Sarah, who was almost certainly fathered by Boothby – and who, in despair, committed suicide in her late 20s. The entire Macmillan family was shattered. His son, Maurice, also a Conservative MP, became an alcoholic.
Macmillan himself suffered a nervous breakdown after the Stockton defeat, aware of his wife’s conduct. He recovered sufficiently by 1931 to regain his Stockton seat in the landslide victory of Stanley Baldwin’s National Government. But there was little he could do to curb his wife’s enthusiasm for Boothby, nor his old friend’s bad behaviour.
It remained that way until 1939 when the Second World War and Winston Churchill’s premiership rescued Macmillan and almost certainly helped to create a new, and more hopeful, life for him by appointing him the Government Minister in North-West Africa. Eventually he became Churchill’s man with a vital remit across the whole Mediterranean war zone. It was the re-making of Macmillan.
His inner political views, like his emotional structure, remained ambiguous to the end. When he first entered Parliament in 1924, he was so impressed by David Lloyd George that he toyed with switching to the Liberals. But he judged this would go down badly with his father-in-law, the Duke of Devonshire, so he remained with the Tories. In the early 1930s, after his health breakdown, he actually consulted Aneurin Bevan, whose ability he admired and even envied, seeking advice about switching to the Labour Party – a point told to me by Nye but which has never appeared in any Macmillan biography. Nye advised him: “Stay where you are.”
Perhaps it was all self-delusion or, more likely, an attempt to escape from his marital and emotional trauma. In the end, the whole complex morphed into Supermac – producing an enigma which even this excellent book still fails completely to resolve.
Geoffrey Goodman
