An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (4 page)

Two anecdotes from the day (Thursday 10 January 1957) that Macmillan became Prime Minister show his derogation within his family and his studied nonchalance. In the afternoon he had an audience with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, and accepted her commission to form a government. The news was swiftly broadcast by the BBC. At the Macmillan publishing offices excited staff brought the news to Daniel Macmillan, the eldest brother and chairman of the business. ‘Mr Macmillan’s been appointed Prime Minister,’ they said. ‘No,’ replied Daniel Macmillan, ‘Mr Harold has been appointed Prime Minister.’ (A few years later Daniel Macmillan, while lunching at the long table at the Garrick, was bearded by a club bore. ‘Is it true,’ demanded the bore, ‘that President Kennedy speaks to your brother daily on the telephone?’ Daniel’s reply was deadpan: ‘
Whyever
would President Kennedy want to do that?’) Edward Heath, who was the Tories’ highly effective Chief Whip in 1955–59, recalled the evening of the tenth. Macmillan had been Prime Minister for a few hours. ‘Where is the Chief Whip? We’re off to the Turf to celebrate!’ he cried to Downing Street staff. When the two men reached the club in Piccadilly, they found a lone man installed at the bar reading the
Evening Standard
with a front-page headline blazoning Macmillan’s appointment. The club man looked up, recognised Macmillan, and asked laconically: ‘Any good shooting recently?’

‘No,’ replied Macmillan.

‘What a pity,’ said the man. Heath and Macmillan were served their drinks, ordered oysters and steak, and then rose for the dining room. As they left, the man at the bar looked up and said as casually as before, ‘Oh, by the way, congratulations.’ This was the off-hand behaviour that Macmillan preferred, however ruffled his underlying feelings or agitated his nerves.
¹⁸

Originality could be fatal to men of Macmillan’s generation, or indeed to the vast majority of those who had served in the armed forces in either of the world wars. Conformity in clothes, deportment and opinions was the sign of trustworthiness. Conventionality was so strong that when Sir John Widgery was appointed a Judge of the Queen’s Bench Division in 1961, there was disgruntlement among lawyers because he would not sacrifice his military-looking moustache, although the English bench was entirely clean-shaven. Indeed, the process by which Macmillan became Prime Minister exemplified conformity in action. After Eden had announced his resignation to the Cabinet on 9 January 1957, the Cabinet members, except Butler and Macmillan, went one by one to Lord Salisbury’s room in the Privy Council Office. There they were questioned by Salisbury and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir. Their reception by Kilmuir and Salisbury reminded most of them of a visit to the headmaster’s study.

Salisbury, who deprecated Rab Butler as a prewar appeaser, did not interview the Cabinet in order of seniority, but began with ministers whom he judged most committed to Macmillan. To each minister Salisbury posed the same question: ‘Well, which is it? Wab or Hawold?’ He had laid on the table a sheet of notepaper with two columns headed ‘Macmillan’ and ‘Butler’ deliberately visible. The names accumulated in the first column, and deterred wobblers from naming Butler; only one minister did so, and he never held ministerial office again. Tory backbenchers, whom Macmillan had been sedulous in cultivating since November, also plumped for him because he seemed more combative than Butler: he had resisted the appeasement policy of which Butler had been a principal exponent. Memories of the war, martial attitudes, and the instilled discipline of 1939–45 were pervasive: twelve years is not a long time, except to children.

‘Would you like to join my shooting party?’ Macmillan asked men whom he was inviting to join his government. Fifty-two offices changed holders; four ministers left the Cabinet. Forming his administration, as he noted in his diary, ‘meant seeing nearly a hundred people and trying to say the right thing to each … many considerations had to be born in mind – the right, centre and left of the party; the extreme “Suez” group; the extreme opposition to Suez; the loyal centre – and last, but not least, U and non-U (to use the jargon that Nancy Mitford has popularised) that is, Eton, Winchester, etc. on the one hand; Board school and grammar school on the other.’
¹⁹

To Butler, in October 1957, Macmillan regretted the lack of ruthlessness among his Cabinet colleagues: ‘there were no tough guys like Swinton’.
²⁰
The Earl of Swinton, whose dropping from the Cabinet by Eden in 1955 Macmillan had deplored, was a revealing political model for Macmillan to tout: a middle-class professional man, whose marriage had transmuted him into the territorial aristocracy; a first-generation grandee with a moderated swagger; a politician with thirty years of Cabinet experience who had proven his acumen and resilience.

Swinton had once been Philip Lloyd-Greame, a barrister who specialised in mining law. He won the Military Cross on the Somme, and in 1918 was elected for the newly created London suburban constituency of Hendon, a northern equivalent to Bromley, where Macmillan was elected MP in 1945. His Hendon candidature was financially sponsored by Dudley Docker, founding President of the Federation of British Industries, on whose company boards he sat until 1922, when he was appointed President of the Board of Trade at the age of thirty-eight. A die-hard Tory MP called him ‘very clever’, but not too clever – ‘a Sahib’. This MP tried the experiment of inviting the political newcomer to stay for a tennis weekend. ‘I like the Lloyd-Greames as a couple not quite entirely,’ he decided. ‘Across all their actions is written the words “Get On”.’ When his wife’s uncle, the last Lord Masham, died in 1924, she inherited the Swinton estate in Yorkshire, as well as the cash her grandfather had made from inventing the Lister nip comb (which revolutionised Victorian wool-spinning). Lloyd-Greame changed his surname by Royal Licence to Cunliffe-Lister, assumed the responsibilities of a hospitable landed magnate, received his first peerage in 1935, and sat in every Conservative Cabinet until 1938. Churchill appointed him as chairman of the wartime Security Executive in 1940, as Resident Minister in West Africa in 1942 and as Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations in 1952.
²¹

Swinton’s elder son was killed in action in 1943, and the younger son, a wartime squadron leader in the RAF, shot himself through the heart in 1956 after years of nervous troubles. Macmillan, who spoke with tears in his eyes to Butler about his only son Maurice’s wrestling with alcoholism, felt for the Swintons in their double loss. As Prime Minister he was always pleased to see Philip Swinton, whose judgement he thought peculiarly sound and whose vitality he envied. His visits to Swinton Park – a battlemented, impervious, northern house, which symbolised all that he wished to seem – were a highpoint of his calendar. ‘One of the reasons one loves a holiday on the moors is that, in a confused and changing world, the picture in one’s mind is not spoilt,’ Macmillan wrote to Mollie Swinton after one shooting break. ‘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 the same; and (except for the coming of the Land Rover) there is a sense of continuity.’
²²

Macmillan embraced change, although he cherished surface continuities, thought his Foreign Office minister Ian Harvey. The Prime Minister ‘understood people, and he cared about them. He knew that politicians who pretended to be ordinary were not respected by the electorate.’ He had also learnt before 1940 that his party and the electorate mistrusted showy cleverness, but admired panache, ‘even if they did not know the meaning of the word’, Harvey judged. ‘Above all he understood the make up of the Conservative Party and although he was highly intelligent, he treated stupid people kindly, and there were plenty about in the political field.’
²³

Realising that character is more reliable than brilliance, and that cleverness disrupts political continuities, Macmillan strove to have a balanced government, with members who would never dazzle. As Secretary of State for Air, for example, he appointed (in 1957) George Ward, brother of the Earl of Dudley. ‘Poor Geordie! However, he is hard-working & brave, but not quite quick enough for modern life.’ As Chancellor of the Exchequer he appointed (in 1958) Derick Heathcoat-Amory, whom he judged ‘an awfully nice fellow – rather slow, but very sensible’. To the post of Minister of Power, Macmillan appointed (in 1959) the Earl of Halifax’s youngest son, Richard Wood: ‘poor Richard (though a charming character) is not very clever’. Wood was undeniably valiant: he was the solitary minister who voted in favour of decriminalising homosexuality in 1960; his masculinity was irreproachable as both his legs had been amputated after being blasted by a landmine in Tunisia.
²⁴

Although it proved an electoral mistake in the early 1960s to have a patrician administration full of Scottish earls with such recognisable place names as Selkirk, Dundee and Perth, it was purblind to assume that such men were uninteresting or second-rate. Geordie Selkirk, Macmillan’s First Lord of the Admiralty in 1957–59, was shrewd, resilient and adept, although easy to underrate because he had no taste for self-advertisement. He had read PPE at Oxford, studied at the universities of Paris, Bonn and Vienna, graduated in law from Edinburgh University, practised at the bar and became a QC. At the age of twenty-eight he was commanding officer of the RAF’s City of Edinburgh bomber squadron. By his early thirties his expertise in housing and employment problems was recognised by his appointment as Commissioner for Special Areas in Scotland. After war came in 1939, Selkirk was chief intelligence officer to Fighter Command and personal assistant to its commander-in-chief. In 1944, piloting a Wellington bomber above the Bay of Biscay, the aircraft was attacked by five Junker 88 fighters: the windscreen was shot out but Selkirk took deft evasive action – and survived another half century. He was the only member of the staid Athenæum club to marry a captain of the British women’s ski team. Promoted to the Cabinet by Eden, his support for Eden’s Suez policies was the most anomalous of all the Cabinet, for he was a man (like his fellow Scottish earl, Perth, at the Colonial Office) with staunch independent integrity. Macmillan thought him ‘a fine, earnest man’, and did right to trust him. Similarly, the Earl of Dundee, whom Macmillan selected as Minister without Portfolio in 1958, and as Minister of State at the Foreign Office in 1961, was no duffer, despite his resemblance to Bulldog Drummond,
pace
a journalist who saw him dealing effectively with Patrice Lumumba during the Congo crisis of 1960: ‘a tall handsome presence with a square jaw, a clipped moustache and greying hair’.
²⁵

There was an assumption that self-made businessmen made more efficient, canny and decisive ministers than the privileged sons of rich men. Some, however, proved as vain, bombastic and calculating as might be expected of men who forsook the boardroom for the public platform. The foremost example was Ernest Marples, who joined Macmillan’s first administration as Postmaster General in 1957 and brought automated letter-sorting and subscriber trunk-dialling to British communications. Two years later Marples reached the Cabinet as Minister of Transport. Just as Belisha beacons commemorated a prewar Minister of Transport, so parking meters were the innovative street furniture that symbolised Marples’s power. The grandson of the Dukes of Devonshire’s head gardener at Chatsworth, and son of an engine fitter, he was educated at a grammar school in Manchester’s suburbs. One of his earliest jobs was as gatekeeper at a football ground in Manchester. He made money as a London property developer converting Victorian houses into flats before starting a construction company called Marples Ridgeway, which specialised in docks, power stations and motorways. He married his secretary, and used prostitutes. His self-confidence was boundless. He imagined himself taking large, sure strides towards a great destiny. His appetite for seeing his name in headlines never slaked. A bicycling and fitness fanatic, he died at the age of seventy. John Boyd-Carpenter, the Minister of Pensions, never saw Macmillan laugh more than at a Cabinet meeting when a name was mooted for a public appointment. ‘Does anyone know him?’ asked the Prime Minister. ‘Yes,’ volunteered Ernie Marples, ‘he once made a proposition to me. I didn’t accept. It wasn’t quite straight, and anyhow there was nothing in it for me.’
²⁶

Macmillan, who had been a railway company director before Labour’s nationalisation in 1947–48, trusted Marples with the bold scheme of transport rationalisation that was intended to prove the modernity of the Conservatives in the 1960s. The ramshackle railway system was crushed by its accumulated debts and operating deficit. The British Transport Commission, which had a mishmash of responsibilities for running railways, docks, canals and London transport, was ill-managed as well as submissive to the National Union of Railwaymen and Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen. Both unions disrupted services with exorbitant pay claims and enforced a regime of restrictive practices: their conservative obstinacy made Bournemouth Tories seem progressive.

Marples convinced Macmillan to appoint a bracing new chairman of the British Transport Commission named Richard Beeching, an accountant who was technical director of ICI (Beeching’s annual salary of £24,000 aroused the envious carping in 1961 that then characterised Britain). The choice of Beeching proved calamitous. He was not the infallible cost accountant as pictured by Marples, but botched his analysis of railway costs, and proved cocksure yet unimaginative in his thinking. His recommendations to close one-third of the 18,000-mile railway network were published in March 1963, and endorsed in one of the Cabinet’s worst decisions: his proposals were based on false premises, fudged figures and dodgy political expediency; they moreover failed in their purpose of securing the railways on a profitable basis.