Portraits and Miniatures (7 page)

In 1945, because he happened to be on leave at his father's holiday house there, he more or less adopted himself as a sort of makeshift Conservative candidate for the Western Isles, and ran
third to both the sitting Labour member and the Liberal challenger. Within two months of finally getting out of the army at the beginning of 1946 he had - together with Enoch Powell and Reggie Maudling - been taken on by the Conservative Research Department as part of the parliamentary secretariat. The director thought Macleod was intellectually the least good of the three, but ten years later he decided that Macleod balanced this by being the most formidable politician amongst them. By either criterion it was a distinguished trio amongst whom to compete.

After another couple of months he was adopted as candidate for Enfield. With a Labour majority of 12,000 it was not an obvious plum of a seat, but a redistribution before the next election (which could be foreseen at least as easily as the run of the cards in a bridge game) gave Macleod only the much more favourable western half of the borough to fight, a comfortable majority in 1950, and no real constituency worries throughout the six subsequent elections that he fought there.

For his first thirteen years in Enfield he lived there. In 1941 he had married a war widow of striking good looks who had been born Evelyn Blois, a descendant of Essex baronets on her father's side and of a Disraeli-created peer on her mother's, and who is now Lady Macleod of Borve, longer-lived but no less dependent upon courage to overcome pain than was her husband. By the end of the war they had two children and had settled in a moderate-sized 1920s house on a sylvan suburban ridgeway. Perhaps surprisingly the Macleods seemed to like suburban living, for although they moved to an SW1 flat when he was Colonial Secretary and then Leader of the House of Commons they were back in Potter's Bar, just over the Hertfordshire county boundary from Enfield, for much of the 1960s.

Macleod, more than any other politician I can think of, made both his career and his reputation with a single highly effective House of Commons intervention. F. E. Smith in 1906 sprang at least as much into the public eye with a coruscating maiden speech. But it did not directly make his career, for he was in opposition for the next nine years and on the back benches for the first six of them. Aneurin Bevan achieved his first fame from
the impact of his iconoclastic wartime attacks upon Churchill, but it was a cumulative effect rather than a single speech that produced the result. And, amongst Macleod's own contemporaries, Enoch Powell's 1959 speech on the Hola Camp massacre in Kenya remains in the minds of those who heard it at least as strongly as does Macleod's 1952 oration. But, as with Smith, it had no direct career impact, partly because it was a further attack on a government from which Powell had recently resigned and partly because its primary appeal was to a swath of cross-party opinion which he was subsequently bitterly to affront.

Macleod's speech, on the other hand, was manna to the ears of his party leaders and admirably attuned (although not necessarily calculatingly so) to bring its reward. Following on his Research Department experience he thought of himself as a health specialist. He had made his maiden speech on the subject with unspectacular success. Two years later his speciality gave him the opportunity to engage in and win a joust with Bevan. Bevan's debating reputation was at its height and he regarded the National Health Service as almost a personal political fief, although, brooding increasingly on wider issues, he had in fact become somewhat rusty on the subject. The Speaker had intended Macleod to precede Bevan, but he changed his mind and put in a maiden speaker so that Macleod immediately followed the great gladiator. Because he had the verve to exploit his opportunity it was a greater piece of luck than he had ever experienced at a gaming table. He began with an unusually phrased and riskily provocative sentence of invective: ‘I want to deal closely and with relish with the vulgar, crude and intemperate speech to which the House of Commons has just listened.' Churchill had come in to listen to Bevan and rose to depart as Macleod said these words. Hearing them he sat down again and stayed. Macleod, benefiting from his phenomenal factual memory, his quickness of reaction and the deadly beam of his delivery, fully justified his opening statement of intention. Early on Churchill turned to his Chief Whip and asked who Macleod was. Then he turned again and said ‘Ministerial material?' Six weeks later he made Macleod Minister of Health. The post was not then in the Cabinet, but it none the
less meant that Macleod at thirty-eight had moved ahead of his contemporaries and leap-frogged over the frustrations of junior office into a department of his own.

The circumstances of his appointment to that department were, however, more dramatic than his tenure of it. He stayed there three and a half years, identified well with the Health Service ethos and always looked at home in photographs with nurses or doctors. But he innovated little and achieved little extra money for a demanding service. Ironically, having used anti-Bevanism as a launching pad, he became a defender of the structure that Bevan had bequeathed as well as a mild friend and modified admirer of Bevan himself. This illustrated two points about Macleod's attitudes. The first was that, although he was always an overt campaigner for the centre ground, he preferred those on the other side who did not compete with him for it. He did not like Gaitskell any more than he liked me, and much preferred Bevan and maybe Foot and Crossman too. The second was that he regarded invective as a politician's stock-in-trade rather than as an expression of genuine indignation. He cared deeply about some mostly worthy causes, but his strictures on the moral turpitudes of his opponents had a certain calculated coldness about them. He frequently said that opposition was sterile and unimportant. It was office that counted, and there was almost an indifferent frivolity about his attacks on those who stood in his way of getting it. This was paradoxical, for it is at least arguable that he was better as a destructive critic than he ever was in any ministerial office.

After Health came promotion to the Cabinet in a major reshuffle at the end of 1955 and nearly four years, one under Eden (who had at last succeeded Churchill in April 1955) and three under Macmillan, as Minister of Labour. To that department of conciliation Macleod brought a more abrasive style than his predecessor, the famously emollient Walter Monckton. Was this a difference only of style or of substance as well? Mostly of style, I think. His main confrontation was with the London busmen under the new and truculent leadership of Frank Cousins. But it took place only after he had secured his flank by a compromise
settlement of a more important and more dangerous dispute with the railwaymen, and only too after the Cabinet had forced him into a more intransigent (and arguably duplicitous) handling of Cousins than he might himself have chosen.

Macleod compensated, as was often his way, with a viciously successful House of Commons speech. Also typically, he muted his criticism of Alf Robens, who had moved a motion of censure upon him, and turned the blast of his invective against Gaitskell, the bigger target and never Macleod's favourite: ‘I cannot conceal my scorn and contempt for the part that the Leader of the Opposition has played in this … We are having the debate because the Leader of the Opposition, in a parliamentary scene on Monday, could not control himself. Because of his refusal on Friday to say a single word that would uphold the authority of an arbitration award; because of his mischievous speech over the weekend; because of his lack of authority on Monday. If we are to vote then let the censure of the House be on the right honourable gentleman tonight and from the country tomorrow.'

Most people would now think there was a good deal more mischief, and indeed irresponsibility, in Macleod than in Gaitskell, but it was high-order jugular debating. In fact Macleod beat the busmen and improved his own and the government's standing as a result, but it is none the less the case that throughout nearly his whole career he scored more triumphs with words than with deeds.

The exception was his period in his next office. Just as he had been eager to leave the Ministry of Health in 1955 so he looked for a move from the Ministry of Labour in 1959. They were perfectly reasonable desires in both cases. He had served more than adequate stints in both offices. In 1959 he was looking for a change rather than for a great promotion, and the office on which he had fixed his sights was the Colonial secretaryship. This office, which was historically the third of the secretaryships of state, had reached its apogee under Joseph Chamberlain, who chose it when he was the second man in the Salisbury Government in terms of power and the first in terms of public impact. For the Colonial Office it had mostly been gently downhill after that, and the path
was to be far more precipitately so after Macleod, although this was because of the success and not the failure of his policies. The department was abolished in 1967.

In 1959-61, however, the job had plenty of political content. It was the period of the ‘wind of change' in Africa, the affairs of the dark continent stood near the centre of the Westminster stage, and there was both risk and opportunity in being involved with them. Even so Macmillan was surprised that Macleod wanted the department, although it at first suited the Prime Minister very well that he did. In offering it Macmillan talked about ‘the poisoned chalice', but his surprise probably came at least as much from the fact that it was so far from the previous bent of Macleod's interests. The new Colonial Secretary had never made a significant speech on the subject, had cultivated no contacts with African or Caribbean leaders, and had never set foot in a colony. For the last deficiency there were plenty of near precedents in British imperial history. Gladstone's commitment to Irish Home Rule was not made less intense by the fact that only once in his life did he cross the sixty-five miles of St George's Channel. Baldwin showed more courage on India than on any other issue, but never even contemplated visiting the sub-continent. Macleod had plenty of colonial travel during his two years in the responsible office, but his previous abstinence did illustrate a certain insularity. Although he was politically a staunch pro-European throughout the 1960s, he was never much of a traveller across the Channel. He had seen more of France as a soldier than he was to do in any other way. His favourite European destination was a frequently revisited hotel on the Costa Brava. The capitals in which he seemed most at home were Washington and New York in the Kennedy/Johnson era.

Despite this lack of preparation or previous interest, Macleod did not approach the Colonial secretaryship as a routine ‘stage in a career' appointment. He treated it as a vocation, even if a short-term one, and for the sake of doing it, rather like a temporarily holy man going into a monastery and renouncing the temptations of the flesh, he gave up the practice at which he was best and therefore enjoyed the most, which was the flailing of the opposition
parties. In view of his office and his policy within it, which was to hasten the drive to independence and give paramountcy to the interests of the black majorities, he had no choice. There were no battles to fight with Labour or the Liberals. They were on his side. His potential opponents were the African whites (or at least most of them) and their sympathizers in the Conservative Party at home. He was successful, particularly in his first year, in disarming a lot of the latter. In doing so he could not resist a few party flicks (the dismissive phrases came to him so easily), but he could not get much leverage out of them. The peroration of his 1960 Conservative Party Conference speech, which secured a thunderous ovation from an audience much of which had little enthusiasm for his policy, illustrates the skill with which he could put together familiar, even hackneyed, phrases in an order that was resonant, persuasive and applause-provoking:

I cannot promise you a popular colonial policy. There will be toil and sweat and tears; but I hope not blood and I hope not bitterness - although in the turmoil that is Africa today, of even that one cannot be certain. But this is the road we must walk, and we can walk no other. The Socialists can scheme their schemes and the Liberals can dream their dreams, but we, at least, have work to do. I make you one pledge only; nothing more than this and nothing less - that we will at all times, and to all peoples, in all these territories, carry out our duties faithfully, steadfastly and without fear.

By the end of 1960 he had achieved a lot. Nigeria had reached independence. Tanganyika (Tanzania) and Sierra Leone were well on the way to it. There had been a successful conference on the future of Nyasaland (Malawi) and considerable progress had been made towards a reconciliation in Kenya, the most difficult nut to crack because of the combination of the Mau Mau revolt and a higher proportion of white settlers. Outside Africa a settlement and independence, although hardly stability for the future, had also been achieved in Cyprus.

Nineteen sixty-one was a more difficult year for Macleod. He
got himself impaled on three nasty bits of barbed wire: Sir Roy Welensky, the fifth Marquess of Salisbury, and Duncan Sandys, who as Commonwealth Secretary was the Cabinet colleague with whom his responsibilities marched most closely. Welensky was a formidable although ultimately unsuccessful leader of the white settlers and wrote disparagingly of Macleod's ‘mixture of cold calculation, sudden gushes of undisciplined emotion and ignorance of Africa'. Salisbury had become sour and malevolent. The implication of his notorious House of Lords attack was that Macleod was an upstart card-sharper. It caused a lot of resentment and damaged Salisbury. But it also damaged Macleod who was much interested in his own future, which Salisbury no longer was. Sandys was a minister of monumental stubbornness. Macleod and he got their horns completely locked, which was a natural posture for Sandys but an unnatural one for Macleod, who had a darting not a stolid personality. Furthermore, their constant conflict bored Macmillan, who blamed the one who seemed to be acting out of character. Macleod began to lose the Prime Minister's confidence and his days at the Colonial Office became numbered.