‘Some of our people have never had it so good’ is the phrase for which Harold Macmillan will always be remembered. In the lexicon of British politics it stands next to Churchill’s ‘Finest Hour’ as shorthand for a collective national experience – in Macmillan’s case the engineering of mass affluence in the 1950s and a consequent transformation of British life that now envelops us, for better and worse.
As millions came to own televisions, Macmillan was the first prime minister to use the medium successfully to foster an image of himself as a leader in touch with national life, even though he only kept a radio in his country house for the use of his servants. In 1963 he held a lunch party at Chequers for the West Indies cricket captain Frank Worrell and the England captain Ted Dexter, who was also a Conservative Party candidate: ‘[it] caught the public imagination’, Macmillan wrote with glee, ‘and came out very well on TV’.
As Peter Catterall points out in his introduction to this interesting and highly readable (though over-priced) volume, Macmillan’s reputation as ‘a showman … distracting the British from their long-term decline’ is unjust. His 1957 ‘never had it so good’ speech was not just a celebration of the consumer society but also a warning of the dangers posed to it from militant trade unions. As I wondered what Macmillan would say about today’s militant bankers, I thought how few politicians there are today of his calibre.
He was a cultivated man with a sense of history and a love of literature that included modern American fiction as well as the English classics (in 1963, at the height of the Profumo Scandal that helped to end his premiership, we find him reading Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 – ‘very bitter, but very amusing’).
Macmillan’s experience of both world wars and the Depression gave him two defining political outlooks: the importance of European unity alongside the ‘Special Relationship’ with the US; and a real empathy for what he called ‘the masses’, which is too easily dismissed as the condescending populism of a toff.
Catterall gives us the well-known diary entries, such as Macmillan’s despair after the French veto of Britain’s first application to join the Common Market in 1963: ‘All our policies at home and abroad are in ruins … European unity is no more. Our popularity as a Govt is rapidly declining. We have lost everything except our courage and determination.'
Catterall also has a good eye for less familiar entries which express that determination, such as the pleasure Macmillan records in 1963 when crowds flocked to see the new Coventry Cathedral, built alongside the blitzed ruins of the old one as a symbol of European reconciliation. ‘2,000 people came every hour to see the Cathedral. The community spirit; the international spirit; the Christian church in action – these are the themes which the genius of Basil Spence and the other artists involved have brought into the understanding of the ordinary public.’
There are few confessional entries (for example, the immense pain his wife’s adultery caused him is not mentioned). But the diaries do provide an insight into a man who combined a ruthless political instinct with a sense of humility and humour. Take this entry from 1965, in which Macmillan expresses regret about the passing of the aristocratic Edwardian world that he so loved, while also reiterating his belief in the benefits of a more democratic capitalism: ‘As a kind of tranquiliser I am taking a course of Henry James! What a world – how quiet and peaceful and happy it was for the “upper and upper-middle classes”. Now it’s a nightmare. Happily, it’s a much better world for the masses, as has been brought home to me most forcibly in writing the history of the inter-war years.’
This is one of many entries written not at the height of his power or in the maelstrom of ‘events’, but recorded in the mid-1960s when he had left office and was better able to put his life into some perspective.
The diaries also reveal Macmillan’s ignoble actions, which are partly redeemed by his frankness about them. The man who as prime minister declared that a ‘wind of change is blowing through’ Africa as he accelerated the pace of decolonisation, then joined the scramble of Western businessmen trying to curry favour with Africa’s new, despotic leaders. When Macmillan expanded the global operation of his family publishing firm in the mid-1960s he observed that a Nigerian election had gone the right way for the firm: ‘Our friends … got re-elected by the simple but effective device of kidnapping some 20 of the Opposition candidates on their way to nomination.’
In that entry, we catch a little tone of regret that Macmillan had been unable to despatch his own political enemies so easily. Yet we can also sense a wry smile on the face of an old Conservative politician who embraced the modern world to his advantage; one who knew that the age of the British shooting party must give way to that of the global shopping mall.
