Читать книгу An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo - Richard Davenport-Hines - Страница 8

‘I have news today that will bring a gasp from every Tory in Britain,’ reported Crossbencher, the political columnist of the Sunday Express, on 2 December 1956.

Mr Harold Macmillan is planning to retire from the Commons.

What a turnabout this is. Only the other day all the talk was of his rivalry with Mr Richard Austen Butler. He was alight with ambition, his Edwardian moustache bristling for the fray. It is true, of course, that he has lately been dropping a few little hints. In the Commons he talks of looking forward ‘to retirement from many of these troubles’. To the Tory 1922 Committee he says he is thinking ‘of the viscounty that is my right’. But these are laughed off by most people as typical Macmillan flourishes.

I report that Macmillan means exactly what he says. He intends to go. The reason? Not because of any personal clashes with his colleagues. Not because of any disagreement on policy. But he is sixty-three in February, three years older than [the Prime Minister] Sir Anthony Eden, nine years older than Mr Butler. And suddenly, with absolute clarity, he sees that the nation’s highest office is forever beyond his grasp. How sad a moment for a politician who has come so far. The moment when he realises that he is finally out of the race.

The only remaining question: When will Mr Macmillan claim his coronet?

One can imagine the poignant sorrow, the air of noble resolve, affected by Macmillan as he confided in the Sunday Express man. A few days later, Brendan Bracken, chairman of the Financial Times, reported a similar tale to the Express proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, but with a hard-headed gloss. ‘Macmillan is telling journalists that he intends to retire from politics and go into the morgue. He declares that he will never serve under Butler. His real intentions are to push his boss out of Number Ten.’ A month later, on 10 January 1957, after seductive courting of the parliamentary party, Macmillan became Prime Minister.¹

Only a consummate politician would brief that he is on the brink of retirement as a device to reach the highest office. Macmillan had foreseen, since November, when he had a privileged talk with Eden’s physician, Sir Horace Evans, that failing health would force the Prime Minister’s retirement. He knew, too, that many Tories felt, in the backbencher Robert Boothby’s words, ‘contemptuous disdain’ for Rab Butler as a boneless appeaser, and would not have him as Eden’s successor at any cost. His ruthless clarity and oblique tactics were outstanding.²

Lloyd George was the predecessor whom Macmillan most admired, the arch-spiv among Prime Ministers – shameless, improvising, compassionate, devious, inspired. Macmillan was a politician who mastered both appearances and realities, and understood the differences between the two. He was simultaneously a romantic escapist and sturdy materialist. He studied men’s wiles, and knew their weaknesses. He was a world-weary cynic about human vanity yet could be as shocked as a boy scout by the grubbiness of people’s motives. Outward calm masked high-strung agitation. He looked like a grandee, had the manners of an Edwardian man-about-town and was one of the last men in England who still put his tongue in his cheek when making a sardonic quip. His self-protective staginess, his toying with appearances, his patrician pose of authoritative nonchalance – all so artfully embedded in the past – were a source of strength and renewal when he was Prime Minister approaching the general election of 1959, but would prove a source of increasing weakness in the years before his resignation in 1963.

Macmillan had been born in 1894 in a tall, thin house in Cadogan Place, where Knightsbridge borders Belgravia. In his parents’ home solid comforts were joined with a dread of worldly show and admiration for spartan discipline. Maurice Macmillan, his father, was a partner in the publishing house of Macmillan, an outstanding example of Victorian self-help and constructive idealism, for it had been started by Maurice’s father and uncle, themselves the sons of a crofter, a poor tenant farmer, on the Scottish Isle of Arran. Macmillan’s mother was a physician’s daughter from Indiana, which made him the only Prime Minister (apart from Churchill) to have an American mother. She proved morbidly possessive, withdrawing him from Eton when he was fifteen and sacking his tutor when he was sixteen. His education was further disrupted, for he was an early volunteer in the First World War, which began when he had been only twenty months an undergraduate at Oxford.

Macmillan’s war experiences, which proved his courage but shredded his nerves, are of supreme importance in understanding him. Overall he was wounded five times, and bore his scars and disabilities for seventy years. At first, on the Western Front, he was a bomb officer with the Grenadier Guards, training men to throw grenades, and pacifying himself with the novels of Dickens and Scott. In the first battle in which he fought, Loos in 1915, he was shot in the hand and also suffered a head injury. In 1916 he was wounded during a reconnaissance mission to German lines. ‘The stench from the dead bodies that lie in heaps around is awful,’ he wrote to his mother after the Battle of the Somme. ‘We do all the burying that we possibly can.’ Once, leading an advance platoon down a moonlit lane near the devastated village of Beaumont-Hamel, he passed a dead German with an outstretched arm rigid in death: his orderly went up and shook it. A few days later, near Delville Wood, he was hit in the knee by shrapnel and in the pelvis by machine-gun bullets. A water bottle in his tunic deflected a bullet from hitting his heart. He rolled into a shell hole in no-man’s land, where he lay for twelve hours, feigning death when Germans approached, dosing himself with morphine, and scanning a copy of Aeschylus which he had secreted in his battledress, until a rescue party found him. He nearly died of his wounds, endured several operations and years of gruelling pain. ‘The act of death in battle is noble,’ he had written to his mother a few days earlier, ‘but the physical symptoms and actual appearances of death are, in these terrible circumstances, revolting.’ He learnt, as no one should have to learn, to tell how a man had died by the way their body lay. The war left him with sporadic pain, a shuffling gait, a limp handshake and spidery handwriting. It accentuated the apprehensions that had made him such a sad, morbid, unpopular boy at Eton: ‘the inside feeling that something awful and unknown was about to happen’ which still decoyed him as Prime Minister, and forced him to retreat from the world to spend weekends in bed.³

While recuperating from his wounds, Macmillan immersed himself in books to enrich an already well-stocked mind. He had been elected a King’s Scholar at Eton in 1906, and was the first K.S. to become Prime Minister since Walpole. He ranked with Asquith as the best-read twentieth-century Prime Minister. He had the longest uninterrupted hold on power of any premier between Asquith and Thatcher. His literary-mindedness intensified when he left the army to become a partner in the family publishing firm. He became responsible for such authors as Kipling, Hardy, Yeats, Hugh Walpole, and Sean O’Casey. Maynard Keynes, who had been the boyhood friend and perhaps lover of Harold’s elder brother Daniel, was a Macmillan author with strong influence on his economic ideas. There had not been so literary a Prime Minister since Disraeli, and his love of novels made him the most vivid and alluring of political leaders. He calmed his nerves by happily re-reading Austen, Trollope and Meredith; excited his imagination with Stendhal or Nevil Shute’s dystopic tale of radiation sickness after nuclear war; honed himself by reading Anthony Powell (‘witty but pointless’) as a preliminary training for Proust.⁴ His temperament – nervous, subtle and theatrical – was decisive to the colour, texture and shape of the modernisation crisis in British politics and society of 1957–64.

In 1924, Macmillan captured a difficult industrial constituency, Stockton-on-Tees, by unusual methods. He insisted that his local supporters contribute to election expenses, reorganised the local association along democratic lines, declined the help (or handicap) of speakers sent by the central party organisation in London, and left unopened the parcels of official propaganda. His distress at the unemployment and privation of north-east England made him a rebel against economic orthodoxies. In 1927 he and three other young MPs who were styled ‘Tory Democrats’ issued a milk-and-water Keynesian booklet entitled Industry and the State. ‘A Tory Democrat,’ sneered a socialist professor, ‘means you give blankets to the poor if they agree not to ask for eiderdowns.’ Nevertheless, Aldous Huxley found much sense in Macmillan’s 1931 publication Reconstruction: A Plea for National Unity, and told T. S. Eliot: ‘I’m glad the young conservatives are waking up.’⁵

Together with Sir Cuthbert Headlam, Macmillan formed the ‘Northern Group’ of Tory MPs lobbying on behalf of the region. ‘He is a curiously self-centred man, and strangely shy and prickly – and yet the more I see of him the more I like him,’ Headlam noted after a talk in 1934. Although Headlam advised him to continue pushing progressive ideas, but to stop speaking and voting against the government, Macmillan did not restrain his dissent. He affronted fellow Tories by telling a newspaper interviewer in 1936 that ‘a party dominated by second-class brewers and company promoters – a casino capitalism – is not likely to represent anyone but itself’. That year he was the only backbencher to resign the party whip when Baldwin’s government lifted sanctions which had been imposed on Mussolini’s Italy after the invasion of Abyssinia. Although he rejoined the party after Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister in 1937, he risked de-selection as a Conservative candidate by continuing opposition to appeasement of dictators. In 1938 he wrote a Keynesian treatise entitled The Middle Way, which indicted Conservative economics as callous and complacent, and argued for more consensual, corporatist, expansionist economics. The London Stock Exchange, he suggested, should be replaced by a National Investment Board. This was not the rebellion of a showy, self-seeking mutineer, but the dissent of a man who obstinately, perseveringly, worked out new lines for himself.⁶

In 1940, when Churchill became Prime Minister, he chose Macmillan as Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Ministry of Supply. About a month after this humdrum appointment, Headlam sat beside Macmillan at the long table where members dine together at the Beefsteak Club. ‘He is very much the Minister nowadays, but says that he has arrived too late to rise very high,’ Headlam noted. ‘I can see no reason (except his own personality) for his not getting on – even to the top of the tree – but he is his own worst enemy: he is too self-centred, too obviously cleverer than the rest of us.’ Shortly after this Beefsteak evening, Macmillan was motoring in a car with his private secretary, John Wyndham. After desultory conversation, Macmillan fell into brooding silence. Then suddenly, with intense emphasis, but as if talking to himself, he exclaimed: ‘I know I can do it.’⁷

These glimpses of Macmillan at forty-six – delighted to have reached office, but equivocal about his prospects – are telling. He felt his aptitude for power, but sensed he must disguise his clever ambition. His confidences to Headlam, his exclamation before his most trusted aide Wyndham, prefigure him briefing journalists in 1956 that his political career was over as he poised himself to take supreme control.

At the end of 1942 Churchill offered the post of ‘Minister Resident at Allied Forces Headquarters in Algiers’ to Macmillan, his second-best candidate, whom he had recently described as ‘unstable’. Macmillan accepted without a moment’s havering. It proved to be a hard job, unrewarding in outward prestige, but he won praise from those who knew of his behind-the-scenes adroitness. With both the American and Free French representatives he was direct in his approach but insinuating in his ideas. During the closing phase of the war, Macmillan headed the Allied Control Commission in Italy, becoming, said Wyndham, ‘Britain’s Viceroy of the Mediterranean by stealth’.⁸

By the war’s close Macmillan had been married for a quarter of a century. He had met Lady Dorothy Cavendish when he was serving as aide-de-camp to her father, the Duke of Devonshire, who was then Governor-General of Canada. They married – she aged nineteen, he twenty-six – at St Margaret’s, Westminster in 1920. The bride’s side of the church was filled with hereditary grandees: Devonshires, Salisburys, Lansdownes; the groom’s with Macmillan authors, including Thomas Hardy, who signed as one of the witnesses. The young couple took a London house, at 14 Chester Square, on Pimlico’s frontier with Belgravia. After 1926 they also shared Birch Grove, a large house newly built in Sussex under the directions of his mother. The marriage deteriorated after 1926, as Dorothy Macmillan chafed under her mother-in-law’s meddling intimidation.

One of the Tory Democrats to whom Macmillan was closest in the 1920s was Robert Boothby, a dashing young MP with an unruly mop of black hair and bombastic style of speechifying. Dorothy Macmillan was attracted to him when they met during a shooting and golfing holiday in Scotland in 1928: during a second holiday after Macmillan’s defeat in the general election of 1929, she squeezed Boothby’s hands meaningfully while they were on the moors. Their affair was consummated during a house party with her Lansdowne cousins at Bowood. Photographs of the pair, taken at Gleneagles, show her as clear-skinned and strong-limbed, with prominent eyebrows and chin, a saucy grin, and the air of an undergraduate. Of the two lovers, Dorothy Macmillan had the dominant temperament.

Boothby was intelligent, but wayward in his habits and ductile in his feelings. ‘A fighter with delicate nerves,’ Harold Nicolson called him in 1936. Boothby had a look of manly vigour, with a boisterous style, and a reputation as a coureur des femmes. Nevertheless, he enjoyed being chased by men during his trips to Weimar Germany, and supposedly enjoyed frottage with fit, ordinary-looking, emotionally straightforward youths. Homosexuality, however, drove public men to suicide or exile in the 1920s, and stalled careers; indeed it was a preoccupation of policemen and blackmailers until partially decriminalised in 1967. ‘I detected the danger and sheered away from it,’ Boothby later wrote.⁹

Dorothy and Harold Macmillan had one son and three daughters. She fostered the untruth that their youngest daughter Sarah, born in 1930, had been fathered by Boothby, in the hope of provoking her husband to agree to a divorce. Macmillan did not yield to this wish. A solicitor whom he consulted warned that divorce would be an obstacle to receiving ministerial office, and might make Cabinet rank impossible. It might even require him to resign his parliamentary seat (as happened in 1944 when Henry Hunloke MP was in the process of divorce from Dorothy’s sister Anne, and seemed likely for a time in 1949 when James Stuart MP, married to another sister, was cited in a divorce). There would have been outcry at Birch Grove, too. His brother Arthur had been ostracised by their mother for marrying a divorcee in 1931, despite consulting the Bishop of London before proceeding with the ceremony.

Until the divorce reforms of 1969, it was necessary for one of the married partners to be judged ‘guilty’ of adultery or marital cruelty before a divorce could be granted. It was considered deplorable, except in flagrant scandals, for a man to attack his wife’s reputation by naming her as the guilty party. Instead, even if the wife had an established lover, the husband was expected to provide evidence of guilt, by such ruses as hiring a woman to accompany him to a Brighton hotel, signing the guestbook ostentatiously, sitting up all night with her playing cards, but having sworn evidence from hotel staff or private detectives that they had spent the night together. Macmillan, who had been neither adulterous nor cruel to his wife, refused to collude in fabricating evidence of marital guilt: still less was he willing to sue her for divorce, and cite Boothby as co-respondent. ‘In the break-up of a marriage,’ Anthony Powell wrote of the 1930s, ‘the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame’.¹⁰ Sympathy, then, lay with Dorothy Macmillan.

She was too proud and ardent to bother with discretion as an adulteress; her bracing earthiness left no room for subtlety. Her telephone calls to Boothby were made in earshot of her husband and children; she left Boothby’s love letters visible about the Birch Grove and Chester Square houses. As he wrote to a parliamentary colleague in 1933, she was ‘the most formidable thing in the world – a possessive, single-track woman. She wants me, completely, and she wants my children, and she wants practically nothing else. At every crucial moment she acts instinctively and overwhelmingly.’ Over forty years later, in 1977, Boothby gave a similar recapitulation. ‘What Dorothy wanted and needed was emotion, on the scale of Isolde. This Harold could not give her, and I did. She was, on the whole, the most selfish and most possessive woman I have ever known.’ When he got engaged to an American heiress, she pursued him from Chatsworth, via Paris, to Lisbon. ‘We loved each other,’ he said, ‘and there is really nothing you can do about it, except die.’¹¹

Commentators have suggested that Macmillan’s distress at his wife’s lifelong infidelity (her affair with Boothby lasted until her death in 1966) made him chary of speaking to Profumo directly in 1963, or of confronting the implausibility of the minister’s disavowals of an affair with Keeler. This is doubtful, for Downing Street power relaxed Macmillan’s inhibitions. ‘The PM,’ wrote his niece, the young Duchess of Devonshire, in 1958, ‘has become much more human all of a sudden and talks about things like Adultery quite nicely.’ His prime ministerial diaries show his pleasure in playing the part of a man-of-the-world who knew about kept women, betrayal and divorce. In 1958, after reading the memoirs of the nineteenth-century courtesan Harriette Wilson, he mused that Doris Delavigne, Beaverbrook’s Streatham-born mistress (and quondam wife of Beaverbrook’s columnist Lord Castlerosse), who took a fatal overdose of barbiturates after being insulted in 1942 in a corridor of the Dorchester hotel by the Duke of Marlborough, was one of the last of the demimondaines. ‘This type really depends on the institution of marriage being strict & divorce impossible or rare,’ he wrote. ‘Now people marry for a year or two & then pass to the next period of what is really licensed concubinage. Since the so-called “upper classes” are as corrupt as they can be, these ladies, like Harriette Wilson, are cut out by “real ladies” – the daughters of our friends. I think the old way was really best.’¹²

It is, however, true that the Profumo Affair snared a specific, secret susceptibility of Macmillan’s. The ‘foursome’, as Harold Wilson slyly called Ward, Profumo, Keeler and the Russian attaché Yevgeny Ivanov, whose convergence was imagined to raise security issues, had met at the Astor house, Cliveden.¹³ Thirty years earlier Nancy Astor had made decisive interventions during the Macmillan marital crisis: a visit by Boothby to Cliveden had proved critical to its resolution. Like many people who had been done a good turn, Macmillan did not forgive the Astors for helping him at his nadir. He associated them with memories that he preferred to repress.

Boothby triggered the crisis in September 1932. He told his lover that he could not continue their ‘unendurable’ half-life together: ‘Just an interminable series of agonising “goodbyes” with nothing to go back to. Living always for the next time. Work to hell. Nerves to hell.’ Dorothy Macmillan was aghast at Boothby’s ultimatum: marriage or a clean break. ‘Why did you ever wake me?’ she cried at him. ‘I never want to see any of my family again. And, without you, life for me is going to be nothing but one big hurt.’ She knew that Boothby’s political career would be ruined if he eloped with another MP’s wife, and that they would have little money to live on. She asked her husband for a divorce, confident that he would agree to collude in providing evidence, and was devastated when in January 1933 he gave an adamant refusal. In desperation she sought sympathy and counsel from Nancy Astor, who gave her the use of a house at Sandwich in Kent as refuge for calm reflection. Lady Astor invited Boothby to Cliveden: there were confabulations in St James’s Square with the deserted husband, who also sought his mother-in-law’s help. ‘Poor Harold had another awful time with me last night, & he talked till 3 in the morning, and is still entirely hard about everything and everybody,’ the Duchess of Devonshire wrote to Nancy Astor on 24 January.¹⁴

Macmillan was exciting himself into a suicidal rage. Around 31 January 1933 he scrawled an agonised pencilled note from 14 Chester Square to his trusted intermediary in his marital negotiations. It is the most emotionally naked document of his that survives, and the fact that it was sent to an Astor may explain his inhibitions, and unforgiving attitude to Bill Astor, when thirty years later a scarring scandal was foisted on Cliveden. ‘Dearest Nancy,’ he wrote. ‘Sorry to bother you. But make it clear to her that I will never divorce her’ – even if she publicly absconded with Boothby. ‘If she does that, I will kill myself. I won’t & can’t face the children. This is real – not stuff.’ Having promised suicide if Dorothy deserted him, he proposed the best way forward. ‘If I could feel she was trying to achieve the same ultimate objective as I am, I will do everything to make her life happy. But I must feel that we are working together, as it were. And she must be considerate to my nerves.’ If she would try to restore ‘normality,’ he promised, ‘I’ll devote anything that [is] left of my life for that – for the children & for her – whom I love more than I can say. Tell her that I am still grateful for the 8 happiest years that mortal man ever had. Nothing can take that away from me.’¹⁵

A few hours later he sent Nancy Astor a second message: ‘You are our angel – and you are really fighting for a soul, as well as for lots of innocent people – e.g. four lovely children.’ On 1 February he saw Boothby, and received a letter from Dorothy accepting a compromise. ‘It only remains, therefore, for us to help her to build a new life & to heal the wounds,’ he told Nancy Astor in a third letter. ‘I realise that I can do nothing – except negatively, by leaving her alone.’ There was no bridling of his gratitude to Lady Astor for her handling of Boothby. ‘Dear, dear Nancy – I know how much I owe to you. When I saw him on Tuesday after he had been at Cliveden, he was in a different mood (I sensed a great change) to any that I had seen at previous interviews. It seemed to me that some of the crust of cynicism had been broken & all the rot with which he had protected himself was rather shattered. Your influence I trace there.’ Macmillan believed that their prayers, too, had helped. The continuing strains in the situation were clear in a later confidence of Evie Devonshire’s to Lady Astor. Dorothy’s temper was stabilised, the duchess wrote, but ‘whether she will ever get over her dislike of H is another matter, but she is less hard and angry’.¹⁶

Macmillan’s marital traumas raised a muffled commotion in Society. It was humiliating that parliamentary colleagues knew he was Boothby’s cuckold. He donned a mask of indifference, but was instilled with the vengeful ambition and steely endurance that brought him to the premiership in 1957. He described himself to his biographer Alistair Horne as ‘this strange, very buttoned-up person’. Strolling in the Birch Grove grounds with Horne, he proffered a hint about himself: ‘I think gardens should be divided, so you can’t see everything at once.’ Pamela Wyndham, wife of his closest confidant as Prime Minister, said he was protean in his shape-shifting: ‘one moment you had a salmon in your hand, the next it was a horse’. Significantly, one of his favourite novels was Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, with its hero who returns from the dead in various disguises to wreak revenge on those who had betrayed and humiliated him. An air of cynical mastery was what he aspired to.¹⁷

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.

‘A really remarkable figure,’ Macmillan wrote after a two-hour meeting with Marples in April 1963. ‘I only wish we had more ministers with his imagination and thoroughness.’ However, controversy over the Beeching Axe brought obloquy upon his government, partly because the ministerial presentation was self-advertising, truculent and weak. ‘When Mr Marples presented the Beeching Report,’ noted a future Labour minister, George Thomson, ‘the biggest thing of its kind, we were given to understand, since the Beveridge Report, the operation was intended to show the Conservatives looking forward to the seventies, while the socialists, tied to the railway unions, timorously looked back to the forties. But Mr Marples muffed it monumentally, and suffered a press universally worse than I can remember a minister receiving.’ Macmillan, despite his susceptibility to territorial grandees, was hoodwinked by the bouncy self-promotion of rough diamonds, and the myths of infallibility boomed by self-made men.²⁷

Derick Heathcoat-Amory’s appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1958 was a better choice by Macmillan than Marples as Minister of Transport in 1959. The assessment of Heathcoat-Amory by Lord Altrincham who, under his later pen name of John Grigg, was one of the canniest political commentators of his generation, had a perfect justness. ‘He is often described as “sound”, an adjective which in this specialised usage connotes a decently concealed intelligence, more than average efficiency, a willingness to take pains (for instance, in not hurting the feelings of moronic colleagues), a belief in good relations between management and the (not so easily) managed, a fine war record and a squirearchical background. There is, indeed, one feature which might make him suspect – he is opposed to the death penalty – but his friends can plead in mitigation that he has been a zealous huntsman. He is the sort of man who not being first-class pretends to be third-class, and so receives a quite disproportionate amount of credit for being top second-class.’²⁸

What of the England and the parliamentary party of which Macmillan took charge in 1957, where men became Prime Minister by pretending to be old-and-done-for and Chancellor of the Exchequer by concealing their intelligence?

In the spring of 1957, Macmillan saw a newspaper story about a seventeen-year-old man, Derek Wiscombe, whose home town of Jarrow-on-Tyne had suffered high unemployment since the 1930s. Wiscombe had applied for a licence to carry furniture and building materials with the intention of passing his driving test and buying a lorry to replace his pony and cart. His application was however rejected after objections from local hauliers, and the state-owned haulage company Pickfords. Macmillan, who never lost his sympathetic interest in the north-east, was vexed by this example of tyrannical regulations protecting vested interests from competition. He prompted William Elliott, the newly elected Tory MP for Newcastle-upon-Tyne North, to organise a fund to pay for Wiscombe’s driving lessons and buy him a lorry. With Elliott’s help, Wiscombe successfully re-applied for a licence to carry furniture on a lorry bearing L plates. A local businessman was induced to pass Wiscombe some business for starters. Macmillan closed the file with the single word: ‘Good’. A few months later, the municipal council at Jarrow found that one of its tenants, Norah Tudor, was supplementing her husband’s income by doing embroidery at home. The council ordered her to stop. ‘Mrs Tudor is the wife of a worker who earns a good salary,’ declared the socialist chairman of the local housing committee. ‘It will be no hardship for her to give up her needlework.’ As a Tory backbencher commented, ‘this utterance (which Mr Harold Wilson himself could hardly improve on) conveys the politics of envy in a nutshell’. The persecution of Derek Wiscombe and Norah Tudor both occurred in Jarrow, but the mean, restrictive spirit shown by these cases was a national force.²⁹

England was a country where the gravy served at main meals made everything taste alike. Dominated by the memory of two world wars, it was more drilled and regimented than at any time in its history, and more strictly regulated. Restaurants and pubs were controlled under onerous rules derived from the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914; audiences stood in respectful silence when the National Anthem was played at the end of every cinema performance; pedestrians still doffed their hats as they passed the Cenotaph memorial to the war dead in Whitehall; family-planning clinics did not dare to give contraceptive advice to the unmarried; every foreigner had to register with their local police station, and report there regularly; businesses needed clearance from the Bank of England for the smallest overseas expenditure; there was a rigid obsession about preserving fixed exchange rates for sterling; the system of Retail Price Maintenance safeguarded shopkeepers from undercutting, and ensured that shoppers could seldom find competitive prices. Though entrepreneur John Bloom was trying to start a consumer revolution with his cut-price ‘Rolls Razor’ washing machines, the English authorities still frowned on mass consumption, and by imposing taxes that at some levels approached a hundred per cent of income, discouraged it all too effectively. Millions of people were longing to make money, spend money, enjoy the conspicuous spending of money and never apologise for money; but both officials and politicians, whether of the left or the right, wanted to restrict money-making, idealised discomfort as character-building and frugality as manly, scowled at other people’s expenditure, thought that the ostentatious enjoyment of wealth was shameful. It’s No Sin to Make a Profit was the title of Bloom’s defiant memoirs.

Macmillan was unperturbed when, two months into his premiership, in March 1957, Lord Salisbury resigned from the Cabinet. Much nonsense was written about Macmillan’s relationship with Salisbury (they had both married Cavendish women), and the fracturing of the family circle. In truth Betty Salisbury, who was a nettlesome character, had shown longstanding (and reciprocated) animosity towards Dorothy Macmillan over the Boothby affair. The Conservative Party was not fazed by the rupture with Salisbury. Although constituency associations often had a local nobleman as honorary president, they were run by solicitors, prosperous shopkeepers, men with small businesses and their wives. For these roturiers, the Cecils were not a popular bodyguard to have gathered around the seat of power. Two months after the spluttering squib of Salisbury’s secession, Macmillan wrote to John Wyndham asking him to join his private office at Downing Street. ‘I did not really think my administration could last more than a few weeks; but we now seem to have got over quite a number of jumps in this Grand National course, and having just managed to pull the old mare through the brook and somehow got to the other side, with the same jockey up, and the Cecil colours fallen, I am plucking up my courage.’³⁰

The Prime Minister had a salary of £10,000 a year (with £4,000 tax free) but, as there was no permanent domestic staff at Downing Street, Macmillan had to pay five household servants. Wyndham found him calm and considerate with his office staff. Macmillan kept a neat desk, never mislaid papers and had a tremendous power of work. His tastes were frugal. For breakfast he took tea and toast, sometimes with a boiled egg. He might have a gin and tonic or sherry before luncheon, but seldom drank alcohol during the meal. Cold roast beef was his favourite lunchtime dish. Before dinner he would have a glass or two of whisky, and wine at table. When possible on Fridays, before going to Birch Grove or Chequers for the weekend, he enjoyed a schoolroom high tea served at Downing Street in preference to dinner. He liked port, and champagne with agreeable companions. During Lent he forsook alcohol.

The Cabinet Room and secretaries’ offices, on the ground floor of 10 Downing Street, were reached by a red-carpeted corridor lined with photographs of defunct Cabinets and busts of bygone premiers. The ambience resembled a Pall Mall club with a historic past, but uneasy finances. Outside the Cabinet Room there was a small lobby with a round table. There, during Cabinet meetings, ministers who were not in the Cabinet would await a summons when the subject under their purview was reached on the agenda. It was, said one of them, ‘bleaker than a dentist’s waiting room’. When a minister was ushered in, he had to scramble to find an empty chair and hurriedly open his papers; usually he found that the Cabinet had started discussing his subject; indeed, from the glazed eyes as he began his remarks, he realised that somebody else had already said them.³¹

Kenneth Rose likened the Cabinet Room to ‘the dining room in a well-to-do boarding house in the neighbourhood of Russell Square’. Macmillan, though, thought like a clubman, not a boarding-house keeper. ‘The RAC or Boodle’s?’ he asked when, during the Cypriot settlement of 1959, the Cabinet had to decide whether Cyprus should receive full Commonwealth status after independence. ‘There was an element of the dining club about his conduct of Cabinets,’ Lord Hailsham reminisced. ‘There would be quotations from Homer, there would be vague historical analogies; the trade union leaders would be described as medieval barons in the period of the War of the Roses. And some of them would be relevant and some of them would be mildly misleading. But they would all be very amusing and detached.’ Ministers learnt ‘to watch what he was doing, as well as what he was saying’.³²

‘For him Europe is the super-continent and Great Britain the super-country,’ wrote a recent Conservative parliamentary candidate, Lord Altrincham, of Macmillan in 1957. ‘In this he resembles Sir Winston Churchill, whom indeed he is clearly much too anxious to resemble. Here, perhaps, is the root cause of his psychological unbalance. He is a pawky Scottish businessman trying to convince himself and others that he is an English aristocrat of the old school.’ Although Macmillan was proud of his Scottish crofter ancestry, he projected a patrician English persona. ‘Like Sir Winston at the Other Club, Mr Macmillan holds forth in the grand manner at Pratt’s – only with this vital difference, that neither the manner nor the setting is his own. As a practical man he is genuine and acceptable; as an imitation grandee he is nauseating.’ Yet it was this bogus act – this game of playing the unregenerate grandee – which recommended Macmillan to backbenchers and ministers as they rallied to face the 1959 general election. He may not have been consistently militant during the Suez affair, but he had the air of militancy. Surveying Macmillan’s postwar record of Lloyd George-like opportunism, Altrincham predicted that England would soon resemble France, ‘where it is accepted that politicians have a code of their own, and most people have an instinctive repugnance to the idea of entering politics’. The appearance of the Prime Minister’s wife – the duke’s daughter in tweeds and sensible shoes – was part of his deceptive facade, as Altrincham wrote in a profile which uniquely hinted at the Macmillans’ domestic irregularities. ‘Lady Dorothy is not quite all that she seems in some respects, and a great deal more than she seems in others. To the casual observer she is just a typical English upper-class cup of tea; but on closer inspection he would find that it was laced with liquid of a more stimulating kind.’ Time & Tide, after interviewing Boothby in 1962, noted a photograph of Lady Dorothy, and a separate one of her husband, in Boothby’s Eaton Square drawing room.³³

The provenance of Tory MPs changed markedly after 1951. Before his promotion to the Lords, Macmillan’s Lord Chancellor, Kilmuir, had instigated the Maxwell Fyfe reforms of the Conservative Party organisation (1948–49). These new rules ended the practice of candidates paying their own election expenses or subsidising constituency party funds. Kilmuir intended to discourage men who had made their pile of money in business from deciding that they wanted the status of a MP and collaring a provincial constituency: this malaise resulted in backbenches lined by complacent, inarticulate, politically obtuse money men with the reactionary, inflexible views of late middle age. The new rules also vested the constituency parties with independence in the selection of candidates. Retrospectively, Kilmuir believed that the quality of new MPs elected at the general elections of 1950 and 1951 was high, but thereafter plummeted. Local associations became dismaying in their choice of candidates in seats with handsome majorities. During the 1950s, to Kilmuir’s regret, they copied the cardinal error of Labour constituency parties, which had always weakened the efficacy of the parliamentary party by selecting tedious local worthies for safe seats while abler younger candidates were consigned to marginal or unwinnable constituencies. ‘Few of the new Members who entered the Commons in 1955 and 1959,’ wrote Kilmuir in 1964, ‘had achieved a reputation outside Westminster in any field, and far too many of them were obscure local citizens with obscure local interests, incapable – and indeed downright reluctant – to think on a national or international scale. What made this situation particularly annoying was that many excellent candidates, who would have made first-class Members and probably Ministers, were left to fight utterly hopeless seats … while the safe seats went to men of far lower calibre.’³⁴

The Midlands conurbation, for example, was represented by nonentities with aldermanic paunches which they carried in a stately, self-satisfied way as if they contained dividend coupons: Harold Gurden (elected at Birmingham Selly Oak in 1955), Gordon Matthews (elected at Meriden, 1959), John Hollingworth (Birmingham All Saints, 1959), Leslie Seymour (Birmingham Sparkbrook, 1959), and Leonard Cleaver (Birmingham Yardley, 1959). Clever young William Rees-Mogg was condemned to contest the hopeless seat of Chester-le-Street in 1959 partly because of prejudice in better seats against his Catholicism. According to Rees-Mogg, there were only two Jewish MPs (Harry d’Avigdor-Goldsmid and Keith Joseph) on the Conservative side during the Parliament of 1955–59 and both had the advantage of inherited baronetcies. Margaret Thatcher was selected at Finchley in 1959 solely because a woman seemed less objectionable than her rival, who was Jewish. Julian Critchley, who was one of the 1959 intake, thought it contained ‘more than its share of those who could talk nonsense with distinction’.³⁵

In January 1957, just before Macmillan replaced Eden, a retired Conservative MP, Christopher Hollis, noted that Eton had ten times as many MPs and ten times as many members of the government than any other school, a disproportion greater than before 1832. He did not think this was inherently undesirable. At the height of the Suez crisis, it was Etonians – the Macmillans’ son-in-law Julian Amery and future brother-in-law Victor Hinchingbrooke among the hawks, Jakie Astor, Boothby, Edward Boyle, Anthony Nutting among the doves – who had the courage to refuse blind loyalty to Eden’s blunders. Hollis argued ‘that in a generally egalitarian society, those who have positions of responsibility will be apt to be too timidly conformist and that a few Old Etonians about the place, bred in a tradition of liberty, ready in their very insolence to value other things above immediate success, are no bad leaven to the general lump’. Hollis had been an intelligent, independent-minded MP who had retired at the 1955 general election because he had not received political advancement, probably because he was suspected of homosexuality. Such was the parliamentary party’s fearful recoil from unorthodox opinions or temperament that, as one young backbencher later recalled with shame, ‘had I been more mature I might have benefited from his friendship, but as it was I brushed him off as swiftly as I decently could’.³⁶

Responding to Hollis, Henry Kerby, a Tory backbencher with links to MI5, stressed the importance in party counsels of men whose families were neither traditional gentry nor hereditary nobility, but had got their wealth, and possibly recent titles, from shareholdings in large businesses. ‘The House of Commons is packed with Old Etonians who are no more members of the aristocracy than I am. The Government benches are crowded with Members of Parliament who are Old Etonians only because their fathers could afford to send them to that school.’ These MPs were ‘representatives of a moneybags plutocracy, however much many of them may try to disguise their origins. The House is crammed with first-generation descendants of hard-faced men who have done very well for themselves in trade of every sort – honourable and otherwise.’ (Kerby’s point was backed by a survey in 1959 of the country houses in Banbury district, just south of Profumo’s constituency of Stratford-on-Avon, which found that of the forty-three houses large enough to be named on the one-inch ordnance survey map, only four had been in the same family for more than two generations.) Constituency selection committees, continued Kerby, were ‘dumbstruck’ by the sight of prospective candidates sporting the black ties, with thin blue stripes, that showed the old Etonian. They realised that young men, with that particular fabric round their necks, would quickly reach political patronage and power. ‘Money,’ Kerby complained, ‘lies at the bottom of Old Etonian dominance.’³⁷

Angus Maude, a Tory MP who would succeed Profumo at Stratford, explained that once constituency parties were debarred from extracting election expenses and big subscriptions from candidates, they instead demanded that MPs spent more time in constituencies attending to local fusses. Old Etonians, with inherited incomes that exempted them from the need to earn a living, had the free time that constituency associations required. Moreover, the MPs who were most likely to reach office were those who could devote most time to politics. ‘OEs’, overall, had more free hours than professional and company director MPs. There was a higher proportion of OEs in government posts than on the backbenches because of the low pay of junior ministers: many MPs could not accept office without financial hardship. Macmillan’s government, Maude calculated, had seventy ministers, of whom about ten might be called ‘self-made’. This scarcely mattered, he argued, because ‘a parliamentary party consisting entirely of very clever men would prove the devil to run and might prove extremely dangerous’.³⁸

‘Those who hope to rule must first learn to obey,’ a Harrow housemaster had written thirty years earlier. ‘To learn to obey as a fag is part of the routine that is the essence of the English Public School system, and … is the wonder of other countries. Who shall say it is not that which has so largely helped to make England the most successful colonising nation, and the just ruler of the backward races of the world?’ The instinctive, automatic obedience to their leader felt by most Tory MPs was based on fear of party whips, who reminded them of prefects brandishing canes, or of scragging from other backbenchers. Mark Bonham Carter described his experience after being elected in a Liberal by-election coup in 1958. ‘It’s just like being back as a new boy at public school – with its rituals and rules, and also its background of convention, which breeds a sense of anxiety and inferiority in people who don’t know the rules. Even the smell – the smell of damp stone stairways – is like a school. All you have of your own is a locker – just like a school locker. You don’t know where you’re allowed to go, and where not – you’re always afraid you may be breaking some rule … It’s just like a public school: and that’s why Labour MPs are overawed by it – because they feel that only the Tory MPs know what a public school is like.’ Robin Ferrers, who was appointed as a lord-in-waiting by Macmillan in 1962, found front-bench life just like school. ‘There are the clever guys. There are the silly clots, too. Like football, you do the best that you can when the ball comes to you in order not to let the side down. At Question Time, if you can make them laugh, it is very satisfying. The schoolboy ethos is never far away – and that is good.’³⁹

Sticklers resented any challenge to the prefects’ authority. When a decision of the Deputy Speaker’s was criticised by Lady Mellor, wife of a Tory MP, at a garden party, Labour MPs complained, and the Commons Privileges Committee censured her. No words that might weaken house esprit de corps could be tolerated, especially from anyone as objectionable as a woman with forthright and informed views. During crises, the Conservative parliamentary party resembled a boarding house in which any boy who challenged the housemaster’s decisions would be biffed or given a bogging. Even in private sessions, it was bad form to bestir the deferential placidity. When Macmillan, or his successors Douglas-Home and Heath, addressed the 1922 Committee of backbenchers, questions were confined to the closing minutes of the meeting. The questions seldom exceeded the level of those at a constituency ward meeting.⁴⁰

There was a striking homogeneity in the appearance of the Conservative parliamentary party: MPs wore a uniform of stiff white collars or cream silk shirts; dark, well-pressed suits or a black jacket with striped black and grey trousers; sleek Trumper’s haircuts and oils. On Fridays, which were called Private Members’ Days, when government business was not taken, and the Commons was thinly attended, the Conservative whips wore weekend tweed suits and brogue shoes. Julian Critchley was once standing in the crowded ‘No’ lobby, waiting to vote, when Sir Jocelyn Lucas, a crusty baronet who bred Sealyhams, accosted him, seized his elbow, hissed ‘You’re wearin’ suede shoes’, and stalked off. Lucas never addressed Critchley again. Excessive importance was attached to social standing. ‘Some able middle-class Conservatives – like Enoch Powell or Iain Macleod – have gone a long way,’ Anthony Wedgwood Benn commented in 1957, ‘but one senses that many Tory MPs would prefer to be in the top drawer and out of office than to be out of the drawer and in office.’⁴¹

Once he became Prime Minister, Macmillan began attending the Derby, cricket matches, and other jollities to settle his image with his party faithful. He excelled in striking poses which projected his personality until it was a palpable force over others. The Tory die-hards had not been fooled by so brilliant a man since Disraeli. His address to Tory peers before the general election of 1959 was ‘the best speech I think I have ever heard from a leader addressing his followers’, noted blimpish Lord Winterton, who had fifty-five years’ parliamentary experience. There were sweeping historical parallels to flatter his auditors’ intelligence, and patriotic pride to rouse them. In international affairs, Britain was speeding towards danger ‘like a man on a monorail’, Macmillan warned the peers, ‘but mankind had never known security save perhaps in Antonine age of Ancient [Rome] & Victorian age’. The achievement of full employment with ‘one of the highest standards of living in the world’ by a nation with few natural resources was possible because Britain was ‘rich in brain power as in the time of the first Elizabeth when Europe looked on us as Barbarians who couldn’t use a fork’. The Lords – backwoodsmen and activists alike – were rallied by such High Table urbanities.⁴²

Critchley recalled a dinner that was arranged for the Prime Minister to meet newly elected backbenchers after the 1959 general election had been won with an improved majority. ‘We dined in one room, and then moved to another, where some of us literally sat at his feet. Macmillan was the ideal speaker for the intimate occasion: splendid after dinner, witty, elegant of phrase, skilled at flattering his audience, taking us apparently into his confidence. He was especially beguiling with the young. He told us, “Revolt by all means; but only on one issue at a time; to do more would be to confuse the whips”.’ Critchley studied Macmillan’s mannerisms at close quarters: ‘the nervous fingering of his Brigade tie; his curiously hooded eyes which would suddenly open wide, and the famous baring of the teeth. He told us that no one who had not experienced Oxford before the Kaiser’s War could know “la douceur de vivre”.’ Humphry Berkeley, a pompous youngster who was among the 1959 intake, admired Macmillan’s skill in disguising from his die-hards his intention to grant independence to African colonies as swiftly as possible. He recalled the Prime Minister charming backbenchers after his return from Africa in 1960 with references to the Scottish earl – collateral descendant of a Victorian Viceroy of India – whom he had appointed as Governor-General of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland: ‘It’s awfully good of Simon Dalhousie to have taken out to Salisbury the viceregal gold plate which was presented to his ancestor. It’s so good for morale.’⁴³

‘I am always hearing about the Middle Classes,’ Macmillan wrote to the Conservative Research Department after a month in office. ‘What is it they really want? Can you put it down on a sheet of notepaper, and then I will see whether we can give it to them?’⁴⁴ He knew the answer, though, well enough: they wanted a steady onrush of material prosperity, and to recover their margin of advantage over the working class.

The half century between Macmillan’s seizing of the premiership in 1957 and the banking collapse of 2008 was exceptional in history as a time of abundance, not scarcity. In all other periods, privation was the common Western experience. Most people were kept on short rations, emotionally and materially; frustration, not satisfaction, provided the keynote of existence. Macmillan offered an end to the stingy circumstances in which women watered down their children’s marmalade to make it go further.

Six months into his premiership Macmillan went to Bedford, the county town of the dullest English county. Its population of 60,000 worked in factories making pumps, diesel engines, gas turbines, farm implements, switchgear, tube fittings, transistors, and sweets. There, at the football pitch of the local team on 20 July 1957, Macmillan was guest of honour at a political gala to celebrate the parliamentary career of his Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd, the long-serving Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire: a career begun under the aegis of the ancien régime Duke of Bedford. No tickets were needed to attend; no ‘spin doctors’ existed to control the audience; there were no stewards from security firms to evict hecklers, or threaten them under anti-terrorist legislation. It was one of the last open-air political speeches by an English statesman to a genuine mass gathering. Politicians had for generations learnt to pitch their voices to reach thousands, to captivate their audiences and to master the art of impromptu retorts to hecklers. Henceforth they would have to simulate sincerity for television audiences.

The Bedford gala was ‘unique in the political annals of the county’, reported the local newspaper. ‘The Premier received a great welcome from a crowd that had assembled from every part of Bedfordshire.’ Macmillan told those who talked of the disintegration of the Empire: ‘It is not breaking up; it is growing up.’ He warned against complacency at recent advances in prosperity. ‘Let’s be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had … in the history of this country. What is beginning to worry some of us is “Is it too good to be true?” or perhaps I should say “Is it too good to last?”’ The crowd cheered, perhaps because they were polite, perhaps because they were enjoying their afternoon in the sun, but surely not because they liked his warning that there might be bad times ahead. Indeed, the Bedfordshire Times, judging perhaps by his manner rather than his words, thought Macmillan had been over-optimistic about the economic future. The paper quoted his remark: ‘Most of our people have never had it so good’, and commented: ‘That is true, but Mr Macmillan said little enough about the slender foundations on which all this prosperity rests.’ There was no talk of measures to check inflation. The Prime Minister dismissed ‘the fashion for newspapers and political commentators to work up all kinds of stories of troubles and dangers ahead’. The Bedfordshire Times thought no ‘working-up’ was needed: ‘the dangers are very real ones, and it is time they are squarely faced’.⁴⁵

At the rally a youngster in a boiler-suit persistently heckled the Prime Minister. One of his interruptions concerned the level of old-age pensions: the Labour Party was calling for the basic rate of old-age pensions to be raised to £3 a week and to be annually adjusted to the cost of living. ‘You’ve never had it so good,’ Macmillan cried back at the heckler, contrasting the youngster’s rising wages with the fixed income of a pensioner, rather than targeting everyone in Bedford football ground. According to another account (that of Quentin Skinner, the historian of political thought, then a sixth-former at Bedford school, who was present), the heckler shouted facetiously: ‘What about the workers?’ Macmillan responded as if a serious objection had been called. It was this phrase that beyond any other became associated with his premiership.⁴⁶

If people’s material standards were improving, in Bedford and nationally, there was a perception that, perhaps in consequence, sexual standards were deteriorating. Two years after Macmillan’s football-pitch speech, Peter Kennerley of the Sunday Pictorial went to Bedford. ‘Good-time girls – drunken teenagers – mothers who leave home for the bright lights – and plain unvarnished vice – these are the problems … earning the town of Bedford the reputation of “BRITAIN’S SIN TOWN 1959”.’ Kennerley reported that seven brothels had been raided and closed by Bedford police in the preceding six months. Twenty children from Bedford had been taken into council care in the last four months because their mothers had deserted their homes. A probation officer was quoted as saying that the absconding mothers, like troublesome teenagers, ‘go where the money is’. Money in this case meant hundreds of American servicemen from three nearby airbases.⁴⁷

Six weeks after Macmillan’s Bedford speech, on 4 September 1957, the Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in Great Britain published its report. This recommended that homosexual activity between consenting adult men should no longer be criminalised; that penalties for street-soliciting by women should be increased; and that landlords letting premises to prostitutes should be deemed as living off immoral earnings. The recommendations on heterosexual prostitution were adopted in the Street Offences Act, which came into operation in 1959, while the recommendations on homosexuality were resisted.

Although the Profumo Affair would be, exclusively, a tooth-and-claw heterosexual business, reactions to it were part of a continuum of sexual attitudes. The fears, insults and cant surrounding male homosexuality in this period were not restricted in their impact to the communities that were targeted. On the contrary, the obtuseness of intelligent people about sexual motives, the punitive urges, the notion that collective respectability was maintained by newspaper bullying and abasement of vulnerable individuals, the prudish lynch mobs, the deviousness behind the self-righteous wrath of the judiciary – all these defining traits of homophobia erupted nationwide during the summer of 1963, with the Profumo resignation, Ward trial and Denning report.

Writing about Ward’s mis-trial, the jurist Louis Blom-Cooper later commented: ‘The law does not care for social realities; it bases its action upon highly emotive opinion on what is best for the country’s morals.’ The truth of this was exemplified by sundry interventions from Lord Hailsham, a barrister who held several Cabinet posts under Macmillan and hoped to succeed him as Prime Minister in 1963. In an epoch when it was unthinkable for Cabinet Ministers to appear in shirtsleeves, Hailsham and Ian Macleod were pioneers among Tory politicians in trying to indicate that they were hustling, businesslike modernisers by tightly buttoning the middle button of their suit jackets. At the time of the Wolfenden committee’s appointment, while citing his courtroom expertise, Hailsham had published a scourging essay on homosexual ‘corruption’. He was emphatic that male homosexuality was ‘a problem of social environment and not of congenital make-up’. For most men, ‘the precipitating factor in their abnormality has been initiation by older homosexuals while the personality is still pliable’. Homosexuality was indeed ‘a proselytising religion, and initiation by an adept is at once the cause and the occasion of the type of fixation which has led to the increase in homosexual practices’. Hailsham, with his authority as a Queen’s Counsel and Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn, held that ‘homosexual practices are contagious, incurable, and self-perpetuating’, that ‘homosexuality is, and for fundamentally the same reasons, as much a moral and social issue as heroin addiction’. Homosexuals, he averred, were pederasts by preference. ‘No doubt homosexual acts between mature males do take place … but the normal attraction of the adult male homosexual is to the young male adolescent or young male adult to the exclusion of others.’

As so often, hostility to same-sex activity splayed into asinine condemnation of heterosexual behaviour. ‘Adultery and fornication may be immoral but, on the lowest physical plane, they both involve the use of the complementary physical organs of male and female,’ Hailsham explained. However, ‘between man and woman the persistent misuse of these organs in any other way is often fraught with grave dangers, emotional, or even physical, to one or both of the participants’. This seems to be a verbose warning that people who enjoyed using either mouths or fingers in their sex lives were in peril of nervous or bodily collapse. Homosexual practices were worse because they used ‘non-complementary physical organs’, Hailsham continued. ‘The psychological consequences of this physical misuse of the bodily organs cannot in the long run be ignored … nearly all the homosexuals I have known have been emotionally unbalanced and profoundly unhappy. I do not believe that this is solely or exclusively due to the fear of detection, or of the sense of guilt attaching to practices in fact disapproved of by society. It is inherent in the nature of an activity which seeks a satisfaction for which the bodily organs employed are physically unsuited.’⁴⁸

Hailsham sounded moral alarms monotonously, although the miscreant modernity that he despised was tied to material ease promoted by the government of which he was a member. His inaugural address as Rector of Glasgow University in 1959 flailed ‘the emotional, intellectual, moral, political, even the physical litter and chaos of the world today, when truth has almost ceased to be regarded as objective, when kindness is made to depend on political, class or racial affiliations, when only the obvious stands in need of publicity’. He felt revulsion, he declared, ‘when I look at popular pin-ups, playboys, millionaires and actresses with the bodies of gods and goddesses and the morals of ferrets lurching from one demoralising emotional crisis to another and never guessing the reason; when I view the leaders of great states, the masters of immense concentrations of power and wealth, gesticulating like monkeys and hurling insults unfit for fishwives; when I reflect on the vapidity of so much that is popular in entertainment, the triteness of so much that passes for profundity, the pointlessness and frustration in the popular mood.’ In these rounded periods lay the quandary of the Macmillan era, and the trap for Jack Profumo.⁴⁹

Despite the spiritual pride of Hailsham and allies like him, Macmillan won the general election of 1959 because the Tories were more convincing as a party of liberty and progress: Labour, by contrast, seeming conservative and cheeseparing. Profumo’s campaign message to the electors of Stratford-on-Avon decried his socialist opponents as regressive killjoys and fretful regulators. ‘Most people are suffering from acute political exhaustion. Facts, figures, graphs, slogans, promises, boasts, taunts and threats galore have been chucked about for weeks.’ But some things were clear: the Labour government of 1945–51 had failed to meet expectations. ‘The Labour leaders were all so keen to establish a Socialist State that they failed to observe what made people tick and what made them kick. They divided us, depressed us, disillusioned us and nearly destroyed us.’ By contrast, since 1951, ‘we have swept away all the paraphernalia of controls and proved that Conservative freedom does work to the benefit of everyone’. Voters were ‘glad to be free of controls; but a Labour Government would clamp them on again … This is your life – don’t let Labour ruin it.’⁵⁰

Hugh Trevor-Roper, who masterminded Macmillan’s election as Chancellor of Oxford University in 1960, thought that the tendency of the times was towards ‘a vulgar, jolly, complacent, materialist social democracy’. He found ominous ‘the universal absorbent materialism even of spiritual life which has triumphed in America and, unless one fights against it, will gradually triumph here too – has already triumphed in the majority of the population’. A Salford bookmaker’s son thought similarly to the Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford. ‘I jumped at the chance,’ Albert Finney said in 1961 of his lead in the screen version of Alan Sillitoe’s novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, ‘because of what the film had to say about our present-day smash-and-grab society’. Some Tories shuddered at Macmillan’s bribery of voters. During elections, declared a discontented backbencher in 1962, each political party entered ‘a sort of spiv auction, each one trying to outbid the other with promises of material gain to the masses, in the cynical belief that the electorate is composed of unthinking dupes whose highest aspiration in life is to worship Mammon’.⁵¹

If Macmillan’s England seemed a smash-and-grab society to some, it remained a place of frugal, unimaginative routines for many others. Michael Wharton, the Daily Telegraph columnist, lunched every working day in a dingy Fleet Street pub on an identical meal of corned beef sandwiches washed down by brandy and ginger. He ate the same supper each evening at his Battersea flat of lime juice and soda with five fish fingers (never more or less). Yet Wharton felt deep passions, cravings and regrets, as shown by his lament for England in 1961: ‘Her empire and influence is almost gone; her patriots are too much ashamed and beaten down with incessant jeers to speak up for her, or if they do, their voices are shrill and ugly with rancour’ (a reference to the League of Empire Loyalists, a group of embittered hecklers, opposed to decolonisation, who followed Macmillan about shouting that he was a traitor). As to the countryside, farmers had become ‘money-mad mechanics, forever searching for new poisons for the soil which will ensure quick profits at any cost’; fox-hunters chased their quarry around housing estates; Morris dancers cavorted beside atomic power stations; in summer the Lake District was infested by smelly, honking pleasure traffic.

Wharton did not wonder that England, ‘the first country to suffer industrialisation and uniquely vulnerable to its final triumph, clings to survivals, landed titles, splendid rituals’. The move towards classlessness was a drift into stereotypes and the culture of grievance. ‘Policemen and sociologists, clergymen and psychiatrists are chasing the fashionable hooligans and sex maniacs; housewives yawn in deathly new towns; journalists, television interviewers and experts endlessly discuss the Problems of Today. There is the Problem of Youth, the Problem of Delinquency, the Problem of Coloured Immigration, the Problem of the Eleven Plus, the Problem of Parking.’ People thought less in terms of class loyalties, and increasingly as categories of oppressed: ‘as teenagers, homosexuals, motorists, misunderstood criminals and so on’. Mammon ruled under Macmillan, Wharton thought. ‘Over all this England, with its mingled apathy and desperation, lies a thick fog of money and of the operations of money. The ideal Englishman of the advertisements is no longer an aristocrat; he has become a salesman or a financial speculator. His office skyscrapers shoot up overnight where familiar old buildings have been (and he hires public relations men to tell us how much more beautiful they are than the old buildings and makes us ashamed of ourselves for thinking otherwise); his empires of money grow and combine, grow and combine again, continually devising new needs, new categories of people to feel those needs and buy the goods that will satisfy them, temporarily, until new needs can be devised.’⁵²

About the time that Churchill retired as Prime Minister in 1955, the patriotic catchphrases that public men had traditionally parroted abruptly began to seem bogus, weary and redundant. A few months later, after the revelations of the Burgess-Maclean espionage cover-up, the word ‘Establishment’ was first deployed with the overtone that anything established was suspect. The notion flourished that political, administrative and economic authority was controlled by a secretive sect with strange rites and arcane customs – a mafia comprised of Wykehamists and Etonians. ‘There certainly exists in Britain a number of persons, many of them known to each other and sometimes educated together, who exercise considerable power and influence of the kind that is not open to direct public inspection,’ wrote the young philosopher Bernard Williams at the time of the general election of 1959. ‘Large areas of British life are permeated by mediocrity and the refusal to face genuine issues. Influential figures undoubtedly share, in their own refined complacent way, these characteristics, but they are not the cause of them.’ Henry Fairlie, the political journalist who was amongst the most perceptive commentators on Macmillan’s premiership, complained in the same year that this demure coinage, ‘the Establishment’, had been debauched by publicists until it was a harlot of a phrase used promiscuously by dons, novelists, playwrights, artists, actors, critics, scriptwriters and band leaders to denote those in positions of authority whom they disliked. The Establishment’s defenders argued that it was rooted in neither class nor sectional interest, and was, therefore, disinterested. Its opponents found this lack of passion or commitment to be depressing, and perhaps reprehensible.⁵³

Macmillan’s appointment of a Scottish earl, Home, as Foreign Secretary in 1960, and of his wife’s nephew, the Duke of Devonshire, to the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1961, provoked the anti-Establishment pundits to fume (although neither man failed at his post). The Tories traditionally believed that the tests of experience and of time were sound guides, but after the 1959 election victory appeals to tradition were no longer winning. Instead, Tory leaders had to place themselves as the people best able to manage change. By 1962, Macmillan was trying to identify his party as the modernisers and Labour as retrogressive: Marples’s disastrous transport policies and Britain’s ill-fated application to join the Common Market were at the forefront of this strategy.

In July 1962, the Observer journalist and former gossip columnist Anthony Sampson published his Anatomy of Britain which, on the basis of interviews with political, business and official leaders, presented public life as amateurish, caste-ridden, dithering and cowed. His bestseller operated by the technique of the prewar fellow-travellers who compiled Union of Democratic Control pamphlets: genealogical tables revealing distant, unsuspected cousinhoods; Venn diagrams of overlapping company directorships and schematic representations of power relations all tending to suggest there was a loose conspiracy by undemocratic, debilitated and incompetent fuddy-duddies. Sampson had a priggish belief that people should be spurred hard by overriding moral purposes; in an earlier generation he might have been a disciple of Frank Buchman’s Moral Rearmament group. He seemed to idealise men who worked exorbitantly long hours, scorned holidays and judged themselves virtuous for spreading stress in their offices.

Sampson’s book chimed with the clashing cymbals of opinion-making in 1962. Jack Plumb, the son of a Leicester shoe factory worker, was a communist in the 1930s, a Bletchley Park codebreaker during the war, a Cambridge history don from 1946 and an avid, frustrated crosspatch with a beady eye for the main chance. ‘Your time is coming,’ his lifelong confidant C. P. Snow promised him in 1960, ‘one can smell it in the air.’ Initially Plumb resented tradition: in 1962, for example, he decried the privileged readers of history books as ‘those who had nannies, prep-schools, dorms, possess colonels and bishops for cousins, and now take tea once a year on the dead and lonely lawns of the Palace’. In time he proved the very model of an anti-Establishment skirmisher who, once his enemies were routed, annexed their domains of influence and adopted their style and amenities which he had all along irritably envied. Soon he had a rectory in Suffolk and a moulin in France, ingratiated himself with philanthropic millionaires and smart noblewomen, looked cocksure in the private apartments of palaces, became a conspicuous member of Brooks’s, figured until the last moment among the peers in Harold Wilson’s notorious resignation honours list, performed a clumsy political somersault in the hope of prising a coronet from Margaret Thatcher.⁵⁴

Richard Crossman was another opportunistic rhetorician where modernisation and class distinction were concerned. Reviewing Sampson’s Anatomy of Britain for the New Statesman, he pretended that political and economic power was more irresponsibly concentrated than at any time in living memory. ‘Never in our island history have so many been fooled by so few,’ he claimed. ‘An irreverent attitude to top people is the yeast that makes democracy rise. Without it a free society soon degenerates into a starchy oligarchy, an indigestible complex of collusive interest groups which can only be broken up by subjecting it to constant investigation and public exposure.’ Hostile analyses of the Establishment were class-war waged with polysyllables: a device to get one crowd out of power, and another in; to usurp one set of authority figures, and install a different lot. Anti-establishment critics masqueraded as street-fighting egalitarians, but in truth they were jostlers for place in the corridors of power.⁵⁵

Simon Raven was rare among Sampson’s reviewers in resisting his thesis. The scolding theme of Anatomy of Britain was that ‘most educated Englishmen reserve their respect for old-fashioned institutions, such as Eton, Latin, the regimental system and Mr Macmillan, and refuse to recognise the demands of the New Age for such qualities as industrial efficiency and high-pressure salesmanship’, wrote Raven. He, however, wanted to be saved from despotic bores who resented people having placid, aimless moments. ‘While long-established English institutions tend to be illogical and wasteful, the values which they promote, however limited in their scope, are morally and aesthetically far superior to anything which the new world of admass tastes and applied science can show. If I want to spend my day writing Latin verses or watching cricket, as opposed to selling some beastly machine or rubbishy gimmick over a fat expense account luncheon, who is to say that I am not the better man for it?’⁵⁶

Although Macmillan in 1963 headed a Cabinet with the youngest average age for a century, he was also the Prime Minister who kept his only television set at Birch Grove in the servants’ hall. Broadcasting, however, more than newspapers, showed the tendency of the times. ‘The formality of BBC official language used to be one of great reassurance; it spoke of order, like guards on trains,’ reflected Malcolm Bradbury, lecturer in English Language at Birmingham University, in the spring of 1963. ‘Now, in a wave of informality, even the news is changing. The names of contributors to newsreels are frequently mentioned (personal), announcers cough regularly and carefully do not, as they easily can, switch the cough out (informal), the opinions of people in the street are canvassed, though they frequently have none (democratic), and interviewers are aggressive and sometimes even offensive (vernacular). So, personal, informal, democratic and vernacular, becomes the new common speech for all things.’⁵⁷

The challenge for Macmillan, as the protagonists of the Profumo Affair converged towards their crisis, would be to hold onto power in an age of common speech. His attendance at the Derby, the shoots at Swinton, quips about Boodle’s which were incomprehensible to ninety-five cent of the electorate, had rallied his parliamentary party after 1957, and brought a thumping electoral victory in 1959. But in the new informal, levelling and vernacular age, these poses made his government vulnerable.