ebook img

Harold Macmillan Aspects of a Political Life PDF

274 Pages·1999·31.05 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Harold Macmillan Aspects of a Political Life

HAROLD MACMILLAN: ASPECTS OF A POLITICAL LIFE Also edited by Richard Aldou sand Sabine Lee HAROLD MACMILLAN AND BRITAIN'S WORLD ROLE Also by Sabine Lee AN UNEASY PARTNERSHIP: British-German Relations between 1955 and 1961 Harold Macmillan Aspects of a Political Life Edited by Richard Aldous Lecturer in Modern History University College, Dublin and Sabine Lee Lecturer in German History University of Birmingham Foreword by Alistair Home flfl First published in Great Britain 1999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG2l 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-40312-7 ISBN 978-0-230-37689-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230376892 First published in the United States of America 1999 by ST. MARTIN~S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. !0010 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Harold Macmillan : aspects of a political life I edited by Richard Aldous, Sabine Lee. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. L Macmillan, Harold, 1894- . 2. Great Britain-Politics and government-1945-1964. 3. Prime ministers-Great Britain -Biography. I. Aldous, Richard. IL Lee. Sabine. DA566.9.:0,133H373 1998 941 .085'5'092-dc21 [B] 98-38450 CIP Selection, editorial matter and Introduction© Richard Aldous and Sabine Lee 1999 Foreword© Alistair Horne 1999 Chapter 8 © Sabine Lee 1999 Chapter 9 © Richard Aldous 1999 Chapters 1-7 and 10-15 ©Macmillan Press Ltd 1999 All rights reserved. \lo reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Totten ham Court Road, London W l P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages, The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources, 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 Contents Foreword vii Alistair Home Acknowledgements xii Notes on the Contributors xiii 1 Introduction 1 Richard Aldous and Sabine Lee 2 Macmillan: aView from the Foreign Offic e 6 Sir Oliver Wright 3 The Cots of Myth: Macmillan and teh Illusion fo the 'Special Relationship' 16 W. Scott Lucas 4 Opportunity Knocks: Macmillan at the Treasury, 1955-7 32 Lewis John man 5 Much Ado about Nothin?g Macmillna and Appeasement 59 N. J. Crowson 6 Macmillan and Europe 75 Richard Lamb 7 'Ne pleurez pas ,Milord': Macmillan and France from Algiers to Rambouillte 95 N. Piers Ludlow 8 Pragmatism versus Principl?e Macmillan and Germany 113 Sabine Lee VI Contents 9 Perfect Peace? Macmillan and Ireland 131 Richard Aldous 10 Dear Brendan and Master Harold 145 Charles Lysaght 11 Macmillan, the Second World War and the Empire 162 S. J. Ball 12 Macmillan and East of Suez: the Case of Malaysia 177 John Subritzky 13 Macmillan and the Soviet Union 195 Sir Curtis Keeble 14 Macmillan and Nuclear Weapons: the SKYBOLT Affair 217 Donette Murray 15 Managing Transition: Macmillan and the Utility of Anglo-American Relations 242 Nigel Ashton Index 255 Foreword Alistair Home In July 1996 I had the greatest good fortune to be invited to at tend the oration to the joint Houses of Parliament by Nelson Mandela in St Stephen's Hall. During it I reflected how, as a young journal ist, I had had the equal good fortune to listen to President de Gaulle, in the same place and on the last such auspicious occasion, when he had been invited by Harold Macmillan in 1960. Looking round the great hall, I reckoned that I was probably one of a very small handful privileged to have been at both. In his remarkable speech, Mandela singled out Macmillan and The wind of change' as one of the few British statesmen deserving of any praise. De Gaulle, in his speech, duly lauded Macmillan and British institu tions; then returned home to slam the door on Macmillan's appli cation to join the EEC less than three years later! The bracketing of those two red-letter events reminded me last summer of the remarkable range covered by Harold Macmillan's seven years in office. From the turmoil which accompanied Eden's resignation in 1956, from Suez to the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the frenzy that surrounded Macmillan's resignation in 1963, these years covered some of the most dramatic events in recent British history. His first four years were triumphant - he established closest relations with both Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy; as first peace time PM to visit Moscow, in 1959, with Khrushchev he began to break the log-jam of the Cold War; and, that same year, he returned the Tories to power with a hundred majority. From then on, events conspired against him; the economy turned sour; he recognized the 'wind of change' in Africa, but failed to resolve the crisis in Rhodesia; and, in 1963, de Gaulle vetoed his application to join the EEC. That same year the Profumo scandal came close to destroy ing him. But his premiership was redeemed by his pioneering the Nuclear Test Ban with the Soviets, which presaged the Gorbachev- Reagan accords of the 1980s. In October 1963, a sudden prostatectomy forced his retirement - in all probability, unnecessarily. December 1996 marked the tenth anniversary of Macmillan's death, and therefore it seems to me most timely and apposite that this Vlll Foreword conference should have been set up in Christ's College, Cambridge, in September of that year to re-examine his career. Political reputations have a curious way of advancing and reced ing with almost indecent speed. Who can now recall how once the British popular press trumpeted Nigel Lawson, following his famous tax-slash budget, as the 'greatest Chancellor since ...'; since who. ..? Indeed, perhaps, there may be British schoolchildren in a decade's time unable to recall who, and wherefore, was the 'Iron Lady'? When he died, in the middle of the Thatcher epoch, Harold Macmillan was covered in laurels. Perhaps it was because he was regarded, romantically, as some kind of king-over-the-water antithesis to Thatcherdom. Now, derided once again as the 'old actor-manager', his reputation seems to lie at the other end of the scale. In the 1980s, the years of his extreme old age, Harold Macmillan emerged into a kind of new golden age. Though the Enoch Powells and the Tebbits may have growled, his maiden speech in the Lords, with its highly emotive appeal about the miners and the dangers of a divided society received widest acclaim. So did his less well-judged, rather mischievous subsequent sally about 'selling off the family silver'. In December 1986 he died venerated as the grand old man of British politics, in affection and respect. Yet, had he died in 1996 one feels he might almost have shuffled off the scene the forgotten Prime Minister, if not actively misprized (especially by the 'young fogeys' of Tory journalism) as the pro genitor of all our current woes. Why this sudden reversal in his fortunes? Could it be that at the peak of Monetarism, people yearned for those halcyon days of 'You've never had it so good'? That we reached towards 'Supermac' as a kind of antidote to Maggie? That in contrast, perhaps, the less confrontational, more 'middle-road', world of John Major's resembled a little too closely Macmillan's own? There are some rather tendentious parallels. If Macmillan had come back to earth around the time of the sacking of Norman Lamont, he might well have thought that - with all the talk about soaring unemployment, high interest rates, inflation, and a slug gish economy - Selwyn Lloyd was still at the Treasury, and long overdue for a 'night of the long knives'. (Except, of course, that Selwyn would have gone without such a frightful, undignified howl as Norman! Times change.) Selfishly, this official biographer comes out of this swing in repu tations as an extremely lucky man. Had my two volumes appeared Foreword IX in the 1990s instead of the 1980s, I have little doubt that they would have almost disappeared without trace, relegated to the dustier shelves of Hatchards! Often one is asked - now that the 30-year rule has released most of the papers for the Macmillan years, and other material has emerged - would you have changed much? My answer: some de tails, some fine-tuning possibly, but otherwise not a great deal; tactics versus strategy. Since the Aldington v. Tolstoy case, I would now be a good deal less harsh in apportioning blame to Macmillan for the repatriation of the Cossacks in 1945; in fact I would absolve him almost entirely. I would be harsher on him for the cover-up over Calder Hall in 1957 - which I certainly missed in writing my biography; and I think I would be harsher over his whole handling of the EEC business. Pace the reproofs of the young fogeys, I do not think I would be any more severe with Macmillan over his handling of the economy, or the trades unions, than I have been already. Perusal of the Public Record Office documents for 1963 showed little to change one's recounting of the Profumo Affair. Nevertheless, doubtless time will show that there are still nuggets to be found - missed by an idle and incompetent official biographer! But what does change, has changed, is the point of view. When writing an 'update' on Macmillan back in 1993 (to mark the thirtieth anniversary of his resignation), I interviewed a number of survivors from his entourage - including the late Lord Thorneycroft (who, however, remained unforgiving, and critical, of the 'little local difficulties' of 1958 and the reasons behind his own resigna tion). Most agreed on four scores: with the one aberration of the 'Night of the Long Knives' (when he sacked a third of his Cabinet in July 1962), he was superb in his appointments, and particularly in the 'team' which ran his inner office. Secondly, his reputation as a thinker survives intact. (Part of the duties of his 'team' was to protect the space he created for himself in which to think - and read.) None of his successors can challenge his claim to have been Britain's best-read PM. Thirdly, and not least, 'Supermac' did have that elusive, indefinable quality of style; nobody can take this away from him, and with him it vanished from Westminster forever. And, fourthly, he and the Tory Party of his times could reckon on - what seems today - an amazing degree of traditional loyalty, in both directions. Sacked ministers did not immediately sit down

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.