Harold Macmillan, Mosleyite?

"In the same year--1929--that Dorothy began her liaison with Boothby, Macmillan suffered another disaster--the loss of his Stockton seat in the general election which brought Ramsay MacDonald back to the premiership. He subsequently narrowly avoided a far worse fate--that of becoming a close associate of Sir Oswald Mosley. In May, 1930 Mosley resigned as a minister in the Labour government because of its failure to tackle unemployment. Macmillan immediately fired off a letter to *The Times,* warmly supporting Mosley's action. When Mosley subsequently founded his New Party, pledged to a planned economy, this strongly appealed to Macmillan who seriously considered defecting from the Tories. He drew back at the last moment, saving himself from probable electoral humiliation at the subsequent general election and from the taint of having been a fellow traveller of Mosley in the early stages of his headlong flight into fascism. Instead, Macmillan, having unsuccessfully flirted with the possibility of fighting a safe Tory seat in the south-east, stuck to Stockton, which he easily regained in the landslide election of October 1931." Dick Leonard, *A Century of Premiers: Salisbury to Blair* (2005), p. 214.

Suppose Macmillan does indeed become a Mosleyite candidate for Parliament in 1931 (and loses, as they all did). Now the first thing to say is that of course Macmillan's flirtation with Mosley will be short-lived. "Blackshirt Harold" is ASB territory. Macmillan will never follow Mosley into the swamp of fascism and anti-semitism. He will likely seek to rejoin the Conservative Party. (Given his concerns about unemploynent and his desire to use government to combat it--he favored not only expanded public works but the nationalization of the mining industry--Macmillan might seem a possible recruit for Labour. But in OTL when Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford, a Tory who had switched to Labour, tried to persuade Macmillan to follow suit, he replied that "When I consider the prospect of associating with your wild young men of the Left, I have to remember that I am a very rich man." Leonard, p. 214. But perhaps a Macmillan who felt that he had burned his bridges with the Tories in 1931 might look more favorably on joining Labour? Even in OTL, Macmillan in 1936 floated the idea of a center party, which, he suggested, should be led by Labour's Herbert Morrison.) But however short-lived the flirtation, it would presumably keep him out of Parliament until at least 1935, and there is the question of whether the Conservatives--who even in OTL had grave doubts about him because of his independence and "left-wing" economic views [1]--would ever allow him to reach high office.

[1] Though he preferred to call them *The Middle Way* (the title of his book, published in 1938).
 
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