1964-1968 Harold Macmillan (Conservative)
The 3 of Hearts
The Austerity Statesman Who Hid From The Public Eye
The 3 of Hearts
The Austerity Statesman Who Hid From The Public Eye
And so, two months after Douglas-Home announced he would resign the leadership in the aftermath of the 1961 election, the magic circle turned to the Last Hero Standing. Harold Macmillan, a veteran of the Great War and one of Churchill and Eden’s allies during Appeasement, found himself called upon to lead the party to which he had given his whole life. A charming figure with a sense of noblesse oblige, he provided an obvious contrast with the Callaghan government. A health scare in 1962 saw him warned by doctors of possible cancer, but this had disappeared within the year. Forever a slightly more cautious man, he nevertheless campaigned with renewed vigour, and a leak of his health fears to the press backfired and attracted public sympathy across 1963. When Callaghan appeared out of place at the funeral of President Nixon, the public longed for a Douglas-Home-like figure to represent them on the world stage - or, indeed, a Macmillan.
When the election of 1964 placed him in Downing Street, Macmillan was still surprised at the result. Callaghan’s timing had been misjudged, but a narrow Labour victory had been expected. The people were prepared to give the Tories a chance, it seemed. Initially confident that the Conservatives could govern as Douglas-Home had done, Macmillan’s hopes were dashed in the crash of 1965, where Callaghan and Wilson’s ‘overheated economy’ came crashing down around their successors. Attempts to blame the previous government fell on deaf ears, and Macleod’s radical and forthright budget, with its talk of ‘unavoidable reductions in public expenditure’ dominated the headlines. Macmillan tried to remain above economics, pointing out instead the ‘quality of life success story’ of post-war Britain. Callaghan lambasted him in the House for this. “Mr Speaker,” began a memorable quip, “is the Prime Minister living in the same country as the rest of us? Is he really not aware that most of our people have never had it so bad?”
At the end of 1965, with agitation in Botswana increasing, Macmillan gave his famous ‘winds of opinion’ speech. “I will not allow the British state to be buffeted about,” he told television viewers, “by the winds of fickle international opinion.” This would define his foreign and colonial policy. As President Reagan stepped up American involvement in Korea, Macmillan gained rare plaudits from friends and foes alike when he held firm to a commitment to keep British troops out of harm’s way. Korea was not Viet Nam - the public view of the conflict was influenced by television and photojournalism, bringing its stalemated horror to Western homes night after night.
On decolonisation, however, Macmillan proved to be a man on the wrong side of history. Recent scholarship has put his obstinance on the matter down to the chaos of the previous government’s attitude to the process, which had seen some nations in Africa granted independence without the slightest consideration for post-Imperial infrastructure or meaningfully democratic power structures. When Ian Smith made his ‘unilateral declaration of independence’ in Rhodesia in late 1965, Macmillan pressed the British government to find a way to legitimise the Smith government over time, and eventually accept Rhodesia’s status. Simplistic commentary accuses Macmillan of racism over this - the anti-fascist was nothing of the sort. A patrician, however, he most certainly was. Seeing African not as black or white but in terms of ‘readiness’, he demonstrated his views by, in 1966, launching a programme of ‘educational aid’ for Rhodesia and a number of colonies in Africa. Decolonisation would be slow and steady if Macmillan got his way.
Which, of course, he would not. By 1967, the economy was not so much on its feet as shakily standing on one leg and just about managing to remain upright. Macmillan’s government, and his own appearance, had begun to reek of staleness and a lack of dynamism. He famously never reshuffled his Cabinet once during his four year premiership (aside from replacing Joseph Godber with John Profumo when the former resigned over budget leaks) and many compared his government to one more suited to the booming years of the 1920s. As Labour rallied and made headway in the polls, Macmillan grew personally apathetic toward running the country, spending long hours at his club and even, it was rumoured, taking to drink. He refused, however, to resign as Conservative leader, and attempts to purge him failed when the Magic Circle closed ranks around their vanguard leader. This set in motion the Tory Civil War of the late 1960s, which culminated in the formal process for electing a leader from among the Parliamentary Conservative Party. That, however, would first take place after Macmillan’s time in office.
As 1968 dawned, the world was an uncertain place. Reagan was doubling down in Korea, and growing frightened of the anti-war Republican faction headed by Nelson Rockefeller. That year’s election would see Reagan lose power, but it would also see the Seollal Offensive irrevocably turn the American people against Korea. In Britain, trade union strife was on the rise, and marches demanding ‘freedom for Africa’ occurred almost every weekend, with largescale riots breaking out on the May bank holiday. The atmosphere of the year was captured by Michael Foot's infamous Hang The Rich speech (a title that comes from a misquotation of this fiery address to the Rhymney Socialist Society). Foot would be sacked from the Shadow Cabinet for his remarks, and remains to this day a controversial figure who epitomises the Angry Left.
Macmillan, meanwhile, was often nowhere to be found. He gained a reputation as an invisible Prime Minister, unwilling to actually do anything. The announcement of an election, only four years after the last one rather than the expected five, was a bolt from the blue, and the Conservatives grudgingly readied themselves for a pasting. The public were only too happy to provide one. Macmillan resigned as leader of the Conservative Party the following day, and died only three years later.
Historians today have little to say about Harold Macmillan. Public opinion ranks him low among post-war PMs, and he is considered the last of an out-of-touch generation that sought to govern Britain simply out of a sense of entitlement. Those who say he was a stodgy, unimaginative person are probably wide of the mark - in his youth, he was radical figure in the troublemaking right on the Conservative Party, and in personal terms he is believed to have been entertaining and innovative until the end.
But when it came to his leadership style, there is no polite way of describing him. He was a firm hand on the tiller that came to power when the boat needed to be turned around. When this became clear to him, he chose not to adapt, or to resign - he retreated from the public eye, leaving the country’s leadership in a vacuum, fought over by sharks circling in the race to succeed him. His selfishness cost Britons jobs, and many British subjects their lives. There is only one statue to him in all the United Kingdom, including Westminster - it stands on a side road in Brighton, his adopted home. It bears the headline the Brighton Argus ran when he took office: ‘Local man becomes Prime Minister’.
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