Harold Macmillan
National Democratic
1963-1968
At nine in the morning on Wednesday 17th April 1963, Harold Macmillan gave a live broadcast on both television channels, which was simultaneously carried by the Home and World Services. Everyone knew what he was going to say. After eight years in office, it was time to retire and hand over to someone younger. Reginald Maulding had already begun clearing his desk at the Foreign Office, safe in the knowledge that the Magic Circle were to recommend his appointment as the new Prime Minister and Leader of the Conservative Party.
He was wrong on both counts, not least because the Conservative Party was about to cease to exist. To the United Kingdom, her Empire and the World, Harold Macmillan announced that – following high-level discussions with party grandees, the Chancellor and The Queen – the Conservative and Unionist Party would be dissolved and replaced by a new organisation aimed at formally representing the ‘broad base’ of Britain’s electorate.
“The Conservative Party that emerged over a century ago,” the Prime Minister stated, “represented the ascendency of rational actors above the forces of reaction on one side and revolution on the other. Since then, it has merged with the Radical Liberalism of Joseph Chamberlain, and entered into formal concord with Unionists in Scotland and in Ulster. Now, it too must step aside for a new organisation that truly speaks for the millions of men and women emancipated by universal suffrage and the assistive state.”
At a stroke, Britain had a new dominant political organisation, the National Democratic Party. It was perhaps the most calculated risk taken in British politics since David Lloyd George’s coup against Asquith. Macmillan was well aware that the decision would lead to outrage throughout the party, and not exclusively from the right. Maulding was said to be incandescent and reportedly took a toffee hammer to a small bust of Gladstone, whilst the former Home Secretary, Derick Heathcoat-Amory, penned a furious editorial in the
Daily Telegraph, all but accusing the Prime Minister of “treason against the party of Churchill and of victory!” For one frantic morning, it appeared that Mac the Knife had managed to engineer a civil war from a standing start. Anthony Greenwood was reported to have sung in the bath. However, a man long absent from the daily grind of politics was on the prowl.
“The Premier has made a fine and courageous decision that guarantees the future prosperity of these islands and secures a bulwark against socialism”, was how Churchill summarised the news in a televised interview at Chartwell. The eighty-eight year old was by now profoundly deaf and weakened by a succession of strokes, but had lost little of the fire for politics. Having previously been of the view that his successor in Downing Street was little more than a dilettante aristocrat, Churchill had warmed to Macmillan over the years, paying him quiet visits to Chequers as often as his health permitted. Some reports have even indicated that the decision to reform the Conservative Party came from Churchill personally, although the consensus from many historians is that the original idea came from an internal memorandum first circulated in 1946 by Rab Butler (by now ruminating in semi-exile on the Crossbenches as the Viscount Saffron Walden).
With Churchill’s patronage, any reports of a serious threat to Macmillan’s position were rendered moot. Maulding soon recovered his sensibilities and backed off from resignation, and an attempted revolt led by the right-wing member for Haltemprice, Patrick Wall, failed miserably after only nine of his fellow backbenchers signed a letter calling for Macmillan to go. The final stumbling block to the Prime Minister remaining in office - his health - was also dismissed after receiving a second opinion from Harley Street. A quickly commissioned poll from Gallup showed that almost three-quarters of the electorate supported the establishment of ‘a new political party for the middle-classes.’
Several weeks later (May Day, as it happened) at an extraordinary conference in Brighton, the Conservative and Unionist Party voted to abolish itself. It was succeeded immediately by the National Democratic Party and, the next day, the Executive Committee of the National Liberals formally approved their merger with the new organisation. On the final day of the conference, the Defence Secretary, Enoch Powell, provided the keynote address:
“For all the torrents of speculation, the cartoons, the thumbnail sketches, it is not between persons that the people of Britain - if they understand aright their responsibility as electors - are called upon before long to decide. If that were all, it might not matter so much if they resigned themselves to the good-humoured cynicism which is all too common, and were ready to toss a coin or "let the other chaps have a chance now". The decision on the contrary is between two opposite ways of life, two utterly different kinds of society, two conflicting philosophies about the individual and hs place in the world around him. The difference between the alternatives presented is, as Housman once said of truth ard falsehood, greater than that between an icicle and a red-hot poker, but not so noticeable to the senses. We should not wake up on tomorrow to witness a Labour victory at the polls to find ourselves and thus resign ourselves to living in a complete socialist state. It is only by the force of anti-Socialism, which much constantly reinvent and reappraise itself, as Peel did, that we avoid the specter of revolution, however cowled in the robes of reform it may be.”
The so-called ‘Line of the Centuries’ speech (Powell always hated that epigram, he always insisted that he had cited Virgil in the original Latin but it had been subsequently translated the reporters), would set the tone for the autumn’s election campaign. Voters turned out in the their droves (indeed, it was the highest turn-out since 1951 and returned the National Democrats with only a slightly decreased majority. Surprisingly, the Liberals held on to their slight resurgence, even taking a few seats in the West Country. Labour could make little headway, and a disappointing election night was capped by humiliation when Anthony Greenwood was defeated by three-hundred votes in Rossendale. He would be succeeded by his Deputy, Richard Crossman.
The first major crisis for Britain’s first National Democratic government came from overseas. President Kennedy’s escalation of American activities in Indochina had placed considerable pressure on the Ministry of Defence to follow in the steps of their colleagues in the Pentagon. In November, Macmillan took to the despatch box to present a request for assistance that he had claimed to have received from the Government of South Vietnam. Some of the more observant members of the Labour frontbench may have noticed the odd word spent with a ‘z’ rather than an ‘s’, but any rumours that the requisition had originated from the American Embassy, rather than from President Ngo Dinh Diem, were soon put to rest. Despite protests from from the CND and opposition from the Labour left, the Government easily won the debate. On 1st December 1963, a single detachment of Royal Marine Commandos under the command of General Walter Walker arrived in Phan Thiết. They would not be alone for long.
“Waive Britannia! Britannia Waives The Rules!” sang Flanders and Swann the following year on their tour of the United States. The ‘British Invasion’ meant two very different things depending on what side of the Pacific you happened to live on, but had had been genuinely appreciated in Washington. In May, Macmillan travelled to Ottawa to sign the ‘North Atlantic Trade and Security Pact’, a new initiative spearheaded by Secretary of State William Fulbright and Prime Minister Diefenbaker to increase co-operation between the three great English-speaking powers. Whilst Macmillan insisted that, in joining NATSP, Britain remained committed to engagement with the EEC, the Treaty of Ottawa confirmed that Britain had missed the bus in that respect. Although De Gaulle’s assassination in 1962 had removed the most obvious obstacle to Britain’s membership of the Treaty of Rome, the destinies of Europe and the United Kingdom paths had diverged. Simply put, there was not a good enough reason for Britain to look across La Manche.
As the sixties continued, Britain boomed. Although commitments in Vietnam placed challenges on the Exchequer, NATSP and bilateral deals mitigated most of them. A particular coup took place in the Australian desert in 1966, when
Blue Streak launched a small satellite named Oberon into the cosmos. Equipped with the latest surveillance equipment and carrying an Eagle and Lion motif, it heralded the start of the British Space Programme and a new era in Anglo-American relations. By the end of President Kennedy’s second term, ‘Mac’n’Jack’ had established themselves as the partnership the world needed to stand up against the Soviet Union. The power-struggle that had followed the ousting of Khrushchev had been long if bloodless, but Alexei Kosygin was not going to let the Revolution lag behind the two heralds of capitalism without a fight.
By 1968, the shine was finally beginning to come off Edward Heath’s economic miracle. Although investment in factories and infrastructure had increased productivity, inflation had once again begun to creep up. Heath allowed himself to be moved aside in the spring and was replaced by Powell. The new Chancellor was a proponent of the new theories coming out of the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics and reacted accordingly, tightening control of the monetary policy and transferring control of supply to the Bank of England. However, proposals to decimalise the Pound Sterling had amounted to little, especially after Powell declared himself to be a resolute supporter of LSD (after some initial consternation, it soon transpired that he had been referring to librae, solidi and denarii).
But for an ambush near Huế on 19th March 1968, public opinion on ‘Viet-Narm’ might not have become an election issue. Casualties had been low across the preceding twelve months, and non-student opposition had stabilised since the angry summer of ’67, when even Mancunian soap opera
Rosamund Street had included a storyline about National Service (and landed the Director of Granada Television in front of a Select Committee). The Labour Party’s increasingly incoherent attempts to oppose the conflict without looking like they were about to add ‘-Crossmanite’ to Marxist-Leninist had little impact, in some quarters increasing support for the defence of South Vietnam.
Sixty-four Royal Engineers, two-thirds of them National Servicemen, died that day. Spontaneous protests snowballed into two nights of rioting in London, Manchester and Liverpool (where a disproportionate number of mothers had received telegrams since 1963). Macmillan’s public response was typically both perfect and insufficient simultaneously – eschewing both emotion and politicking, his stoicism looked like stoniness when broadcasted into millions of homes in full colour. Fifty years ago, he had been a young British infantryman himself, and a wounded one too. But few seemed to remember that five decades on. And those who did, didn’t care.
The election having already been called, the NDP went into ‘damage control’ mode. It was too late, and even cabinet members went increasingly off-script in the final week of the campaign. A poor set of economic figures on the eve of polling, coupled with England’s quarter-final defeat to Portugal in the European Championships, sealed the deal as the country went to the polls.
The result was clear. The National Democratic Party had lost nearly sixty seats, whilst Labour had gained almost the same. Macmillan gave a brief statement on the results, before going to the Palace to tender his resignation as Prime Minister after over thirteen years in power, the longest continuous term of office since Lord Liverpool.
The identity of his successor, however, raised eyebrows around Westminster.
