Harold Macmillan
National Democratic and Labour
1968-1973
“MACMILLAN SUCCEEDS MACMILLAN” screamed the front page of the Daily Mirror as the Prime Minister re-entered the door he had, just 72 hours earlier, apparently left for the last time. In a poetic show of what was to come, the new Deputy Prime Minister was blurred and all-but cropped out of the photographs taken in Downing Street that day. This may have been for the best – George Brown was, it is said, visibly ‘tired and emotional’, and not just from the wrenching experience of leading a schism in his own party.
The Smith Square Statement is embedded in the British political lexicon in the same way as the Zinoviev Letter or the Hawarden Kite. On the morning of Monday 1st April 1968, Patrick Gordon Walker appeared on the steps outside Labour Party headquarters at Transport House, a stone’s throw from Westminster. George Brown was by his side, steadying himself.
Walker spoke for little over a minute, but the words were unambiguous. The left-wing campaign that had been fought by Dick Crossman had been repudiated on the doorstep by many Labour activists, and it was of no help to them that it had been endorsed by a narrow plurality of the electorate (the Liberals, who had stood on an explicitly Monetarist Platform, had enjoyed their best result since 1931, electing 34 Members to the House). However, to the likes of Walker, Brown, Roy Jenkins and Merlyn Rees, it was a kowtow to Moscow. A sizable chunk of Labour MPs flanked the triumvirate as they set out an intention to formally take the NDP whip. A motion to instead sit as ‘British Labour’ and endorse the National Democrats through a supply and confidence motion had failed by one vote, a decision which would cost the grouping half a dozen MPs who, in words attributed to both Denis Healey and Harold Wilson, “could never join the Tories, whatever name they may be taking today”.
The announcement caused uproar, not least in the rump Labour Party. Crossman – who had literally been drawing up his Cabinet as the news came through on the radio – insisted on the forty-eight defecting Labour MPs resigning their seats and standing for re-election, whilst the
Morning Star openly accused them of ‘sedition against the state’, a matter that resulted in snorts elsewhere. However, Parliamentary Arithmetic was Parliamentary Arithmetic, and Macmillan once again headed to the Palace to kiss hands.
His first priority, obviously, was Vietnam.
Macmillan had grown increasingly distant from Jack Kennedy since the President’s second term started to groan under the weight of Indochina. The steady stream of coffins had become a torrent after Secretary Fulbright had announced his policy of ‘Americafication’ in 1965. The links between Saigon and Washington had become even closer during the mid-1960s, and some candidates in the forthcoming Presidential race had even proposed admitting South Vietnam to the Union as the 52nd State. The eventual Republican candidate had no such illusions.
As George Wilcken Romney took the oath of office on Monday 20th January 1969, few would have expected him to have taken the steps he did to end the conflict in Vietnam. As Governor of Michigan, Romney had been the exemplar of moderate, establishment Republicanism, with his foreign policy experience basically absent on the campaign trail. Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., GOP Vice Presidential candidate for the second time, was widely expected to provide the diplomatic brains for the new tenant of the Oval Office. This confidence would be misplaced. Shortly after dawn on 15th March 1969, a single B-52 Stratofortress took off from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. It would be a bad day to be a fisherman in Ha Long Bay.
As the Chief Teleoperator in the Kremlin struggled to find the best approximation for Kosygin’s spontaneous outburst, the world held its breath. A naval stand-off off the shore of Cuba was one thing, but the the ‘Romney Reaction’ was quite another magnitude all together. In the end, however, there was little that could be done. The Soviet Union was too far away, whilst China – gripped by the Great Leap Backwards – had more domestic matters to attend to. The Vietnam War was not over but, as General Walter Walker stood awkwardly in the signing ceremony in Huế, it certainly seemed like it was.
However, international communism was having more success elsewhere, within the quarrelling and feuding Labour Party. Richard Crossman had narrowly survived calls to step down following the actions of the Inglorious Fifty, but only at the cost of ceding further control of the party machinery to the left. At the post-election conference in Birmingham, the newly-elected chair of the Trades Union Congress, Hugh Scanlon, engineered a commitment to unilateral disarmament and “cooperation” with “friends and allies in the Soviet Bloc where they challenge American hegemony”. Whilst this was treated with uproar from many of the more moderate unions (some of whom walked out to form the non-affiliated but quietly pro-National Democratic ‘National Council of Workers’), it nevertheless placed Scanlon and his allies in a position of power within the party.
Later that year, Crossman was further humiliated when the National Democratic Party chose to add ‘and Labour’ to their name. Whilst resulting in some grumbles from the right of the NDP and even a few resignations of the new NDLP whip, to the public it further cemented the perception of the government’s party, and Macmillan, as the dominant force in British politics. Clearly, drastic work was needed to return ‘the other Labour Party’ to power. In February 1969, Scanlon sensationally won the Bassetlaw by-election on a broad left ticket. In his victory address, he announced plans to ‘democratise’ the Labour Party, and said that he would challenge Crossman for the leadership if required. The Long March to Scarborough had begun.
While Scanlon was moving slowly but surely in February 1969, Secretary of State for Development Reginald Maudling was moving very fast indeed. For Maudling, along with a hundred others, was on board the maiden flight of the Harmony supersonic passenger jet. The Anglo-American collaboration had been spearheaded by Maudling in Whitehall terms, with engineering carried out by BAC and Boeing. In Washington, the enthusiastic Secretary of Commerce, Stanislaw Ulam, became an unlikely ally of the project, getting it out of trouble on more than one occasion. The TSR-2, which had entered USAF service as the F-111 Camelot four years prior, formed an aesthetic basis for what all but the most French design critics quickly proclaimed the most beautiful aircraft of the jet age.
For Maudling, the Mach 2 journey to Idlewild was a poetic microcosm of his changing fortunes. Once considered the next leader of his party, he had plummeted when Macmillan’s decision to create the NDP had left him out in the cold. Rumour had it that he would have been more forthcoming with support for his premier in those crucial first hours had he not been blind drunk. Harmony – like the Department for Development itself – was a sop to a man the public liked to see doing well because he reminded them of themselves. It was a very fancy bauble that certainly bore some importance but would not decide any great matter of state. Maudling appears to have realised this, and whatever peace he made with his dignified retirement-by-default, his drinking caught up with him when he died in a low-speed car accident in the autumn of 1971.
A more sudden and dramatic end to a political career came when Enoch Powell, now considered to be the new heir apparent, resigned from the Cabinet in September 1971 over – of all things – a motorway. Plans to relieve pressure on the M6 north of Birmingham had been mooted for several years, and when Geoffrey Rippon took to the despatch box to announce the latest Transport Strategy, it was not seen as being the seeds of a major Cabinet split. Powell, however, was furious. The MP for Wolverhampton South West was incandescent at having only been informed of the route of the relief road in the local papers the following morning. In a furious speech to his Constituency Association, the Chancellor read out various pieces of correspondence he had received opposing the matter. One in particular, a letter from a man in Tettenhall Regis concerned about air and noise pollution, was noted in depth:
“Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that the countryside will not be worth living in for his children.”
The outcome of ‘Rivers of Tarmacadam’ was unsurprising. An entirely nonplussed Macmillian accepted Powell’s resignation the next day, allegedly offering him a clear path to the leadership if it would change his mind. To avoid a schism with the Party Right, the Prime Minister replaced the Chancellor with an ideological ally, Sir Keith Joseph, but the resignation achieved little. The motorway extension went ahead, and to this day, motorists to the Midlands can still enjoy a Full Enoch Breakfast at the Traveller’s Grill.
While an unashamed work of ‘great man’ history, this volume would not be complete without a note on the social transformations occurring in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Macmillan’s patrician charm and measured response to all great matters of state appealed to the war generations, but proved less appealing to the Angry Young Men (by now, Angry Middle-Aged Men) and the teenagers the gutter press loved to emphasise. Blocking the Opposition’s regular attempts to reduce the voting age to 18 bought the government time in this regard, but on wider social issues – particularly divorce and abortion rights – there were plenty of people in the NDLP’s gargantuan electoral coalition who wanted to see Something Done. Many of them happened to be women.
Macmillan was mindful of the poorly-received stoicism that had almost ousted him in 1968. Energised by the now apparently invincible NDLP, in 1970 he shook up his internal team. Tabloid-stirred fears of a ‘Night of the Long Knives’ at cabinet level were unwarranted, but Macmillan shocked many old allies by bringing ‘media experts’ and even former television journalists into the Downing Street operation. More shocking was that two-thirds of these new ‘men of tomorrow’ were from the L of the NDLP. Operating as a Lincolnesque ‘team of rivals’, Bernard Donoughue et al crafted a strategy by which Macmillan could be led by his patrician instincts while maintaining the easy-going, hands-off image that continued to play well with the voting public. By lending soft government support to private members’ bills on divorce law and abortion, Macmillan began to shift the social fabric of Britain, one thread at a time.
The televisual satirists still attempting to cling to relevance in a period of widespread satisfaction with the government may not have liked it, but the social reforms broadly succeeded in their aims, with some caveats. Capital punishment’s suspension came to an end in 1969, and was unexpectedly not renewed thanks to a divide on the NDLP benches and lower-than-expected Labour support. But the judiciary simply declined to issue any death sentences, with one exception that was overturned by the Home Secretary in 1971 – rightly so, as a retrial later exonerated the would-be victim. Private attempts to legalise sodomy fell flat, and with little public appetite for such a move, the expenditure of political capital on it was ruled out until ‘the next Parliament’.
Approaching twenty years in office, Macmillan was increasingly tired. His false health scare in 1963 and the harm it did to his over-eager opponents gave his new rivals pause and arguably bought him at least eighteen months. However, by the end of 1972 he felt satisfied that to go now would be to do so on his own terms, and the growing issues in the Dominion of Nigeria looked like something it would be wise to leave in the hands of a younger man.
As per the constitution of the National Democratic and Labour Party (agreed in 1965, amended in 1969), Macmillan sent a letter to Party Secretary Quintin Hogg to formally trigger a leadership contest. MPs were balloted in three rounds after a brief campaign of one week in February 1973, and an initially crowded field gave way to a clear winner.
The candidates came from various walks of life and traditions, and represented the different strands Macmillan had brought together when he wove the NDLP across the preceding decade. Edward Heath was yesterday’s man in the public eye but still commanded the loyalty of a sizeable chunk of the NDLP’s parliamentary party. Christopher Soames was full of easy charm and anecdotes from his six-year tenure at the FO, and being Churchill’s son-in-law had never hurt anybody. His jovial appearance, however, led to quite unfair whispers of ‘lightweight’ dogging him until his withdrawal in the second round. Roy Jenkins was ambitious, well-spoken and the highest-ranking former Labour member of the NDLP in his capacity as Dominions Secretary, but surprised nobody when he won slightly
fewer votes than the total number of ex-Labour MPs on the government benches.
Bill Deedes, who had enjoyed a slow-and-steady rise through the cabinet ranks under Macmillan, had for several years been considered a ‘crown prince’. But his break with Macmillan on NATSP (by now pronounced ‘Natsper’ in common parlance) poisoned the relationship. Macmillan, ever the honourable gentleman, respected that he had no grounds to sack Deedes as Trade Secretary, but their closeness came to an end and Macmillan realised the NDLP could not afford too many men in high office who thought NATSP was not the best deal for the United Kingdom. Deedes’ objections may have publicly centred on textile standards, but in private he made clear to the PM that “we aren’t getting half as much out of all this as the Yanks”. Without the retiring PM’s backing, Deedes was dead in the water – a decade and a half as a sidekick had earned him as many enemies as it had resenters.
The former chancellor, Enoch Powell, mounted a campaign from the backbenches but even himself admitted it was a quixotic gesture he was performing simply out of a sense of duty. It was his last brush with the frontline – in spite of offers to return to cabinet being recorded as late as 1980, he would remain a backbencher until his retirement at the 1991 election, after which he served for ten years as Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.
All these men fell by the wayside as Macmillan’s chosen successor inevitably made his way to the finish line. A spirited tea-room session by Heath just before balloting saw his numbers climb to a respectable 167 votes, but the result was realistically never in doubt.
The NDLP’s internal transition complete, the formal arrangements were made, and the now former leader of the National Democratic and Labour Party left Number 10 on a crisp March morning. After an unusually long session with his sovereign, Macmillan returned to the ministerial car and made his way to Chequers, where arrangements had been made for him to stay until his all belongings had left Downing Street. As the black Rover turned onto the Mall, a new political era was about to dawn.
