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| Political Biography: Maurice Harold Macmillan |
(b. London, 10 Feb. 1894; d. 29 Dec. 1986) British; Foreign Secretary 1955, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1955 – 7, Prime Minister 1957 – 63; Viscount Stockton 1984 The son of a publisher (and grandson of a Scottish crofter), Macmillan was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. He served with the Grenadier Guards during the First World War and was wounded three times, on the third occasion seriously. His wartime experience, surviving when much of his generation was wiped out, had a lasting impact. So too did his experience as Conservative MP for Stockton-on-Tees, representing the depressed industrial town from 1924 to 1929 and from 1931 to 1945. His experiences led him briefly to resign the Conservative whip (1936 – 7) and to write The Middle Way, espousing a moderate brand of Conservatism. His stance was essentially paternalist. He married into the family of the Duke of Devonshire and retained a fascination with the aristocracy.
His first ministerial experience came in 1940 when he was appointed as a junior minister. Two years later he took up the post of Resident Minister at Allied Forces HQ in the Mediterranean theatre, in which post he struck up a friendship with Eisenhower. He served until the caretaker Conservative government in 1945 in which he served as Secretary of State for Air. He lost his seat at Stockton in the general election but was almost immediately returned at a by-election for the safe seat of Bromley. He was a leading member of the Opposition front bench from 1945 to 1951, speaking on economic and industrial issues, but occasionally contributing to debates on foreign affairs. On the return of a Conservative government in 1951, he was appointed to the Cabinet as Minister of Housing. The post was less than he had hoped for, but he threw himself into it with vigour. He proved an effective minister. By 1953, he could claim that 300,000 new homes had been built. In 1954 he was rewarded with promotion. He was appointed Minister of Defence. His tenure of the post and, indeed, his two subsequent posts was short-lived. In April 1955, the new Prime Minister Eden appointed him Foreign Secretary. It was the post he wanted, but he served in it only nine months. Eden wanted to remain involved in foreign affairs and in December appointed Macmillan Chancellor of the Exchequer, a move that Macmillan did not appreciate. As Chancellor, he introduced the Premium Bond and variously clashed with Eden. When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, Macmillan was among the more hawkish members of the Cabinet. When the Americans applied economic pressure, he shifted his position and came to dominate the Cabinet. Eden resigned. The majority of the Cabinet and the parliamentary party reportedly favoured Macmillan, rather than Butler, as his successor and — after taking advice — the Queen sent for Macmillan.
Macmillan quickly restored the morale of the Conservative Party. He exuded an air of calm confidence. When the Chancellor Peter Thorneycroft and the other Treasury ministers resigned in January 1958, Macmillan dismissed it as a "little local difficulty". He was able to cite continuing economic prosperity and in the 1959 budget pushed the new Chancellor Heathcoat-Amory to adopt an expansionary budget. In 1959 he led the party to a substantial victory in the general election. He was hailed as "Supermac". Conditions turned against him in the new parliament. The party's 1959 manifesto offered no clear sense of direction. Facing economic pressures, Chancellor Selwyn Lloyd adopted an unpopular "stop-go" economic policy. Macmillan decided to pursue an application for membership of the European Economic Community. The application split the party and was subsequently vetoed by French President Charles de Gaulle. In 1962, government unpopularity spurred Macmillan into dismissing one-third of the Cabinet, "the Night of the Long Knives", an act that upset many of his own supporters. The following year, his handling of the Profumo affair — when his War Minister resigned after admitting lying to the House about his affair with a prostitute — left him looking out of touch with events. He looked old, and oldfashioned, in comparison with the new Labour leader, Harold Wilson. Macmillan and his ministers were on increasingly bad terms with the press. Speculation about his leadership grew. He planned to lead the party into the next general election. His plans were upset in October 1963 when he was taken ill with prostatitis and had to go into hospital for an operation. Believing he was more gravely ill than in fact he was, he resigned the premiership (a decision he quickly regretted). From his hospital bed, he set in train a process of sounding out opinion in the party as to his successor. Initially a supporter of Lord Hailsham (Quintin Hogg), Hogg's antics at the party conference led him to shift his support to Lord Home (Alec Douglas-Home). The advice received from the party appeared to confirm this view, though the process of ascertaining the view was to prove highly controversial. The Queen sent for Lord Home.
Macmillan retired from the House in 1964 and declined a peerage. He worked on his memoirs and enjoyed his position — to which he had been elected in 1960 — as chancellor of Oxford University. After twenty years out of parliament, he returned in 1984, having accepted a hereditary peerage. He was installed as Viscount Stockton. Despite being 90 years of age and with poor eyesight, he attended the House and, speaking from notes held in front of his face, criticized the economic policies of the Thatcher government, claiming that privatization was like "selling the family silver". His time in the Upper House was short. He died on 29 December 1986.
Macmillan was often portrayed as a great showman in politics. He exuded unflappability and urbaneness, an outward appearance that masked both nervousness and personal unhappiness. His earlier experiences never left his memory, his wife had a long-standing affair with another MP (Robert Boothby), and his son Maurice — an MP to whom he had denied ministerial office — predeceased him. He was committed to ensuring a stable society, free of the misery he had witnessed in Stockton. His misfortune was to be Prime Minister at a time when Britain's economic improvement ran into the buffers.
| Biography: Harold Macmillan |
The British politician and prime minister (Maurice) Harold Macmillan (1894-1986) was one of the outstanding Conservative leaders of the 20th century in terms of achieving both unity in his party and electoral success.
Harold Macmillan was born on Feb. 10, 1894, in London, England. He was educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford. During his World War I service in the Grenadier Guards he was wounded three times. From 1919-1920 he was an aide to the governor general of Canada. In 1920 he married into one of the most deeply rooted Conservative aristocratic families - the Cavendishes (Lady Dorothy Cavendish, daughter of the 9th Duke of Devonshire). She died in 1966. They had three daughters and one son.
Early Career
This impeccable upper-class background served Macmillan in good stead in his prime ministerial career (January 1957-October 1963) when he wished to lead his party in directions that it would have found difficult to take from another leader. But in the early phase of his career this background could be seriously misleading. As member of Parliament for Stockton-on-Tees after 1924, he was no orthodox Conservative. He was deeply moved by mass unemployment; in such works as Reconstruction: A Plea for a National Policy (1933) and The Middle Way (1938) he advocated neo-Keynesian solutions to the economic crisis of those years that were by no means fashionable.
As an opponent of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy toward Hitler's Germany, and as a Conservative rebel, he was an obvious choice for Winston Churchill's wartime administration. Macmillan served as parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Supply from 1940 to 1942, as undersecretary of state for the colonies in 1942, and his most important office, as minister resident at Allied Headquarters in Northwest Africa from 1942 to 1945. In the latter capacity he came close to Churchill and acted as an effective link between quarreling Allied military and political commanders.
Political Service
After the war, he was made secretary of state for air in the caretaker government. In the Conservative government of 1951, Macmillan served first, and most successfully, as minister of housing and local government (1951-1954). He was then minister of defense, foreign secretary, and chancellor of the Exchequer (December 1955-January 1957) before succeeding Anthony Eden as prime minister in January 1957, a position he held until his resignation in October 1963.
As prime minister, Macmillan took over after the Suez operation, when President Abdul Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal, and his party's morale and fortunes were at a low ebb. By 1959 the Conservatives had recovered enough to win a large electoral victory. His period in office was associated with developments that only Macmillan's public relations skills made acceptable to large sections of his own party: the acceptance of the move toward black African independence (1960), the initiation of formal government planning through the National Economic Development Council, and the approach to joining the European Common Market (now the European Union) in 1961. Macmillan was also instrumental in negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that was signed by the former Soviet Union, England, and the United States in 1963.
Speaking to the South African Parliament in 1960, Macmillan said, "A wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, the growth of national consciousness is a political fact."
In 1963 a downturn in the economy coupled with a sex scandal involving one of the prime minister's aides resulted in Macmillan's resignation from office. When he left public life, Macmillan returned to his family's publishing business, Macmillan Ltd., of which he became president in 1974. After years of refusing his peerage, he was created Earl of Stockton in 1984. Macmillan died of pneumonia, December 29, 1986, in Haywards Heath, West Sussex, England.
Further Reading
MacMillan, Harold, Winds of Change 1914-1939 (1966); The Blast of War 1939-1945 (1967); Tides of Fortune 1945-1955 (1969).
"Earl of Stockton: British Politician," Annual Obituary 1986, New York: St. Martins Press, c1986, p. 736-739.
Horne, Alistair, Harold Macmillan, New York: Viking, c1989.
Hughes, Emrys, Macmillan: Portrait of a Politician (1962).
Sampson, Anthony, MacMillan: A Study in Ambiguity (1967).
Turner, John, Macmillan, New York: Longman, c1994.
Davenport-Hines, R.P.T., The Macmillans, London: Heineman, c1992.
| British History: Harold Macmillan |
Macmillan, Harold (1894-1986). Prime minister. Anglo-American by birth, Macmillan proceeded from Eton to Balliol College, Oxford, where he secured a first in classical moderations. During the war he was badly injured. After the war he served as ADC to the governor-general of Canada before going into the family publishing firm.
Macmillan was elected as member for Stockton at his second attempt in 1924. In Parliament he associated himself with a group of progressive Tories, styled the YMCA, but his career suffered a blow when he lost his seat in the 1929 general election. He won it back in 1931. The publication of The Middle Way in 1938 showed Macmillan's commitment to a mixed economy and considerable government intervention. Macmillan was also at odds with the foreign policy of the National Government and resigned the Conservative whip for the last year of Baldwin's premiership.
When Churchill became premier in May 1940 Macmillan's ministerial rewards were initially small. But in 1942 he made his first major political advance with his appointment as minister of state for north Africa. Macmillan took easily to his new authority and struck up a good working relationship with General Eisenhower.
Macmillan lost his Stockton seat again in the general election of 1945, but was soon returned to Parliament following a by-election in Bromley. As minister of housing after 1951 Macmillan achieved credit as the man who fulfilled the Conservative pledge to build 300, 000 houses in a single year. He served briefly as minister of defence, but became foreign secretary when Eden succeeded to the premiership in 1955. Too forceful in this post for Eden's liking, he was transferred to the Exchequer after six months.
An ardent proponent of the Suez adventure in 1956, its failure provided Macmillan with his opportunity. Though it was he who pressed the financial necessity of bringing the operation to an end, his earlier enthusiasm ensured the backing of the Conservative right. To the surprise of many he was preferred to Butler when ill-health forced Eden's resignation in January 1957.
As prime minister Macmillan displayed political skills which few had anticipated. Against the odds, he restored party morale after Suez and led the Conservatives to a third successive electoral victory in 1959. By 1960 Macmillan stood at the height of his power. The nickname ‘Supermac’ encapsulated the public's acclaim. But then problems arose. The collapse of the summit conference of 1960 was a particular blow which helped persuade Macmillan to seek British admission to the European Common Market. This quest ultimately met with the veto of General de Gaulle. Meanwhile difficulties mounted on the domestic front. Many sensed panic when Macmillan dismissed a third of his cabinet, including the chancellor, in the famous ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in July 1962. Thereafter the government was beset by a series of sex and spy scandals. Illness precipitated Macmillan's resignation at the time of the Conservative Party conference in October 1963.
Macmillan was a complex individual. An external self-confidence was matched by inner doubts, exacerbated no doubt by his wife's long-standing affair with Robert Boothby. The years of his premiership remain controversial. For some they represent a period of unprecedented prosperity; for others a time when a blind eye was turned to underlying problems in the British economy.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: (Maurice) Harold Macmillan, 1st earl of Stockton |
Bibliography
See his memoirs (6 vol., 1966-73); biographies by N. Fisher (1982) and A. Horne (2 vol., 1988-89).
| Quotes By: Harold Macmillan |
Quotes:
"We have not overthrown the divine right of kings to fall down for the divine right of experts."
"It has been said that there is no fool like an old fool, except a young fool. But the young fool has first to grow up to be an old fool to realize what a damn fool he was when he was a young fool."
"Memorial services are the cocktail parties of the geriatric set."
"Marxism is like a classical building that followed the Renaissance; beautiful in its way, but incapable of growth."
"Jaw-jaw is better than war-war."
"If you don't believe in God, all you have to believe in is decency. Decency is very good. Better decent than indecent. But I don't think it's enough."
See more famous quotes by
Harold Macmillan
| Wikipedia: Harold Macmillan |
| The Right Honourable The Earl of Stockton OM PC |
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| In office 10 January 1957 – 18 October 1963 |
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| Monarch | Elizabeth II |
| Deputy | Rab Butler |
| Preceded by | Sir Anthony Eden |
| Succeeded by | Sir Alec Douglas-Home |
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| In office 25 May 1945 – 26 July 1945 |
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| Prime Minister | Winston Churchill |
| Preceded by | Sir Archibald Sinclair |
| Succeeded by | The Viscount Stansgate |
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| In office 30 October 1951 – 19 October 1954 |
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| Prime Minister | Sir Winston Churchill |
| Preceded by | Hugh Dalton |
| Succeeded by | Duncan Sandys |
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| In office 19 October 1954 – 7 April 1955 |
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| Prime Minister | Sir Winston Churchill |
| Preceded by | The Earl Alexander of Tunis |
| Succeeded by | Selwyn Lloyd |
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| In office 7 April – 20 December 1955 |
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| Prime Minister | Sir Anthony Eden |
| Preceded by | Sir Anthony Eden |
| Succeeded by | Selwyn Lloyd |
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| In office 20 December 1955 – 13 January 1957 |
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| Prime Minister | Sir Anthony Eden |
| Preceded by | Rab Butler |
| Succeeded by | Peter Thorneycroft |
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| Born | 10 February 1894 Chelsea, London, United Kingdom |
| Died | 29 December 1986 (aged 92) Chelwood Gate, Sussex, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Political party | Conservative |
| Spouse(s) | Lady Dorothy Macmillan |
| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
| Profession | Publisher |
| Religion | Anglican[1] |
| Signature | |
Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, OM, PC (10 February 1894 – 29 December 1986) was a British Conservative politician and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 10 January 1957 to 18 October 1963.
Nicknamed 'Supermac' and known for his pragmatism, wit and unflappability, Macmillan achieved notoriety before the Second World War as a Tory radical and critic of appeasement. Rising to high office as a protegé of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, he believed in the essential decency of the post-war settlement and the necessity of a mixed economy, and in his premiership pursued corporatist policies to develop the domestic market as the engine of growth.[2] As a One Nation Tory of the Disraelian tradition, haunted by memories of the Great Depression, he championed a Keynesian strategy of public investment to maintain demand, winning a second term in 1959 on an electioneering budget. Benefiting from favourable international conditions,[3] he presided over an age of affluence, marked by low unemployment and high if uneven growth. In his immortal Bedford speech of July 1957 he correctly[4] told the nation they had 'never had it so good', but warned of the dangers of inflation, summing up the fragile prosperity of the 1950s.[5]
In international affairs Macmillan rebuilt the special relationship with the United States from the wreckage of Suez, and redrew the world map by decolonising sub-Saharan Africa. Reconfiguring the nation's defences to meet the realities of the nuclear age, he ended National Service, strengthened the nuclear deterrent by acquiring Polaris, and pioneered the Nuclear Test Ban with the United States and the Soviet Union. Belatedly recognising the dangers of strategic dependence, he sought a new role for Britain in Europe, but his unwillingness to disclose United States nuclear secrets to France contributed to a French veto of the United Kingdom's entry into the European Economic Community.[6]
Macmillan's government in its final year was rocked by the Vassall and Profumo scandals, which seemed to symbolise for the rebellious youth of the 1960s the moral decay of the British establishment.[7] Resigning prematurely after a medical misdiagnosis, Macmillan lived out a long retirement as an elder statesman of global stature. He was as trenchant a critic of his successors in his old age as he had been of his predecessors in his youth. When asked what represented the greatest challenge for a statesman, Macmillan replied: 'Events, my dear boy, events'.[8]
Harold Macmillan was born at 52 Cadogan Place in Chelsea, London, to Maurice Crawford Macmillan (1853–1936), publisher, and Helen (Nellie) Artie Tarleton Belles (1856–1937), artist and socialite, from Spencer, Indiana, US.[9] He had two brothers, Daniel, eight years his senior, and Arthur, four years his senior.[10] His paternal grandfather, Daniel MacMillan (1813–1857), was the son of a Scottish crofter who founded Macmillan Publishers.
Macmillan was first educated at Summer Fields School and then at Eton but left during his first half after a serious attack of pneumonia.[11][12] He also attended Balliol College, Oxford, although he only completed two years of the four-year course reading Greats before the outbreak of the First World War.
Macmillan served with distinction as a captain in the Grenadier Guards during the war, and was wounded on three occasions. During the Battle of the Somme, he spent an entire day wounded and lying in a slit trench with a bullet in his pelvis, reading the classical Greek playwright Aeschylus in his original language.[13] Macmillan spent the final two years of the war under anaesthetic in hospital undergoing a long series of operations, seeing no further active service.[14] His hip wound took four years to heal completely, and left him with a slight shuffle to his walk (and a limp grip in his right hand from a separate hand wound) for the rest of his life. As was common for contemporary former officers, he continued to be known as 'Captain Macmillan' until the early 1930s.
Macmillan lost so many of his fellow students during the war that afterwards he refused to return to Oxford, saying the university would never be the same.[15] He served instead in Ottawa, Canada, in 1919 as ADC to Victor Cavendish, 9th Duke of Devonshire, then Governor General of Canada and future father-in-law.[16]
On his return to London in 1920 he joined the family firm Macmillan Publishers as a junior partner, remaining with the company until his appointment to ministerial office in 1940.
Macmillan married Lady Dorothy Cavendish, daughter of the 9th Duke of Devonshire, on 21 April 1920. Her great-uncle was Spencer Cavendish, 8th Duke of Devonshire, who was leader of the Liberal Party in the 1870s, and a close colleague of William Gladstone, Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Salisbury. Lady Dorothy was also descended from William Cavendish, 4th Duke of Devonshire, who served as Prime Minister from 1756–1757 in communion with Newcastle and Pitt the Elder. Her nephew William Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington married Kathleen, a sister of John F. Kennedy. Between 1929 and 1935 Lady Dorothy had a long affair with the Conservative politician Robert Boothby, in full public view of Westminster and established society. Boothby was widely rumoured to have been the father of Macmillan's youngest daughter Sarah. The stress caused by this may have contributed to Macmillan's nervous breakdown in 1931.[17] Lady Dorothy died on 21 May 1966, aged 65.
The Macmillans had four children:
On 26 November 1950, Lady Dorothy's brother Edward Cavendish, the 10th Duke of Devonshire had a heart attack and died in the presence of John Bodkin Adams, the suspected serial killer. Thirteen days before, Edith Alice Morrell, another patient of Adams, had also died. Adams was tried in 1957 for her murder but controversially acquitted. Political interference has been suspected[18][19] and indeed, the case was prosecuted by a member of Macmillan's cabinet, Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller. Home office pathologist Francis Camps linked Adams to a total of 163 suspicious deaths.[19]
Eileen Kathleen O'Casey (née Reynolds), the actress wife of Irish dramatist Seán O'Casey, had a close relationship with Macmillan, who had published her husband’s plays. There is disagreement over whether he proposed after she was widowed. According to her husband's biographer: 'Eileen and O'Casey's marriage had become celibate by the time she was in her fifties, now a strikingly handsome woman, notable for her warm wit, who, on her own candid admission, fulfilled her sexual needs outside marriage ... One ardent, lifelong admirer was Macmillan, who in later life gently broached to her the idea of marriage, which she declined.'[20]
Eileen's obituary notice in the Evening Standard states: 'It was the death of Sean O'Casey in 1964, and of Dorothy Macmillan, two years later, that cemented Macmillan and Eileen’s intimacy. She became the light which illuminated his prime years, eventually even replacing Dorothy in his affections.'[21] O'Casey's biographer notes that 'Eileen was the first woman whom Macmillan asked to sit in Lady Dorothy’s place at table in Birch Grove; he also took her out frequently to dine at Buck’s Club.'[22]
Eileen's obituary in The Times records that 'she became one of Harold Macmillan's closest friends. The two grew even closer after the death of their respective spouses. That Macmillan never proposed marriage was a source of bewilderment to outsiders, although Eileen was understanding about his shyness....Her relationship with Macmillan, which only ended with his death in 1986, was a source of comfort to her in old age. For his part, he relied completely on her honest, outspoken Irish perspective. She recalled one lunch when Lord Home asked Macmillan to accept a peerage: "Harold turned to me and said 'What about that Eileen?' I told him I thought it nicer to keep the name Harold Macmillan to the end of his days and said, 'Titles are two-a-penny these days. Butchers and bakers and candlestick makers are all getting them.' I got the impression that Alec Home was a bit annoyed with me."[23]
Elected to the House of Commons in 1924 for the depressed northern industrial constituency of Stockton-on-Tees, Macmillan lost his seat in 1929 in the face of high regional unemployment, but returned in 1931. He spent the 1930s on the backbenches, with his championing of economic planning, anti-appeasement ideals and sharp criticism of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain serving to isolate him from the party leadership. During this time (1938) he published the first edition of his book The Middle Way, which advocated a broadly centrist political philosophy both domestically and internationally.
In the Second World War Macmillan at last attained office, serving in the wartime coalition government as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Supply from 1940 to 1942. The task of the department was to provide armaments and other equipment to the British Army and Royal Air Force. Macmillan travelled up and down the country to co-ordinate production, working with some success under Lord Beaverbrook to increase the supply and quality of armoured vehicles.[24]
Macmillan was appointed as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1942, in his own words, 'leaving a madhouse in order to enter a mausoleum'.[25] Though a junior minister he was sworn of the Privy Council and spoke in the House of Commons for successive Colonial Secretaries Lord Moyne and Lord Cranborne. Macmillan was given responsibility for increasing colonial production and trade, and signalled the future direction of British policy when in June 1942 he declared:
| “ | The governing principle of the Colonial Empire should be the principle of partnership between the various elements composing it. Out of partnership comes understanding and friendship. Within the fabric of the Commonwealth lies the future of the Colonial territories.[26] | ” |
Macmillan attained real power and Cabinet rank upon being sent to North Africa in 1942 as British government representative to the Allies in the Mediterranean, reporting directly to Prime Minister Winston Churchill over the head of the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden. During this assignment Macmillan served as liaison and mediator between Churchill and US General Dwight D. Eisenhower in North Africa, building a rapport with the latter that would prove helpful in his later career.[27]
As minister resident with a roving commission, Macmillan also the minister advising General Keightley of V Corps, the senior Allied commander in Austria responsible for Operation Keelhaul, which included the forced repatriation of up to 70,000 prisoners of war to the Soviet Union and Tito's Yugoslavia in 1945. The deportations and Macmillan's involvement later became a source of controversy because of the harsh treatment meted out to Nazi collaborators and anti-partisans by the receiving countries, and because in the confusion V Corps went beyond the terms agreed at Yalta and AFHQ directives by repatriating 4000 White Russian troops and 11,000 civilian family members who could not properly be regarded as Soviet citizens.[28][29]
Macmillan returned to England after the European war and was Secretary of State for Air for two months in Churchill's caretaker government, 'much of which was taken up in electioneering', there being 'nothing much to be done in the way of forward planning'.[30] He felt himself 'almost a stranger at home',[31] and lost his seat in the landslide Labour victory of 1945, but soon returned to Parliament in a November 1945 by-election in Bromley.
With the Conservative victory in 1951 Macmillan became Minister of Housing under Churchill, who entrusted Macmillan with fulfilling the latter's conference promise to build 300,000 houses per year. 'It is a gamble—it will make or mar your political career,' Churchill said, 'but every humble home will bless your name if you succeed.'[32] Macmillan achieved the target a year ahead of schedule.[33]
Macmillan served as Minister of Defence from October 1954, but found his authority restricted by Churchill's personal involvement.[34] In the opinion of The Economist: 'He gave the impression that his own undoubted capacity for imaginative running of his own show melted way when an august superior was breathing down his neck.'[35]
A major theme of Macmillan's tenure at Defence was the ministry's growing reliance on the nuclear deterrent, in the view of some critics, to the detriment of conventional forces.[36] The Defence White Paper of February 1955, announcing the decision to produce the hydrogen bomb, received bipartisan support.[37]
By this time Macmillan had lost the wire-rimmed glasses, toothy grin and brylcreemed hair of wartime photographs, and instead grew his hair thick and glossy, had his teeth capped and walked with the ramrod bearing of a former Guards officer—acquiring the distinguished appearance of his later career.
Macmillan served as Foreign Secretary in April-December 1955 in the government of Anthony Eden. Returning from the Geneva Summit of that year he made headlines by declaring: 'There ain’t gonna be no war.'[38] Of the role of Foreign Secretary Macmillan famously observed:
| “ | Nothing he can say can do very much good and almost anything he may say may do a great deal of harm. Anything he says that is not obvious is dangerous; whatever is not trite is risky. He is forever poised between the cliché and the indiscretion.[39] | ” |
Macmillan served as Chancellor of the Exchequer 1955–1957. In this office he insisted that Eden's de facto deputy Rab Butler not be treated as senior to him, and threatened resignation until he was allowed to cut bread and milk subsidies. One of Macmillan's innovations at the Treasury was the introduction of premium bonds,[40] announced in his budget of 17 April 1956.[41] Although the Labour Opposition initially decried the sale as a 'squalid raffle', it proved an immediate hit with the public. During the Suez Crisis, according to Shadow Chancellor Harold Wilson, Macmillan was 'first in, first out': first very supportive of the invasion, then a prime mover in Britain's withdrawal in the wake of the financial crisis.
Harold Macmillan became Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party after Eden's resignation in January 1957, surprising observers with his appointment over the favourite, Rab Butler. The political situation after Suez was so desperate that on taking office on 10 January he told Queen Elizabeth II he could not guarantee his government would last "six weeks".[42]
Macmillan populated his government with many who had studied at the same school as he: he filled government posts with 35 former Etonians, 7 of whom sat in Cabinet.[43] He was also devoted to family members: when Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire was later appointed (Minister for Colonial Affairs from 1963 to 1964 amongst other positions) he described his uncle's behaviour as "the greatest act of nepotism ever".[19]
He was nicknamed Supermac in 1958 by cartoonist Victor 'Vicky' Weisz. It was intended as mockery, but backfired, coming to be used in a neutral or friendly fashion. Weisz tried to label him with other names, including "Mac the Knife" at the time of widespread cabinet changes in 1962, but none of these caught on.[citation needed]
Macmillan brought the monetary concerns of the Exchequer into office; the economy was his prime concern. His One Nation approach to the economy was to seek high or full employment. This contrasted with his mainly monetarist Treasury ministers who argued that the support of sterling required strict controls on money and hence an unavoidable rise in unemployment. Their advice was rejected and in January 1958 the three Treasury ministers Peter Thorneycroft, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Birch, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, and Enoch Powell, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, resigned. Macmillan, away on a tour of the Commonwealth, brushed aside this incident as 'a little local difficulty'.
Macmillan took close control of foreign policy. He worked to narrow the post-Suez rift with the United States, where his wartime friendship with Dwight D. Eisenhower was key; the two had a productive conference in Bermuda as early as March 1957.
In February 1959 Macmillan became the first Western leader to visit the Soviet Union since the Second World War.[44] Talks with Nikita Khrushchev eased tensions in East-West relations over West Berlin and led to an agreement in principle to stop nuclear tests and to hold a further summit meeting of Allied and Soviet heads of government.[45]
In the Middle East, faced by the 1958 collapse of the Baghdad Pact and the spread of Soviet influence, Macmillan acted decisively to restore the confidence of Gulf allies, using the RAF and special forces to defeat a revolt backed by Saudi Arabia and Egypt against the Sultan of Oman in July 1957,[46] deploying airborne battalions to defend Jordan against Syrian subversion in July 1958,[47] and deterring a threatened Iraqi invasion of Kuwait by landing a brigade group in July 1960.[48]
Macmillan was also a major proponent and architect of decolonisation. The Gold Coast was granted independence as Ghana, and Malaya and North Borneo as Malaysia in 1957.
In April 1957 Macmillan reaffirmed his strong support for the British nuclear deterrent. A succession of prime ministers since the Second World War had been determined to persuade the United States to revive wartime co-operation in the area of nuclear weapons research. Macmillan believed that one way to encourage such co-operation would be for the United Kingdom to speed up the development of its own hydrogen bomb, which was successfully tested on 8 November 1957.
Macmillan's decision led to increased demands on the Windscale and (subsequently) Calder Hall nuclear plants to produce plutonium for military purposes.[49] As a result the safety margins of the radioactive materials inside the Windscale reactor were eroded. This contributed to the Windscale accident on the night of 10 October 1957, in which a fire broke out in the plutonium plant of Pile No. 1, and nuclear contaminants travelled up a chimney where the filters blocked some but not all of the contaminated material. The radioactive cloud spread to south-east England and fallout reached mainland Europe. Although scientists had warned of the dangers of such an accident for some time, the government blamed the workers who had put out the fire for 'an error of judgement', rather than the political pressure for fast-tracking the megaton bomb.[50][51]
Macmillan, concerned that public confidence in the nuclear programme might be shaken and that technical information might be misused by opponents of defence co-operation in the US Congress, withheld all but the summary of a report into the Windscale fire prepared for the Atomic Energy Authority by Sir William Penney, director of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment.[52] While subsequently released files show that 'Macmillan's cuts were few and covered up few technical details',[53] and that even the full report at the time found no danger to public health, later official estimates acknowledged the release of polonium-210 may have led directly to 25 to 50 deaths, and anti-nuclear groups linked it to 1,000 fatal cancers.[54][55]
On 25 March 1957 Macmillan also acceded to Eisenhower's request to base 60 Thor IRBMs in England under joint control, to replace the nuclear bombers of the Strategic Air Command, which had been stationed under joint control in the country since 1948, and were approaching obsolescence. Partly as a consequence of this favour, in late October 1957, the US McMahon Act was eased to facilitate nuclear co-operation between the two governments, initially with a view to producing cleaner weapons and reducing the need for duplicate testing.[56] The Mutual Defence Agreement followed on 3 July 1958, speeding up British ballistic missile development,[57] notwithstanding unease expressed at the time about the impetus co-operation might give to atomic proliferation by arousing the jealousy of France and other allies.[58]
Macmillan led the Conservatives to victory in the October 1959 general election, increasing his party's majority from 67 to 107 seats. The successful campaign was based on the economic improvements achieved; the slogan "Life's Better Under the Conservatives" was matched by Macmillan's own remark, "indeed let us be frank about it—most of our people have never had it so good." [59], usually paraphrased as "You've never had it so good". Such rhetoric reflected a new reality of working-class affluence; it has been argued: "The key factor in the Conservative victory was that average real pay for industrial workers had risen since Churchill’s 1951 victory by over 20 per cent".[60]
Critics contended that the actual economic growth rate was weak and distorted by increased defence spending.[citation needed]
Britain's balance of payments problems led to the imposition of a wage freeze in 1961 and, amongst other factors, this caused the government to lose popularity and a series of by-elections in March 1962.
Fearing for his own position, Macmillan organised a major Cabinet change in July 1962—also named 'the night of long knives' as a symbol of his alleged betrayal of the Conservative party. Eight junior Ministers were sacked at the same time. The Cabinet changes were widely seen as a sign of panic, and the young Liberal MP Jeremy Thorpe said of Macmillan's dismissal of so many of his colleagues, 'greater love hath no man than this, than to lay down his friends for his life'.
Macmillan supported the creation of the National Incomes Commission as a means to institute controls on income as part of his growth-without-inflation policy. A further series of subtle indicators and controls were also introduced during his premiership.
The special relationship with the United States continued after the election of President John F. Kennedy, whose sister had married a nephew of Macmillan's wife. The Prime Minister was supportive throughout the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and Kennedy consulted him by telephone every day. The British Ambassador David Ormsby-Gore was a close family friend of the President and actively involved in White House discussions on how to resolve the crisis.
Macmillan's first government had seen the first phase of the sub-Saharan African independence movement, which accelerated under his second government. His celebrated 'wind of change' speech in Cape Town on his African tour in February 1960 is considered a landmark in the process of decolonisation.
Nigeria, the Southern Cameroons and British Somaliland were granted independence in 1960, Sierra Leone and Tanganyika in 1961, Uganda in 1962, and Kenya in 1963. Zanzibar merged with Tanganyika to form Tanzania in 1963. All remained within the Commonwealth but British Somaliland, which merged with Italian Somaliland to form Somalia.
Macmillan's policy overrode the hostility of white minorities and the Conservative Monday Club. South Africa left the multiracial Commonwealth in 1961 and Macmillan acquiesced to the dissolution of the Central African Federation by the end of 1963.
In East Asia, Singapore became independent in 1963.
The speedy transfer of power maintained the goodwill of the new nations but critics contended it was premature. In justification Macmillan quoted Lord Macaulay in 1851:
| “ | Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free until they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learnt to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever.[61] | ” |
Macmillan cancelled the Blue Streak ballistic missile system in April 1960 over concerns about its vulnerability to a pre-emptive attack. Instead he opted to replace the existing Blue Steel stand-off bomb with the Skybolt missile system, to be developed jointly with the United States. From the same year Macmillan also permitted the US Navy to station Polaris submarines at Holy Loch, Scotland, as a replacement for Thor. When Skybolt was in turn unilaterally cancelled by US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, Macmillan negotiated with US President John F. Kennedy the purchase of Polaris missiles from the United States under the Nassau agreement in December 1962.
Macmillan was also a force in the successful negotiations leading to the signing of the 1962 Partial Test Ban Treaty by the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union. His previous attempt to create an agreement at the May 1960 summit in Paris had collapsed due to the U-2 Crisis of 1960.
Macmillan worked with states outside the European Economic Community (EEC) to form the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), which from 3 May 1960 established a free-trade area between the member countries. Macmillan also saw the value of rapprochement with the EEC, to which his government sought belated entry. In the event, Britain's application to join was vetoed by French president Charles de Gaulle on 29 January 1963, in part due to de Gaulle's fear that 'the end would be a colossal Atlantic Community dependent on America', and in part in anger at the Anglo-American nuclear deal, from which France, technologically lagging far behind, had been excluded.[62]
The Profumo affair of spring and summer 1963 permanently damaged the credibility of Macmillan's government. He survived a Parliamentary vote with a majority of 69, one less than had been thought necessary for his survival, and was afterwards joined in the smoking-room only by his son and son-in-law, not by any Cabinet minister. Nonetheless, Butler and Maudling (who was very popular with backbench MPs at that time) declined to push for his resignation, especially after a tide of support from Conservative activists around the country.
The Profumo affair may have exacerbated Macmillan's ill-health. He was taken ill on the eve of the Conservative Party conference, diagnosed incorrectly with inoperable prostate cancer. Consequently, he resigned on 18 October 1963. He felt privately that he was being hounded from office by a backbench minority:
| “ | Some few will be content with the success they have had in the assassination of their leader and will not care very much who the successor is ... They are a band that in the end does not amount to more than 15 or 20 at the most.[63] | ” |
Macmillan was succeeded as Prime Minister by the Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home in a controversial move; it was alleged that Macmillan had pulled strings and utilised the party's grandees, nicknamed 'The Magic Circle', to ensure that Butler was not chosen as his successor.
Macmillan initially refused a peerage and retired from politics in September 1964.
Macmillan had been elected Chancellor of the University of Oxford in 1960, in a campaign masterminded by Hugh Trevor-Roper, and continued in this distinguished office for life, frequently presiding over college events, making speeches and tirelessly raising funds. According to Sir Patrick Neill QC, the vice-chancellor, Macmillan 'would talk late into the night with eager groups of students who were often startled by the radical views he put forward, well into his last decade.'[64]
In retirement Macmillan also took up the chairmanship of his family's publishing house, Macmillan Publishers, from 1964 to 1974. He brought out a six-volume autobiography:
The read was described by Macmillan's political enemy Enoch Powell as inducing 'a sensation akin to that of chewing on cardboard'. His wartime diaries were better received.
Macmillan made occasional political interventions in retirement. Responding to a remark made by Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson about not having boots in which to go to school, Macmillan retorted: 'If Mr Wilson did not have boots to go to school that is because he was too big for them.'[65]
Macmillan accepted the distinction of the Order of Merit from the Queen in 1976. In October of that year he called for 'a Government of National Unity', including all parties, that could command the public support to resolve the economic crisis. Asked who could lead such a coalition, he replied: 'Mr Gladstone formed his last Government when he was eighty-three. I'm only eighty-two. You mustn't put temptation in my way.'[66] His plea was interpreted by party leaders as a bid for power and rejected.
Macmillan still travelled widely, visiting China in October 1979, where he held talks with its leader, senior Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping.[67]
Macmillan found himself drawn more actively into politics after Margaret Thatcher became Conservative leader and Prime Minister, and the record of his own premiership came under attack from the monetarists in the party, whose theories Thatcher supported. In a celebrated speech he wondered aloud where such theories had come from:
| “ | Was it America? Or was it Tibet? It is quite true, many of Your Lordships will remember it operating in the nursery. How do you treat a cold? One nanny said, 'Feed a cold'; she was a neo-Keynesian. The other said, 'Starve a cold'; she was a monetarist.[68] | ” |
On Macmillan's advice in April 1982 Thatcher excluded the Treasury from her Falklands War Cabinet. She later said: 'I never regretted following Harold Macmillan's advice. We were never tempted to compromise the security of our forces for financial reasons. Everything we did was governed by military necessity.'[69]
Macmillan finally accepted a peerage in 1984 and was created Earl of Stockton and Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden. He took the title from his former parliamentary seat on the border of the Durham coalfields, and in his maiden speech in the House of Lords he criticised Thatcher's handling of the coal miners' strike and her characterisation of Marxist militants as 'the enemy within'.[70] He received an unprecedented standing ovation for his oration which included the words:
| “ | It breaks my heart to see—and I cannot interfere—what is happening in our country today. This terrible strike, by the best men in the world, who beat the Kaiser's and Hitler's armies and never gave in. It is pointless and we cannot afford that kind of thing. Then there is the growing division of Conservative prosperity in the south and the ailing north and Midlands. We used to have battles and rows but they were quarrels. Now there is a new kind of wicked hatred that has been brought in by different types of people.[68] | ” |
As Chancellor of Oxford Lord Stockton also condemned the university's refusal in February 1985 to award Thatcher an honorary degree. He noted that the decision represented a break with tradition, and predicted that the snub would rebound on the university.[71]
Stockton is widely supposed to have likened Thatcher's policy of privatisation to 'selling the family silver'. What he did say (at a dinner of the Tory Reform Group at the Royal Overseas League on 8 November 1985) was that the sale of assets was commonplace among individuals or states when they encountered financial difficulties: 'First of all the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the salon. Then the Canalettos go.' Profitable parts of the steel industry and the railways had been privatised, along with British Telecom: 'They were like two Rembrandts still left.'[72]
Stockton's speech was much commented on and a few days later he made a speech in the House of Lords to clarify what he had meant:
| “ | When I ventured the other day to criticise the system I was, I am afraid, misunderstood. As a Conservative, I am naturally in favour of returning into private ownership and private management all those means of production and distribution which are now controlled by state capitalism. I am sure they will be more efficient. What I ventured to question was the using of these huge sums as if they were income.[73] | ” |
In the last month of his life, he mournfully observed:
| “ | Sixty-three years ago ... the unemployment figure (in Stockton-on-Tees) was then 29%. Last November ... the unemployment (there) is 28%. A rather sad end to one's life. | ” |
Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, died on 29 December 1986, at Birch Grove, the Macmillan family mansion at the foot of the Sussex Downs. He was aged 92 years and 322 days—the greatest age attained by a British Prime Minister until surpassed by James Callaghan on 14 February 2005. His grandson and heir Alexander, Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden, said: 'In the last 48 hours he was very weak but entirely reasonable and intelligent. His last words were, "I think I will go to sleep now".'[74][75]
Thatcher, on receiving the news, hailed him as 'a very remarkable man and a very great patriot', and said that his dislike of 'selling the family silver' had never come between them. He was 'unique in the affection of the British people'.[64]
Tributes came from around the world. US President Ronald Reagan said: 'The American people share in the loss of a voice of wisdom and humanity who, with eloquence and gentle wit, brought to the problems of today the experience of a long life of public service.'[64] Outlawed ANC president Oliver Tambo sent his condolences: 'As South Africans we shall always remember him for his efforts to encourage the apartheid regime to bow to the winds of change that continue to blow in South Africa.'[64] Commonwealth Secretary-General Sir Shridath Ramphal affirmed: 'His own leadership in providing from Britain a worthy response to African national consciousness shaped the post-war era and made the modern Commonwealth possible.'[64]
A private funeral was held on 5 January 1987 at St Giles Church, Horsted Keynes, West Sussex, where Lord Stockton had regularly worshipped and read the lesson.[76] Two hundred mourners attended,[75] including 64 members of the Macmillan family, Thatcher and former premiers Lord Home of the Hirsel and Edward Heath, Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone,[74] and 'scores of country neighbours'.[76] The Prince of Wales sent a wreath 'in admiring memory'.[74] Stockton was buried beside his wife, Lady Dorothy, and next to the graves of his parents and of his son, Maurice Macmillan.[76]
The House of Commons paid its tribute on 12 January 1987, with much reference made to the dead statesman's book, The Middle Way.[77] Thatcher said: 'In his retirement Harold Macmillan occupied a unique place in the nation's affections', while Labour leader Neil Kinnock struck a more critical note:
| “ | Death and distance cannot lend sufficient enchantment to alter the view that the period over which he presided in the 1950s, whilst certainly and thankfully a period of rising affluence and confidence, was also a time of opportunities missed, of changes avoided. Harold Macmillan was, of course, not solely or even pre-eminently responsible for that. But we cannot but record with frustration the fact that the vigorous and perceptive attacker of the status quo in the 1930s became its emblem for a time in the late 1950s before returning to be its critic in the 1980s.[77] | ” |
A public memorial service, attended by the Queen and thousands of mourners, was held on 10 February 1987 in Westminster Abbey.[78]
Stockton's son Maurice had become heir to the earldom, but predeceased him suddenly a month after his father's elevation. The 1st Earl was succeeded instead by his grandson, Maurice's son, Alexander, Lord Macmillan, who become the 2nd Earl of Stockton.
For a full list of Ministerial office-holders, see Conservative Government 1957-1964.
Change
In a radical reshuffle dubbed "The Night of the Long Knives", Macmillan sacked a third of his Cabinet and instituted many other changes.
During his premiership in the early 1960s Macmillan was savagely satirised for his alleged decrepitude by the comedian Peter Cook in the stage review Beyond the Fringe.[79] 'Even when insulted to his face attending the show,' a biographer notes, 'Macmillan felt it was better to be mocked than ignored.'[80] One of the sketches was later revived by Cook for television.
Macmillan appears as a supporting character, played by Ian Collier, in the 1981 miniseries Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years produced by Southern Television for ITV.
Set in 1963 during the Profumo scandal, Hugh Whitemore's play A Letter of Resignation, first staged at the Comedy Theatre in October 1997, dramatises the occasion when Harold Macmillan, staying with friends in Scotland, received a political bombshell, a letter of resignation from Profumo, his war minister.
Edward Fox portrayed Macmillan with uncanny accuracy. But the play also explores the involvement of MI5 and the troubled relationship between Macmillan and his wife Dorothy (Clare Higgins) who had made no secret of her adultery with the wayward Tory MP, Robert Boothby. The play was directed by Christopher Morahan.
Macmillan was played by Kevin Quarmby in Gemma Fairlie's production of James Graham's stage play Eden's Empire, at the Finborough Theatre, London, in 2006.
Never So Good is a four-act play by Howard Brenton, a portrait of Harold Macmillan set against a back-drop of fading Empire, two world wars, the Suez crisis, adultery and Tory politics at the Ritz.
Brenton paints the portrait of a brilliant, witty but complex man, tragically out of kilter with his times, an old Etonian who eventually loses his way in a world of shifting values.
The play was premiered at the National Theatre in March 2008, directed by Howard Davies with Jeremy Irons as Macmillan.
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