MacMillan: A Study in Ambiguity

by Anthony Sampson

These political biographies are intended to analyse in depth the real men lurking behind the personality cults of great contemporary statesmen. Their purpose is to explain how such political leaders as Mao Tse-Tung and Macmillan, de Gaulle and Stalin formed their political outlooks, to examine how they gained power and how they held and exercised it, and to suggest what each has come to epitomize in the eyes of his own nation and of the world at large.The political career of Harold Macmillan culminated in one of the greatest enigmas in the politics of the last hundred an intellectual, sensitive, aristocratic Prime minister whose premiership is now remembered chiefly for its profligacy, scandal and vulgarity.In the thirties Macmillan was one of the first to understand the significance of Keyne's economic theories, to apprehend the growing menace of Hitler and to accept Britain's changing place in the coming Imperial revolution. In the sixties as Prime Minister he led a regime notable for Premium Bonds, gaming saloons, "Never had it good," government scandals and a mismanagement of resources which brought England to the edge of crisis.

Genres: Politics

250 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 17, 2012

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anthony Sampson's 1967 nearly contemporaneous account of Macmillan's life and premiership is preferred on balance to Alastair Horne's large two volume but hagiographical 1989 account. Horne had access to private papers but Sampson was a working journalist who saw Macmillan in action.

The two books are both creations of their time. Horne is writing at the high point of Tory Thatcherite hegemony and wants to see Macmillan as noble precursor. Sampson writes at a low point in Tory fortunes during the premiership of Harold Wilson and sees him as failure.

The truth probably sits somewhere between the two, Both books obviously share much in common because they are dealing with many of the same facts by the way of such things. For all its secret dealings, much of British politics still has to be judged by results in the democratic horse race.

Sampson passes much of the blame for the downturn in Tory fortunes in the 1960s on to Macmillan. There is a lot of merit in that argument. My assessment is that neither excess praise nor blame is due. Macmillan got things wrong but more fundamental forces were in operation.

Looking back on Macmillan from 2020, we can still probably not presume to have the definitive answer on two grounds. Few nowadays can honestly know what it was like to live then and we are always going to judge matters through the lens of where we are now.

We can start perhaps by saying that the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation was a very real issue in the post-Suez world. Macmillan's sincere attempt to leverage Britain's collapsing imperial credit in the direction of nuclear arms reduction and detente has to be in his favour.

Similarly, the withdrawal from Africa was recognition that the United Kingdom could not sustain its imperial ambitions after the fiasco over Suez (on which he was, in fact, a 'hawk'). If he was only recognising reality, he was doing so in a Party that often could not.

Where he now appears to be weak is in his excess of pessimism about the country's long term future prospects and his naive belief that somehow Britain could be central to a Western alliance of the United States, the Commonwealth and the Common Market (later to be the European Union).

The blundering over the European relationship may be regarded as the start of a fatal process of creeping and despairing integration into a European Union that the United Kingdom could never really be a part of with any security as far as its own sovereignty was concerned.

The idea that the Special Relationship could ever be anything but subservience (reaching its rather repulsive nadir in the manipulative poodledom of Tony Blair) has still not been fully understood and this too was a reflection of his patrician pessimism about our ability to be a free nation.

Attempting to be Greece to Washington's Rome and part of a European Union where the best that might be hoped for was a liberal moderation of Franco-German continentalism resulted in the degeneration of Britain's global trading position and near-abandonment of the Commonwealth.

Macmillan studied at any time after 1975 and before 2016 looks prescient. After 2016, we have to revert to Sampsonism and we might now see his euro-centric centrism as a profound wrong turning (subsequently followed by Labour) constructed out of an old man's patrician despair.

Macmillan the man is one of our more interesting Prime Ministers, perhaps closer to Disraeli than any other - genuinely concerned about the condition of the people, cunning but generally decent, oddly excitable behind his quasi-patrician calm and rather lucky until the last years in office.

Perhaps the kindest judgment is that he was the best possible bridge between the Imperial delusions of the mid-twentieth century and final acceptance that we British did not really win the war. we merely survived it and that we would have to reinvent ourselves to create something new.

He could move us on from the past but he had no positive vision for the future that might maintain some commitment to secure sovereignty. Harold Wilson in 1964 was at least a little better with his commitment to technology but turned out to be little more than a tinkerer.

We really cannot blame the past for not imagining the future accurately. Harold Wilson was still engaged in futile imperial commitments and, by 1975, making a desperate attempt to attach the nation to what we naively thought was a free market but was much, much more.

The really negative legacy of Macmillan was to create a claque for Europe in the Tory Party that had its Prime Ministers in Heath, Cameron and May, brought down Thatcher and is currently trying to bring down Johnson after only three months in office.

This claque displaced its pessimism - though it still remains pessimistic about what the United Kingdom can achieve on its own - with a strategy of selling off the country for the mess of potage that is high corporate profitability and a comfortable lifestyle for the southern middle classes.

So, perhaps we can see Macmillan not so much as a great statesman (as many saw him in the late 1950s) but as someone who helped end the Imperium in a civilised manner over the heads of the Tory Right and was then instrumental in creating the basis for our modern centrist Tory 'Left'.

If you look at matters from the point of the Tories then it could be said that, far from weakening them, he was instrumental in creating the conditions for eventual 'modernisation'. From the point of view of the nation, that 'modernisation' was, in fact, as corrupting as it was to be for Labour.

Sampson, of course, could not see the future any more than Horne (or you and I can) but the story is all there in the collection of facts and experiences he provides for us. Obviously out of date in terms of interpretation and without access to private papers, the book is still useful.