An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (5 page)

‘A really remarkable figure,’ Macmillan wrote after a two-hour meeting with Marples in April 1963. ‘I only wish we had more ministers with his imagination and thoroughness.’ However, controversy over the Beeching Axe brought obloquy upon his government, partly because the ministerial presentation was self-advertising, truculent and weak. ‘When Mr Marples presented the Beeching Report,’ noted a future Labour minister, George Thomson, ‘the biggest thing of its kind, we were given to understand, since the Beveridge Report, the operation was intended to show the Conservatives looking forward to the seventies, while the socialists, tied to the railway unions, timorously looked back to the forties. But Mr Marples muffed it monumentally, and suffered a press universally worse than I can remember a minister receiving.’ Macmillan, despite his susceptibility to territorial grandees, was hoodwinked by the bouncy self-promotion of rough diamonds, and the myths of infallibility boomed by self-made men.
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Derick Heathcoat-Amory’s appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1958 was a better choice by Macmillan than Marples as Minister of Transport in 1959. The assessment of Heathcoat-Amory by Lord Altrincham who, under his later pen name of John Grigg, was one of the canniest political commentators of his generation, had a perfect justness. ‘He is often described as “sound”, an adjective which in this specialised usage connotes a decently concealed intelligence, more than average efficiency, a willingness to take pains (for instance, in not hurting the feelings of moronic colleagues), a belief in good relations between management and the (not so easily) managed, a fine war record and a squirearchical background. There is, indeed, one feature which might make him suspect – he is opposed to the death penalty – but his friends can plead in mitigation that he has been a zealous huntsman. He is the sort of man who not being first-class pretends to be third-class, and so receives a quite disproportionate amount of credit for being top second-class.’
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What of the England and the parliamentary party of which Macmillan took charge in 1957, where men became Prime Minister by pretending to be old-and-done-for and Chancellor of the Exchequer by concealing their intelligence?

In the spring of 1957, Macmillan saw a newspaper story about a seventeen-year-old man, Derek Wiscombe, whose home town of Jarrow-on-Tyne had suffered high unemployment since the 1930s. Wiscombe had applied for a licence to carry furniture and building materials with the intention of passing his driving test and buying a lorry to replace his pony and cart. His application was however rejected after objections from local hauliers, and the state-owned haulage company Pickfords. Macmillan, who never lost his sympathetic interest in the north-east, was vexed by this example of tyrannical regulations protecting vested interests from competition. He prompted William Elliott, the newly elected Tory MP for Newcastle-upon-Tyne North, to organise a fund to pay for Wiscombe’s driving lessons and buy him a lorry. With Elliott’s help, Wiscombe successfully re-applied for a licence to carry furniture on a lorry bearing L plates. A local businessman was induced to pass Wiscombe some business for starters. Macmillan closed the file with the single word: ‘Good’. A few months later, the municipal council at Jarrow found that one of its tenants, Norah Tudor, was supplementing her husband’s income by doing embroidery at home. The council ordered her to stop. ‘Mrs Tudor is the wife of a worker who earns a good salary,’ declared the socialist chairman of the local housing committee. ‘It will be no hardship for her to give up her needlework.’ As a Tory backbencher commented, ‘this utterance (which Mr Harold Wilson himself could hardly improve on) conveys the politics of envy in a nutshell’. The persecution of Derek Wiscombe and Norah Tudor both occurred in Jarrow, but the mean, restrictive spirit shown by these cases was a national force.
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England was a country where the gravy served at main meals made everything taste alike. Dominated by the memory of two world wars, it was more drilled and regimented than at any time in its history, and more strictly regulated. Restaurants and pubs were controlled under onerous rules derived from the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914; audiences stood in respectful silence when the National Anthem was played at the end of every cinema performance; pedestrians still doffed their hats as they passed the Cenotaph memorial to the war dead in Whitehall; family-planning clinics did not dare to give contraceptive advice to the unmarried; every foreigner had to register with their local police station, and report there regularly; businesses needed clearance from the Bank of England for the smallest overseas expenditure; there was a rigid obsession about preserving fixed exchange rates for sterling; the system of Retail Price Maintenance safeguarded shopkeepers from undercutting, and ensured that shoppers could seldom find competitive prices. Though entrepreneur John Bloom was trying to start a consumer revolution with his cut-price ‘Rolls Razor’ washing machines, the English authorities still frowned on mass consumption, and by imposing taxes that at some levels approached a hundred per cent of income, discouraged it all too effectively. Millions of people were longing to make money, spend money, enjoy the conspicuous spending of money and never apologise for money; but both officials and politicians, whether of the left or the right, wanted to restrict money-making, idealised discomfort as character-building and frugality as manly, scowled at other people’s expenditure, thought that the ostentatious enjoyment of wealth was shameful.
It’s No Sin to Make a Profit
was the title of Bloom’s defiant memoirs.

Macmillan was unperturbed when, two months into his premiership, in March 1957, Lord Salisbury resigned from the Cabinet. Much nonsense was written about Macmillan’s relationship with Salisbury (they had both married Cavendish women), and the fracturing of the family circle. In truth Betty Salisbury, who was a nettlesome character, had shown longstanding (and reciprocated) animosity towards Dorothy Macmillan over the Boothby affair. The Conservative Party was not fazed by the rupture with Salisbury. Although constituency associations often had a local nobleman as honorary president, they were run by solicitors, prosperous shopkeepers, men with small businesses and their wives. For these
roturiers
, the Cecils were not a popular bodyguard to have gathered around the seat of power. Two months after the spluttering squib of Salisbury’s secession, Macmillan wrote to John Wyndham asking him to join his private office at Downing Street. ‘I did not really think my administration could last more than a few weeks; but we now seem to have got over quite a number of jumps in this Grand National course, and having just managed to pull the old mare through the brook and somehow got to the other side, with the same jockey up, and the Cecil colours fallen, I am plucking up my courage.’
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The Prime Minister had a salary of £10,000 a year (with £4,000 tax free) but, as there was no permanent domestic staff at Downing Street, Macmillan had to pay five household servants. Wyndham found him calm and considerate with his office staff. Macmillan kept a neat desk, never mislaid papers and had a tremendous power of work. His tastes were frugal. For breakfast he took tea and toast, sometimes with a boiled egg. He might have a gin and tonic or sherry before luncheon, but seldom drank alcohol during the meal. Cold roast beef was his favourite lunchtime dish. Before dinner he would have a glass or two of whisky, and wine at table. When possible on Fridays, before going to Birch Grove or Chequers for the weekend, he enjoyed a schoolroom high tea served at Downing Street in preference to dinner. He liked port, and champagne with agreeable companions. During Lent he forsook alcohol.

The Cabinet Room and secretaries’ offices, on the ground floor of 10 Downing Street, were reached by a red-carpeted corridor lined with photographs of defunct Cabinets and busts of bygone premiers. The ambience resembled a Pall Mall club with a historic past, but uneasy finances. Outside the Cabinet Room there was a small lobby with a round table. There, during Cabinet meetings, ministers who were not in the Cabinet would await a summons when the subject under their purview was reached on the agenda. It was, said one of them, ‘bleaker than a dentist’s waiting room’. When a minister was ushered in, he had to scramble to find an empty chair and hurriedly open his papers; usually he found that the Cabinet had started discussing his subject; indeed, from the glazed eyes as he began his remarks, he realised that somebody else had already said them.
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Kenneth Rose likened the Cabinet Room to ‘the dining room in a well-to-do boarding house in the neighbourhood of Russell Square’. Macmillan, though, thought like a clubman, not a boarding-house keeper. ‘The RAC or Boodle’s?’ he asked when, during the Cypriot settlement of 1959, the Cabinet had to decide whether Cyprus should receive full Commonwealth status after independence. ‘There was an element of the dining club about his conduct of Cabinets,’ Lord Hailsham reminisced. ‘There would be quotations from Homer, there would be vague historical analogies; the trade union leaders would be described as medieval barons in the period of the War of the Roses. And some of them would be relevant and some of them would be mildly misleading. But they would all be very amusing and detached.’ Ministers learnt ‘to watch what he was doing, as well as what he was saying’.
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‘For him Europe is the super-continent and Great Britain the super-country,’ wrote a recent Conservative parliamentary candidate, Lord Altrincham, of Macmillan in 1957. ‘In this he resembles Sir Winston Churchill, whom indeed he is clearly much too anxious to resemble. Here, perhaps, is the root cause of his psychological unbalance. He is a pawky Scottish businessman trying to convince himself and others that he is an English aristocrat of the old school.’ Although Macmillan was proud of his Scottish crofter ancestry, he projected a patrician English persona. ‘Like Sir Winston at the Other Club, Mr Macmillan holds forth in the grand manner at Pratt’s – only with this vital difference, that neither the manner nor the setting is his own. As a practical man he is genuine and acceptable; as an imitation grandee he is nauseating.’ Yet it was this bogus act – this game of playing the unregenerate grandee – which recommended Macmillan to backbenchers and ministers as they rallied to face the 1959 general election. He may not have been consistently militant during the Suez affair, but he had the air of militancy. Surveying Macmillan’s postwar record of Lloyd George-like opportunism, Altrincham predicted that England would soon resemble France, ‘where it is accepted that politicians have a code of their own, and most people have an instinctive repugnance to the idea of entering politics’. The appearance of the Prime Minister’s wife – the duke’s daughter in tweeds and sensible shoes – was part of his deceptive facade, as Altrincham wrote in a profile which uniquely hinted at the Macmillans’ domestic irregularities. ‘Lady Dorothy is not quite all that she seems in some respects, and a great deal more than she seems in others. To the casual observer she is just a typical English upper-class cup of tea; but on closer inspection he would find that it was laced with liquid of a more stimulating kind.’
Time & Tide
, after interviewing Boothby in 1962, noted a photograph of Lady Dorothy, and a separate one of her husband, in Boothby’s Eaton Square drawing room.
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The provenance of Tory MPs changed markedly after 1951. Before his promotion to the Lords, Macmillan’s Lord Chancellor, Kilmuir, had instigated the Maxwell Fyfe reforms of the Conservative Party organisation (1948–49). These new rules ended the practice of candidates paying their own election expenses or subsidising constituency party funds. Kilmuir intended to discourage men who had made their pile of money in business from deciding that they wanted the status of a MP and collaring a provincial constituency: this malaise resulted in backbenches lined by complacent, inarticulate, politically obtuse money men with the reactionary, inflexible views of late middle age. The new rules also vested the constituency parties with independence in the selection of candidates. Retrospectively, Kilmuir believed that the quality of new MPs elected at the general elections of 1950 and 1951 was high, but thereafter plummeted. Local associations became dismaying in their choice of candidates in seats with handsome majorities. During the 1950s, to Kilmuir’s regret, they copied the cardinal error of Labour constituency parties, which had always weakened the efficacy of the parliamentary party by selecting tedious local worthies for safe seats while abler younger candidates were consigned to marginal or unwinnable constituencies. ‘Few of the new Members who entered the Commons in 1955 and 1959,’ wrote Kilmuir in 1964, ‘had achieved a reputation outside Westminster in any field, and far too many of them were obscure local citizens with obscure local interests, incapable – and indeed downright reluctant – to think on a national or international scale. What made this situation particularly annoying was that many excellent candidates, who would have made first-class Members and probably Ministers, were left to fight utterly hopeless seats … while the safe seats went to men of far lower calibre.’
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The Midlands conurbation, for example, was represented by nonentities with aldermanic paunches which they carried in a stately, self-satisfied way as if they contained dividend coupons: Harold Gurden (elected at Birmingham Selly Oak in 1955), Gordon Matthews (elected at Meriden, 1959), John Hollingworth (Birmingham All Saints, 1959), Leslie Seymour (Birmingham Sparkbrook, 1959), and Leonard Cleaver (Birmingham Yardley, 1959). Clever young William Rees-Mogg was condemned to contest the hopeless seat of Chester-le-Street in 1959 partly because of prejudice in better seats against his Catholicism. According to Rees-Mogg, there were only two Jewish MPs (Harry d’Avigdor-Goldsmid and Keith Joseph) on the Conservative side during the Parliament of 1955–59 and both had the advantage of inherited baronetcies. Margaret Thatcher was selected at Finchley in 1959 solely because a woman seemed less objectionable than her rival, who was Jewish. Julian Critchley, who was one of the 1959 intake, thought it contained ‘more than its share of those who could talk nonsense with distinction’.
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