WHEN Harold Macmillan died I wondered if he had met his Judgement Day about his behaviour back on earth – and having to explain his inhumane blunder of sending the White Russian refugees back to the USSR, thereby facing certain imprisonment and most likely death on Stalin’s direct orders.
I even recall looking at my watch and thinking: could be justifying himself at this moment?
Today the Tory Prime Minister nicknamed Supermac for his unflappability in his prime seems a curious Edwardian throwback compared to today’s slick operators.
His remark that “most of our people have never had it so good” perfectly summarised Britain’s boom of the late 1950s.
He was the last PM born in the reign of Queen Victoria and the last to have fought in World War I.
Yet he was a master of media technique and no mean spinner of soundbites in his day. Interestingly, he was also the last PM to wear a moustache. We must realise that even Peter Mandelson shaved off his facial hair to get up and get on.
In a new biography, Charles Williams gets to grips with possibly our most intriguing postwar PM, who was in power from 1957 until undone by the Profumo scandal and prostrate trouble in 1963. For there were plenty of contradictions in the Macmillan character, whereby a shy, distant, academic youngster becomes a pastmaster at political manoeuvring. Indeed the word “devious” crops up many times in the book.
Macmillan combined being a scholar, a great wit, a WWI hero, a radical and a devout Anglo-Catholic.
But his deliberate “Edwardian” mannerisms became wearing and even the Queen instructed her staff to occupy him with country rambles while staying with her at Balmoral.
His super-cool and cultured public facade also hid a disastrous marriage to Lady Dorothy Cavendish. She openly pursued an affair (known throughout upper class circles) with Lord Bob Boothby, the dubious Tory rake. Lady Dorothy appeared to be a selfish harridan who forced her daughter Sarah (possibly fathered with Boothy) to have an abortion for the sake of Harold’s career. The resulting botched operation turned the young woman into an alcholic and caused her early death.
