English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  This is the new consensus on the subject; and Thorpe subscribes to it. Yet, fair-minded as ever, he offers several pieces of evidence to support those who still believe that Macmillan was, at best, guilty of ‘over-compliance’. In his diary for 13 May, Macmillan wrote: ‘Among the surrendered Germans are about 40,000 Cossacks and “White” Russians, with their wives and children. To hand them over to the Russians is condemning them to slavery, torture and probably death. To refuse, is deeply to offend the Russians, and incidentally break the Yalta agreement. We have decided to hand them over.’ The next day, 14 May, Keightley telegraphed Alexander, the commander-in-chief: ‘On advice Macmillan I have today suggested to Soviet General on Tolbukhin’s HQ that Cossacks should be returned to SOVIETS at once.’ As for there being no final authorization for handing over either the Cossacks/White Russians to Stalin or the Croats to Tito until the conference at Udine on the 26th, Lieutenant-Colonel Robin Rose Price wrote in his diary on 19 May: ‘Order of most sinister duplicity received i.e. to send Croats to their foes, i.e. Tits to Yugoslavia under the impression they were to go to Italy.’ Thorpe does not quote the even more sinister sentence that follows in Rose Price’s diary: ‘Tit guards on trains hidden in guards van.’ It is not unreasonable then to suppose that the essential decisions were taken, not at Udine, which looks more like a rubber-stamping, but during the two hours Macmillan spent on the airstrip at Klagenfurt. Whether other orders could have been given in the circumstances of the time remains debatable, but ‘marginal’ isn’t quite the right word to describe Macmillan’s role.

  What he cannot be acquitted of is callousness. Which is shown by a curious coda to the miserable story. Macmillan’s diaries break off (not to resume until 1950) when he flies home on 26 May to become air minister in Churchill’s caretaker government. Thorpe, like previous biographers, assumes that this was his final farewell to the mountains and lakes of Austria. But William Dugdale, in his recently published memoir, Settling the Bill, describes being deputed to organize a Fourth of June dinner in an orchard by the banks of the Wörthersee. Sixty or seventy Old Etonian guards officers were invited to sing ‘Floreat Etona’ and toast the Old Coll in slivovitz, along with the army commander, General McCreery, Field Marshal Alexander (who as an outsider made his excuses and left early) and Harold Macmillan. Nothing, it seems, would have deterred him from flying halfway across the ravaged continent to celebrate the two institutions he loved best, Eton and the Grenadiers. At the end of dinner, Macmillan was accosted by Rose Price, aflame with drink and an almost Homeric rage, and lambasted for ordering his battalion to send the Cossacks to their death. Dugdale records beautifully how Macmillan, a cigarette drooping from his lips, turned his strangely flappy hands (weakened by war wounds) outwards in that gesture we came to know so well and replied: ‘How else are we to demonstrate our loyalty to Stalin and the Russians?’ Thus, long before the controversy reawakened in the 1980s, Macmillan was made forcibly aware of the repugnance the orders aroused among the soldiers who had to carry them out. What is so striking is that he had no hesitation in returning to the scene of the crime only nine days later.

  Again and again, one notices the callous insouciance, which, as Crossman spotted, was both his strength and his weakness, leading him to overcome, seemingly without effort, ‘little local difficulties’ that might have unhorsed more careful operators, but also drawing him into wildly optimistic miscalculations which generated terrible outcomes. Certainly the part he played at Suez seems to fit that description. As chancellor, he was desperately keen to establish that the Americans would back Britain in the use of force. He hammered home as forcefully as he could to Bob Murphy, his wartime comrade who had come to London on Eisenhower’s behalf, that the government had decided to drive Nasser out of Egypt and that Parliament and people were behind them. He told John Foster Dulles, the secretary of state, the same thing. ‘We are committed to a peaceful settlement of this dispute, nothing else,’ Eisenhower said at a press conference on 5 September. But Macmillan refused to believe this or to grasp the fairly obvious fact that all Ike cared about was being re-elected in November. In Washington at the end of September, Macmillan saw Eisenhower, Dulles and George Humphrey, the US treasury secretary. Yet he still could not grasp that, in Humphrey’s words after the invasion, ‘You’ll not get a dime out of the US government until you’ve gotten out of Suez.’ Roger Makins, Macmillan’s private secretary, who took notes at the meeting with Eisenhower, was amazed by the rambling, unfocused nature of the conversation and thought Macmillan was wholly unwarranted in his subsequent optimism about American support. Ike was rambling on purpose in his typically devious way. Macmillan just failed to listen.

  Macmillan’s diaries break off again on 4 October 1956, to resume only in February 1957, which is when Catterall’s second volume begins. In the introduction to the first volume, the editor tells us that another diary covered the missing months, but that Macmillan destroyed it ‘at the request of Anthony Eden’. In his introduction to this volume, Catterall says merely that it ‘appears to have been destroyed’. It seems more likely that, if it contained material embarrassing to Macmillan, he destroyed it himself. But in any case, his fatal contribution to the fiasco had already been made, in Washington in September.

  Thorpe acquits Macmillan of the charges usually laid against him: that he was ‘first in, first out’, that he pushed Eden into a disastrous venture which he knew would fail, that he exaggerated the ensuing economic crisis and that he poured his energies into outmanoeuvring Butler for the succession. Fair enough, but Thorpe also makes light, much too light, of the secret collusion with the Israelis. Contrary to the long prevailing misconception, he tells us, the cabinet was informed of Lloyd’s meeting at Sèvres with the French and the Israelis – which serves only to implicate the lot of them. Then he wheels on the historians Robert Blake and Andrew Roberts to argue that secret diplomacy and suppressio veri are necessary to the successful prosecution of war: in Blake’s words, ‘no one of sense will regard such falsehoods in a particularly serious light’.

  This sort of unabashed realpolitik is undermined if not exploded by the final Suez despatch from the supreme military commander, General Keightley, last seen in Klagenfurt: ‘The one overriding lesson of the Suez operation is that world opinion is now an absolute principle of war.’ Where military action is undertaken for moral reasons, to right a wrong or to turf out a tyrant, any hint of deceit is fatal (see Iraq passim). The gravamen of the charge against Macmillan is different: namely, that he was the only British minister to talk to all the top Americans and that he completely and disastrously misread their intentions.

  Which is much what he did again, as prime minister, in gauging whether de Gaulle was ready to let Britain into the Common Market. As late as their meeting at Rambouillet in December 1962, Macmillan still had high hopes that de Gaulle would yield to his suasions. They went for a walk in the woods, accompanied only by Philip de Zulueta, one of Macmillan’s private secretaries. Macmillan insisted on talking in French and returned from the walk believing that the conversation had gone well. Again, the private secretary was not so sure. The next morning, de Gaulle explained, as bluntly as he could, that though he was in favour of Britain’s eventual membership the time was not yet right. Macmillan was shocked and dismayed. Yet anyone with his head screwed on could have seen it coming. Reginald Maudling, then President of the Board of Trade, had forecast exactly this outcome eighteen months earlier, after the failure of the free trade negotiations in Paris. And Macmillan himself had had repeated meetings with the General over the previous two years at which de Gaulle had made plain his ingrained resistance.

  If Macmillan’s political vision was impaired, his eye for the main chance was undimmed. He was, quite simply, a magnificent intriguer, opaque when he had to be, brutally swift to jump through any window of opportunity, smashing the glass where necessary. Enoch Powell described the way Macmillan destroyed Butler’s chances of succeeding Eden when they both appeared before
the 1922 Committee after Eden had flown off to Jamaica as ‘one of the most horrible things that I remember in politics’ (and he ought to know). Macmillan saw off Butler again, just as effortlessly, in the race to succeed himself in 1963. In his usual charitable way, Thorpe acquits Macmillan of organizing Alec Douglas-Home’s startling triumph. As in 1957, he argues, the parliamentary party would not have Rab Butler at any price, and Home was the candidate that fewest people objected to and so the one best qualified to keep the party united. Yet once again Thorpe provides us with the materials to come to a rather different conclusion.

  Compared to his dithering over the preceding months about whether he should resign, Macmillan moved with great rapidity once his prostate trouble was diagnosed. Contrary to previous misconception, he was told by his consultant urologist Alec Badenoch before he resigned that he didn’t have cancer. The reality was that he was desperately tired and was glad of the medical excuse to pack it in. He told Badenoch that the illness ‘came as manna from heaven – an act of God’.

  But he was by no means done for. Consider the calendar. The lord chancellor, Lord Dilhorne, had asked all the cabinet ministers at the beginning of September whether they wanted Macmillan to carry on and, if he decided not to, who should succeed him; all but three wanted him to carry on, nobody mentioned Home as a successor. October 4: Macmillan discusses possible successors with his son Maurice; again no mention of Home. On the night of 7–8 October he is taken ill. On the afternoon of the 8th he is diagnosed and in the evening taken to hospital. The next morning, the 9th, he talks to Home about the announcement of his resignation and raises, for the first time, the possibility that Home might make himself available. At the same time, Selwyn Lloyd sets about spreading Home’s claims. By the 11th, Lloyd has converted Dilhorne and Martin Redmayne, the chief whip, and is walking along the prom at Blackpool with them, plotting what to do next. It is these two men who are to be responsible for canvassing opinion: Dilhorne doing the cabinet (for the second time), and Redmayne the Tory MPs. By Tuesday the 15th, it is agreed that these soundings should include three questions: who’s your first choice, who’s your second and who would you oppose? Then, after Lord Hailsham makes a fool of himself at Blackpool, a fourth is added: what do you think of Lord Home as leader? That same day, before the soundings are actually taken, Supermac composes what becomes known as ‘the Tuesday memorandum’ for the Queen. It is a dithyramb for Sir Alec, comparing him to the heroic Grenadiers of 1914 and lauding his qualities of judgment and selflessness. He also makes a note in his diary after another meeting with Maurice and the party chairman, Lord Poole: ‘the basic situation was the same – the party in the country wants Hogg; the Parliamentary Party wants Maudling or Butler; the Cabinet wants Butler.’ But what they all got, only three days later, was Home.

  Almost at the end of his book, Thorpe tells us, though without giving a source, that ‘Macmillan and Home both came in time to think that it might have been better if Rab Butler had become prime minister in 1963.’ I would go a lot further. It might have been better if Butler had succeeded Eden in 1957, or even Churchill in 1955. The country would undoubtedly have been better governed. There would have been no Suez, no inflationary stampede, no botched attempt to join the EEC but rather a careful development of a European Free Trade Area. Social reform and economic modernization would have been pursued in a more serious and systematic fashion. It would have been a soberer time, without the showmanship with which Macmillan delighted some and repelled others. We would not have been told we had never had it so good; but we might have been better off.

  Alas, the qualities required for being prime minister are not the same as those required for becoming one. Butler had all the charisma of an old flannel. Supermac in his heyday was a class act. In his later years the satirists got at him, and to the young he was a somewhat moth-eaten comic figure. Thorpe tells us at the end that ‘Macmillan was a great prime minister for much of his time in Downing Street.’ There is a certain desperation about those italics. What was his legacy, after all? Premium Bonds and the Beeching Report. Macmillan said of Eden, quite rightly, that he had been trained to win the Derby of 1938 but had not been let out of the stalls until 1955. If you change the dates slightly, you could say much the same of Macmillan. His best years were already behind him when he reached the top at the age of sixty-two. And somewhere at the back of his mind, I think he knew it.

  EDWARD HEATH: THE GREAT SULK

  At the end of his official biography of Lord Mountbatten twenty-five years ago, Philip Ziegler wrote: ‘There was a time when I became so enraged by what I began to feel was his determination to hoodwink me that I found it necessary to place on my desk a notice saying: REMEMBER, IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING, HE WAS A GREAT MAN.’ At the end of his authorized biography of Edward Heath, Ziegler writes: ‘He was a great man, but his blemishes, though far less considerable, were quite as conspicuous as his virtues, and it is too often by his blemishes that he is remembered.’ In the case of Mountbatten, we were to understand, it was the charm, the deviousness, the sexual vanity, the manipulation of people and the rewriting of history that were in danger of blinding us to the genuine achievements. Heath’s traits were almost the direct opposite: charmlessness, rudeness, sexual neutrality, rancour, an excess of candour and an unwillingness to budge. But these too we are to forgive, or at least put to one side, and see beyond to the solid body of achievement. The trouble is that in both cases Ziegler’s relentless accumulation and presentation of the evidence diminish that achievement to near-invisible proportions. Mountbatten smashed up almost every ship he skippered, and as a strategic commander his ingenious schemes vanished into the air with alarming rapidity. And Heath?

  Ziegler has not lost his silken narrative touch, nor his insidious but brilliant gift of making the best possible case for his subject while not hesitating to show him in the worst possible light. Only thus can a biographer who hopes to be authorized or official please the victim’s family or executors while serving the cause of truth. This is a deliciously readable and unfailingly fair book, but I cannot believe that its subject would have liked it any better than he cared for John Campbell’s 1993 biography, Heath’s own copy of which is scrawled with angry marginalia – ‘Nonsense!’, ‘No!’ and ‘Wrong!’

  Campbell’s book was less alluring in style, more detailed in its accounts of interminable negotiations, psychologically no less acute than Ziegler’s, but above all more hopeful that history would judge Heath less harshly than his contemporaries did; indeed, that his reputation was already beginning to be restored. Heath, he wrote, was arguably the true Tory, and his ‘lonely doom-mongering looks more prescient than he was given credit for in the heady boom years.’ Campbell, writing after the collapse of the Lawson boom, thought that Thatcherism had ended in painful disillusion and that Heath had been ‘a political Cassandra, very largely right but not believed’. Yet seventeen years later, there are few signs of any such restoration of Heath’s reputation, and Ziegler makes scarcely any such claims. It was to Thatcher, not Heath, that Tony Blair hastened to pay court. And although the Con-Lib coalition made much of its determination to protect the poorest against the cuts better than they were protected in the 1980s, it was common ground that the reduction of the deficit must be given top priority even in a recession. The protests of Keynesians and vulgar-Keynesian journalists were no more listened to than the 364 of their brethren who wrote to The Times to protest against the 1981 budget. Ted Heath’s angry shade remains unloved and unappeased.

  Not since Achilles has a public figure been so notorious for wrath. The journalist George Gale spoke of Heath’s ‘angry will’. Yet the sources of this anger remain hard to get at. If it was some sexual hurt which made Heath so solitary and so horrible to women (though, as Campbell points out, he could be equally horrible to men – it was just that the women minded it more), then it must have been as obscure as the hurt allegedly suffered by Henry James, since nobody so far has convincingly explained it.

&nbs
p; Ted’s father and grandfather were convivial, easy-going men, rooted in their native Kent, fond of a drink and ready to pinch any passing bottom. On his eightieth birthday, Heath père, who had started life as a carpenter and later done pretty well as a builder in Broadstairs, was asked if he had any regrets and said: ‘Yes, that the permissive society did not begin 50 years earlier.’ Ted was fond of both of them and they of him. His mother adored him, and her early death distressed him greatly. But even she seems to have been in awe of her fiercely ambitious and gifted son. Once, when she went up to his room and suggested that he was working too hard and should come down and join the family, the ten-year-old Teddy replied: ‘Mother, sometimes I think you don’t want me to get on.’

  At school, he was excused football and cricket on the grounds that they might damage his pianist’s hands. Yet the force of his character was such that he was never bullied or teased as a milksop. On the contrary, he was popular in every milieu he passed through: Balliol, the army, the whips’ office (it is a later invention that he was a notoriously harsh chief whip). His opponents in the Monday Club liked to identify Heath as the original of Widmerpool – Anthony Powell disavowed the attribution. In any case, Widmerpool would never have been able to lose himself in music or sailing, or to achieve such high standards in either. Rising to wartime lieutenant-colonel, Heath certainly impressed his superiors, but he remained genuinely liked by his messmates and his men too. The fact was that he was almost superhumanly competent and diligent, and it was no surprise when he passed top into the Civil Service after the war. In his attitude to the British people, he reminds me more of the Efficient Baxter vainly attempting to sort out Lord Emsworth’s affairs.