22 September 2016
Radical Pinstripes
Mr MacMillan’s recipe.
by J.R.Thomas
The departure of David Cameron from the political stage – a moderately popular act sadly ending by our hero tripping and tumbling into the orchestra pit, dragging half his fellow stage strutters with him, probably marks the end of one of the periodic periods of reform in the Conservative Party. Mrs May, though making the standard Tory noises about fairer societies and chances for all, has more than enough on her plate without trying to continue much reform on a Cameronian model. Nothing in her political history suggests that she is anything other than an old fashioned steady one nation centrist, so the traditional Tories in the shires may be able to relax for a while.
The whole history of the Conservative Party over the last couple of hundred years constitutes periods of intellectual stability – stagnation some might say – followed by a reforming leader dragging his or her party fast forward into a new age, causing great excitement, pain, and the threat or actuality of revolt from more conservative Conservatives. Peel’s reforms, done without grace, made him hated by his ungrateful party for years. Disraeli, distrusted always by the party faithful, nevertheless rebuilt his party’s philosophy to create the modern Conservative Party with a style and panache that left him still revered, at least among party thinkers, a hundred years later.
Last week saw the announcement of the death of Lady Caroline Faber, last surviving child of Harold MacMillan, Prime Minister 1956 to 1963. MacMillan was the great Tory reformer of the twentieth century, a man who managed to persuade his party to leap happily from Imperialism to near Thatcherism in one great six year bound. Not quite to Thatcherism; MacMillan thought that Mrs T’s manner was too harsh, too direct, too little polished, to bring popular acceptance as to what she was about. But the great post war radical recognised another great radical when he saw one, and that the time had come once again to apply drastic change to stagnant thinking.
MacMillan suffered various tragedies in his life; his adored wife had a long lasting affair, then died suddenly and quite young; as did his only son and two grandchildren. He had lost many friends during the First World War, when he served on the Western Front as a junior officer, and his experiences in the War greatly affected his politics and approach to life ever after. But unlike some politicians of his generation, MacMillan was additionally broadened by what he saw in his early political career after the war. He won the northern working class seat of Stockton on Tees for the Conservatives in 1924 and was an exemplary constituency MP – as a marginal seat he knew that it was the only way he would hold it – and his insight into the lives of his constituents made him aware that the “One Nation” of Disraeli was no reality in the poverty of the industrial towns.
As a politician he was driven more than most by a genuine urge to bring about change, by a deep social conscience. A very wealthy man, married into a ducal and political family, he seemed an unlikely radical, but his background and strong intellect, fuelled by a voracious reading habit that he maintained all his life, convinced him that to change the Tory Party in the House and in the country would need an approach of great subtlety. His chance did not come until 1956, at the age of 62, when the unexpected fall of Anthony Eden over Suez allowed him to sweep more obvious candidates aside to become Prime Minister.
Faced with a reviving Labour Party where a range of talented intellectuals were bringing a new approach to Labour Politics (one that in the end fizzled out with the sudden death of the party leader Hugh Gaitskell) MacMillan saw that he had to give Toryism a new belief system which would recognise the reality of Britain’s financial constraints and would not only accept the rapid dissolution of the British Empire, but positively embrace it. One key part of that, which MacMillan in the end failed to deliver, but set the course for, was Britain’s membership of the European Union. David Cameron, pondering European entanglements, might have learned much about management of complex political risk by studying MacMillan’s careful avoidance of nailing anything too firmly to any permanent object.
MacMillan is probably the most interesting psychological study of any British leader of the twentieth century. He was a private man, very old fashioned in his habits and life style but willing to embrace technology – he was a master of the television interview at a time when politicians greatly feared and resented the questing lens. His leisure was spent in the garden of his great house in Sussex, preferably reading, and preferably Trollope, whose insights into the political mind he greatly admired. He had very few close friends – and it is a great pity that Lady Caroline, who lived close to him all her life, left no personal memoir of him; she probably knew him more closely than anybody and was his greatest confidante in his latter years. The angry radicalism of his youth never left him, but it became very carefully concealed behind a heavy curtain of Edwardian traditional style. Indeed, MacMillan positively revelled in his archaic image, with his heavy moustache, three piece pinstripe suits adorned with watch chains and handkerchiefs, beetling eyebrows, appearances in baggy plus-fours on grouse moors, apparent indifference to modern trends and events. The public loved all this; moreover, it reassured the Conservative Party that their Prime Minister was another safe traditionalist. Just occasionally it became very obvious he wasn’t, perhaps most notably with his Winds of Change speech in Cape Town in 1960, but somehow the party bore with it. What MacMillan was careful to do was to never alarm the parliamentary party, nor the party faithful in the country, nor the electorate. Cameron there too might have learned much from his predecessor; not to frighten the Tory horses was always MacMillan’s objective, that the need for change should seem natural and minor and inevitable. He would not have approved Cameron’s loud and personal advocacy of radical social change. MacMillan knew not to try to make personal capital out of forcing reform; that way lay personal disaster and maybe even the banking up of opposition to the very things which he looked to achieve.
Never has a politician had so many nicknames bestowed upon them, nicknames worn with such public affection. He was the “Great Actor-Manager”; the “Last Edwardian”; Vicky, the cartoonist, called him “Supermac” with intended and heavy irony, but the handle was picked up by the public and used with great affection. Even his labelling as “Mac The Knife” after his axing of a third of his cabinet in 1962 made the public chuckle over what was a potentially a great political disaster. It is indeed a great tribute to a man who lived in turbulent times and delivered a reforming agenda that he was held in such affection by the public. And it is perhaps a telling mark of Mr Cameron’s failure to establish himself in the public affections that no punning name or personal political label has stuck to him.
David Cameron does seem to have read up and replicated one aspect of Supermac’s career; the fulsome handing out of honours and decorations. MacMillan had a very cynical view of what drove his fellow politicians. He was a great hander out of social baubles, bestowing hereditary titles, knighthoods and baronetcies on an enormous scale. He refused almost all himself, taking only those in the personal gift of his monarch, until at the age of 90 and after advising Mrs Thatcher on the practicalities of running a war cabinet during the Falklands War, he finally requested an earldom, as was customary for departing premiers. He took the title of “Earl of Stockton”, his 1920’s northern working class seat. A true meld of the ultra-traditionalist and the radical to the last.
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