But most important of all is the picture that emerges of the winner, Harold Macmillan, who by the end has not only won the race for the power and glory but also for social grandeur, becoming the first Earl of Stockton in his own right. But there is more to it than that. For to begin with, in the days of SuperMac, he managed to give hereditary aristocracy a new lease of life. Under his aegis a whole new generation of middle-class politicians, like Ian Macleod and Reginald Maudling, were only too happy to become part of the old order serving alongside the Duke of Devonshire, Macmillan’s nephew by marriage. It was the Disraeli touch all over again, and the nation loved it. Then Macmillan, struck down by what he thought was prostate cancer, made the fatal mistake of going a step too far by engineering the succession of the 14th Earl of Home, which was rather as if the Conservative old guard in 1940 had succeeded in putting the Earl of Halifax into Downing Street instead of Mr Churchill. It was a blunder — for which the new men, provoked beyond endurance by jealousy, never forgave him — leading indirectly to the disaster of Thatcherite bourgeois triumphalism.
Towards the end of his life Macmillan despaired of friendship in politics. Once at the top, he said, there are ‘only clients’. In his case, however, this was not quite true. For when Harry Crookshank, a lonely and unhappy old man, lay dying, Macmillan, then prime minister, spent many hours at his bedside holding his old friend’s hand. ‘Looking down at his emaciated form,’ Ball writes, ‘the image that kept forming in Macmillan’s mind was of a chubby eight-year-old he had known first at Summer Fields’, the pre-Eton preparatory school where the two had first met. Ball is very fair. Although the nastiness of politics is not ignored, neither is the sentimentality or even the gallantry.
The Guardsmen is a magnificent achievement and if the judges of the next Duff Cooper prize have any sense — a big if — they will look on it with favour. A product of superb scholarship and profound insight and written in a style both incisive and flowing, this is a book for every taste and for the politically minded of every age group. I cannot recommend it too highly.
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