Outmoded elegance

Harold Macmillan seemed well prepared when he succeeded a sick and humiliated Anthony Eden as prime minister after the disaster of Suez in 1957. An intellectual who knew about economics, a tough debater, an advocate of closer relations with Europe, Macmillan had been a ministerial success at Housing, the Foreign Office and the Treasury. He was also a puritanical hard worker, determined and self-contained. His wife, Lady Dorothy, the cheerful and dowdy daughter of a Duke, pleased a still deferential Tory party; he even had an American mother when Anglo-American relations needed reviving. No wonder Eden’s cabinet, with only two exceptions, thought Macmillan the best candidate, far ahead of his rival, Butler.

It is the shadows behind this that make him particularly intriguing. Macmillan had also been closely involved in the dishonest attempts to seize the Suez Canal back from Nasser, the Egyptian dictator who had nationalised it. He had, partly because of his party’s doubts, prevaricated over Europe. Many of the houses built during his time as Housing Minister were architectural disasters. For years Lady Dorothy Macmillan had been having an affair with Bob Boothby, a bisexual intimate of gangsters and rent boys. One can see why biographers return often to Macmillan’s supposed ambiguity and deviousness, to his enjoyment of irony.

I must declare an interest. My father worked for Harold Macmillan and, although young enough to be his son, knew him for years, first as his private secretary, then as a confidant and friend. Macmillan was my godfather, someone whom I found fascinating, endearing, funny, wise and kind. When, some 30 years ago, I was writing a biography of Arthur Balfour, he gave me an astonishingly clear psychological analysis of this earlier intellectual prime minister.