There’s something wrong with these diaries.
There’s something wrong with these diaries. This is not to disparage the scholarly efforts of their editor, Dr Catterall, nor the skill with which he seems to have pruned the original papers (twice the length) into the greatest coherence achievable, nor his helpful contextualisation and calmly rational explanatory notes. Nor is it to question the importance for modern historians of the whole painstaking enterprise, to observe that the general reader will plough onward from summit, to cabinet, to dinner party, to pheasant shoot, to bilateral meeting, with a half-formed question growing in his mind. Who was Harold Macmillan writing all this for? For himself? For friends and family? For history? To answer questions? To settle scores? To win the approval of later generations?
Voracious reader and professional publisher that he was, Macmillan must surely have known that no writer should so much as pick up his pen without first having formed a mental picture, however hazy, of his intended audience. It can be yourself alone, a ‘Dear Diary’ diary. Sometimes these papers suggest as much: the self-pity (aches, pains, general exhaustion and protestations that he is feeling ‘shattered’ punctuate the narrative) and Macmillan’s incipient gloom:
6 Sept 1958: Last night there was a tropical storm … The harvest in East Anglia and the South will now be finally ruined, I fear. What is almost worse is that the potato crop is beginning to go mouldy. We are certainly not having much luck in my period of office. When I think of all the troubles since 1956, I feel we have had almost more than our share — and now the weather … keeps intruding.
But only in its pessimism could you call much of this confessional. Even space travel is talked down:
[The Russian astronaut] seems to have gone round the world 17 times. It is a wonderful feat of science and technology, altho’ I should have thought it rather dull for the man . . .
But there is otherwise little here that is really intimate, except foreboding. We learn nothing about his loves, nothing about his (rumoured) bisexuality, little about his feelings (or lack of them) for his wife, Dorothy, or her affair with Bob Boothby, or his son Maurice’s problems. Self-absorbed though they often are, these diaries are not really addressed to himself or those close to him, still less to future psycho-biographers.
For history then: to answer questions and explain? But this diarist seems oblivious to such unspoken questions as ‘why, really, did you do that?’ ‘How did you feel?’ and only fitfully does he offer any insight into his tactics and strategies. Whole chapters of history — huge world events — seem to slip by with barely a mention; and then all at once he’s obsessing on how to save the First Lord of the Admiralty.
As for his dreams and ambitions — let alone political philosophy — their absence is obtrusive. One finishes these accounts with no better idea of what sort of a Conservative Macmillan was, although the types who irritated him are a persistent theme: Quentin Hogg’s vulgarity; R.A. Butler’s indecision; Selwyn Lloyd’s inactivity — and recalcitrant and reactionary Tories are a running sore. He dislikes populism, admires (as Catterall notes) manliness, but leaves us unclear about ideological direction. ‘It seems absurd,’ he writes in 1960, ‘to put the whole country to the loss and trouble of a railway strike on a dispute about 2/- a week for 40,000 men’. Well, that ‘clever young woman’ (his only reference to Margaret Thatcher) might have had something to say about that.
Controversy over whether to have an incomes policy, and about Resale Price Maintenance, is mentioned often, but he never seems interested in the merits, only the to-ing and fro-ing of the politics. Rhodesia, Kenya, Cyprus, Aden appear almost to dominate the political age, but if the Prime Minister had any clear conviction about what would be right — as opposed to politic — for Britain and our former empire, it hardly surfaces. Come to think of it, even that famous ‘wind of change’ speech in South Africa was really about reaction, not pro-action. One begins to wonder whether the horribly over-quoted ‘Events, dear boy, events’ remark tells us more about Macmillan than it does about politics. He is fascinated — to the point of tedium — with the press and its judgments; though (from 1962) I did enjoy ‘The Manchester Guardian still hedges … always willing to wound and afraid to strike — and always essentially priggish and slightly dishonest.’
He is in fact at his best when at his cattiest. In October 1959 he writes:
There is a great problem … about the Speakership. A strong ‘moderate’ opinion has appeared, in the Party and in the Press, that we ought to have a ‘Labour’ Speaker. But if this means Mitchison (who is ‘gaga’) or Jones (who is a fellow traveller) or [W. R.] Williams (who is a buffoon) it is not a reasonable idea … I was sorry about Aubrey Jones — a nice, sincere, and shy creature. But he is not really fitted for the rough and tumble of politics and industry. He is the son of a coal-miner. But he looks like, and is like, a rather overbred and slightly effete younger son of a duke.
There is a great deal of this. The class act and genial Edwardian showman of contemporary cartoons lies distinctly dormant in these diaries. There is precious little warmth.
And at the end it’s all rather sad. After the medical emergency that the official story — and these diaries — insist was the only reason for his deciding in 1963 to quit (read his account and make your own judgment: I think he’s dissimulating) comes an entry which stops the reader in his tracks:
12 January 1964 : I read the papers hardly at all — Cyprus, riots in Panama, steel strike, etc, etc. Nor do I hear anything of home politics and the prospects for the General Election … The truth is that I am still in a kind of daze — like a man who has had concussion. I can just about manage to concentrate on a limited range of problems … but all the flexibility and resilience of my mind (wh[ich] I think was considerable) has gone. However, I suppose this is the result partly of the operation but partly (and perhaps principally) of 10 years and more of tremendous work at tremendous pressure …
Would that these diaries contained more such moments of private truth. Sadly, they are thin on the ground.
Comments