The wobbly Anglo-French tandem

In the spring of 1916, the young French officer Charles de Gaulle was captured at Verdun. The French demanded from the British a diversionary offensive to prevent the entire French army from collapsing. Most British troops were not yet trained for such an effort. Nonetheless, they opened an offensive on the Somme. There, the young British officer, Harold Macmillan, was almost fatally wounded.

Twenty-seven years later, the Anglo-Americans intrigued against that same de Gaulle in North Africa, and he intrigued back against the same. Churchill sent that same Macmillan from London to help resolve the dispute. De Gaulle survived as Free French leader, partly as a result of Macmillan’s diplomatic skills.

Twenty years after that, the two men were heads of their countries’ governments. Macmillan applied for membership of an international union which the other dominated. Membership was refused.

Beginning as unknown participants in great events, steadily moving over many years to the centre of them, the lives of these two intertwined for half a century. Peter Mangold is the first to have had the idea of tracing this joint journey. It is a story concerned with those two subjects which Mr Benn and the more pious always tell us should have nothing to do with one another, but which all history tells us are inseparable: politics and personalities. Mangold has done the subject justice.

It will be found that Macmillan and de Gaulle were very different from one another, but, perhaps to some readers’ surprise, also had much in common. But first we must admit the differences.

Macmillan was a professional politician. He was good at his profession. He would have risen to the top, or near it, at any time in British parliamentary history. After ‘a good war’ and work in the family firm, he got into parliament early, as professional politicians do.