Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister of Britain from 1957 to 1963. He enjoyed the nicknames ‘Supermac’ and ‘Unflappable Mac’. He seemed cool and littered the political landscape with memorable phrases like, ‘You’ve never had it so good’ and ‘the winds of change’.
Macmillan’s career is well documented. The circumstances for this were unique and propitious. He belonged to the famous publishing family. The house of Macmillan published his war diaries, his memoirs (six volumes), Alistair Horne’s excellent two volume biography, and now the first volume of his diaries.
This spin doctor’s paradise was well controlled. Macmillan chose his own biographer and coordinated with him. There was even ‘a certain amount of guidance’ in his editing of the diaries.
Macmillan was a bookish man, an avid reader and a prolific diarist and writer. He was also reticent and uptight (he worked at being ‘unflappable’). His memoirs are said to be very dull. This is not entirely a surprise. He told his biographer that the aim of the memoirs ‘was to keep myself out of it’. This aim is less manifest in the diaries, but not much.
Macmillan suffered all the hazards of an upper-class up-bringing plus a childhood in a strict Victorian household dominated by a strong-minded American mother of Methodist persuasion. She was ambitious for her three sons and particularly Harold, the youngest.
He was a lonely child, his brothers were much older. Afternoon walks with his nanny were a highlight. At nine he was sent to boarding school, then Eton. At Oxford he fell under the influence of a young tutor, Ronald Knox, but his mother, intolerant of Anglo-Catholic nonsense, fixed that by having Knox sent down from Oxford. Macmillan joined the Army. His mother had him transferred to the Grenadier Guards. He was badly wounded in France. Back in England he joined the publishing company and later became a member of parliament.
In 1920 he married Lady Dorothy Cavendish, a daughter of the Duke of Devonshire. His mother approved, but it was a strange relationship, although it began happily. In 1929 Macmillan learned of his wife’s affair with his ‘friend’ and parliamentary colleague Robert Boothby, a charmer of some notoriety. Both Macmillan’s marriage and his wife’s affair lasted until her death in the 1960s.
Against this background it is perhaps not surprising that Macmillan became absorbed in political life with such determination and toughness. The military moustache concealed a stiff upper lip. Bernard Levin, the