History of England 1-6

Nevertheless, Macmillan could boast of many admirers. While his cabinet was composed overwhelmingly of public schoolboys and while his family connections stretched from Westminster to Chatsworth House, he had a fan in a tall, saturnine young student with a fondness for sweaters by the name of Peter Cook. With Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett, Cook formed the ‘Beyond the Fringe’ group. Unlike the Goons before them, they derived their humour not from caricature but from observation. They performed with almost no set beyond a piano. The target appeared to be what was becoming known as ‘the establishment’, and yet their humour had always a samizdat quality in its ironical deference. In one sketch of 1961, Peter Cook played the prime minister in a spoof party-political broadcast. His meandering, deadpan delivery was uncanny. Such satire was addressed at a persona, of course, but this persona was itself a role that Macmillan assumed. It was a success. Intransigent foe and improbable allies were to be swayed by it.

Macmillan, who was dubbed ‘the most radical politician’ in Britain by Attlee, was in fact a ‘soft’ socialist, and the economic policies he urged upon his chancellors reflected this. In times of dearth, demand must be stimulated. Thus was inaugurated a period of ‘stop-go’ economics; government spending was increased to ensure growth, and then curtailed in order to stanch inflation. The result was ‘stagflation’, a monster sired by spending and bred upon austerity.

By the spring of 1962, Selwyn Lloyd, the upright, talented, but unimaginative chancellor of the time, was the target of ever more hostile feeling. The Orpington by-election of March, where the Conservatives were heavily defeated by the Liberals, was only one sign of a wider disaffection. Leicester was also lost, to Labour. Called to the cameras, Lloyd was unrepentant. The important thing, he maintained, was that the chancellor do ‘the right thing’, regardless of by-elections or popular feeling in general. Yet his sharp, fluent delivery was belied by his hands, which swayed and jerked like those of a puppeteer. Quintin Hogg, later Lord Hailsham, was not alone in feeling that the malaise sprang from the leader rather than from the chancellor. He wrote to Macmillan, claiming that ‘the party had lost its sense of direction and its sense of conviction, and this was due to neglect from the centre’.

Macmillan was unmoved. While he felt respect, affection and even pity for his brilliant but troubled chancellor, he had grown dissatisfied. The country had turned against the Tories, and it would not be long before it turned against Macmillan himself. Lloyd, he wrote in his diaries, was ‘finished’. There were fears that the government might tumble. Iain MacLeod, Conservative party chairman, privately urged the prime minister to remove Lloyd, and events moved swiftly. A leak to the Daily Mail suggested that Macmillan was intending a radical reshuffle. The source was never named, but all knew that Rab Butler was responsible. When Macmillan summoned Lloyd for a talk, the chancellor was at first perturbed and then astonished; Macmillan seemed ‘flustered’ and upset, staring at the floor. The affable, imperturbable grandee babbled about mysterious ‘plots’. At last, Macmillan broke the news. A ‘less tired’ mind was needed in the Treasury. Outwardly, Lloyd remained cheerful, but Jonathan Aitken, the sole remaining member of his staff, recalled, ‘He was broken by it, shattered … He walked up and down our croquet lawn for five hours.’

As Butler put it, ‘A prime minister has to be a butcher, and know the joints.’ Other ‘joints’ would now be severed, in what became known as ‘the Night of the Long Knives’. On 13 July, Charles Hill, the housing minister, Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor and an early supporter of Macmillan against Butler, Percy Mills, Sir John McLeigh, Harold Watkinson and David Eccles were all informed that they must step aside. Macmillan later claimed indeed to have felt greater pain than the men he had removed, yet his reaction was not surprising. Macmillan’s grandson observed that even before giving away prizes at a prep school, Macmillan would be ‘sick and quivering’. There had been no plot, of course, and the only result of this professional butchery was a widespread loss of faith in Macmillan. ‘Supermac’ became ‘Mac the Knife’ and then ‘Supermacbeth’.