History of England 1-6

Heath was a magnificent negotiator, whose talent for detail, doggedness and deep love of all things continental raised him above any previous British minister. However, he had to deal with the hostile de Gaulle and the suspicious Adenauer. On 29 January 1963, France announced that it would veto the British application. Familiar objections were advanced: Britain was an insular nation with maritime interests and had too close and dependent a relationship with the United States. But de Gaulle went further: ‘In the end,’ he said, ‘there would appear a colossal Atlantic community under American dependence and leadership which would soon swallow up the European Community.’

It was hard for the British delegates to determine which was the more demoralizing, the veto itself or the hypocrisy with which it was sauced. De Gaulle, for all his swagger, was simply frightened at the thought of the British crashing into his pond. He acquired infamy as a man who could neither forget nor forgive a benefit. Macmillan himself, who had supported de Gaulle during the war in defiance of his superiors’ doubts, felt less bitterness than grief. The mass of the people were either delighted or, more worryingly for their leaders, indifferent. The success of Macmillan’s ‘stop-go’ economic policies was also under increasing question, as was his continuing fitness for rule. But it was neither incompetence nor senescence nor nemesis which brought down this wily innocent.

John Profumo, the minister for war, was respected in the Commons. He had a modicum of talent, an easy charm and a weakness shared by many men in power. At a party at Cliveden House, then owned by Lord Astor, Profumo had met a model named Christine Keeler, the protégée of one Stephen Ward, osteopath and socialite. Initially cool, Keeler was nonetheless an impressionable teenager and soon began an affair with Profumo that lasted just under a month, and there the matter might have rested. But Keeler had also made the acquaintance of ‘Eugene’, a Soviet attaché and spy. Periodicals picked up on the increasingly insistent hum of rumour, and Keeler herself began to blab.

Profumo denied any impropriety to the House and even sued the relevant newspapers. But when the case came to court and both Keeler and her friend Mandy Rice-Davies testified, he was left helpless. He resigned and vanished into the East End to do penance by helping the poor. Meanwhile, Keeler went to prison for perjury, the largely innocent Ward committed suicide, and Mandy Rice-Davies contrived an elegant skip from notoriety to fortune. The leader of the opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, knew better than to exploit the scandal for its sexual content. Instead he stuck to the question of national security, leaving Macmillan diminished and lame. At last the prime minister resigned, for reasons of ill health, protesting his innocence of the whole affair. He had presided over boom and bust, prosperity and uncertainty, had restored, or perhaps even created, the ‘special relationship’ with the United States, had rescued his party from the disaster of Suez and overseen the end of empire. Who then was to replace this splintered colossus?

The Establishment Club in particular, set up by Peter Cook to continue the tradition of Beyond the Fringe, mourned his loss: he had been prodigal meat for satire. But while the satire boom was only scotched by television, the Establishment Club was killed by it. The vein of alternative comedy was by no means exhausted, however. Private Eye was founded in 1961, produced by a very different crowd from that of Beyond the Fringe. They were more acerbic and less funny, but the venture flourished.

With the airing in November 1962 of That Was the Week That Was, the new comic movement moved to the television. After the show was cut to a watchable length, its fans were treated to the growing presence of household names on the screenwriting credits. Keith Waterhouse was one. Above all, there was David Frost, flat and uninspiring but a television ‘natural’. But the show’s appeal soon waned. It became, of all things, pompous: wit descended to invective, harmless joshing to self-important malice.

In The Other England, the journalist Geoffrey Moorhouse attempted a survey and analysis of England as a whole. It was published in 1964 as a kind of sequel to Priestley’s English Journey, although ‘corrective’ might be the more fitting term. Moorhouse begins by referring to an article entitled ‘The Condition of the North’. It was written by George Taylor, chief education officer for Leeds, who commented that

it is fairly safe to assert that the Northern child will receive his education in an old, insanitary building planned on lines wholly inappropriate for contemporary teaching, his teachers will be too few in number, probably inexperienced, possibly unqualified, and constantly changing … If he attends a grammar school, its children will be, like him, drawn entirely from the local workingclass community.