An English Affair. Richard Davenport-Hines

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СКАЧАТЬ the English Public School system, and … is the wonder of other countries. Who shall say it is not that which has so largely helped to make England the most successful colonising nation, and the just ruler of the backward races of the world?’ The instinctive, automatic obedience to their leader felt by most Tory MPs was based on fear of party whips, who reminded them of prefects brandishing canes, or of scragging from other backbenchers. Mark Bonham Carter described his experience after being elected in a Liberal by-election coup in 1958. ‘It’s just like being back as a new boy at public school – with its rituals and rules, and also its background of convention, which breeds a sense of anxiety and inferiority in people who don’t know the rules. Even the smell – the smell of damp stone stairways – is like a school. All you have of your own is a locker – just like a school locker. You don’t know where you’re allowed to go, and where not – you’re always afraid you may be breaking some rule … It’s just like a public school: and that’s why Labour MPs are overawed by it – because they feel that only the Tory MPs know what a public school is like.’ Robin Ferrers, who was appointed as a lord-in-waiting by Macmillan in 1962, found front-bench life just like school. ‘There are the clever guys. There are the silly clots, too. Like football, you do the best that you can when the ball comes to you in order not to let the side down. At Question Time, if you can make them laugh, it is very satisfying. The schoolboy ethos is never far away – and that is good.’³⁹

      Sticklers resented any challenge to the prefects’ authority. When a decision of the Deputy Speaker’s was criticised by Lady Mellor, wife of a Tory MP, at a garden party, Labour MPs complained, and the Commons Privileges Committee censured her. No words that might weaken house esprit de corps could be tolerated, especially from anyone as objectionable as a woman with forthright and informed views. During crises, the Conservative parliamentary party resembled a boarding house in which any boy who challenged the housemaster’s decisions would be biffed or given a bogging. Even in private sessions, it was bad form to bestir the deferential placidity. When Macmillan, or his successors Douglas-Home and Heath, addressed the 1922 Committee of backbenchers, questions were confined to the closing minutes of the meeting. The questions seldom exceeded the level of those at a constituency ward meeting.⁴⁰

      There was a striking homogeneity in the appearance of the Conservative parliamentary party: MPs wore a uniform of stiff white collars or cream silk shirts; dark, well-pressed suits or a black jacket with striped black and grey trousers; sleek Trumper’s haircuts and oils. On Fridays, which were called Private Members’ Days, when government business was not taken, and the Commons was thinly attended, the Conservative whips wore weekend tweed suits and brogue shoes. Julian Critchley was once standing in the crowded ‘No’ lobby, waiting to vote, when Sir Jocelyn Lucas, a crusty baronet who bred Sealyhams, accosted him, seized his elbow, hissed ‘You’re wearin’ suede shoes’, and stalked off. Lucas never addressed Critchley again. Excessive importance was attached to social standing. ‘Some able middle-class Conservatives – like Enoch Powell or Iain Macleod – have gone a long way,’ Anthony Wedgwood Benn commented in 1957, ‘but one senses that many Tory MPs would prefer to be in the top drawer and out of office than to be out of the drawer and in office.’⁴¹

      Once he became Prime Minister, Macmillan began attending the Derby, cricket matches, and other jollities to settle his image with his party faithful. He excelled in striking poses which projected his personality until it was a palpable force over others. The Tory die-hards had not been fooled by so brilliant a man since Disraeli. His address to Tory peers before the general election of 1959 was ‘the best speech I think I have ever heard from a leader addressing his followers’, noted blimpish Lord Winterton, who had fifty-five years’ parliamentary experience. There were sweeping historical parallels to flatter his auditors’ intelligence, and patriotic pride to rouse them. In international affairs, Britain was speeding towards danger ‘like a man on a monorail’, Macmillan warned the peers, ‘but mankind had never known security save perhaps in Antonine age of Ancient [Rome] & Victorian age’. The achievement of full employment with ‘one of the highest standards of living in the world’ by a nation with few natural resources was possible because Britain was ‘rich in brain power as in the time of the first Elizabeth when Europe looked on us as Barbarians who couldn’t use a fork’. The Lords – backwoodsmen and activists alike – were rallied by such High Table urbanities.⁴²

      Critchley recalled a dinner that was arranged for the Prime Minister to meet newly elected backbenchers after the 1959 general election had been won with an improved majority. ‘We dined in one room, and then moved to another, where some of us literally sat at his feet. Macmillan was the ideal speaker for the intimate occasion: splendid after dinner, witty, elegant of phrase, skilled at flattering his audience, taking us apparently into his confidence. He was especially beguiling with the young. He told us, “Revolt by all means; but only on one issue at a time; to do more would be to confuse the whips”.’ Critchley studied Macmillan’s mannerisms at close quarters: ‘the nervous fingering of his Brigade tie; his curiously hooded eyes which would suddenly open wide, and the famous baring of the teeth. He told us that no one who had not experienced Oxford before the Kaiser’s War could know “la douceur de vivre”.’ Humphry Berkeley, a pompous youngster who was among the 1959 intake, admired Macmillan’s skill in disguising from his die-hards his intention to grant independence to African colonies as swiftly as possible. He recalled the Prime Minister charming backbenchers after his return from Africa in 1960 with references to the Scottish earl – collateral descendant of a Victorian Viceroy of India – whom he had appointed as Governor-General of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland: ‘It’s awfully good of Simon Dalhousie to have taken out to Salisbury the viceregal gold plate which was presented to his ancestor. It’s so good for morale.’⁴³

      ‘I am always hearing about the Middle Classes,’ Macmillan wrote to the Conservative Research Department after a month in office. ‘What is it they really want? Can you put it down on a sheet of notepaper, and then I will see whether we can give it to them?’⁴⁴ He knew the answer, though, well enough: they wanted a steady onrush of material prosperity, and to recover their margin of advantage over the working class.

      The half century between Macmillan’s seizing of the premiership in 1957 and the banking collapse of 2008 was exceptional in history as a time of abundance, not scarcity. In all other periods, privation was the common Western experience. Most people were kept on short rations, emotionally and materially; frustration, not satisfaction, provided the keynote of existence. Macmillan offered an end to the stingy circumstances in which women watered down their children’s marmalade to make it go further.

      Six months into his premiership Macmillan went to Bedford, the county town of the dullest English county. Its population of 60,000 worked in factories making pumps, diesel engines, gas turbines, farm implements, switchgear, tube fittings, transistors, and sweets. There, at the football pitch of the local team on 20 July 1957, Macmillan was guest of honour at a political gala to celebrate the parliamentary career of his Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd, the long-serving Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire: a career begun under the aegis of the ancien régime Duke of Bedford. No tickets were needed to attend; no ‘spin doctors’ existed to control the audience; there were no stewards from security firms to evict hecklers, or threaten them under anti-terrorist legislation. It was one of the last open-air political speeches by an English statesman to a genuine mass gathering. Politicians had for generations learnt to pitch their voices to reach thousands, to captivate their audiences and to master the art of impromptu retorts to hecklers. Henceforth they would have to simulate sincerity for television audiences.

      The Bedford gala was ‘unique in the political annals of the county’, reported the local newspaper. ‘The Premier received a great welcome from a crowd that had assembled from every part of Bedfordshire.’ Macmillan told those who talked of the disintegration of the Empire: ‘It is not breaking up; it is growing up.’ He warned against complacency at recent advances in prosperity. ‘Let’s be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you will see a state of prosperity such СКАЧАТЬ