An English Affair. Richard Davenport-Hines

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ far end of Kensington Gardens. It was the first building in London to overlook the gardens of Buckingham Palace, and this objection, too, had been quelled to my father’s pleasure. (Thirty years later I was to read the minutes of the Cabinet meeting at which Harold Macmillan’s government endorsed this encroachment on the Queen’s privacy: the justification given was that American holiday-trippers staying in the Hilton would bring badly needed dollars to revitalise the ailing English economy.) The site had belonged until 1956 to an old banking family, the Abel-Smiths, who had a mortgage on it. This was a period when debt frightened most people as a weir would scare steady ferrymen, but spurred a bold minority rather as the wide oceans excited fearless privateers. The Abel-Smiths had therefore sold their plot for £550,000 to a property developer called Charles Clore, who bedded Keeler, as it happens. Clore, who borrowed heavily, spent another £5 million turning the site into the Hilton. In the hotel my father and I went to the American coffee shop: he gulped scalding black coffee while I spooned my way through a banana split or knickerbocker glory. I cannot imagine why we were there: perhaps a rival for the brunette was in the offing.

      Afterwards, back on wheels, the Hilton behind us, my father stopped his car outside a large, abandoned house of dilapidated stucco on the corner of Hertford Street and Old Park Lane. It was awaiting demolition, he explained. Londonderry House, he added, had belonged to a proud, stupid family who had been friends of Hitler, but the last lord had been a helpless drunk who had died young. Now their day was done, the old house where prime ministers once dawdled on the marble stairs had been sold and was to be torn down. Londonderry House would be smashed for good. It represented a world that impeded progress. My father told me that another hotel for Americans was planned for this site next to the Hilton. It was glorious what competition was going to do. It was marvellous what future prosperity was promised to those who were quick to snatch their chances.

      Then my father swung the car round into a full U-turn to head back to Park Lane: no unmanly glances back over the shoulder, no effeminate wing-mirrors to look in, just my father’s iron resolve as he pulled out. There followed an almighty screech of brakes, a squeal of tyres, and the sound of a horn held down hard. A black taxi cab behind us had made an emergency halt. As we completed the U-turn and passed the stationary taxi, my father stopped, looked at its driver and gave a harsh, defiant laugh: he was proud of having a chuckle that made people lose their temper or, if they were already angry, re-double their rage. The taxi driver was furious, temporarily powerless, but not, he reminded us, permanently disempowered. As my father drove off chortling, his victim shouted after him the deadly threat: ‘Wait until October!’

      Everyone knew there was going to be a general election in October. ‘A Labour voter,’ my father said witheringly. He probably forgot the incident in a trice, but I never did. October came, Sir Alec Douglas-Home was displaced as Prime Minister by Harold Wilson, and I acquired the private incantation: ‘Wait until October’. For years, I would repeat the phrase to remind myself that however insecure life already seemed, there was greater instability to come. Waiting for October became the title of the self-pitying memoirs that I secretly wrote at the age of fifteen.

      This book is not Waiting for October in another guise, although it is about insolence, envy and the politics of revenge. Rather, it is a history of the mentalities that made Miss Groom, Mr Wilcox, Mrs Soskin and the Edgware Road brunette. It is a study of milieux: the worlds of Harold Macmillan, Jack Profumo, Lord Astor, Stephen Ward. ‘How separate we keep ourselves in Britain,’ the Labour politician Richard Crossman reflected of the 1960s. ‘There is the legal world, the doctors’ world, the artistic world, the dramatic world, the political world. We are tremendously separate.’² The spheres of politics, medicine, law, journalism, smart society, new money, and espionage – each a discrete segment of British society – all converged into the Profumo Affair of 1963 and detonated a shattering blast. This is a London book, which depicts the capital’s good-time girls, property dealers and Fleet Street hacks, and the ways they pointed the rest of the nation. It is about the millionaire with his new Alvis who resented the old order, thought his time had come, and longed to see the demolition ball hit Londonderry House, as well as the taxi driver who hated the millionaire, and thought his time was coming in the October election. It describes the worlds they made, and how none of them got what they wanted.

PART ONE

       ONE

       Prime Minister

      ‘I have news today that will bring a gasp from every Tory in Britain,’ reported Crossbencher, the political columnist of the Sunday Express, on 2 December 1956.

      Mr Harold Macmillan is planning to retire from the Commons.

      What a turnabout this is. Only the other day all the talk was of his rivalry with Mr Richard Austen Butler. He was alight with ambition, his Edwardian moustache bristling for the fray. It is true, of course, that he has lately been dropping a few little hints. In the Commons he talks of looking forward ‘to retirement from many of these troubles’. To the Tory 1922 Committee he says he is thinking ‘of the viscounty that is my right’. But these are laughed off by most people as typical Macmillan flourishes.

      I report that Macmillan means exactly what he says. He intends to go. The reason? Not because of any personal clashes with his colleagues. Not because of any disagreement on policy. But he is sixty-three in February, three years older than [the Prime Minister] Sir Anthony Eden, nine years older than Mr Butler. And suddenly, with absolute clarity, he sees that the nation’s highest office is forever beyond his grasp. How sad a moment for a politician who has come so far. The moment when he realises that he is finally out of the race.

      The only remaining question: When will Mr Macmillan claim his coronet?

      One can imagine the poignant sorrow, the air of noble resolve, affected by Macmillan as he confided in the Sunday Express man. A few days later, Brendan Bracken, chairman of the Financial Times, reported a similar tale to the Expresss proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, but with a hard-headed gloss. ‘Macmillan is telling journalists that he intends to retire from politics and go into the morgue. He declares that he will never serve under Butler. His real intentions are to push his boss out of Number Ten.’ A month later, on 10 January 1957, after seductive courting of the parliamentary party, Macmillan became Prime Minister.¹

      Only a consummate politician would brief that he is on the brink of retirement as a device to reach the highest office. Macmillan had foreseen, since November, when he had a privileged talk with Eden’s physician, Sir Horace Evans, that failing health would force the Prime Minister’s retirement. He knew, too, that many Tories felt, in the backbencher Robert Boothby’s words, ‘contemptuous disdain’ for Rab Butler as a boneless appeaser, and would not have him as Eden’s successor at any cost. His ruthless clarity and oblique tactics were outstanding.²

      Lloyd George was the predecessor whom Macmillan most admired, the arch-spiv among Prime Ministers – shameless, improvising, compassionate, devious, inspired. Macmillan was a politician who mastered both appearances and realities, and understood the differences between the two. He was simultaneously a romantic escapist and sturdy materialist. He studied men’s wiles, and knew their weaknesses. He was a world-weary cynic about human vanity yet could be as shocked as a boy scout by the grubbiness of people’s motives. Outward calm masked high-strung agitation. He looked like a grandee, had the manners of an Edwardian man-about-town and was one of the last men in England who still put his tongue in his cheek when making a sardonic quip. His self-protective staginess, his toying with appearances, his patrician pose of authoritative nonchalance – all so artfully СКАЧАТЬ