The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made. Simon Ball

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СКАЧАТЬ He had caused a stir by obtaining an appointment to the Foreign Office: the son of a successful surgeon, Cooper was one of the first non-aristocrats to be recruited to the administrative grade. He had ostentatiously not volunteered for the army but had been conscripted into the Guards and won a DSO towards the end of the war. Cooper’s greatest coup, however, was to marry Diana Manners, daughter of the Duke of Rutland and reputedly the most beautiful woman in England. The Rutland connection further enhanced Cooper’s standing. The Rutlands’ London home was next door to that of the Salisburys, for instance, and the two families were close. Cooper assiduously worked his connections – the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, the whips, the Speaker, the press lord Max Beaverbrook – to make sure he was called.⁹¹ His hard work was not in vain. Crookshank and other new MPs had to watch, consumed with jealousy, as Cooper was put on at a ‘wonderfully fortunate moment’.

      He rose at seven o’clock in the evening. ‘Ministers and ex-Ministers hadn’t left the House – Lloyd George was there throughout and so was Baldwin.’ Austen Chamberlain came in and was heard to say to Baldwin, ‘I hear he’s very good.’ Cooper began by twitting the recently defeated government about the Zinoviev letter, a document published by the Daily Mail which purported to show that the Soviet Union was trying to stir up revolution in Britain, which many Labour MPs believed had lost them the election. It did not matter whether or not the letter was a forgery, Cooper claimed, the Labour party and the electorate knew ‘that Bolshevist propaganda was taking place in this country’. Moving on to the Egyptian situation, he mocked any suggestion that the League of Nations should become involved. ‘When,’ he asked, ‘you have appointed this commission of broad-minded, broad-browed, learned Scandinavian professors, what are you going to do?’ He lauded British rule to the skies. ‘We restored an independence which Egypt had not enjoyed since some time before Alexander the Great.’ He excoriated the idol of the Egyptian nationalists, Sa’ad Zaghloul, for having ‘indirectly inspired the hand that held the revolver and threw the bomb’.⁹²

      The speech was a tour de force, as even his rivals had to admit. Crookshank could not contain his envy. ‘Duff Cooper made a very good speech for his maiden effort on Egypt. Subject matter good and a fair delivery, though rather too like a saying lesson at school. It was frightfully advertised – he lives (like or because of his wife) in a press atmosphere.’⁹³ ‘Duff Cooper,’ noted Cuthbert Headlam, Lyttelton’s fellow ADC in 1915, himself a new Tory MP in 1924, ‘is now a marked man.’⁹⁴ Headlam was quite right. One well-timed and well-delivered speech could make a political career. The plaudits poured in on Cooper. ‘I had,’ he wrote to his wife the next day, ‘a letter of congratulation from the Speaker which I gather is a rather unusual honour – and also one from Winston – all the evening people whom I didn’t know were coming up to me and congratulating me. In other words, baby, it was a triumph.’⁹⁵

      The lead Cooper established over his contemporaries that night lasted for the rest of the decade. In 1929 William Bridgeman, a senior member of Baldwin’s Cabinet who had been much concerned with party management, noted that after Cooper ‘there did not seem to me anyone so markedly brilliant as to deserve immediate promotion from the back benches’.⁹⁶ Although Crookshank subsequently pursued his interest in eastern affairs, having missed his opportunity in December, it was to little effect. His first parliamentary question two months later on the subject of the ecumenical patriarch was hardly likely to set the heather on fire. His maiden speech was given not in the early evening of a great debate, as was Cooper’s, but late at night to a thin house. It was not a succès d’estime. It did cover foreign policy, but was chiefly noted for the dictum that, ‘The conduct of foreign affairs must be in the hands of the few,’ which, stated in such an unvarnished fashion, led to unflattering comparisons with Jim Salisbury.⁹⁷ Crookshank, who had come into politics knowledgeable about and fascinated by imperial affairs, was never able to take an opportunity to become involved in them.

      Crookshank was nevertheless an able and quick-witted parliamentary speaker, in contrast to Macmillan, who tended to the ponderous. But this only seemed to gain him a reputation for idiosyncrasy, one of the last attributes desirable in a ministerial careerist. He was not helped by two aspects of his physical appearance. One he could not help. Early hair loss revealed a large cranium. He looked like nothing other than the spitting image of William Shakespeare. No newspaper seemed able to mention his name without alluding to this resemblance. His dress, on the other hand, was entirely his own choice. Until the outbreak of the Second World War he insisted on wearing a shiny topper to the House. He looked like a shorter version of Sir Austen Chamberlain – which was probably worse than looking like the Bard. No newspaper seemed able to mention his name without alluding to this resemblance either. Physically equipped for quirkiness, he started to make his name as a backbencher rather than as a potential minister. When another well-known House of Commons character, Commander Kenworthy, drew up his list of new MPs to watch, he noted that ‘the outstanding figure amongst the younger members is Mr Duff Cooper’. Crookshank was notable as one ‘who has realized that one of the first essentials of success in Parliament is to be always in his place’.

      Instead of Asiatic affairs, Crookshank was increasingly drawn to quixotic affairs. His first great parliamentary set piece came in 1926 when he tried to wreck a government bill obviating the need for MPs to seek re-election when they became ministers. He managed to insult a number of groups: the party’s business managers, liberal Conservatives, Liberals who had become Conservatives. Labelling himself an ‘ultra-conservative’, he mocked, ‘Debates…extraordinarily busy with the question of safeguarding industries,’ and suggested that the Commons should instead ‘follow out the principle of safeguarding the present rights of the electorate’. He also had a dig at turncoats. In a considerable coup for the whips, two former Liberal Cabinet ministers had just defected to the Conservatives. Crookshank expressed the view that if such men, ‘in crossing the floor, were quite sure of office, then I think it is important and absolutely essential that the present safeguard should be maintained’. Not only was Crookshank intemperate, he also got his parliamentary procedure wrong. His amendment to the bill inadvertently implied that a Cabinet minister moving to another post in the Cabinet would have to seek re-election to the House of Commons. ‘It is the first time I have tried my hand at this kind of thing, and I am not a lawyer,’ was Crookshank’s somewhat lame excuse. His friend Charles Waterhouse, another of the 1924 intake, had to come to his aid, amending the amendment to make it coherent. To no one’s surprise this stand for parliamentary precedence over the convenience of the government was defeated by a large margin. Crookshank was also associated with another parliamentary revolt against Baldwin over the Prayer Book. Given his own Irish background and the fact that his Gainsborough seat contained the highest proportion of non-conformists in England,⁹⁸ Crookshank had little choice but to line up behind the home secretary, ‘Jix’ Joynson-Hicks, who believed the Church of England’s proposed new liturgy was papism by the back door. In this case he was part of the majority, but he had been dragged, this time reluctantly, into another quixotic fight.⁹⁹

      Macmillan’s strategy for success was quite different from that of Crookshank. In part it derived from the constituency he represented. Stockton was one of the seats won by Baldwin’s abandonment of ‘dear food’. Yet a change of national policy was certainly not enough to secure the seat for any length of time. The MPs for the newly won northern seats had to be seen actively lobbying for the interests of their constituents if they were to stand a chance of keeping their places. So although Macmillan was more interested in foreign than domestic affairs, he could not afford the luxury of following his natural inclination. Support for industrial protection and urban relief was almost inevitable. Yet the manner in which СКАЧАТЬ