Incident at Birch Grove
Yet it was Britain’s post-war relationship with Europe, not the fate of the Empire, immigration or the Cold War, which produced some of the deepest cracks in British public life. Why should that be? This was not of prime importance to the people of the country, certainly no more so than the cost of living or the building of a multiculture. What gave it added importance in the corridors and lobbies of the Palace of Westminster was that ‘Europe’ was about them – the importance of MPs and ministers, of mandarins and ambassadors. Britain was fading as head of the Commonwealth and had little leverage with the Washington of Eisenhower and Kennedy. Joining the European Economic Community would either (depending on your point of view) give Britain’s elite a new, well-appointed and large theatre to try to dominate; or it might push them aside in a Babel of competing and alien politicians. By the late fifties, this choice was becoming urgent. The distant echoes ignored by Attlee and Churchill had become a deafening proposition. Across the channel, they had had the builders in.
After the iron and coal community, which the Durham miners were supposed to have been so against, the six founding EU nations – France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands – had kept designing and laying out bigger structures. The European Defence Community had foundered. But in 1955 a breakthrough had happened in the unlikely setting of a small and undistinguished coastal town in Sicily called Messina. Here the foreign ministers of ‘the Six’ had agreed to move towards a customs union, and combine in transport, atomic know-how and energy policy. The driving force behind this was a squat, pro-British Belgian now formally revered as a European founding father, called Paul-Henri Spaak. Later, he stolidly recalled how the ministers had worked through the night to complete the proposal: ‘The sun was rising over Mount Etna as we returned to our rooms, tired but happy. Far-reaching decisions had been taken.’46 The first view from London was that, at any rate, Etna had not erupted. As the negotiations continued in Brussels about what would eventually become the EU, Britain refused to send a minister to take part, choosing instead a formidably bright but middle-ranking civil servant, a trade economist called Russell Bretherton.
This fox-like little man with a clipped moustache soon realized two things: he was being treated like a very important person by the Europeans and, second, they were deadly serious about trying to build a new political system. Bretherton was regarded by the French, Belgians and Germans as national negotiator when in truth he was a mere observer with written notes about what he could and could not say. In the mythology of the European Union, there is a wonderful story about Bretherton. It tells us that at the end of the negotiations this starchy representative of Her Britannic Majesty stood up and informed the room: ‘Gentlemen, you are trying to negotiate something you will never be able to negotiate. But if negotiated, it will not be ratified. And if ratified, it will not work.’ He is then supposed to have walked out, no doubt clutching his rolled umbrella. Sadly, it seems unlikely that this ever happened as reported, though it has poetic truth. The continental negotiators were disappointed and shocked by Britain’s lack of serious interest and Bretherton had been given a loftily dismissive brief by his political masters; it was simply less crisp than myth tells us. At any rate the Six shrugged off Britain’s attitude. They were still rebuilding shattered cities and healing torn economies, and for them the coming Union was manifest destiny. The Treaty of Rome duly followed in 1957. Coming so soon after the humiliation of Suez it was greeted by increasingly agitated head-scratching in Whitehall.
And for Britain, the world was differently shaped. The Commonwealth then meant more than a worthy outreach programme for the Royal Family. Its food and raw materials poured into Britain and there was an illusion that Britain’s manufacturing future would be secured by selling industrial goods to kith and kin in Durban, Dunedin, Canberra and Calgary. In came butter, oil, meat, aluminium, rubber, tobacco and woodpulp. Out would flow engines, cars, clothing, aircraft and electronics. The poorer members of the sterling club kept their reserves in London, so Britain was banker as well as manufacturer for much of Africa and parts of Asia too. Most people believed that to cut adrift the Commonwealth and join a new club would be economically ruinous as well as immoral. For Labour, Wilson told the Commons that ‘If there has to be a choice, we are not entitled to sell our friends and kinsmen down the river for a problematical and marginal advantage in selling washing machines in Dusseldorf.’ Later Hugh Gaitskell told the Labour conference that membership of the European Economic Community would mean the end of a thousand years of history: ‘How can one seriously suppose that if the mother country, the centre of the Commonwealth, is a province of Europe . . . it could continue to exist as the mother country of a series of independent nations?’ Yet at just this time the European market, thirsting for new consumer goods, was growing spectacularly fast, while the Commonwealth trading group was by comparison falling behind. As we have seen, most of the poorer countries did not want Britain anyway. The richer nations of the old Commonwealth – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and even semi-detached South Africa – would soon turn to the United States for their consumer goods. Rileys would not long compete with Cadillacs.
Yet membership of the EEC would subordinate Britain in important ways to foreigners. This was recognized from the first. There was no illusion. Independence would be lost. Other forms of subordination and loss of independence had already happened. The foundation of the United Nations, the post-war economic system and the establishment of Nato involved relinquishing traditional freedoms of action. Those could be painful, as Suez and the various financial crises had been. Yet there seemed to be good military and security reasons there. Europe was something different. Those who had looked clearly at the Treaty of Rome were struck by its overwhelming ambition. Lord Kilmuir, Harold Macmillan’s Lord Chancellor, told him that Parliament would lose powers to the Council of Ministers whose majority vote could change British law; that the Crown’s power over treaties would partly shift to Brussels and that British courts would find themselves in part subordinate to the European Court of Justice.47 He made it all clear in later parliamentary debates though this truth was hardly rammed home to the millions outside the world of high politics. Macmillan himself tended to obscure it in windily reassuring words, the old actor-manager trying to keep the whole theatre happy; but Kilmuir spoke out and so did Lord Home, the future Prime Minister.
Had Britain been involved from the start as even the French wanted, the EEC, eventually the EU, would have developed differently. There would certainly have been less emphasis on agricultural protection and more on free trade. ‘Europe’ might have been a little less mystical and a little more open, perhaps more democratic, though this is difficult in so many languages. At any rate, the moment passed. Even after the shock and humiliation of Suez, the Commonwealth and relations with the Americans took precedence for London. The struggle to keep in the nuclear race meant private deals with Washington which infuriated Paris. After the Treaty of Rome took effect at the beginning of 1958, French attitudes hardened. General de Gaulle, who had felt humiliated by Churchill during the war, returned as President of France, too late to stop the new European system which he had opposed on traditional nationalistic grounds, and therefore determined that it should at least be dominated by France. In the words of diplomats and journalists at the time there could not be two cocks on the dunghill.
Macmillan, always a keen Europeanist, became worried. Various British plots intended to limit the Six and hamper their project had failed. London had tried to rival the new Common Market with a grouping of the excluded countries, Britain, Austria, Denmark, Portugal, Norway, Switzerland and Sweden, calling it the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) or ‘the Seven’. This was a poor arithmetical point, since the Seven had a smaller population than the Six, were geographically scattered and far less determined. EFTA was a petulant minuet of the wallflowers. Roy Jenkins, always an ardent pro-European, described it as ‘a foolish attempt to organise a weak periphery against a strong core’.48 By 1959 Macmillan was worrying that ‘for the first time since the Napoleonic era, the major continental powers are united in a positive economic grouping, with considerable political aspects’ which might cut Britain out of Europe’s main markets and decisions. Soon in his diaries he was sounding even more alarmed, talking of ‘a boastful, powerful “Empire of Charlemagne” – now under French, but bound to come under German, control’. There was much self-deception about the possible deal that could be struck. Macmillan’s team, centred on Edward Heath, hoped that somehow the trading system of the Commonwealth supporting English-speaking farmers across the world could be accommodated by the protectionist system of Europe. They seem to have thought that any loss of sovereignty would be tolerable if this deal could be struck. Macmillan might have seemed as safely steeped in tradition as country houses and the novels of Trollope but he had nothing like the almost spiritual reverence for the House of Commons felt by Enoch Powell or, on the other side of politics, Gaitskell.
In the early Sixties the battle over Britain’s coming loss of sovereignty was postponed because British entry was blocked – brutally, publicly and ruthlessly. Two scenes tell the story. The first occurred in November 1961 at Birch Grove, Macmillan’s country house in Sussex, a substantial pile with stunning views to the South Downs. De Gaulle was due to come to Britain for talks and told the Prime Minister that, rather than visit Downing Street, he would prefer to come to his private home, two old comrades together. And they were in some ways old friends. During the war, as the leading British minister in North Africa, Macmillan had been crucial in helping de Gaulle through an immense crisis. De Gaulle, leader of the Free French, was struggling to dominate the coming government-in-exile which would take power in France after its liberation. His opponent was a right-wing general who had tolerated pro-Vichy allies but de Gaulle’s arrogance and refusal to compromise with him so infuriated Roosevelt and Churchill that they wanted him kicked out of the exiled administration. Macmillan, realizing de Gaulle’s huge potential, had worked frantically to soften Churchill and to shore up the general’s position. De Gaulle was grateful to Macmillan personally but he left North Africa more than ever convinced of the danger to France of a coming Anglo-American alliance which would try to dominate the world.
This was the background to his arrival in Sussex, one of the oddest summits in Franco-British history. To the annoyance of local gamekeepers and farmers, the woods surrounding Birch Grove had been filled with French and British police and their dogs though, to the Prime Minister’s delight, one of the Alsatians did bite a Daily Mail reporter on the bottom. Lady Dorothy, Macmillan’s wife, had been warned by the Foreign Office that she would have to find space in the fridge for the French President’s blood since he travelled with a stock for transfusion in case of an attempted assassination. Mrs Bell, the family cook, then refused to have it in the kitchen fridge which was ‘full of haddock and all sorts of things for tomorrow’; another fridge was set up in a squash court. When the talking finally started, the two leaders were interrupted by an angry gamekeeper, who protested that the police dogs were ruining the prospects for shooting that weekend. De Gaulle was perplexed, Macmillan hugely amused. After apologizing to the gamekeeper, they exchanged blunt views. Macmillan argued that European civilization was threatened from all sides and that if Britain was not allowed to join the Common Market, he would have to review everything, including keeping British troops in Germany. If de Gaulle wanted an ‘empire of Charlemagne’ it would be on its own. The French President replied that he didn’t want Britain to bring in its ‘great escort’ of Commonwealth countries – the Canadians and Australians were no longer Europeans; Indian and African countries had no place in a European system; and he feared Europe being ‘drowned in the Atlantic’. In short, he simply did not believe that Britain would ditch its old empire; and if it did, he thought it would be a Trojan horse for the Americans.
These seem formidable objections, points of principle that should have been seen as a clear warning. Yet the detailed and exhaustive talks about British entry chugged along despite them. Edward Heath clocked up sixty-three visits to Brussels, Paris and other capitals, covering 50,000 miles as he haggled and argued. But by then Macmillan was a fast-fading figure. A natural intriguer who had risen to power on the bloodied back of Eden, he was obsessed by possible political coups against himself, and increasingly (and rightly) worried about the weak state of the economy. He was failing in Europe and looked old when seen with the dapper young President Kennedy.
After an unpopular budget Macmillan drafted an alternative policy based on more planning, and decided to sack his Chancellor, a close friend, Selwyn Lloyd. The news was leaked to the papers, and over a brutal and panicky twenty-four hours in July 1962 Macmillan expanded the circle of his sackings ever more widely, removing a third of his cabinet ministers from their jobs without notice. In what became known as ‘the Night of the Long Knives’ Macmillan called in and dismissed a succession of bewildered, then outraged, colleagues. One protested that his cook would have been given more notice. Macmillan’s official biographer described it as ‘an act of carnage unprecedented in British political history’. The press portrayed him as a somewhat crazed executioner. In the Commons Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader, told him, ‘greater love hath no man than this, that he lays down his friends for his life.’ The reaction seems odd decades on, when ruthless cabinet reshuffles have happened so often, though never again on this scale. Many of those sacked deserved to lose their jobs and Macmillan, far from relishing the butchery, found it made him vomit. But it was the final failure of sangfroid.
In November, Macmillan returned to his argument with de Gaulle, this time in the grand chateau of Rambouillet, a Renaissance confection south of Paris which has been used by French presidents for scores of summits, as well as summer holidays. The circumstances were almost as odd as at Birch Grove and again centred on the issue of pheasant shooting. Though de Gaulle did not shoot himself, he organized a fairly comprehensive welcoming slaughter, standing behind Macmillan and other guests and commenting loudly every time they missed. There was much use of trumpets and the beaters were soldiers; Macmillan shot seventy-seven birds.49 But now, on his home turf de Gaulle’s objections to British membership were even more aggressively expressed. If Britain wanted to choose Europe, she would have to cut her special ties with America. At one point, Macmillan broke down in tears of frustration at the Frenchman’s intransigence, leading de Gaulle to report cruelly to his cabinet later: ‘This poor man, to whom I had nothing to give, seemed so sad, so beaten that I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder and say to him, as in the Edith Piaf song, “Ne pleurez pas, milord”.’
Cruel or not, it was a significant moment for Macmillan, for the Tories and for Britain. The Edwardian act now seemed weak and old, not impressive. When a few months later, in early 1963, de Gaulle’s ‘Non’ was abruptly announced in a Paris press conference, causing huge offence in Britain. A visit by Princess Margaret to Paris was cancelled. At the England–France rugby international at Twickenham a few days later, England won six-five and the captain assured Heath, the failed negotiator, that he had had a word with the team and told them ‘this was an all-important game. Everyone knew what I meant and produced the necessary.’50 Macmillan himself bitterly recorded in his diary that ‘the French always betray you in the end.’
In 1962 the world had come to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis. The people living round Scotland’s Holy Loch, where Macmillan had allowed the Americans to base the first nuclear submarines, immediately realized the gravity of the Cuban crisis when they awoke in the night to the unfamiliar sound of silence. The humming of motors on the loch they had become so used to had suddenly ceased and when morning broke they saw that the US submarines had slipped away to prepare their nuclear attack on Russia. In Whitehall the historian Peter Hennessy believes that Macmillan was preparing for a cabinet meeting which would have authorized the first stage of hiding his government underground. There were no illusions about what a missile strike would mean. In 1955 secret government papers on the impact of hydrogen bombs stated that the effect ‘on dense populations would remain beyond the imagination until it happened. Whether this country could withstand an all-out attack and still be in any state to carry on hostilities must be very doubtful.’51 How many H-bombs would it take to wipe out the British military state? At an eerie encounter in 1961 between the Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev and the British ambassador Sir Frank Roberts, who found themselves together at a ballet performance in Moscow, exactly this issue came up. Khrushchev asked Roberts how many it would take and he replied, loyally hoping to limit the scale of any planned strike, that Britain would be destroyed by six H-bombs. The Soviet leader told him that ‘optimists’ at the Soviet forward command headquarters in East Berlin had reckoned Britain would take nine. In fact, said Khrushchev, the Soviet general staff had a higher opinion of the UK’s capacity to resist and had earmarked ‘several scores of bombs for use’ against Britain.52
In the face of this horror, the British government had built huge networks of bunkers, with food and water supplies, emergency generators, communications systems, decontamination suits and the rest in order to maintain some vestigial State alive after the holocaust. Plans for regional command centres and what has been described as a form of Cromwellian military dictatorship with martial law and the shooting of civilians who resisted, were well advanced. By the early sixties, Macmillan had his post-nuclear government system ready. Whitehall had earmarked 210 people who would run the remnant of a country, from chiefs of staff and intelligence officers to typists and clerks. They would be rushed to TURNSTILE, the top secret underground bunker system with sixty miles of tunnels, built deep under the Cotswolds at Corsham. Everyone else, including the wives, husbands and children of those ordered to the bunkers, would have been left to burn, die of radiation poisoning, or otherwise expire. Sir Rodric Braithwaite, later Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, said of all this planning that ‘It was inescapable, it was necessary and it was lunatic.’
Something of the same mix of fatalism and fascination underpinned the determination of successive British governments to persevere with un-independent nuclear weapons, something to chuck back in the final hour. We have seen how, under Attlee and Churchill, Britain struggled to create her own nuclear deterrent, and did so hoping to maintain her independence from America. For a brief period of five or six years Bevin’s belief in the possibility of a genuinely independent British bomb was vindicated but in the Macmillan years all this changed. It is striking that the original clinching argument for British nuclear weapons, which was that they would give Britain’s politicians special status and leverage to influence Washington, so quickly collapsed. Leverage and dependency rarely go together. And it is even more striking that when the argument collapsed there was no radical rethinking of Britain’s nuclear posture. In government nobody seemed to notice.
The RAF had been assembling a great fleet of V-bombers – Valiants, Victors and finally Vulcans – intended to fly over Russia and drop free-falling nuclear bombs. Like the bombers, the bombs had been developed independently at Aldermaston. They continued to grow in destructive power, giant squat tubes with wings and names such as Blue Danube, Yellow Sun or Red Beard. But the V-bomber fleet had been running late. So in 1958 as a stop-gap Macmillan allowed sixty huge American Thor missiles to be stationed in Britain. The UK’s intercontinental ballistic missiles, Blue Streak, used liquid propellant which had to be stored separately, creating too long a preparation period in a nuclear emergency. British planners believed they would have as little as two and a half minutes’ warning of a Soviet missile attack. To defend Blue Streak while the fuel was prepared would have meant building sixty vast silos deep in the ground, an epic project too expensive for Whitehall to contemplate.
Two years later in 1960 when the Soviets shot down an American U2 spy plane, flying far higher than any Victor, Vulcan or B52 could manage, the age of the bombers was over. At first that wasn’t clear and Macmillan began negotiating to buy American air-launched Sky-bolt missiles, which it was thought could be used by the V-bomber fleet to fire at the Soviet Union from a safe distance. At Camp David, Eisenhower’s Spartan retreat in Maryland outside Washington, Macmillan struck his deal. Britain could buy Skybolt and in return the United States would be allowed a deep-water base for its latest top-secret missile system, the submarine-launched Polaris, which was to be tested that year. Yet again, events overtook Macmillan. Skybolt turned out to be a dud, or at least too unreliable for the United States. The age of the nuclear submarine had arrived.
To stay in this race, Britain would need Polaris instead. Impossible to trace underwater, the submarines carrying them could cruise the oceans for months. Each submarine sailed with sixteen missiles. Each missile, once launched could not be stopped. Each carried more destructive force than all the bombs dropped in the Second World War. ‘Polaris’ was the ultimate doomsday fish. Thanks to Macmillan’s deal at Camp David, the first American version arrived a short drive away from Glasgow. Macmillan originally talked to Eisenhower only about some base in Scottish waters, though sites in England and Wales were also considered. He had been nervous from the start, noting in his diary that ‘A picture could well be drawn of some frightful accident which might devastate the whole of Scotland.’53 The US Navy, however, searching for suitable sites, rejected the north-west Highlands as too remote. They fixed on the Holy Loch, a steep-sided inlet close to Glasgow. It had deep water, it was easy for navigation, quiet and yet submarines would quickly be able to hide themselves in the heavy marine traffic leaving and entering the Clyde. It was also close to Scotland’s only international airport, Prestwick, which would be handy for American sailors. Macmillan became increasingly alarmed at the promise he had made, writing to Eisenhower that, ‘It would surely be a mistake to put down what will become a major nuclear target so near to the third largest and most overcrowded city in this country. As soon as the announcement was made, Malinovsky [the Soviet defence minister] would threaten to aim his rockets at Glasgow and there would not only be the usual agitation of the defeatists and the pacifists but also genuine apprehension among ordinary folk.’
Eisenhower was blandly dismissive: they had discussed merely a Scottish base, had they not? The details would be worked out by naval people. But that was the trouble. The Royal Navy was desperate to get its hands on Polaris. Its status was crucially affected. If it became the nuclear delivery system, then after decades of air power supremacy, the navy would finally edge ahead of the RAF as the most important, as well as the senior, service. So the naval lobbyists were adamant that Macmillan must be accommodating about the Holy Loch. Macmillan was impaled. The same went for a government suggestion that the US Navy might agree to joint control over the American missiles stationed in Scotland. Again, this was vetoed. Again, the Navy was with the Americans. Macmillan buckled and allowed the deal to stand. The now inaptly named Holy Loch would welcome America’s nuclear submarine fleet. When the first US nuclear supply ship arrived in the Clyde, the captain faced a tiny demonstration by Scottish CND members in canoes and kayaks – which he dismissed as the protest of a few ‘damn Eskimos’. Both his ship, the Proteus, and the first nuclear submarines into the Clyde, were targeted by protesters who managed to hold onto the bows of the supply ship, climb its side and generally win a little publicity. There was a demonstration in Glasgow and marches to the gates of the new US base but CND’s plan for a blockade by dinghy and canoe was defeated by rain, choppy waters and energetic policing by local bobbies.
A few years later, Macmillan did a further deal, this time with the new US President John F. Kennedy; and the Royal Navy duly got its own Polaris fleet. Britain would build the submarines, at Barrow-in-Furness and Birkenhead, including the nuclear power systems, and would produce her own nuclear warheads. But America would supply the Polaris missiles themselves. Work started in 1963 on a new British nuclear submarine base at Faslane, just along the coast from the Holy Loch, the first new naval base since 1909. It had become perfectly obvious after the Cuban missile crisis that if Armageddon happened, it would have been triggered by some miscalculation or accident involving the US or the USSR. Every other nation, nuclear or not, would be a mere observer. And if the independent deterrence was not independent, and far from giving Britain leverage, made her a supplicant, why did Britain press on? The mixed motives of Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home included a whiff of the old Churchillian fantasy about great power status. There was also a vague sense that the Western alliance should include more than just one nuclear power. Russia was a real threat, and if deterrence worked then Britain needed it as much as anyone. With a large British Army of the Rhine and this country the first in line for any pre-emptive Soviet missile strike, there was a remarkably wide political consensus on the need for submarines and missiles, with the Union Jack on top. Polling and voting shows that most of the time a large majority of voters agreed with this despite the campaigns of the disarmers. Labour never went anti-nuclear, even though so many of its supporters were so passionately committed to CND.
By the early sixties Britain was essentially in the same global rictus that she would adopt until the end of the Cold War. Once she had stomped the globe, imposing her will on subject peoples. Now she was stoically preparing for her own destruction, burrowing deep and buying the wherewithal for a final act of retaliation. She was sloughing off the Age of Empire, until only a few scattered dots would remain. She was America’s unsinkable carrier and ally, not an independent European power. Her main commitment was to the fight against Communism and on it she was spending proportionately more money than any comparable country. This required a great rearrangement of the mental furniture, but it was rearranged by both main parties. They all struggled with it. In the Attlee years it had been the struggle for financial survival and to achieve an independent British bomb. In the sunset Churchill administration it was his forlorn attempt to make peace between the Americans and Russians. Eden suffered the disillusioning smash of Suez and Macmillan came to terms with the Americans finding that even the smallest expressions of independence, as over the Holy Loch, were brushed aside. All through these years with steadily shrinking armed forces, Britain had been fighting somebody somewhere. Any British citizen reviewing life in these islands since 1945 would conclude that they have enjoyed one of the longest periods of peace ever. Yet from outside, and in secret corners, the story had been very different. Fighters then, fighters now.
How might one sum up the love-hate relationship between the British Establishment and their allies in Washington, at the height of the Cold War? What metaphor might you choose? They were like competitive gamblers trying to outwit the wicked Soviets, yet constantly wary of one another. The self-assured Englishman, who moves between the world of espionage and high society, is out there taking the risks, but he simply doesn’t have the cash to keep playing. The Americans, whom he treats with a mixture of condescension and admiration, are watching half-contemptuously, ready to help at the last minute. The British agent is cultured, well educated and stylish but fated to be the junior partner. He is prickly about his politics. Obsessively, he defends his country’s underlying greatness despite the appearance of weakness. For one to the manner born, it is a kind of torture and he ends up naked, with his testicles hanging out of the bottom of a cane chair, having them beaten – a nasty but undeniably powerful image of the humiliation of British power. All this comes, of course, from the first ever James Bond novel, Casino Royale, published in 1953.
Its author was in his way at least as influential a commentator on the Anglo-American relationship as most politicians. Ian Fleming is also a fine example of how British society was tightly twisted at the top. He was yet another Etonian, and yet another character who flitted between journalism, intelligence and high society. Of a Scottish banking family, he had tried Sandhurst, foreign reporting – including in Stalin’s Moscow – and the City – where he was no good – before joining Naval Intelligence during the war. There his wild schemes for sabotage and dirty tricks were widely considered more fit for novels. After the war he ran a network of foreign correspondents from London and, like so many other Britons, tried to work out ways of moving out of the dreary reality of austerity London. He eventually built a house in Jamaica, then a British colony, which he called Goldeneye.
It turns out to be Ian Fleming’s wife Ann, admired by her friends for her ‘sharpness, determination and lack of pretence’54 who really gives us the feel of how interconnected politics and society life were in the 1950s. Ann had originally been married to a newspaper magnate, Esmond Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail and London Evening Standard. She had had a high old time in the years after the war, living like an old-fashioned society hostess while making and unmaking editors and journalistic careers – it was one of her protégés who broke the story of Princess Elizabeth’s engagement to Philip Mountbatten. But she had been enjoying a long affair with Fleming and eventually divorced the devastated Lord Rothermere to marry him, taking off in new directions, politically and sexually. She was a close friend of Eden’s wife, Clarissa, who had in turn been loved by the novelist Evelyn Waugh, a friend of Ann’s. The latter two were great letter-writers, which is how we can picture Clarissa Eden in Number Ten practising with a snorkel – for it was to Ian Fleming’s Goldeneye that the Edens fled after Suez to recuperate.
Ann was dubious about the idea, writing to Waugh in November 1956 that the Prime Minister’s wife ‘seemed disconcerted to hear that if one wished a bath, one had to give two days’ notice and that I did not know if there was a dentist on the island and that all the doctors were black. I warned her that shoes must be worn while bathing and that the reef abounded with scorpion fish, barracuda and urchins. I forgot to tell her that if [Eden] is impregnated with spines he should pee on them . . . I think Torquay and a sunlamp would be more peaceful and patriotic.’ The governor of Jamaica was equally concerned, but the Edens, like Noël Coward and many others, did make for the island and the Flemings’ exotic home. When wounded you stick with your own, and these were tight little circles: Ian and Ann Fleming had originally heard about Burgess and Maclean’s defection to Moscow, for instance, while staying with the Edens at Chequers. The memory stayed with them; defending the honour of the British secret service at a time when it was stained by treachery was one of Fleming’s purposes in his novels.
It was not only the worlds of newspapers, Tory politics and writing that Ann Fleming pulled together. A few years after the Edens had visited she was describing another politician on the island, someone who had become one of her favourite dance-partners and lovers. She paints a vivid portrait of the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell swimming, then disappearing underwater for a worryingly long time before breaking surface ‘like an amiable hippo’. In her letters to friends, she was discreet about her love affair with Gaitskell, though the affectionate animal metaphors slightly give the game away – later, he is ‘a very inquisitive man, he has a long inquisitive nose like the ant-eating tapir’. Gaitskell was one of the upper-crust socialists, distrusted by the Labour left. Even so, for such a Tory hostess to have an affair with him would have horrified her friends. It only matters because it shows how small and tight-woven the top of British society still was. You should have seen: everybody, darling, was there.
The history of Britain in the fifties is the history of unconscious conspiracies. The private language of upper-crust diaries and letters is mocking but nervous. The London drinking clubs remain from prewar times but the grand houses are shutting down and the Americans are taking over. In different ways, all these people, from Noël Coward to the newspaper barons, Gaitskell to the Flemings, are struggling with timewarp lives and challenged patriotism. Morals are becoming more fluid. New kinds of pleasure are seeping in. One of his biographers wrote of the Labour leader, ‘Britain was changing, growing more affluent, beginning to enjoy the peace, and Gaitskell relaxed a little alongside everyone else.’55 Gaitskell himself, meanwhile, was able to appreciate both Flemings, writing of the Bond books in the New Statesman that ‘I am a confirmed Fleming fan – or should it be addict? The combination of sex, violence, alcohol and – at intervals – good food and nice clothes is, to one who lives such a circumscribed life as I do, irresistible.’56 It is hard to think of a couple of sentences which explain so well how the austerity years gave way to the Swinging Sixties. Gaitskell was one of the most intensely patriotic men in British public life, deeply wary of America, yet he was being tugged that way too.
James Bond would become one of the most successful if mildly ironic symbols of defiant British pride as the years rolled on, not least through the endless films. Gadget-packed Aston Martins; imperturbable and apparently competent Whitehall mandarins; parachutes opening to display the Union Jack; and above all Bond himself, with his self-confidence in everything from cocktails and sex to scuba-diving and skiing – this was truly a glorious fantasy for a nation in trouble. The Americans were shown as friendly and powerful but slightly slow on the uptake, while in the early novels Fleming worked to satisfy the almost pornographic lust of the British for the richer, more colourful consumer culture over the Atlantic – Gaitskell’s wistful ‘good food and nice clothes’. American cigarettes, nylon shirts and food are indeed lovingly described: in a characteristic passage from Live and Let Die, Bond leaves a ‘bitter raw day . . . the dreary half-light of a London fog’ to go to New York, where his hotel serves him crabs and tartare sauce, ‘flat beef Hamburgers, medium-rare, from the charcoal grill, french-fried potatoes, broccoli, mixed salad with thousand-island dressing, ice-cream with melted butterscotch’ and Liebfraumilch wine. That a burger-and-chips with Blue Nun menu, which would soon become common in suburban lounge bars across Britain, clearly seemed so mouth-wateringly exotic in 1954 is eloquent and, in its way, touching. Though Fleming was a connected member of the elite, Bond’s route to a mass audience would be through rougher trade. Fleming had pictured his agent as an Old Etonian but a working-class Scottish bodybuilder and former milkman, Sean Connery, was chosen to play the first James Bond, and he was followed by a range of shapes and accents, including an Irishman. This appeared to suggest that Bond was something of an outsider, which in turn expanded the films’ appeal. In a further twist, the films were only ever made because of the financial backing of America’s United Artists and the ex-Hollywood producer Albert or ‘Cubby’ Broccoli. He had been working in London, as had his Bond partner, a Canadian called Harry Salzman, whose earlier work included films of grittier subjects such as John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. James Bond would pay rather better.
Was it all a bit too much? Not really: the political scandal that happened at the fag-end of the Tory years was more highly coloured and more unlikely than much of what Ian Fleming poured into his early ‘shockers’.
This tall tale began on a hot summer evening around the swimming pool of a grand house, Cliveden, in Buckinghamshire. Now a hotel for the very rich, the Italianate mansion overlooking the Thames in one of the finest locations in southern England, had once belonged to the Duke of Westminster. Its architecture has an exuberant opulence that makes you laugh out loud even now, and its original style can be summarized by the fact that it contained a dining room taken wholesale from the French palace of Madame de Pompadour. Cliveden was already notorious as a place of cliques and plotters. It had been the home of the first Lord Astor, a newspaper magnate, and his famous wife, politician and hostess, Nancy, a woman who could have given Ann Fleming a run for her money. Before the war, Nancy Astor’s gatherings had been attacked by the left-wing journalist Claud Cock-burn as the very epicentre of pro-appeasement thinking. At Cliveden, Cockburn insisted, Lords Halifax and Lothian and the pro-appeasement Times editor Geoffrey Dawson, gathered with the Astors to undermine Eden and Churchill, and plot a deal with Hitler. The evidence of actual plotting at Cliveden is scanty but the Communist Party took up the story of an upper-class conspiracy, involving highly placed Americans and members of the Royal Family ready to sell out democracy to the Nazis. Soon the ‘Cliveden set’ was being talked about from Berlin to Washington. Nancy Astor, then an MP, complained that she was portrayed as the centre of ‘a vicious and degenerate gang’ and received letters saying that she and her family ‘should be taken out and shot’. When she eventually confronted Cockburn at a party she spat in his face. Remarkably, political lightning now struck the same house again. Cliveden, or rather its swimming pool, helped finish off Tory reputations a generation later.57
The next Lord Astor, known as Bill, was trying to live a relatively apolitical and social life. Amiable, thrice-married, he was turning Cliveden again into a party palace where well-off and eminent guests enjoyed themselves. One of his friends was a slightly sinister osteopath of extreme left-wing affectations (rather than views) called Stephen Ward. He had massaged the backs of Winston Churchill, Gaitskell, many Royals and Elizabeth Taylor. It was said of him that ‘he enjoyed “handling” people’s lives as he enjoyed handling their dislocated limbs or damaged muscles.’ Ward, also a talented artist, kept a collection of pretty young girls whose careers he vaguely promoted in the modelling and sex business. One was called Christine Keeler. She had run away to London from her railway carriage home at the age of fifteen and lived a wild teenage youth afterwards. On the night in question, she was staying with Ward and two others at a grand, vaguely Germanic ‘cottage’ in the Cliveden grounds. Astor allowed Ward and his guests to use his swimming pool. On the muggy evening Keeler shed a borrowed bathing costume and was naked in the pool when Astor wandered down with one of his guests, the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo. Handsome, flirtatious, Profumo had had a good war in a cavalry regiment and was married to a then-famous actress, Valerie Hobson. The only obviously exotic thing about him was his name, which came from an aristocratic Italian grandfather. But hot summer nights are hot summer nights. The men chased Keeler around the pool and later invited her and Ward back to the main house, where Keeler and Profumo began to flirt. He contacted her later and they were soon having an affair. This would probably have remained unknown, in the discreet codes of the time, except for a rotund, cheerful Russian military attaché, and spy, called Yevgeny Ivanov. Ward knew him too (Ward knew ‘everybody’) because he had been introduced to Ivanov by the editor of the Daily Telegraph (who else?) at lunch in the exclusive Garrick Club (where else?). Ivanov also wanted to hire a cottage at Cliveden, which might have struck others as being a tad suspicious. He met Profumo at the pool too. The two men were soon engaged in a childish swimming race. A couple of years later, neatly completing the circle, Ivanov was sleeping with Keeler.
This tangled connection of minister, spy, call-girl, peer and masseur might not have hit the headlines at all, except that among Keeler’s other men was a West Indian dope-dealer who was accused of firing a gun at Ward’s flat. During his trial, rumours started to spread. Keeler became a minor celebrity. There was the famous photograph, attributed by many to David Bailey, of her sitting naked as she looked back from a trendy Arne Jacobsen chair. (In this story nothing should be taken at face value: the photographer was Lewis Morley, the chair was a copy and Keeler was not naked, just cleverly posed.) Private Eye printed a knowing cartoon and article though in fact the cartoonist and writers were largely using guesswork. Keeler had been hanging round the same crowd as the satirists and her connections were widely known in London. The Private Eye story so alarmed Stephen Ward, however, that he turned up at the magazine’s grimy Soho offices and confirmed the lot. Political London is a village and soon the story was raised in the Commons by George Wigg, an unpleasant ex-army Labour MP and friend of Harold Wilson’s, who happened to loathe Profumo. The panicking minister was hauled in and interrogated late at night by the government whips. He hotly denied that he had had sex with Keeler, a lie he then repeated to the Commons. The Prime Minister, like the rest of the Tory hierarchy, believed him.
Jack Profumo was tormented by what he had done. As the Labour opposition leader, Harold Wilson, sent Macmillan further lurid allegations that Ward had tried to get nuclear secrets from Profumo, using Keeler and pillow-talk, the minister fled on holiday to Italy. He there admitted the truth to his wife and returned to make a public confession. He was instantly ruined, spent the rest of his life in private voluntary work in London, atoning for what he had done, and ended his life widely respected and officially honoured for his charity work. But you never escape a name that memorable. More than forty years on, newspaper billboards announced: ‘Sex Scandal Minister Dies’. Back in 1963 the press was in particularly vengeful mood. During his trial for living off the earnings of prostitution, Ward killed himself with an overdose. In the most famous words uttered as the tale unfolded, Mandy Rice-Davies, Keeler’s friend, was asked in court about Lord Astor’s denial that he had had sex with her. She replied: ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’ The frankness of her assumption that yes, of course, rich and powerful men were liars, caught the nation’s mood. Most such scandals simply end. The headlines yellow, the victims limp off to try to rebuild their lives and politics thunders on as usual. The Profumo affair was different. There was a famous inquiry into it by the judge Lord Denning. His report was a bestseller when published by the government, rivalling the Beveridge Report of twenty years earlier. (The different subjects and tone tell us something about Britain’s journey.) Denning cleared MI5 of failure, minimized any security aspect and concluded that Ivanov and Profumo were not sharing Keeler’s bed. Yet very shortly afterwards, in a very tight race, Labour would win the 1964 general election by just four seats. It is a tiny margin. The Profumo affair caused such national interest that it might well have tipped the balance against the Tories.
If so, it was a vote against a closed world of interconnecting relationships from which too many British people felt excluded. Macmillan himself had led a blameless, indeed celibate, life in late adulthood after his wife’s long affair with a fellow politician, Bob Boothby. But the tight connections between a small number of powerful political and social players were particularly intense in the fifties, before the democratizing effect of the sixties’ educational and cultural revolution. The Profumo affair brought both worlds together, in collision. Astor and Profumo, the mistresses and the discreet introductions in London clubs, all came from the old world. The drug-smuggling boyfriend with a gun and the good-time girls from working class backgrounds, unshockable and impossible to intimidate, were characters from the new Britain taking shape around Macmillan. Universes collided. Energy was released. Its noise was heard as the ‘satire boom’.
Beyond the Fringe
Political satire, which had been exuberantly popular in Georgian times, had become duller during the noontide of Empire, and now returned in full force, from savage cartoons in the newspapers, staged lampoons, and the fortnightly mockery of the magazine Private Eye. It can be tempting to treat comedy like a ball being passed down the line in a game of rugby. Among the two million regular listeners to The Goon Show in the mid-fifties were key members of the next generation of comics, who would sting more, men such as Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook. The Goons pass to Beyond the Fringe; Beyond the Fringe passes to Monty Python’s Flying Circus; they pass to Little Britain, and so on until the touch-judge puts a flag up and stops play. Each generation does indeed catch the humour of the previous one, changes it and throws it on. Peter Cook, who is Spike Milligan’s only rival as the outstanding comic genius of the age, as a schoolboy sent a script to the BBC good enough for Milligan to invite him up to London for lunch. In turn, the generation of comedians who created Monty Python’s Flying Circus were transfixed by Cook and his friends. But the origins of the comedy keep changing. The real difference between Milligan and Secombe, and indeed many other war-trained comedians making names for themselves in post-war London, and the next lot, was public school. Had R. A. Butler acted on his original instinct and broken down the ancient class divide in British education, the country’s humour would have been very different. By the 1960s, the flow of lower-middle-class and working-class children through grammar schools and into the universities was strongly affecting the atmosphere of the whole country. But in the decade after the war, the private schools still dominated things. They were often bleak institutions. The austerity years meant little heating, poor food and few modern facilities, a life decorated by brutal customs and petty hierarchies often dating back to the reign of Queen Victoria.
Peter Cook’s school, Radley in Oxfordshire, deployed a private vocabulary, frequent beatings, cold showers, complicated rules about which buttons which boys were allowed to do up, compulsory star-jumps, thumpings with hockey sticks for minor transgressions, and of course a great deal of bullying, undeterred by the staff. This forced bright but vulnerable children like Cook to develop mimickry and mockery to deflect bullies – which in his case included the England cricket captain to be, Ted Dexter. Cook’s biographer, Harry Thompson, himself a noted comic, quoted Cook explaining how he would make people laugh in order that they would not hit him. Thompson asked: ‘How many times, over the years, has the British comedy industry had cause to be grateful to generations of public school bullies?’58 Richard Ingrams, editor of Private Eye, cut his comic teeth at Shrewsbury School, sitting high above the River Severn, and at least as weird as Radley. Its new boys were called ‘douls’ after the Greek for slave; its day started with cold baths; it too had a byzantine dress code, involving different colours of scarf, tie and waistcoat, buttons done up or not, and the rest; when the whole school was sent on cross-country runs, the boys were chased by men with whips. Ingrams’s humour was less about mimickry; instead he, Paul Foot and Willie Rushton, who would join him at Private Eye, turned to writing mock school magazines.
At Radley and Shrewsbury as in scores of other similar schools, such as John Cleese’s Clifton College in Bristol, or indeed Prince Charles’s Gordonstoun in Scotland, boys developed underground languages to cope with their aggressive and closed communities. They knew little of women, which meant the humour that emerged from this was often toe-curlingly juvenile about sex. They were rarely politically radical. They were from a privileged elite, after all. Cook’s father had been a colonial civil servant in Nigeria and Gibraltar. Ingrams was the son of an eccentric banker and intelligence agent, a one-time member of the pro-Nazi Anglo-German Fellowship Society, and a Catholic mother whose father had been Queen Victoria’s doctor. Both men were brought up to look down on the working classes as essentially inferior and comic, though Ingrams would have his perspective shifted as a soldier during the Korean War. Their satire would be biting, with underlying layers of anger and hurt. But it would be very public-schoolboyish too, tittering and often snobby.
The brightest then went on to Cambridge or Oxford, still then mostly male societies, and where in those days there was a direct line from the world of Oxbridge student reviews to the West End. Future satirists mingled with fellow students who would go on to become politicians and business leaders. Thompson points out that this too would affect the style of comedy soon to sweep middle-class Britain. Peter Cook’s generation at Cambridge in 1957 would include the later Conservative cabinet ministers Michael Howard, Kenneth Clarke and Leon Brittan, as well as numerous actors and impresarios: ‘One reason that Oxbridge has traditionally produced so many political satirists is that its undergraduates come face to face with their future political leaders at an early age, and realise then quite how many of them are social retards who join debating societies in order to find friends.’ (Though in fairness it should be added that the same can apply to those joining student theatre companies and satirical magazines.) At Cambridge, Cook simply transferred his monotone sketches about the Radley school butler, to the new environment and eventually had half the undergraduates mimicking him and repeating his one-liners. Sometimes comic success is just a voice. Cook found his voice as a schoolboy and essentially never lost it; the same deadpan, bathetic philosophy swept from public school to Cambridge to Edinburgh’s Beyond the Fringe review, to London, New York and immortality. Ingrams and Rushton, similarly, transferred their jokes and cartoon characters from a school magazine to a student one, and then, with others, to Private Eye. Around these people were many others from different backgrounds who would become just as important in the story of British comedy – Alan Bennett, the Yorkshire grammar school boy; Dudley Moore, the working-class boy from Dagenham; David Frost, the Methodist preacher’s son from Kent. But the dominant personalities of Cook and Ingrams gave them a particular hold over the satire boom.
The day when the traditional Establishment decided it had to acknowledge its critical cousin, the comedy establishment, was 28 February 1962. The Queen visited Beyond the Fringe in London’s Fortune Theatre to see the vicious caricature of her prime minister by Peter Cook. Cook had done his Macmillan at Cambridge and at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe already. In London he had been playing to packed houses since the previous May. There had been protests and walk-outs by people outraged at seeing the Queen’s first minister lampooned in public. But the Queen herself roared with laughter. After this Macmillan, determined to show he was a good sport and could take a joke, decided to go along too. This was a mistake. Other Tory cabinet ministers had seen it already but when the Prime Minister arrived, Cook spotted him in the audience and deviated from his script. In an Edwardian drawl, he told Macmillan: ‘When I’ve a spare evening, there’s nothing I like better than to wander over to a theatre and sit there listening to a group of sappy, urgent, vibrant young satirists, with a stupid great grin spread all over my silly old face.’
The crueller the political comedy, the greater its success. Shortly afterwards, Cook opened the briefly famous Establishment Club in Soho as the capital of the new satire movement. Every night comedy and music would be offered, along with trendy new foods and a bar. It was mobbed and its membership included much of the old Establishment. Everybody, it seemed, wanted a part of the new comedy, including some who weren’t very funny themselves. A spin-off revue, where David Frost was doing his own version of Cook’s Macmillan, was visited by the gangsters of the moment, the Kray twins. A few months after the Queen’s visit, Cook bought the fledgling Private Eye too, where Richard Ingrams would soon become editor. The BBC was just holding its breath to see whether the satire boom could survive on-screen, with That Was the Week That Was, again compered by Frost. It ran for a short season until hurriedly taken off the air as the 1964 election approached. For a short time it seemed that a small bunch of university comics had created a republic of laughter strong enough to change the country.
This was an illusion, never shared by the key players themselves. Cook had had the idea for his club many years earlier visiting West Germany, and would refer wryly to the ‘great tradition of those satirical clubs of the 1930s that had done so much to prevent the rise of Adolf Hitler’. He said different things at different times about Macmillan and the Tories. Right-wing friends tended to think he was right-wing, and socialists thought he was one of theirs, but if Peter Cook had any politics they were never consistent and always took second place to a good punchline. Richard Ingrams was certainly no socialist; his independent-minded Tory radicalism allowed him to flay party placemen from all sides and he was compared to that great nineteenth-century radical Tory William Cobbett. Harold Wilson, observing with delight the satirical onslaught on Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home, later tried to ingratiate himself with Private Eye when he became Prime Minister, inviting Ingrams to Downing Street and professing himself a great admirer of satire. His reward was to become one of the magazine’s most loathed and aggressively pursued targets as the Labour years rolled on.
There were politically minded people at the edges of the satire movement of the early sixties, many of them radicalized by CND and on the left of the Labour Party. Fluck and Law, who would go on to create the latex puppetry of Spitting Image, were socialist friends of Peter Cook’s. Richard Ingrams’ closest friend was probably Paul Foot, nephew of the Labour politician Michael Foot, who became a leading light in the Socialist Workers’ Party and a fine investigative journalist. But there was no organic link between the left of British politics and the wave of comedians, mimics and journalists who tore down the facade of Tory Britain fifteen years after the war. There could not have been. Too many of the satirists were public schoolboys, getting their own back on the nation’s authority figures just as they tried to get their own back on schoolmasters and bullies. Macmillan was for them, in essence, just the head of a decaying prep school. Labour was full of lower-middle-class and working-class people with their funny accents and limited little lives. If there was any alliance, it was very short and entirely one of convenience.
Conclusion: A Country of Cliques is Over
The story of Britain in the years after the fall of Attlee’s New Jerusalem, and before the sixties really began to swing is the story of a country still run by cliques and in-groups, rather than by visionary individuals, still less the masses. Understand the networks, the clubs and the personal associations and you understand the system. For the Tories, public school and Oxbridge links, even family ones, had provided the fusebox of power. Post-war growth had given clique politics a good run. But this Britain eventually failed. It failed over Suez, over the growing signs of economic failure, in its late attempt to copy French central planning and in its inability to grasp the new culture and society growing up all around it. The symbols of that failure were the spy scandals, the Profumo affair and the rising froth of satirical laughter. Macmillan had finished it off, bloodily, on ‘the Night of the Long Knives’. Before this act of almost domestic butchery there was still a notion that the chaps at the Turf Club, the old families with their stalking and salmon rivers, that web of Old Etonian cronies, could maintain British authority and self-confidence, despite the local difficulties of a disintegrating Empire and a weak economy; that they could hang together. Patently, they could not.
The final stage in the collapse of the old authority came with Macmillan’s illness and resignation, and the stitch-up which eventually put the bony, amiable, slightly bemused Lord Home of the Hirsel into Number Ten as the fourth Tory Prime Minister in a row. Much of British politics still came down to class, which threw up many ironies. In this case it was the long, ultimately successful legal fight by a Labour leftwinger, Lord Stansgate, better known as Anthony Wedgwood Benn, better known still as Tony Benn, to disclaim or throw off his peerage. His success in court electrified the Tory struggle. There were Tories in the Commons who were popular candidates to replace Macmillan, above all Rab Butler. Yet the new ability to fling off a coronet and become a commoner and thus possibly an MP in the Commons, meant two other prominent Conservatives could now take part in the race. One was Lord Hailsham, a clever, popular but ultimately rather undignified man, favoured by Macmillan. The other was Lord Home. Macmillan was far less ill than he thought but the news that he would go turned the Tory conference of October 1963, normally a placid and deferential gathering, into wild and hysterical seaside hustings. Lord Hailsham made it clear he would renounce his peerage but then discredited himself with a display of crude and exhibitionistic self-promotion. Macmillan quickly dropped him as favourite, some suggest because he did not want a successor who would be there for long, just in case he could manage a comeback. Rab Butler made a poor speech, leading some to wonder if he really wanted to be prime minister; he was a great mind, and much admired by the brighter Tories, but he lacked the slightest evidence of killer instinct. Enoch Powell, one of his supporters, said they had put the gun in his hands, but he refused to fire it. Macmillan coldly dismissed him as lacking ‘the last six inches of steel’. Up in London, Macmillan was still ill in bed and arranged for the various grandees of the party to ‘take soundings’ among the MPs, party workers, peers and constituency chairmen. This highly unscientific survey produced Lord Home’s name and he was duly proposed by Macmillan, invited by the Queen, accepted, renounced his peerage, won a by-election in a then-tame Scottish Tory constituency and duly entered Number Ten. Fast work milord.
Widely liked but self-effacing, Lord Home, Macmillan’s Foreign Secretary, had a political career which led right back to the Chamberlain government and the Munich appeasement of Hitler. This did not and should not have counted against him entirely. Butler had also been an appeaser; so had, for a while, Hailsham; indeed, so had most of the Tory Party at the time. But Home seemed utterly against the spirit of the new decade. He was the ultimate grouse-moor Tory, but without Macmillan’s wily toughness. Not just a toff but worse, a nice toff. The idea outraged many Tories, notably Hailsham and the liberal Iain Macleod. Powell was equally livid and both men refused to serve under Home, who was described by press commentators at the time as ‘a cretin’ and ‘this half-witted Earl’. In a famous article in the Spectator, Iain Macleod as editor attacked the choice as a stitch-up by the Conservative Party’s ‘magic circle’. He narrated the key soundings, involving Macmillan and functionaries such as Lords Dilhorne, Poole and St Aldwyn, pointing out in a devastating aside: ‘Eight of the nine men mentioned in the last sentence went to Eton.’
As it happened, Alec Douglas-Home went on to be a tougher opponent than Harold Wilson had expected. An Etonian schoolboy contemporary, the writer Cyril Connolly, had described the new Prime Minister as ‘the kind of graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy who is showered with favours and crowned with all the laurels . . . In the eighteenth century he would have become prime minister before he was thirty: as it was he appeared honourably ineligible for the struggle for life.’ Home proved Connolly wrong, at least in getting to the premier position and in being ready to fight for it. Later, he would return as Heath’s Foreign Secretary in 1970–4 and lived long to be a much-liked grand old man of Toryism. Yet he never overcame the handicap of being a symbol of the old ways. As Prime Minister in the early sixties he was out of time, an immaculately turned out anachronism. Macmillan unwittingly pointed this out in a draft of his resignation letter to the Queen, in which he cheerfully described Home as ‘clearly a man who represents the old, governing class at its best’. By 1964, that class was bust. Wilson put it well: ‘We are living in the jet age but we are governed by an Edwardian establishment mentality.’
Though in theory opposed to this fusty clique-ridden world, behind the clothing and language, Labour leaders were not quite as different as they liked to appear. That party too was a cluster of competing clubs and networks, whose own connections to business were chance friendships which would later cause much embarrassment. The trade unions were still mostly in the hands of the old right-wing leaders who manipulated and wire-pulled to stay in office; Whitehall was run by a tiny elite of clubmen, the hyper-educated classicists from Oxbridge in their striped trousers and stiff collars who knew they were cleverer than any elite, anywhere else. The Liberals, under their charismatic leader Jo Grimond, stood outside the inner clubs of fifties power which was no doubt why they began to have some spectacular by-election successes towards the end of the Tory years, particularly in Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. They were seen as somehow modern and classless, though in fact Grimond was another Old Etonian who was intertwined in the once-grand family alliances of strangely dead Liberal England. In Scotland and Wales, the Nationalist parties were just beginning to challenge the paternalists. But when Anthony Sampson published Anatomy of Britain he had illustrated it with a sprawling diagram of intersecting circles to show the closed and nepotistic system under which the country was organized. It was probably the most influential piece of journalism of his long career and as potent in its way as the coining of the word ‘Establishment’ by another journalist, Henry Fairlie, at around the same time.
Of course, all advanced societies have Establishments. France swapped her great Catholic families for the intellectual elites of the de Gaulle era; German industrialists cooperated cosily together in their assault on world markets; even the United States has its Ivy League colleges and grand families interlinked from Wall Street to Washington. But in democracies elites require prestige to survive. They need to have spread their successes widely enough to retain authority. The British elites of the early sixties failed this test. Despite the new tycoons and the cluster of truly innovative big companies, Britain’s output was growing far more slowly than other comparable countries and her share of world markets was shrivelling at a terrifying speed. Despite outside shocks, from Indian independence to Suez, from the sterling crises and the failure of weapons systems, to France’s rejection of her application for Common Market membership, the country had made no radical change of direction. Privately, civil servants and politicians acknowledged that there were profound problems, and agonized about what should be done. Publicly, under Macmillan and Douglas-Home, there was a complacent front of self-congratulation and business as usual.
Was this because we had been happier than other nations in our age of lost content? No revolution, invasion or wartime defeat had shaken the British as they acquired their new cars and explored their new supermarkets; British political scandals were a branch of light entertainment compared to the darker struggles convulsing Italy, France or Eastern Europe. And when Britain finally made a change, it turned out to be a surprisingly modest and ineffective one. Outside politics and the economy, a new country was breaking through – brightly coloured, fashionable, less masculine. For a brief flicker, it seemed to be matched by the arrival of a new government too. An alternative assessment came from Crossman as he contemplated the funeral gathering for Sir Winston Churchill in Westminster Hall at the end of January 1965: ‘But, oh, what a faded, declining establishment surrounded me. Aged marshals, grey, dreary ladies, decadent Marlboroughs and Churchills. It was a dying congregation gathered there and I am afraid the Labour Cabinet didn’t look too distinguished, either. It felt like the end of an epoch, possibly even the end of a nation.’59