The Crown

by Robert Lacey

  For Anthony Eden, the architect of Suez, the consequences of the adventure were disastrous. In Episode 203 we see angry demonstrators waylaying the Prime Minister as he arrives at Sandringham early in 1957 to see the Queen.

  ‘Booooo! Shame on you! … Eden must go!’62

  In fact, far worse was uttered in bitter and violent anti-Suez demonstrations all over Britain. Opinion polls showed some jingoistic support for Eden’s attempt to reassert British authority, but the venture was widely seen as a failure. The country’s essential impotence had been underlined by the Soviet Union’s forcible and brutal occupation of Budapest in November 1956 to suppress the Hungarian uprising at the very moment when British troops were occupying Suez. As Eisenhower’s Vice-President Richard Nixon later put it: ‘We couldn’t on one hand, complain about the Soviets intervening in Hungary and, on the other hand, approve of the British and the French picking that particular time to intervene against Nasser.’63

  American disapproval had severe consequences. In three days at the beginning of November 1956 the Bank of England lost $45 million from Wall Street speculation against the pound, and with Suez blocked, Britain’s oil supply was dwindling dangerously. US–UK relations had seldom been so low. When London sought help from the International Monetary Fund, Washington actually intervened to stop the move, and the irate President Eisenhower told the US Treasury to get ready to sell its Sterling Bond holdings.

  Eden’s deteriorating health added to his problems. At the end of November 1956, while British and French troops were still getting established on the ground in Egypt, the Prime Minister’s doctors insisted that he must take a break, and Eden transformed a political hiccup into a catastrophe when he decided that he would not recuperate in Britain. He opted to fly off instead with his wife Clarissa to Jamaica, to Goldeneye, the exotic villa of his friend the novelist Ian Fleming, the creator of the recently popular spy character James Bond, 007.

  Peter Morgan imagines the suntanned Eden trying to bluff it out as he greets his cabinet on his return to London in December 1956. ‘In all these months,’ he pronounces complacently, ‘we have been a united government.’

  ‘But we are not a united government are we, Anthony?’ responds his Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan acidly. ‘The war you insisted on has left us as divided as Caesar and Pompey, and the country is in chaos. There is no petrol in the pumps. There are no tins on the shelves …’

  In vain, Eden protests that Macmillan and all the cabinet supported the Suez invasion – ‘You would have torn off Nasser’s scalp with your own fingernails, given the chance!’

  Macmillan shrugs.

  ‘Come now, Anthony, you know as well as I, there is no justice in politics.’64

  And so Eden went to Sandringham to hand his resignation to the Queen on 9 January 1957, after just 644 days in office …65

  The dilemma now facing Elizabeth II was the Conservative Party’s total absence of any formal mechanism for choosing a successor. At Eden’s suggestion, the grandest of the current Tory grandees, Robert Cecil, the fifth Marquess of Salisbury – popularly known as ‘Bobbety’ – who had served with distinction in Winston Churchill’s war cabinets, agreed to take ‘soundings’ of the cabinet. These would be backed up by an assessment of backbench MP opinion from the young Chief Whip, Edward Heath, with Winston Churchill stepping in as well from retirement to lend unspecified gravitas to the process.

  It was agreed there were just two candidates, with the favourite being Richard Austen Butler, a piercingly intelligent and liberal reformer popularly known at ‘Rab’ (after his initials), whose great achievement was the post-war Education Act of 1944 which had extended free education to all. Rab had been serving as Eden’s effective deputy while Eden had been in Jamaica – so on the face of it, the job was now his for the taking. But Rab’s habitually lugubrious features lacked charisma. As Labour’s Harold Wilson, who was Butler’s weekly fencing partner as Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, cruelly put it, Rab sported ‘the look of a born loser’.66

  Butler’s older rival Harold Macmillan, who had succeeded him as Chancellor in 1955, was himself often derided for his fuddy-duddy moustaches and his Edwardian courtliness, but he was blessed with an inherent nimbleness. His spring budget of 1956 had introduced the monthly prize draw concept of Premium Bonds, which were denounced by everyone from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Labour Party as a ‘squalid raffle’ but had proved an instant hit with the public. Disparaged for his lack of scruple as ‘Mac the Knife’, the Chancellor was quite happy to be compared to a caller in one of the recently popular ‘bingo halls’. While Butler’s post-Suez speeches had defended Anthony Eden in a loyal but wooden fashion, Macmillan had contrived an altogether trickier mix of regret, patriotism and party loyalty – along with the suggestion, that somehow, he would never have got the country (or the party) into such a mess.

  When the cabinet offered their soundings to ‘Bobbety’ Salisbury on 9 January 1957, their verdict left no doubt. Salisbury had a famous speech impediment, which became immortalised in the question that he put to the 25 or so cabinet ministers in succession – ‘Wab or Hawold?’67 The ‘Hawolds’ had it by an overwhelming majority. Just three or four ministers came out for ‘Wab’. Edward Heath confirmed the preference from the backbench MPs in the tearooms, and Churchill supplied his own breezy endorsement. ‘Sorry, old cock,’ he told Butler then aged 54, ‘we went for the older man.’68 In January 1957 Harold Macmillan was just coming up to his sixty-third birthday.

  Elizabeth II has frequently been criticised for her acquiescence in what have been described as the Tory Party’s ‘machinations’ that produced Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in January 1957 – and she might, perhaps, have made a more obvious attempt to check the ‘soundings’ with which she was presented. But it was hardly her fault that the Conservative Party lacked a more defined leadership selection process at that date, and they did command a solid parliamentary majority of 58 in the Commons. Love them or loathe them, the Tories were clearly the democratically elected majority party, so it was their business if they chose to pick their leader – and hence the Prime Minister – in the mildly conspiratorial fashion that they did. Salisbury, Heath and Churchill covered a broadish sample of those who counted in the party and their verdict stood the test of time. When invited to assemble a cabinet on 10 January, Macmillan told the Queen apologetically that he could not guarantee his government would last ‘six weeks’.69 In the event, Macmillan was to serve as Elizabeth II’s third prime minister for more than six years.

  Harold Macmillan’s political style was summed up by the title of the book he had published in 1938, The Middle Way. Later it became a political commonplace – to seek a unifying path between left and right – but with Nazism threatening Europe in the late 1930s, it was not the message of the moment. Even the Macmillan family nanny sniffed that ‘Mr. Harold is a dangerous pink’70 – inadvertently hitting on the secret of Macmillan’s long-term success. As his biographer, D. R. Thorpe, has perceptively put it, ‘Macmillan was not really a Tory at all’.71

  His First World War experience as an officer in the trenches (in which he was wounded) and the time he spent in his working-class constituency of Stockton-on-Tees – which he lost, but then recaptured by long stints of personal door-to-door canvassing in the Depression years – gave Macmillan a genuine and rather moving understanding of what ‘ordinary’ people wanted. In the years 1914–18, he later confessed, he learned much from reading his ordinary soldiers’ private letters home, as censorship required him to do. He devised a plan to reconfigure Conservatism in a camouflaged, socialistic form, and he carried this liberalism into his foreign policy. As we shall see in Chapter Eight, Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ speech in Cape Town in 1960 boldly swept away decades of colonial tradition and waved farewell to the British Empire.

  His modernism and surreptitious egalitarianism infuriated traditional Tories – to the blithe indifference of the new Prime Minister, who re
lished the social jumbling over which he presided. ‘Mr Attlee [Labour Prime Minister 1945–51] had three Old Etonians in his Cabinet,’ declared Macmillan in 1959. ‘I have six. Things are twice as good under the Conservatives!’72

  Macmillan’s sweeping 101-seat victory in the October 1959 election would have been a Tory pipe dream in the months after Suez, and the credit largely went to ‘Supermac’, as the cartoonist Vicky grudgingly came to dub him.73 Suez was not quite the end of the world, it turned out, when voters came to weigh up the price stability and almost full employment that Macmillan was able to achieve by 1959 with his ‘Keynesian deficit financing’ – the latest academic term for heavy borrowing. ‘You’ve never had it so good,’ pronounced the Conservative leader,74 and the country agreed with him – consigning the Labour Party to an unprecedented third successive poll defeat.

  In foreign policy, Macmillan deployed all his charm to patch up relations with America, building on his military dealings with General Eisenhower during the war in North Africa, then creating an avuncular relationship after 1960 with the new young President J. F. ‘Jack’ Kennedy, to whom his wife’s family, the Devonshires, were related.75 By agreeing to the stationing of US Polaris submarines in Holy Loch, Scotland, Macmillan could claim that Britain remained a member of the nuclear club. Largely for this reason, both Macmillan and his chief negotiator, Edward Heath, fared less well with France’s anti-American President Charles de Gaulle in their attempts to negotiate Britain into the new European Economic Community. But the PM laughed off France’s rejection with one of his trademark bon mots. General de Gaulle, he remarked, possessed ‘all the rigidity of a poker without its occasional warmth’.76

  ‘Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles every knot’ ran a notice that the new Prime Minister had placed upon the cabinet office door.77 Macmillan was famous for relaxing by reading Anthony Trollope’s Barsetshire novels: these entertaining fables of squabbling Victorian clergymen put matters into perspective, he explained, when it came to the patronage of giving out government jobs. Tolerant of the 1960s satire boom, the Prime Minister adored Peter Cook’s biting impersonations of his own bumbling style, and he warned his Postmaster General against any ban on the BBC’s weekly satire programme That Was the Week That Was. It was far better, he declared, ‘to be mocked than to be ignored’.78

  The highlights of Macmillan’s week were his Tuesday evening audiences at the Palace with Elizabeth II. ‘The Queen is not only very charming, but incredibly well-informed,’ he wrote. ‘Less agreeable, are the visits and letters from the Archbishop of Canterbury [Geoffrey Fisher]. I try to talk to him about religion. He seems to be quite uninterested and reverts all the time to politics.’79

  To judge from his prolific diaries, the Trollope-reading Prime Minister rather enjoyed his skirmishes with the Primate. Fisher had been a fierce critic of Suez, then fell out again with Downing Street over who should succeed him at Canterbury, with Macmillan favouring Michael Ramsay, the then Archbishop of York. ‘Dr Ramsay,’ Fisher protested, ‘is a theologian, a scholar, and a man of prayer – therefore he is entirely unsuitable as Archbishop of Canterbury … I have known him all my life. I was his Headmaster at Repton.’ ‘Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice,’ replied Macmillan. ‘You may have been Dr Ramsay’s Headmaster, but you are not mine.’80

  We shall discover in Episode 210 (Chapter Ten) how the racy Macmillan boom years eventually came to a scandalous bust in 1963 and 1964, but until then the slippery old showman presided over an era of remarkable national buzz and prosperity. Austerity Britain became affluent Britain – cheeky, modern, creative Britain, in fact. It took a tattered and moustachioed Edwardian Prime Minister, ironically, to leach the bitterness out of the Teddy Boys, directing the angry energies of the new generation into the fun and youth-driven whoopee of mini skirts, Carnaby Street, pirate radio stations, The Beatles and ‘Swinging Britain’.

  1963 – Love Me Do: Beatles Paul, Ringo, George and John

  No longer was it trendy to be ‘dead behind these eyes’ like Archie Rice. Quite the contrary. When Harold Macmillan retired in 1963, the mingled priorities of his ‘Never Had It So Good’ era were supplied by John, Paul, George and Ringo in their two massively best-selling albums of the year Please Please Me and With the Beatles. You could have it crass and materialistic – ‘Gimme money, that’s what I want’. Or you could have it sentimental – ‘P.S. I love you’.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘BERYL’

  AUGUST–NOVEMBER 1957

  IN JUNE 1949 THE DIARIST SIR HENRY ‘CHIPS’ CHANNON attended the annual ball at Windsor Castle to celebrate Royal Ascot race week, where he was struck by the glamour of ‘the Edinburghs’, as they were then known – the young Princess Elizabeth and her handsome husband Philip. ‘They looked divine …’ he wrote, ‘characters out of a fairy-tale, and quite eclipsed Princess Margaret’, who was cavorting around the Castle with several dozen of her high-spirited young friends – to Channon’s disapproval. ‘Already she is a public character,’ mused the diarist, ‘and I wonder what will happen to her? There is already a Marie Antoinette aroma about her’.81

  Marie Antoinette was the guillotined queen of pre-revolutionary France, notorious for her response when told that the peasants had no bread to eat – ‘Let them eat cake!’82 True or not, the remark and the French queen’s name came to epitomise over the years the idiot wilfulness of a detached royal lifestyle, and now here was ‘Chips’ Channon seeing the same detached wilfulness in the behaviour of the 18-year-old Princess Margaret …

  By 1949, in fact, the teenage Margaret had already embarked on the first of the ill-judged love affairs that were to characterise her highly scandalous life. Two years earlier, by her own subsequent account, she had fallen in love with her father’s equerry, the handsome Group Captain Peter Townsend, on the royal tour of South Africa in 1947. She was a wayward 16, while the war hero, at 32, was precisely twice her age. As depicted in Season 1 of The Crown, the couple’s romance became public following the coronation of June 1953, when the Princess was spotted outside Westminster Abbey brushing fluff from the group captain’s lapel with over-possessive familiarity.83

  The subsequent scandal was a royal disaster to match the Abdication Crisis. ‘It has all been a silly, mismanaged lash-up,’ complained the playwright Noël Coward, ‘and I cannot imagine how the Queen and the Queen Mother and Prince Philip allowed it to get into such a tangle … I hope she will not take to religion in a big way and become a frustrated maiden princess. I also hope that they had the sense to hop into bed a couple of times at least, but this I doubt.’84

  The jury is out on Coward’s last, intriguing speculation. But some years later the Princess’s indiscreet footman David Payne revealed that throughout Margaret’s later courtship with the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, and even up until the couple’s marriage in 1960, there were three precious items that ‘never left the Princess’s bedside table’ – a trio of miniature portraits of Group Captain Peter Townsend.85

  ‘Interesting to watch her face,’ noted the waspish young Tudor historian A. L. Rowse when he spotted the Princess in July 1956 at a Buckingham Palace Garden Party, eight months after her separation from Townsend: ‘Bored, mécontente, ready to burst out against it all – a Duke of Windsor among the Royal Family.’86

  By this date the Queen’s younger sister was becoming notorious for the boisterous antics of the friends with whom she was consoling herself – a group of high-born young folk whom the papers were starting to label the ‘Princess Margaret Set’.87 One evening in the summer of 1956 they joined her at a showing of The Girl Can’t Help It, a recent rock ‘n’ roll film starring Jayne Mansfield, the American sex symbol of the moment.88 In a state of high excitement, the Princess was reported to have put her bare feet up on the rail at the front of the circle, so she could take off her shoes and wave them extravagantly in time with the music.89

  ‘When is Princess Margaret going to be her age (which is 26),’ enquired A
nthony Heap, a local government officer who was writing his diary for the Mass Observation Project, ‘and behave like a member of the Royal Family, instead of a half-baked, jazz-mad Teddy Girl?’90

  Back at Clarence House, halfway down the Mall attached to St James’s Palace, where Margaret had been living since 1952 with Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, the staff were no more impressed. At the end of every evening, footman David Payne would be on duty, standing to attention and waiting for the Princess to come home with her friends, ‘tumbling out of their cars, laughing and calling out to each other’ – and very ready for a fresh round of drinks.

  ‘They might even decide to have a little late dinner,’ wrote Payne, who complained that ‘these decisions were always a thorn in my side, for they never thought about it until 11 o’clock or so, which meant I had to wait up all evening, and then stay up to serve dinner at midnight’.91

  Dinner would be followed by smoking, and the party would then head back to the sitting room. ‘Within minutes,’ wrote Payne, ‘the record-player went on. Brandy and cigars were ordered in quantity, and the “Margaret Set” let their hair down, kicking off their shoes to dance on the carpets, helping themselves to drinks and sorting through the Princess’s vast collection of records, from pop singers to Dixieland to real cool jazz.’92

  It is small wonder that when, in 1961, Payne composed his revealing memoir, My Life with Princess Margaret, he could only get his book published in America. Citing the confidentiality conditions of his employment contract, the Queen Mother successfully secured an injunction to prevent publication in Great Britain.93