by A. N. Wilson
On 3 December, the Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd told the House of Commons of the ceasefire. ‘We have stopped a small war and prevented a large one. The force which we temporarily interposed between the combatants is now to be relieved by an international force…Responsibility for securing a settlement of the long-term problems of the area has now been placed squarely on the shoulders of the United Nations.’16
Britain was publicly announcing that it was no longer the policeman of the world. The American response was immediate, and positive. As soon as conditional withdrawal of British and French troops from Egypt was announced, the American oil companies shipped 200,000 barrels of oil to an oil-starved Britain. The American Export-Import Bank announced that a loan of $500 million would be made available on easy terms and the International Monetary Fund approved a British drawing of $561 million. There could have been no more transparent and humiliating demonstration. If the British acted alone, without the President’s permission, they went bust. If they toed the American line, they became solvent once more.17 When he came back from his holiday, Eden confronted the question posed by a predecessor as Prime Minister, Clement Attlee: namely, whether the British and French governments had had prior warning of the Israeli invasion of Egypt. With Eden’s recovery from ill health, Attlee wrote, ‘the country may reasonably ask that he should put an end…to an uncertainty which cannot fail to be damaging to the national interest’.
A hasty cover-up operation began. Two middle-ranking Foreign Office people were told to put together a file of all the sensitive papers on Suez and deliver it to the Cabinet Secretary, Norman Brook. The papers were never seen again. Meanwhile, at Chequers, the name of General Challe, who had come there to discuss the Israeli plot with Eden, was scratched out of the visitors’ book, to be replaced by the name of some minor official. When confronted in Parliament, Eden was faced with the choice of admitting that he had known in advance of the Israeli invasion, or of lying. He chose to lie.
‘I want to say this on the question of foreknowledge, and to say it quite bluntly to the House, that there was not foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt–there was not. But there was something else. There was–we knew it perfectly well–a risk of it, and in the event of a risk of it, certain discussions and conversations took place as, I think, was absolutely right, and as, I think, anybody would do.’18 Eden knew that both Mollet and Ben-Gurion, the Prime Minister of Israel, were in a position to demonstrate the untruth of what he was saying. Although they did not land him in any embarrassment while he was Prime Minister, they both gave their own accurate version of events afterwards. Worse, Macmillan and Butler both knew that he was lying to the House of Commons. In later times, the mendacity of a Prime Minister at the Dispatch Box was something which the electorate would take for granted, but Eden was living at the tail end of England’s Glory. He went to Lord Salisbury (‘Bobbety’) on 5 January 1957 to tell him that he was resigning for reasons of ill health. There were no elections for the position of Conservative Party leader in those days. Bobbety, the grand old man of the Party, merely canvassed the Cabinet for their views, giving them the choice of R. A. Butler or Harold Macmillan. As each man came into his room, he was asked, ‘Hawold or Wab?’ Only one opted for Wab. And so–such was the way of these things–on 10 January 1957, Harold Macmillan became the Prime Minister.
Part Two
Macmillan
6
Supermac
Harold Macmillan’s appearance–the hooded eyes, the moustache, the irregular and discoloured teeth, the element of parody in dress sense–frequently gave rise to a feeling of distrust. Impressions that he cut a risible figure were disconcertingly replaced by the sense that the joke, whatever it was, might after all be at the mocker’s expense, that Macmillan had contrived his appearance, voice, manner as a comedic mask behind which to conceal either a different self, or, like the Sphinx, the secret of emptiness, the secret that there was no secret to hide.
Visiting a collective farm outside Kiev, he donned plus fours, ‘as if he were at Chatsworth’.1 Such a game would no doubt have delighted the son-in-law of the 9th Duke of Devonshire (which Macmillan was), and yet true blue Tories, who saw him always as one who was eager to sell the pass, remembered that he advised his nephew, the 11th Duke, to abandon Chatsworth.2 He sensibly ignored the advice. Macmillan, to those of instinctively conservative reaction, is the Prime Minister who would not do anything to save the Doric arch at Euston Station, allowing the plansters, as John Betjeman called them, to demolish that magnificent Greek-revival London terminus, and erect a characterless, ugly replacement. His lofty comment was ‘only dying countries tried to preserve the symbols of their past’.3
Then again, hardened monetarists look back upon the Keynesian Macmillan era as one of disaster. Macmillan’s worst economic memories were of Stockton-on-Tees, his first constituency in the 1930s, when he had seen the terrible effects of economic recession. ‘It was his instinct to be rebellious against the restrictive actions of the Treasury–he never liked the Treasury. “What is wrong with inflation, Derry?” I’d reply, “You’re thinking of your constituents in the 1930s?” “Yes–I’m thinking of the under-use of resources–let’s over-use them!” He believed in import controls, but the Treasury wouldn’t let him.’4 These are the recollections of his second Chancellor of the Exchequer, Derick Heathcoat-Amory. His first Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, resigned on 6 January 1958, together with the Economic Secretary to the Treasury, Nigel Birch, and the Financial Secretary, J. Enoch Powell. They had all urged, following a disastrous run on the pound, that there must be swingeing cuts in welfare and public spending if disastrous inflation were to be avoided. Macmillan, who was about to go on a long tour of the Commonwealth when the Treasury men hatched their attack, dismissed it as ‘a little local difficulty’.5 Later he would even pretend not to remember Thorneycroft’s identity–‘that man who looked like an English butler, with the nice Italian wife–I forget his name’. Some believed that Macmillan had come to power, not merely by the normal Machiavellian ploys of lobbying and undermining his rivals, but by making secret deals with the Americans. One of his fiercest critics, Alan Clark, in The Tories,6 went so far as to say that ‘Macmillan’s contact with George Humphrey (US Secretary of the Treasury) bordered on the treasonable…Macmillan now set about mobilising his American contacts.’
Shadier than his dealings with the Americans in 1956 had been Macmillan’s unaccountable role in the handing over of White Russians and Cossacks to the Soviet authorities at Klagenfurt (British-occupied Austria) in May 1945. By the terms of the Yalta Agreement, the Soviets had no claims upon Russian émigrés who had escaped their wrecked country after the Revolution and Civil War. Into this category most certainly fell three White Army generals (Krasnov, Shkuro and Kilech-Ghirey), together with a number of people such as Olga Rotova, a Yugoslav citizen, who had never been Soviet citizens, being held by 36 Infantry Brigade commanded by Brigadier Geoffrey Musson–under the overall control of Lieutenant General Charles Keightley, of the 5 Corps of the 8th Army. Churchill, as Prime Minister, and Lord Alexander of Tunis (Supreme Allied Commander in the Mediterranean) had specifically ordered Keightley not to surrender the Cossacks and non-Soviet citizens to the Red Army. Harold Macmillan flew in to Klagenfurt from Caserta on 13 May 1945 to discuss Soviet proposals. He was the government minister resident at AFHQ (Allied Force Headquarters). The next day, evidently on Macmillan’s instructions, Keightley lied to Alexander, in a telegram, saying the 40,000 or so contained a ‘large number of Soviet nationals’ whom they had been forced to repatriate. On 26 May Brigadier Musson ordered all his battalion commanders holding Cossacks in the Drau Valley to send all their Cossacks back, regardless of citizenship. The Cossacks were ‘handed over’ with violence and entirely against not only their will but international law. Together with their wives and children, they were forced into trucks at bayonet point. ‘It was a great grief to me’, Macmillan recorded in his memoirs, ‘that there was no o
ther course open.’
In 1957, Khrushchev allowed a tiny trickle of Cossacks who had managed to survive the camps in the Arctic Circle and Siberia to leave Russia. Only a few score, of the thousands imprisoned, came out, clutching their non-Russian passports. One of them, Captain Anatol Petrovsky, wrote, appealing to the Prime Minister, reminding him that the British Military Command had known he was not a Soviet citizen when they handed him over for twelve years of starvation, freezing cold and enforced slavery in the mines of Siberia and Vorkuta. He was by then living as an invalid and a displaced person and wondered if the Prime Minister would be prepared to compensate him. He received an impersonal reply from the Foreign Office: ‘I am directed to refer to your letter of the 4th of September to the Prime Minister…A thorough examination of the facts led to the conclusion that no action could be taken to assist the persons named in your letter.7
Those who vilified Macmillan’s memory did so usually from a position of the doctrinal right. They often attributed to him powers which perhaps no British politician at this date actually possessed. Because they regretted the increased power of America; the dissolution of the British Empire in Africa; the failure of Britain to prevent the collapse of Iraq, or the heightening of conflict in the Middle East between Jew and Arab, between ‘moderate’ or pro-Western Arabs and Islamists; the loss of Cyprus as a Mediterranean British base; and the segregation of the island into Greek and Turkish halves; they attributed these ills to the deviousness or anti-Toryism of the Prime Minister. Likewise, at home, the chaos of labour relations, the inflationary wage demands made by trades union ‘barons’, the ‘liberalisation’ of life in areas as diverse as capital punishment, or sexual mores, were blamed on ‘Supermac’, either because he was too weak to prevent them, or because he anarchistically or seditiously wished to undermine the country by promoting them. Another way of seeing him, however, this man of masks, was as one who regretted the loss of old values, but who did not really believe in the power of politics alone to preserve them.
Macmillan’s premiership lasted from January 1958 to October 1963. It was a period of quite extraordinarily rapid change, both in Britain and abroad. He resigned hurriedly because he believed that a minor prostate condition was potentially fatal. His estimation of himself was captured in his judgement–‘That illness was a sad blow for me. Without being conceited, it was a catastrophe for the party.’8 Much was made of the fact that, even from his hospital bed, Macmillan attempted to control the succession. The two likeliest contenders were the irrepressibly foolish Quintin Hogg, who had inherited the title of Lord Hailsham from his father, the founder of the London Polytechnic, and R. A. Butler, Macmillan’s Home Secretary. At the last minute, ‘Supermac’ lost faith in Hogg, and told the Queen that she should appoint the 14th Earl of Home as the new Prime Minister.
Whatever Mac saw in Home, it is clear what he saw in Hogg. ‘Those who clamour for Butler and Home are really not so much shocked by Hogg’s oddities as by his honesty. He belongs both to this strange modern age of space and science and to the great past–of classical learning and Christian life. This is what they instinctively dislike.’9
This is a description that could also be applied to Harold Macmillan. In old age, with a characteristic mixture of Edwardian drawl and simple camp, he meditated upon the sad marriage of Quintin Hogg, whose wife betrayed him during the war with a member of the Free French. ‘He came back on leave, and found her in bed–both of them, so it was a hard thing for him, such a sweet boy. No, he’s suffered…he was a gentleman and a Christian.’10
Macmillan’s own life was clouded by a wife’s infidelity. Unlike Hogg, who put away his own wife instantly, citing the Gospel of Matthew in his defence–‘Saving for the cause of adultery!’11–Mac turned a blind eye to the long love affair with his fellow Conservative MP Bob Boothby.
Although ‘everyone knew’ about the liaison, he was late in coming to the news. When a friend, during a railway journey in 1929, made an allusion to Lady Dorothy and Boothby which was inescapable in its meaning, Macmillan was on the point of reaching for the luggage in the rack above his head. The news so surprised him that he fell backwards on to the carriage floor and fainted.12
Boothby was popular with the public, largely because of his association with Churchill. He had been among the Conservative MPs who stood beside ‘Winston’ in the wilderness years of the 1930s and who opposed the policy of appeasing the brigand states of Europe. In the 1950s and 1960s as television became popular, he was a natural for discussions and chat shows. His spotted bow ties and aristocratic method of delivery reminded audiences of his Churchillian credentials. He was a character, a cove, a card. The development of eroticism in his life, he described in his twilit years to an old friend–‘I began with handkerchieves, progressed to boys, then found women attractive, then back to boys again, and now I find consolation once more with handkerchieves.’13 This remark was made after his marriage, in August 1967, to Wanda Senna, the daughter of a Sardinian import-export wholesaler. ‘I don’t need friends. I’ve got lots of friends. What I want is a wife,’ the sixty-seven-year-old told the thirty-four-year-old beauty. His first marriage, in 1935, to Diana Cavendish, had lasted a matter of months, until his affair with Dorothy Macmillan (a cousin of his wife’s) became known. The association with the East End gang leader Ronnie Kray demonstrated the range of Boothby’s social and erotic sympathies. ‘Once you get into the clutches of that family, by God, you haven’t a hope. They are the most tenacious family in Britain.’ He was speaking in 1973 to a Sunday Times journalist, Susan Barnes, who married the Foreign Secretary Antony Crosland. But he was referring to the Cavendishes rather than to the Krays.14 The Krays, as Ronnie’s obituarist was to put it, ‘brought to the hitherto parochial British criminal scene a taste of American organised crime’.15 The twin brothers, Reggie and Ronnie, controlled pubs and clubs by protection rackets. They were skilled blackmailers and, as amateur boxing champions, adepts of violence. They never lost a fight until they turned professional at sixteen. In 1950 they were charged with brutal assault and then–a common feature of cases involving the brothers–the witnesses retracted their statements. They were eventually to be put on trial for the murder of George Cornell and Jack ‘The Hat’ McVitie. They had lured McVitie to a flat in Stoke Newington in October 1967. Urged on by psychopathic Ronnie, Reggie stabbed McVitie, pinning him to the floor through the throat. The violence of the attack caused McVitie’s liver to fall out. The twins were imprisoned at Parkhurst; Ronnie, having been certified insane, was transferred to Broadmoor.
From his prison cell in 1988 Reg was able to become as moralistic as any Disgusted Reader of a conservative broadsheet. ‘It’s a different world now to what it was in 1969 when we went down. It’s a different criminal world too–it’s far more deadly. Then it was dog eat dog–criminals waging war against other criminals. Old ladies didn’t get attacked by vicious thugs in those days. Young girls didn’t get raped in broad daylight. Coppers didn’t get kicked and punched and spat on at football matches. There was a kind of respect for people in those days.’ So much respect, indeed, was there, that even when on the run from the police in 1968, Reggie had found the time to go to the Starlight Club in Highbury, demanded £1,000 on the spot from a man called Fields, and, when he didn’t pay up, ‘shot him through the leg and left one of the Firm to smash his face in’.16 Ah, happy, innocent days.
Before and after their imprisonment, the Krays enjoyed mingling with the more raffish figures in showbiz and on the fringes of society. Blonde women such as Diana Dors (her husband, Alan Lake, was another criminal) and Barbara Windsor, were part of their circle, though never a temptation to Ronnie. ‘I’m not a poof; I’m a homosexual,’ he would explain. He seduced the East End boys he recruited as spies and he held parties which were regarded as ‘sophisticated’. It was at one such party that Ronnie Kray encountered Bob Boothby.
On 11 July 1964 the Sunday Mirror proprietor Cecil King, editor-in-chief Hugh Cudlipp and editor Reg
inald Payne published a banner headline: ‘Peer and a Gangster: Yard Probe Public Men at Seaside Parties’. The paper announced that ‘a top level Scotland Yard investigation into the alleged homosexual relationship between a prominent peer and a leading thug in the London underworld has been ordered by the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Joseph Simpson’.17 On the Monday following, there arrived a photograph of Boothby in his flat sitting on his sofa next to Kray. The following Sunday the paper published the photograph.
Boothby tried to bluff it out. He even went so far as to ask the openly gay MP Tom Driberg the identity of the well-known peer who was alleged to have had an affair with the well-known thug. ‘I’m sorry, Bob, it’s you’ was the reply.18 Boothby went to see Gerald Gardiner QC, a future Lord Chancellor, who advised him to consult the Mr Tulkinghorn of our times, Arnold Goodman. We can only assume that Boothby lied to both his legal advisers. On 31 July he wrote the following letter to The Times:
Sir,
On July 17th I returned to London from France and I found, to my amazement, that Parliament, Fleet Street and other informed quarters in London were seething with rumours that I have a homosexual relationship with a leading thug in the underworld involved in a West End protection racket; that I have been to ‘all-male’ Mayfair parties with him; that I have been photographed with him in a compromising position on a sofa; that a homosexual relationship exists between me, some East End gangsters and a number of clergymen in Brighton; that some people who know of these relationships are being blackmailed; and that Scotland Yard have for months been watching meetings between me and the underworld thug, and have investigated all these matters and reported on them to the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.