A History of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  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. 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’. 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 château 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. 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.’ Macmillan himself bitterly recorded in his diary that ‘the French always betray you in the end.’

  46

  Tales of Yankee Power

  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.’ 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.

  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. T
he 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.’ 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.’