New history books reviewed
ALWYN TURNER breezes through a magisterial history of high politics at a time when Britain oversaw the dismantling of its empire – and urgently sought access to the EEC
“We are living in a jet age,” declared Harold Wilson in 1964, “but we are governed by an Edwardian establishment mentality.”
It was a widely shared perception.
Through the 1950s, pressure had been building for structural change in Britain, and as the new decade dawned a cultural impatience with the old order was everywhere apparent. Angry young men and kitchensink dramatists were writing bestselling novels and mass-market movies, pop art was moving from galleries into high-street fashion, sitcoms and satirists were mocking the establishment. Above all, Lew Grade and ITV were demolishing the paternalism of a BBC still in thrall to John Reith’s credo: “I do not pretend to give the public what it wants.” Between 1960 and 1965, just one BBC show reached the top of the weekly charts – and that was when the corporation ventured into enemy territory with Club Night, broadcast from a workingmen’s club in Stockport.
Politics, on the other hand, seemed stuck in an era of gentlemen amateurs. At the time of Wilson’s speech, the prime minister was Alec Douglas-Home, drafted reluctantly into the premiership. He later murmured sadly of the experience: “Terrible intrusion into one’s private life.” By contrast, the US president was Lyndon B Johnson, at whose professionalism foreign secretary RA Butler could only marvel: “Politics was his hobby and his life.”
Even so, Wilson’s verdict on a Conservative government that was by then in its 13th year was harsh. As Peter Hennessy shows in his magisterial new study – following on from earlier volumes on Britain in the 1940s and 50s, Never Again and Having It So Good
– there were many leading Tories who knew they had to adjust to the new world and were endeavouring to do so.
Chief among them was the figure who dominates this book: Harold Macmillan, prime minister from 1957–63. The problems he faced were daunting. It was on his watch that the British empire was largely dismantled, a programme of postcolonial independence that managed to stay one step ahead of the “wind of change” he’d identified as blowing through Africa. The mostly peaceful nature of that process, emerging from the shadow of Churchill’s imperialism, was the greatest achievement of his administration.
Macmillan’s eyes, though, were on a still higher prize. It was he who concluded that the future lay not with the Commonwealth but in membership of the European Economic Community. The application to join the EEC was later described by Britain’s main negotiator, Edward Heath, as “the end of a glorious era, that of the British empire, and the beginning of a whole new chapter of British history”. Which was precisely what Macmillan intended. He faced, however, a serious obstacle in the shape of French president Charles de Gaulle, whose sense of national destiny was equalled only by his distrust of the Anglo-Saxon mindset. The encounters between them were respectful, even fond, but wary, “the elaborate fencing of the two history-infused old men”. They left de Gaulle unpersuaded that Britain would fit in: he concluded that “the nature, structure, circumstances peculiar to England, are different from those of the other continentals”, and Macmillan’s plans came to nought.
Rejection by the EEC also prevented the prime minister achieving his domestic ambitions. Since the war, the economy had grown steadily, but not as fast as those of France, Germany, Japan or the US, with British productivity failing to improve. Joining Europe was a key part of finding a way forward, along with a drive towards world trade, the embrace of new technology, the modernisation of the economy and greater state planning. Progress was made in some areas – a big hospital-building programme, the creation of new universities – but productivity remained stubbornly set on the same middling course.
And while Macmillan pursued his grand design of realigning Britain within the western world, there was the lurking fear that the future he was planning for might not actually happen. In 1962, the Cuban missile crisis made all too clear the threat posed to humanity by what was known as “the Bomb”, and which he referred to as “the nuclear”.
By 1963, now 69 years old, the prime minister was looking weary. Then came the Profumo scandal, a double whammy of sex and spies that saw the government painted as sleazy. (It also prompted de Gaulle to remark: “That’ll teach the English for trying to behave like Frenchmen.”) After Macmillan fell ill in the late summer, he bowed out in October, his vision unrealised. “Had he pulled it off,” Hennessy judges, “Harold Macmillan would have gone down as one of the great British prime ministers.”
If history were tidy, Macmillan would have been followed by the meritocratic modernism of Wilson’s white heat. Instead, there was the unsatisfactory coda of Douglas-Home’s premiership, as the long period of Tory government eked out its last months.
This is a splendid, rewarding book, a portrait of a time when politicians could still think on a grand scale, when a prime minister could say his colleagues were “equal in intelligence and energy to any cabinet of the past”, when a civil servant not only spoke six languages but could lip-read in three.
Although the book’s focus is primarily on the highest of high politics, it’s enlivened by personal memory. It opens with the 15-yearold Hennessy trudging through snowdrifts to grammar school in the bitter winter of 1963, and we are aware throughout that this is the perspective of what one of his friends refers to as “the Butler Act generation”. Britain has always had an “emotional deficit with Europe”, he writes, and even when Heath eventually took us into the EEC, it didn’t “provide an emotional surrogate for the British empire”. He recognises in himself this coming together of history, patriotism and kin, so that when he hears Helmut Kohl dismiss Britain as having “won a war but lost an empire and their economy”, he feels the taunt rankle in his heart and mind. But there’s still room to note the important things in life: the introduction of one-day cricket “led to an improvement in fielding”.
Alwyn Turner’s books include A Classless Society: Britain in the 1990s (Aurum Press, 2013)