MACMILLAN: MAGGIE IS A MEGALOMANIAC
July 31, 1979
LUNCH with [former PM] Harold Wilson at the Travellers Club. He is smart and spry in a well-cut, very dark brown suit, with starched cuffs and elaborate cufflinks. Some talk of anti-Semitism, especially [Labour politician] Ernest Bevin’s. Wilson has heard of the relish with which Bevin, on becoming Minister of Labour and National Service in 1940, boasted that he would call up all the East End Jews. ‘Real working-class anti-Semitism’, says Wilson. On Denis Healey, Wilson says: ‘Once a man has been a Communist, his mind runs on intellectual tramlines.’
August 1
I ASK [lawyer and political adviser] Arnold Goodman whether Harold Wilson ever tried to become head of an Oxford or Cambridge college. Arnold says that Wilson would have liked it, but only a grand one, like Trinity, Cambridge.
April 14, 1982
GEORGE MORPETH [Earl of Carlisle] tells me that when Dorothy Macmillan, tiring of [her affair] with Bob Boothby, returned to [PM] Harold Macmillan, there was no emotional reconciliation or apology. The doorbell rang, and there she was with her suitcase. She said: ‘Are there any letters?’
December 6, 1983
LUNCH with Harold Macmillan at Birch Grove. For a man approaching his 90th year, he looks in splendid shape. During the Falklands campaign, the old war horse felt the smoke of battle in his nostrils again when he called on Mrs Thatcher and was asked for his advice. ‘You see, nobody at No 10 had ever fought a war before. So I told her how to run it, with a small War Cabinet, and she wrote down everything I said in a small notebook.’ [Michael] Heseltine is one of the few members of the Thatcher Government for whom he has respect. Norman Tebbit is another. On Mrs Thatcher: ‘I worked for a united country. She is narrow and hard, a middle-class megalomaniac.’
December 15
WHEN gold sovereigns were changed to paper money, Macmillan commented: ‘One never then knew what to give one’s [gun] loader.’
September 23, 1985
TED HEATH most affable at a dinner in Tite Street. I tell him how impressed I was by Nixon when we met. Ted agrees and says it was absurd for him to be disgraced over Watergate. When Ted was in China soon afterwards, [Premier] Zhou Enlai said to him: ‘This is ridiculous isn’t it? After all, we all tap our opponents’ telephones.’
January 11, 1986
MACMILLAN on the House of Lords: ‘Such a wonderful place for an old man: you cannot walk 20 yards without finding a bar and a lavatory.’
April 17
HAROLD WILSON tells me that he has long appreciated Mrs Thatcher’s personal kindness to him. During his serious illness a few years ago, she was the first to send him flowers. She also offered him a car and driver.
August 27, 1990
WILLIAM WALDEGRAVE tells me that when someone expressed surprise to Harold Macmillan that the Iranians had done surprisingly well in the long war against Iraq, he replied: ‘Of course they did well. They shot all their generals before they began.’
1 November
PETER CARRINGTON says that when Ted Heath became PM, he once said to Peter: ‘Of course, you live near my house now,’ i.e. Chequers. Peter replied: ‘No, Ted. You lodge temporarily near my house.’
September 27, 1991
DINNER party for Jim and Audrey Callaghan. Jim tells me that, walking out of Westminster Abbey after the memorial service for Elizabeth Home [wife of former PM Alec Douglas-Home], he found himself next to Ted Heath. It was the morning Mrs Thatcher had resigned — and Ted turned to Jim and said: ‘I had better compose my features so the photographers will not record my true feelings.’
April 18, 1992
I HAVE a talk with [Tory politician] Anthony Nutting. He describes trying to brief Winston Churchill on the [first] ‘cod war’ with Iceland. But the PM was not interested. Anthony swears that he could hear the BBC Light Programme coming out of the old man’s hearing aid.