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Harold Macmillan

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Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, OM, PC (10 February 1894 – 29 December 1986), was a British Conservative politician and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1963.

Nicknamed 'Supermac', he did not use his first name and was known as Harold Macmillan before elevation to the Peerage.

Contents

Early life

Harold Macmillan was born in Brixton to Maurice Crawford Macmillan (1853-1936) and Helen Artie Tarleton Belles (1856-1937). His paternal grandfather, Daniel Macmillan (1813-1857), was a Scottish crofter who founded Macmillan Publishers. Harold was educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford. He served with distinction in World War I, being wounded on three occasions. He lost so many of his fellow students during the war that afterwards he refused to return to Oxford, saying the university would never be the same. He was a director of the Great Western Railway before the nationalization of the railways.

Marriage

He married Lady Dorothy Cavendish, daughter of Victor Cavendish, 9th Duke of Devonshire in 1920. Lady Dorothy is said to have had a long affair with the Conservative politician Robert Boothby; she died in 1966, aged 65.

They had four children:

Political career (1924-1957)

Elected to the House of Commons in 1924 for Stockton-on-Tees, he lost his seat in 1929, only to return in 1931. Macmillan spent the 1930s on the backbenches, with his anti-appeasement ideals and sharp criticism of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain serving to isolate him. In World War II he served in the wartime coalition government, working with the Ministry of Supply before being sent to North Africa in 1942 as British government representative to the Allies in the Mediterranean. During this assignment Macmillan became good friends with Dwight Eisenhower, a friendship which would prove crucial in his later career.

He returned to England after the war and lost his seat in the landslide Labour victory of 1945, but soon returned to parliament in a November 1945 by-election in Bromley. With the Conservative victory in 1951 he became Minister of Housing (October 1951), then Minister of Defence in October 1954 under Winston Churchill, and Foreign Secretary in April-December 1955 and Chancellor of the Exchequer 1955-1957 under Anthony Eden. Harold Macmillan became Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party after Eden's resignation in January 1957, surprising observers with his appointment over the favorite, Rab Butler.

Prime Minister (1957-1963)

Independent nuclear deterrent

Following the technical failures of a British independent nuclear deterrent with the Blue Streak and the Blue Steel projects, Macmillan negotiated the delivering of American Polaris missiles to the U.K. under the Nassau agreement in December 1962. Previously he had agreed to base 60 Thor missiles in Britain under joint control, and since late 1957 the American McMahon Act had been eased to allow Britain more access to nuclear technology. These negotiations were the basis for Peter Cook's satire of Macmillan in Beyond the Fringe.

Macmillan was a force in the successful negotiations leading to the signing of the 1962 Partial Test Ban Treaty by Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. His previous attempt to create an agreement at the May 1960 summit in Paris had collapsed due to the Gary Powers affair.

EEC

Britain's application to join the EEC was vetoed by Charles de Gaulle (29 January 1963), in part due to de Gaulle's fear that "the end would be a colossal Atlantic Community dependent on America" and in part in anger at the Anglo-American nuclear deal.

Economy

Macmillan brought the monetary concerns of the exchequer into office; the economy was his prime concern. However, Britain's balance of payments problems led to the imposition of a wage freeze in 1961 and this caused the government to lose popularity and led to a series of by-election defeats. He organised a major cabinet change in July 1962, but continued to lose support from within his party. During this time he was quoted as saying "Greater love hath no man than this, than to lay down his friends for his life" suggesting the difficulty of his decisions.

His One Nation approach to the economy was to seek high employment. This contrasted with his mainly monetarist Treasury ministers who argued that the support of sterling required strict controls on money and hence an unavoidable rise in unemployment. Their advice was rejected and in January 1958 the three Treasury ministers Peter Thorneycroft, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nigel Birch, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, and Enoch Powell, the Financial Secretary to the Treasury, resigned. Macmillan brushed aside this incident as "a little local difficulty".

Macmillan supported the creation of the National Incomes Commission as a means to institute controls on income as part of his growth-without-inflation policy. A further series of subtle indicators and controls were also introduced during his premiership.

Foreign policy

Macmillan also took close control of foreign policy. He worked to narrow the post-Suez rift with the United States, where his wartime friendship with Dwight D. Eisenhower was key -- the two had a productive conference in Bermuda as early as March 1957. The cordial relationship remained after the election of John F. Kennedy. Macmillan also saw the value of rapprochement with Europe and sought belated entry to the European Economic Community (EEC), and explored the possibility of a European Free Trade Area (EFTA). He also continued the divestment of the colonies, with his "wind of change" speech (February 1960) indicating his policy. Ghana and Malaya were granted independence in 1957, Nigeria in 1960 and Kenya in 1963. However in the Middle East Macmillan ensured Britain remained a force, intervening over Iraq in 1958 and 1960 and becoming involved in the affairs of Oman.

Election victory (1959)

He led the Conservatives to victory in the October 1959 general election, increasing his party's majority from 67 to 107 seats. The successful party's campaign was based on the economic improvements achieved, the slogan "Life's Better Under the Conservatives" was matched by Macmillan's own remark, "most of our people have never had it so good," usually paraphrased as "You've never had it so good". Critics contended that the actual economic growth rate was weak and distorted by increased defence spending.

Parliament trivia

The Supermac label was applied by cartoonist Victor 'Vicky' Weisz. It was intended as mockery, but backfired, coming to be used in a neutral or friendly fashion. Weisz tried to label him with other names, including 'Mac the Knife' (at the time of major cabinet changes in 1962; see below), but none of these caught on. (See also Mack The Knife).

"Supermac"
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"Supermac"

Macmillan had a reputation for being unflappable and witty in public, though he did admit to his wife that he was terrified before each Prime Minister's Question Time (usually on a Tuesday) in the Commons. On September 29, 1960, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev twice interrupted a speech by Macmillan at the United Nations by shouting out and pounding his desk. Macmillan famously replied, "I should like that to be translated if he wants to say anything." Responding to a remark made by Harold Wilson about not having boots in which to go to school, Macmillan, to the delight of Conservative MPs, retorted, "If Mr Wilson did not have boots to go to school, it is because he was too big for them!"

Retirement and death (1963-1986)

Arms of Harold Macmillan
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Arms of Harold Macmillan

The Profumo affair of spring and summer 1963 permanently damaged the credibility of Macmillan's government and exacerbated his ill-health (he had been diagnosed incorrectly with inoperable prostate cancer). Consequently, he resigned in on 18 October 1963. He was succeeded by the Foreign Secretary Alec Douglas-Home in a controversial move; it was alleged that Macmillan had pulled strings and utilised the party's grandees, nicknamed "The Magic Circle", to ensure that Butler was not chosen as his successor.

Macmillan initially refused a peerage and retired from politics in September 1964. He did, however, accept the distinction of the Order of Merit from The Queen. After retiring, he took up the chairmanship of his family's publishing house, Macmillan Publishers.

Over the next 20 years he made the occasional political intervention, particularly after Margaret Thatcher became Tory leader and Macmillan's premiership came under attack from the monetarists in the party. Macmillan is commonly thought to have likened Thatcher's policy of privatisation to "selling the family silver". In fact what he did say (at a dinner of the Tory Reform Group at the Carlton Club on November 8 1985) was that the sale of assets was commonplace amongst individuals or states when they encountered financial difficulties: "First of all the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go." Profitable parts of the steel industry and the railways had been privatised, along with British Telecom: "They were like two Rembrandts still left." Alan Watkins, A Conservative Coup (Duckworth, 1992), p. 105. Macmillan's speech was much commented on and a few days later Macmillan made a speech in the Lords to clarify what he had meant:

When I ventured the other day to criticise the system I was, I am afraid, misunderstood. As a Conservative, I am naturally in favour of returning into private ownership and private management all those means of production and distribution which are now controlled by state capitalism. I am sure they will be more efficient. What I ventured to question was the using of these huge sums as if they were income.468 H.L. Deb., cc.390-1, 14 November 1985. Quoted in Watkins, p. 106.
In 1984 he finally accepted a peerage and was created Earl of Stockton and Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden. In the last month of his life, he observed:

"Sixty-three years ago ... the unemployment figure [in Stockton-on-Tees] was then 29%. Last November [1986] ... the unemployment [there] is 28%. A rather sad end to one's life."
Macmillan died at Birch Grove in Sussex in 1986 aged 92 years and 322 days — the greatest age attained by a British Prime Minister until surpassed by James Callaghan on February 14, 2005.

Titles from birth to death

Notes

External link

Cabinets

For a full list of Ministerial office-holders, see Conservative Government 1957-1964.

January 1957 - October 1959

Change
  • March 1957 - Lord Home succeeds Lord Salisbury as Lord President, remaining also Commonwealth Relations Secretary.
  • September 1957 - Lord Hailsham succeeds Lord Home as Lord President, Home remaining Commonwealth Relations Secretary. Geoffrey Lloyd succeeds Hailsham as Minister of Education. The Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Reginald Maudling, enters the Cabinet.
  • January 1958 - Derick Heathcoat Amory succeeds Peter Thorneycroft as Chancellor of the Exchequer. John Hare succeeds Amory as Minister of Agriculture.

October 1959 - July 1960

July 1960 - October 1961

October 1961 - July 1962

July 1962 - October 1963

In a radical reshuffle dubbed "The Night of the Long Knives", Macmillan sacked a third of his Cabinet and instituted many other changes.

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Sir Anthony Eden

|width="30%" align="center" rowspan=""|Succeeded by:
The Earl of Home |- |-

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