parliamentary party: MPs wore a uniform of stiff white collars or cream silk shirts; dark, well-pressed suits or a black jacket with striped black and grey trousers; sleek Trumper’s haircuts and oils. On Fridays, which were called Private Members’ Days, when government business was not taken, and the Commons was thinly attended, the Conservative whips wore weekend tweed suits and brogue shoes. Julian Critchley was once standing in the crowded ‘No’ lobby, waiting to vote, when Sir Jocelyn Lucas, a crusty baronet who bred Sealyhams, accosted him, seized his elbow, hissed ‘You’re wearin’ suede shoes’, and stalked off. Lucas never addressed Critchley again. Excessive importance was attached to social standing. ‘Some able middle-class Conservatives – like Enoch Powell or Iain Macleod – have gone a long way,’ Anthony Wedgwood Benn commented in 1957, ‘but one senses that many Tory MPs would prefer to be in the top drawer and out of office than to be out of the drawer and in office.’41
Once he became Prime Minister, Macmillan began attending the Derby, cricket matches, and other jollities to settle his image with his party faithful. He excelled in striking poses which projected his personality until it was a palpable force over others. The Tory die-hards had not been fooled by so brilliant a man since Disraeli. His address to Tory peers before the general election of 1959 was ‘the best speech I think I have ever heard from a leader addressing his followers’, noted blimpish Lord Winterton, who had fifty-five years’ parliamentary experience. There were sweeping historical parallels to flatter his auditors’ intelligence, and patriotic pride to rouse them. In international affairs, Britain was speeding towards danger ‘like a man on a monorail’, Macmillan warned the peers, ‘but mankind had never known security save perhaps in Antonine age of Ancient [Rome] & Victorian age’. The achievement of full employment with ‘one of the highest standards of living in the world’ by a nation with few natural resources was possible because Britain was ‘rich in brain power as in the time of the first Elizabeth when Europe looked on us as Barbarians who couldn’t use a fork’. The Lords – backwoodsmen and activists alike – were rallied by such High Table urbanities.42
Critchley recalled a dinner that was arranged for the Prime Minister to meet newly elected backbenchers after the 1959 general election had been won with an improved majority. ‘We dined in one room, and then moved to another, where some of us literally sat at his feet. Macmillan was the ideal speaker for the intimate occasion: splendid after dinner, witty, elegant of phrase, skilled at flattering his audience, taking us apparently into his confidence. He was especially beguiling with the young. He told us, “Revolt by all means; but only on one issue at a time; to do more would be to confuse the whips”.’ Critchley studied Macmillan’s mannerisms at close quarters: ‘the nervous fingering of his Brigade tie; his curiously hooded eyes which would suddenly open wide, and the famous baring of the teeth. He told us that no one who had not experienced Oxford before the Kaiser’s War could know “la douceur de vivre”.’ Humphry Berkeley, a pompous youngster who was among the 1959 intake, admired Macmillan’s skill in disguising from his die-hards his intention to grant independence to African colonies as swiftly as possible. He recalled the Prime Minister charming backbenchers after his return from Africa in 1960 with references to the Scottish earl – collateral descendant of a Victorian Viceroy of India – whom he had appointed as Governor-General of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland: ‘It’s awfully good of Simon Dalhousie to have taken out to Salisbury the viceregal gold plate which was presented to his ancestor. It’s so good for morale.’43
‘I am always hearing about the Middle Classes,’ Macmillan wrote to the Conservative Research Department after a month in office. ‘What is it they really want? Can you put it down on a sheet of notepaper, and then I will see whether we can give it to them?’44 He knew the answer, though, well enough: they wanted a steady onrush of material prosperity, and to recover their margin of advantage over the working class.
The half century between Macmillan’s seizing of the premiership in 1957 and the banking collapse of 2008 was exceptional in history as a time of abundance, not scarcity. In all other periods, privation was the common Western experience. Most people were kept on short rations, emotionally and materially; frustration, not satisfaction, provided the keynote of existence. Macmillan offered an end to the stingy circumstances in which women watered down their children’s marmalade to make it go further.
Six months into his premiership Macmillan went to Bedford, the county town of the dullest English county. Its population of 60,000 worked in factories making pumps, diesel engines, gas turbines, farm implements, switchgear, tube fittings, transistors, and sweets. There, at the football pitch of the local team on 20 July 1957, Macmillan was guest of honour at a political gala to celebrate the parliamentary career of his Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd, the long-serving Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire: a career begun under the aegis of the ancien régime Duke of Bedford. No tickets were needed to attend; no ‘spin doctors’ existed to control the audience; there were no stewards from security firms to evict hecklers, or threaten them under anti-terrorist legislation. It was one of the last open-air political speeches by an English statesman to a genuine mass gathering. Politicians had for generations learnt to pitch their voices to reach thousands, to captivate their audiences and to master the art of impromptu retorts to hecklers. Henceforth they would have to simulate sincerity for television audiences.
The Bedford gala was ‘unique in the political annals of the county’, reported the local newspaper. ‘The Premier received a great welcome from a crowd that had assembled from every part of Bedfordshire.’ Macmillan told those who talked of the disintegration of the Empire: ‘It is not breaking up; it is growing up.’ He warned against complacency at recent advances in prosperity. ‘Let’s be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had … in the history of this country. What is beginning to worry some of us is “Is it too good to be true?” or perhaps I should say “Is it too good to last?”’ The crowd cheered, perhaps because they were polite, perhaps because they were enjoying their afternoon in the sun, but surely not because they liked his warning that there might be bad times ahead. Indeed, the Bedfordshire Times, judging perhaps by his manner rather than his words, thought Macmillan had been over-optimistic about the economic future. The paper quoted his remark: ‘Most of our people have never had it so good’, and commented: ‘That is true, but Mr Macmillan said little enough about the slender foundations on which all this prosperity rests.’ There was no talk of measures to check inflation. The Prime Minister dismissed ‘the fashion for newspapers and political commentators to work up all kinds of stories of troubles and dangers ahead’. The Bedfordshire Times thought no ‘working-up’ was needed: ‘the dangers are very real ones, and it is time they are squarely faced’.45
At the rally a youngster in a boiler-suit persistently heckled the Prime Minister. One of his interruptions concerned the level of old-age pensions: the Labour Party was calling for the basic rate of old-age pensions to be raised to £3 a week and to be annually adjusted to the cost of living. ‘You’ve never had it so good,’ Macmillan cried back at the heckler, contrasting the youngster’s rising wages with the fixed income of a pensioner, rather than targeting everyone in Bedford football ground. According to another account (that of Quentin Skinner, the historian of political thought, then a sixth-former at Bedford school, who was present), the heckler shouted facetiously: ‘What about the workers?’ Macmillan responded as if a serious objection had been called. It was this phrase that beyond any other became associated with his premiership.46
If people’s material standards were improving, in Bedford and nationally, there was a perception that, perhaps in consequence, sexual standards were deteriorating. Two years after Macmillan’s football-pitch speech, Peter Kennerley of the Sunday Pictorial went to Bedford. ‘Good-time girls – drunken teenagers – mothers who leave home for the bright lights – and plain unvarnished vice – these are the problems … earning the town of Bedford the reputation of “BRITAIN’S SIN TOWN 1959”.’ Kennerley reported that seven brothels had been raided and closed by Bedford
