deciding that they wanted the status of a MP and collaring a provincial constituency: this malaise resulted in backbenches lined by complacent, inarticulate, politically obtuse money men with the reactionary, inflexible views of late middle age. The new rules also vested the constituency parties with independence in the selection of candidates. Retrospectively, Kilmuir believed that the quality of new MPs elected at the general elections of 1950 and 1951 was high, but thereafter plummeted. Local associations became dismaying in their choice of candidates in seats with handsome majorities. During the 1950s, to Kilmuir’s regret, they copied the cardinal error of Labour constituency parties, which had always weakened the efficacy of the parliamentary party by selecting tedious local worthies for safe seats while abler younger candidates were consigned to marginal or unwinnable constituencies. ‘Few of the new Members who entered the Commons in 1955 and 1959,’ wrote Kilmuir in 1964, ‘had achieved a reputation outside Westminster in any field, and far too many of them were obscure local citizens with obscure local interests, incapable – and indeed downright reluctant – to think on a national or international scale. What made this situation particularly annoying was that many excellent candidates, who would have made first-class Members and probably Ministers, were left to fight utterly hopeless seats … while the safe seats went to men of far lower calibre.’34
The Midlands conurbation, for example, was represented by nonentities with aldermanic paunches which they carried in a stately, self-satisfied way as if they contained dividend coupons: Harold Gurden (elected at Birmingham Selly Oak in 1955), Gordon Matthews (elected at Meriden, 1959), John Hollingworth (Birmingham All Saints, 1959), Leslie Seymour (Birmingham Sparkbrook, 1959), and Leonard Cleaver (Birmingham Yardley, 1959). Clever young William Rees-Mogg was condemned to contest the hopeless seat of Chester-le-Street in 1959 partly because of prejudice in better seats against his Catholicism. According to Rees-Mogg, there were only two Jewish MPs (Harry d’Avigdor-Goldsmid and Keith Joseph) on the Conservative side during the Parliament of 1955–59 and both had the advantage of inherited baronetcies. Margaret Thatcher was selected at Finchley in 1959 solely because a woman seemed less objectionable than her rival, who was Jewish. Julian Critchley, who was one of the 1959 intake, thought it contained ‘more than its share of those who could talk nonsense with distinction’.35
In January 1957, just before Macmillan replaced Eden, a retired Conservative MP, Christopher Hollis, noted that Eton had ten times as many MPs and ten times as many members of the government than any other school, a disproportion greater than before 1832. He did not think this was inherently undesirable. At the height of the Suez crisis, it was Etonians – the Macmillans’ son-in-law Julian Amery and future brother-in-law Victor Hinchingbrooke among the hawks, Jakie Astor, Boothby, Edward Boyle, Anthony Nutting among the doves – who had the courage to refuse blind loyalty to Eden’s blunders. Hollis argued ‘that in a generally egalitarian society, those who have positions of responsibility will be apt to be too timidly conformist and that a few Old Etonians about the place, bred in a tradition of liberty, ready in their very insolence to value other things above immediate success, are no bad leaven to the general lump’. Hollis had been an intelligent, independent-minded MP who had retired at the 1955 general election because he had not received political advancement, probably because he was suspected of homosexuality. Such was the parliamentary party’s fearful recoil from unorthodox opinions or temperament that, as one young backbencher later recalled with shame, ‘had I been more mature I might have benefited from his friendship, but as it was I brushed him off as swiftly as I decently could’.36
Responding to Hollis, Henry Kerby, a Tory backbencher with links to MI5, stressed the importance in party counsels of men whose families were neither traditional gentry nor hereditary nobility, but had got their wealth, and possibly recent titles, from shareholdings in large businesses. ‘The House of Commons is packed with Old Etonians who are no more members of the aristocracy than I am. The Government benches are crowded with Members of Parliament who are Old Etonians only because their fathers could afford to send them to that school.’ These MPs were ‘representatives of a moneybags plutocracy, however much many of them may try to disguise their origins. The House is crammed with first-generation descendants of hard-faced men who have done very well for themselves in trade of every sort – honourable and otherwise.’ (Kerby’s point was backed by a survey in 1959 of the country houses in Banbury district, just south of Profumo’s constituency of Stratford-on-Avon, which found that of the forty-three houses large enough to be named on the one-inch ordnance survey map, only four had been in the same family for more than two generations.) Constituency selection committees, continued Kerby, were ‘dumbstruck’ by the sight of prospective candidates sporting the black ties, with thin blue stripes, that showed the old Etonian. They realised that young men, with that particular fabric round their necks, would quickly reach political patronage and power. ‘Money,’ Kerby complained, ‘lies at the bottom of Old Etonian dominance.’37
Angus Maude, a Tory MP who would succeed Profumo at Stratford, explained that once constituency parties were debarred from extracting election expenses and big subscriptions from candidates, they instead demanded that MPs spent more time in constituencies attending to local fusses. Old Etonians, with inherited incomes that exempted them from the need to earn a living, had the free time that constituency associations required. Moreover, the MPs who were most likely to reach office were those who could devote most time to politics. ‘OEs’, overall, had more free hours than professional and company director MPs. There was a higher proportion of OEs in government posts than on the backbenches because of the low pay of junior ministers: many MPs could not accept office without financial hardship. Macmillan’s government, Maude calculated, had seventy ministers, of whom about ten might be called ‘self-made’. This scarcely mattered, he argued, because ‘a parliamentary party consisting entirely of very clever men would prove the devil to run and might prove extremely dangerous’.38
‘Those who hope to rule must first learn to obey,’ a Harrow housemaster had written thirty years earlier. ‘To learn to obey as a fag is part of the routine that is the essence of the English Public School system, and … is the wonder of other countries. Who shall say it is not that which has so largely helped to make England the most successful colonising nation, and the just ruler of the backward races of the world?’ The instinctive, automatic obedience to their leader felt by most Tory MPs was based on fear of party whips, who reminded them of prefects brandishing canes, or of scragging from other backbenchers. Mark Bonham Carter described his experience after being elected in a Liberal by-election coup in 1958. ‘It’s just like being back as a new boy at public school – with its rituals and rules, and also its background of convention, which breeds a sense of anxiety and inferiority in people who don’t know the rules. Even the smell – the smell of damp stone stairways – is like a school. All you have of your own is a locker – just like a school locker. You don’t know where you’re allowed to go, and where not – you’re always afraid you may be breaking some rule … It’s just like a public school: and that’s why Labour MPs are overawed by it – because they feel that only the Tory MPs know what a public school is like.’ Robin Ferrers, who was appointed as a lord-in-waiting by Macmillan in 1962, found front-bench life just like school. ‘There are the clever guys. There are the silly clots, too. Like football, you do the best that you can when the ball comes to you in order not to let the side down. At Question Time, if you can make them laugh, it is very satisfying. The schoolboy ethos is never far away – and that is good.’39
Sticklers resented any challenge to the prefects’ authority. When a decision of the Deputy Speaker’s was criticised by Lady Mellor, wife of a Tory MP, at a garden party, Labour MPs complained, and the Commons Privileges Committee censured her. No words that might weaken house esprit de corps could be tolerated, especially from anyone as objectionable as a woman with forthright and informed views. During crises, the Conservative parliamentary party resembled a boarding house in which any boy who challenged the housemaster’s decisions would be biffed or given a bogging. Even in private sessions, it was bad form to bestir the deferential placidity. When Macmillan, or his successors Douglas-Home and Heath, addressed the 1922 Committee of backbenchers, questions were confined to the closing minutes of the meeting. The questions seldom exceeded the level
