Portraits and Miniatures Page 6

  Most people would now think there was a good deal more mischief, and indeed irresponsibility, in Macleod than in Gaitskell, but it was high-order jugular debating. In fact Macleod beat the busmen and improved his own and the government’s standing as a result, but it is none the less the case that throughout nearly his whole career he scored more triumphs with words than with deeds.

  The exception was his period in his next office. Just as he had been eager to leave the Ministry of Health in 1955 so he looked for a move from the Ministry of Labour in 1959. They were perfectly reasonable desires in both cases. He had served more than adequate stints in both offices. In 1959 he was looking for a change rather than for a great promotion, and the office on which he had fixed his sights was the Colonial secretaryship. This office, which was historically the third of the secretaryships of state, had reached its apogee under Joseph Chamberlain, who chose it when he was the second man in the Salisbury Government in terms of power and the first in terms of public impact. For the Colonial Office it had mostly been gently downhill after that, and the path was to be far more precipitately so after Macleod, although this was because of the success and not the failure of his policies. The department was abolished in 1967.

  In 1959-61, however, the job had plenty of political content. It was the period of the ‘wind of change’ in Africa, the affairs of the dark continent stood near the centre of the Westminster stage, and there was both risk and opportunity in being involved with them. Even so Macmillan was surprised that Macleod wanted the department, although it at first suited the Prime Minister very well that he did. In offering it Macmillan talked about ‘the poisoned chalice’, but his surprise probably came at least as much from the fact that it was so far from the previous bent of Macleod’s interests. The new Colonial Secretary had never made a significant speech on the subject, had cultivated no contacts with African or Caribbean leaders, and had never set foot in a colony. For the last deficiency there were plenty of near precedents in British imperial history. Gladstone’s commitment to Irish Home Rule was not made less intense by the fact that only once in his life did he cross the sixty-five miles of St George’s Channel. Baldwin showed more courage on India than on any other issue, but never even contemplated visiting the sub-continent. Macleod had plenty of colonial travel during his two years in the responsible office, but his previous abstinence did illustrate a certain insularity. Although he was politically a staunch pro-European throughout the 1960s, he was never much of a traveller across the Channel. He had seen more of France as a soldier than he was to do in any other way. His favourite European destination was a frequently revisited hotel on the Costa Brava. The capitals in which he seemed most at home were Washington and New York in the Kennedy/Johnson era.

  Despite this lack of preparation or previous interest, Macleod did not approach the Colonial secretaryship as a routine ‘stage in a career’ appointment. He treated it as a vocation, even if a short-term one, and for the sake of doing it, rather like a temporarily holy man going into a monastery and renouncing the temptations of the flesh, he gave up the practice at which he was best and therefore enjoyed the most, which was the flailing of the opposition parties. In view of his office and his policy within it, which was to hasten the drive to independence and give paramountcy to the interests of the black majorities, he had no choice. There were no battles to fight with Labour or the Liberals. They were on his side. His potential opponents were the African whites (or at least most of them) and their sympathizers in the Conservative Party at home. He was successful, particularly in his first year, in disarming a lot of the latter. In doing so he could not resist a few party flicks (the dismissive phrases came to him so easily), but he could not get much leverage out of them. The peroration of his 1960 Conservative Party Conference speech, which secured a thunderous ovation from an audience much of which had little enthusiasm for his policy, illustrates the skill with which he could put together familiar, even hackneyed, phrases in an order that was resonant, persuasive and applause-provoking:

  I cannot promise you a popular colonial policy. There will be toil and sweat and tears; but I hope not blood and I hope not bitterness - although in the turmoil that is Africa today, of even that one cannot be certain. But this is the road we must walk, and we can walk no other. The Socialists can scheme their schemes and the Liberals can dream their dreams, but we, at least, have work to do. I make you one pledge only; nothing more than this and nothing less - that we will at all times, and to all peoples, in all these territories, carry out our duties faithfully, steadfastly and without fear.

  By the end of 1960 he had achieved a lot. Nigeria had reached independence. Tanganyika (Tanzania) and Sierra Leone were well on the way to it. There had been a successful conference on the future of Nyasaland (Malawi) and considerable progress had been made towards a reconciliation in Kenya, the most difficult nut to crack because of the combination of the Mau Mau revolt and a higher proportion of white settlers. Outside Africa a settlement and independence, although hardly stability for the future, had also been achieved in Cyprus.

  Nineteen sixty-one was a more difficult year for Macleod. He got himself impaled on three nasty bits of barbed wire: Sir Roy Welensky, the fifth Marquess of Salisbury, and Duncan Sandys, who as Commonwealth Secretary was the Cabinet colleague with whom his responsibilities marched most closely. Welensky was a formidable although ultimately unsuccessful leader of the white settlers and wrote disparagingly of Macleod’s ‘mixture of cold calculation, sudden gushes of undisciplined emotion and ignorance of Africa’. Salisbury had become sour and malevolent. The implication of his notorious House of Lords attack was that Macleod was an upstart card-sharper. It caused a lot of resentment and damaged Salisbury. But it also damaged Macleod who was much interested in his own future, which Salisbury no longer was. Sandys was a minister of monumental stubbornness. Macleod and he got their horns completely locked, which was a natural posture for Sandys but an unnatural one for Macleod, who had a darting not a stolid personality. Furthermore, their constant conflict bored Macmillan, who blamed the one who seemed to be acting out of character. Macleod began to lose the Prime Minister’s confidence and his days at the Colonial Office became numbered.

  He was again reshuffled in October 1961. In form certainly, and to some extent in substance, he was promoted not demoted. He replaced Rab Butler as Leader of the House of Commons and Chairman of the Conservative Party. The press hailed his promotion as the creation of a new crown prince, and the days after his appointment to these posts were the apparent peak of his position in the Prime Ministerial stakes. Yet there were a number of maggots in the cheese, and the reality was that he was then like one of those countries - Britain in 1890, the United States in 1960, maybe Germany in 1990 - whose competitive position was already weakening when their power and affluence looked greatest.

  The first of the maggots was that he had made a lot of Conservative enemies as Colonial Secretary and that he had been moved for negative reasons as well as promoted for positive ones. The second was that the leadership of the House and the chairmanship of the Party are two wildly incompatible horses to ride. The first requires its incumbent to be the least partisan of ministers and the second requires him to be the most. Even Butler with his built-in ambiguity had found the dual role difficult and unsatisfactory. Macleod, who was more brittle and had less depth than Rab, found it bifurcating. Third, and least important, the sinecure office which he was given in order that he might have a salary, that of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was well below the prestige of the Lord Presidency of the Council or the Lord Privy Sealship which normally goes with leading the House of Commons. In any event, while he was by no means an abject failure at either of his incompatible posts, they did not give him the pivotal position in the government and Party that the two in combination might have been expected to do. The leadership (not just of the House but of the Conservative Party) was twice to fall vacant in the next four years. On neither occasion was Macleod a possib
le runner or even a seriously consulted kingmaker.

  The first occasion was when Macmillan precipitately resigned in October 1963. This was announced on Thursday 10 October. By Saturday 19 October Alec Home had emerged as Prime Minister and had got all the members of the outgoing Cabinet, save only Macleod and Enoch Powell, to serve under him. It was a disastrous ten days, not only for Butler, the obvious although passed-over candidate, but also for Macleod. Macleod was more anti-Home than he was pro-Butler, who was in some sense his mentor but for whom his support in the last leadership contest in 1957 had been to say the least equivocal, and who he regarded, with some justification, as behaving with hopeless softness at the 1963 crunch. But Macleod also seems to have been activated by some inner sourness. His friendly 1973 biographer, Nigel Fisher, then an MP and a supporter as well as a friend, hints strongly at this. He partly attributes Macleod’s temporary lack, not merely of higher judgement, but of basic political common sense to the severe illness of his daughter at the time, but he did not feel that this was the whole explanation.

  Hailsham began as the front runner, or at least the most noisy one. When he began to fade Macleod believed that he himself might emerge between the fainéant Butler and the too rumbustious Hailsham. His only excuse was that his Blackpool conference speech (on n October) had been as great a success as usual, in contrast with the dank efforts of Butler and Maudling. But he ought to have noticed that Home got as good a reception as he did for a much less powerful speech. A politician who is applauded without deploying rhetoric is like a comedian who provokes laughter without saying anything funny. Neither can fail to succeed. But Macleod refused to take Home’s candidature seriously for nearly another week. As a result he was late and ineffective (despite inherent strength) in organizing his junta against him, and was left gesticulating rather than conducting. Macmillan, who over-reacted to his prostate condition but did not allow it to detract from his anti-Butler dedication, took not the slightest notice of Macleod throughout.

  Fisher does not doubt that these days finished off Macleod’s chances of becoming leader of the Conservative Party, which had already been gravely weakened by his liberal courage as Colonial Secretary. If, however, the coffin required the knocking in of any nails Macleod abundantly provided the hammer during the next few months. Out of office, he became editor of the Spectator and a director of Lombard Banking, not one of the great names in the City but a finance house which at least had enough resources, even in those relatively austere days, to provide him with an enormous motor car and a chauffeur. I remember his assuring me that the most important thing for an office-less politician was to secure this facility (he may well have been right). I also remember seeing him frequently step out of it in New Palace Yard looking like a discontented gnome in spite of his golden coach.

  His Spectator editorship, at which he was rather a success, led him much more astray than did the motor car. In January 1964, at the beginning of what was certain to be an election year, he wrote and published a long denunciation of ‘the magic circle’ of privilege, prejudice and complacency which had put Home in and kept Butler out. Macleod wanted to provoke a row, but he got more than he bargained for. Even the Enfield Conservative executive censured him for the article, although only by fifteen votes to fourteen, and with seven abstentions. A rare foray of his into the House of Commons smoking room met with a proportionately still less friendly Tory response.

  He contemplated withdrawal from politics, but instead set about the slow process of working his passage back. That did not start well. His old luck seemed: to have deserted him. Home welcomed his return to the Shadow Cabinet after the 1964 election, but probably unintentionally gave him a dud portfolio. It was thought that the new Wilson Government was about to nationalize steel and that if Macleod were made steel spokesman he could redeem his reputation in the most bloody part of the battlefield without at first being given too senior a command. But the government wisely procrastinated and Macleod languished. There was even a debate in which he allowed himself to be badly worsted by as normally grey a ministerial spokesman as Fred Lee. The humiliation was made greater by the fact that the newspapers had been briefed for several days previously to trumpet Macleod’s coming triumph. Fisher, always loyal but never blind, says it was the one really bad speech that Macleod made in the House of Commons.

  In the summer of 1965 Home resigned the leadership, and Macleod had to stand on the sidelines and watch a battle between Maudling and Heath (with Enoch Powell as a semi-irrelevant third candidate), both of whom were his juniors in age and had been substantially so in rank as recently as 1961. He broke an old compact with Maudling (that they would both support whichever of themselves looked stronger at the time of any future leadership contest) and voted for Heath. If he carried even two handfuls of votes with him this would have been decisive, for the margin was narrow. He was rewarded with the shadow Chancellorship, although I do not think this consideration had affected his vote. The promotion did, however, mark the completion of his penance and his return to the central councils, but only when his last likely chance of leadership had gone by. He was no more than fifty-one but he was in poor health and Heath was four years younger.

  Macleod was shadow Chancellor for almost five years, the longest time for which he ever did any job. For the last half of this period I was too close to his performance to be able to judge it objectively. Looking back, and leafing through his speeches, I am struck by the contrast between the splendour of his phrases and the vacuity of his economic prescriptions. In so far as he endeavoured to be constructive (which was not much, for he was a great believer in the Churchillian doctrine that the business of an Opposition is to oppose), it was about taxation rather than the management of the economy. On the latter he claimed no expertise and preferred scepticism to precision. Even on taxation, however, he operated with a broad-brush blandness which is today treated as the hallmark of a would-be profligate Chancellor. His speech at the 1967 Party Conference was thus summarized by Nigel Fisher: ‘He promised that a Conservative Government would abolish the Selective Employment Tax and reduce the burden of direct personal taxation. He did not think it necessary to increase indirect taxes by an equivalent amount because he relied on larger savings and a higher growth rate to fill the revenue gap under a Conservative Administration.’

  He was much happier at general raillery. In the same speech he said: ‘Secretaries of State come and go. We started with George Brown. Happy days. Three per cent mortgages. The National Plan. Where have all the flowers gone? Gone to the graveyard, every one. Then you will remember Michael - [pause]. No, of course you do not remember Michael Stewart … In nominal charge we have the Prime Minister himself, a man whose vision is limited to tomorrow’s headline.’ He always liked getting Harold Wilson in his sights. In that same year in the House of Commons, having described Wilson as persuading himself and trying to persuade the country that he was in turn Napoleon, Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and the Duke of Wellington, Macleod moved to his cheer line: ‘J. F. Kennedy described himself in a brilliant phrase as an idealist without illusions. I could describe the Prime Minister as an illusionist without ideals.’

  When it came to my period as Chancellor I thought Macleod was much better at Party Conferences than in the House of Commons. I sat before a TV set lost in reluctant and apprehensive admiration as he riveted the faithful at Blackpool or Brighton, but I never found him especially formidable across the despatch boxes. I think he was bored and frustrated as his sixth year out of office turned into the seventh and also the last year of his life. I cannot say that I believe he would have been a great Chancellor. He was too concentrated on taxation, perhaps too much of a politician, and above all too ill for that. He was also curiously and obsessively unrealistic about unemployment. His mind was struck in the early post-war years on the issue and he genuinely believed that any level much over 300,000 was a certain sign of socialist incompetence and bureaucratic indifference. How he would have accommodated himself to
the Conservative performance in the 1980s I cannot imagine. But he would certainly have been a very much better Chancellor than Anthony Barber.

  He was also a considerable general loss to the Heath Government. ‘We have lost our trumpeter,’ someone said when he went. But he was more than that. He had an empathy which eluded Heath and a sense of direction which eluded every other member of that administration. He would not have succeeded Heath had he survived to 1975, when he would have been sixty-one and old for his years. Also he had some quality of self-destructiveness which made him not nearly as papabile as he sometimes looked. But he might have prevented a Thatcher succession. As it is, he remains an ambiguous figure, romantic and perverse, with a capacity for leadership which frustrated itself by his incapacity to conciliate those who were not under his spell.

  Dean Acheson

  Dean Acheson is best remembered in this country for his 1962 speech at the West Point Military Academy in which he said: ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.’ It touched a sore spot only six years after Suez and on the threshold of General de Gaulle’s veto on our first but belated application to join the Common Market (as it was then called). But he should be still more remembered for his part in the Marshall Plan, in the putting together of NATO, and in the rallying of the Western world from a post-1945 slough of despond which led on, after forty years of long and often tense waiting, to the great bloodless victory of 1989. Acheson was not an unduly modest man, but when he called the second (1969) volume of his memoirs Present at the Creation it was an under- rather than an overstatement.