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Harold Macmillan
Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, OM, PC, FRS (10 February 1894 – 29 December 1986) was a British Conservative statesman and politician who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1963. Caricatured as "Supermac", he was known for his pragmatism, wit and unflappability.
Macmillan was badly injured as an infantry officer during the First World War. He suffered pain and partial immobility for the rest of his life. After the war he joined his family book-publishing business, then entered Parliament at the 1924 general election. Losing his seat in 1929, he regained it in 1931, soon after which he spoke out against the high rate of unemployment in Stockton-on-Tees. He opposed the appeasement of Germany practised by the Conservative government. He rose to high office during the Second World War as a protégé of Prime Minister Winston Churchill. In the 1950s Macmillan served as Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer under Anthony Eden.
When Eden resigned in 1957 following the Suez Crisis, Macmillan succeeded him as prime minister and Leader of the Conservative Party. He was a One Nation Tory of the Disraelian tradition and supported the post-war consensus. He supported the welfare state and the necessity of a mixed economy with some nationalised industries and strong trade unions. He championed a Keynesian strategy of deficit spending to maintain demand and pursuit of corporatist policies to develop the domestic market as the engine of growth. Benefiting from favourable international conditions he presided over an age of affluence, marked by low unemployment and high—if uneven—growth. In his speech of July 1957 he told the nation it had 'never had it so good', but warned of the dangers of inflation, summing up the fragile prosperity of the 1950s. He led the Conservatives to success in 1959 with an increased majority.
In international affairs, Macmillan worked to rebuild the Special Relationship with the United States from the wreckage of the 1956 Suez Crisis (of which he had been one of the architects), and facilitated the decolonisation of Africa. Reconfiguring the nation's defences to meet the realities of the nuclear age, he ended National Service, strengthened the nuclear forces by acquiring Polaris, and pioneered the Nuclear Test Ban with the United States and the Soviet Union. After the Skybolt Crisis undermined the Anglo-American strategic relationship, he sought a more active role for Britain in Europe, but his unwillingness to disclose United States nuclear secrets to France contributed to a French veto of the United Kingdom's entry into the European Economic Community.[5] Near the end of his premiership, his government was rocked by the Vassall and Profumo scandals, which to cultural conservatives and supporters of opposing parties alike seemed to symbolise moral decay of the British establishment.[6] Following his resignation, Macmillan lived out a long retirement as an elder statesman. He was as trenchant a critic of his successors in his old age as he had been of his predecessors in his youth. In 1986, he died at the age of 92.
Macmillan was the last British prime minister born during the Victorian era, the last to have served in the First World War and the last to receive a hereditary peerage, although Denis Thatcher, husband of prime minister Margaret Thatcher, received a baronetcy shortly after her resignation.
From the start of his premiership, Macmillan set out to portray an image of calm and style, in contrast to his excitable predecessor. He silenced the klaxon on the Prime Ministerial car, which Eden had used frequently. He advertised his love of reading Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen, and on the door of the Private Secretaries' room at Number Ten he hung a quote from The Gondoliers: "Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles every knot".
Macmillan filled government posts with 35 Old Etonians, seven of them in Cabinet.[] He was also devoted to family members: when Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire was later appointed (Minister for Colonial Affairs from 1963 to 1964 among other positions) he described his uncle's behaviour as "the greatest act of nepotism ever". Macmillan's Defence Minister, Duncan Sandys, wrote at the time: "Eden had no gift for leadership; under Macmillan as PM everything is better, Cabinet meetings are quite transformed".[ Many ministers found Macmillan to be more decisive and brisk than either Churchill or Eden had been.[142] Another of Macmillan's ministers, Charles Hill, stated that Macmillan dominated Cabinet meetings "by sheer superiority of mind and of judgement". Macmillan frequently made allusions to history, literature and the classics at cabinet meetings, giving him a reputation as being both learned and entertaining, though many ministers found his manner too authoritarian. Macmillan had no "inner cabinet", and instead maintained one-on-one relationships with a few senior ministers such as Rab Butler who usually served as acting prime minister when Macmillan was on one of his frequent visits abroad.[143] Selwyn Lloyd described Macmillan as treating most of his ministers like "junior officers in a unit he commanded". Lloyd recalled that Macmillan: "regarded the Cabinet as an instrument to play upon, a body to be molded to his will...very rarely did he fail to get his way"[143] Macmillan generally allowed his ministers much leeway in managing their portfolios, and only intervened if he felt something had gone wrong.[] Macmillan was especially close to his three private secretaries, Tom Bligh, Freddie Bishop and Philip de Zulueta, who were his favourite advisers.[] Many cabinet ministers often complained that Macmillan took the advice of his private secretaries more seriously than he did their own.
He was nicknamed "Supermac" in 1958 by the cartoonist "Vicky" (Victor Weisz), who intended to suggest that Macmillan was trying set himself up as a "Superman" figure. It was intended as mockery but backfired, coming to be used in a neutral or friendly fashion. Vicky tried to label him with other names, including "Mac the Knife" at the time of widespread cabinet changes in 1962, but none caught on.
In April 1957, Macmillan reaffirmed his strong support for the British nuclear weapons programme. A succession of prime ministers since the Second World War had been determined to persuade the United States to revive wartime co-operation in the area of nuclear weapons research. Macmillan believed that one way to encourage such co-operation would be for the United Kingdom to speed up the development of its own hydrogen bomb, which was successfully tested on 8 November 1957.
Macmillan's decision led to increased demands on the Windscale and (subsequently) Calder Hall nuclear plants to produce plutonium for military purposes. As a result, safety margins for radioactive materials inside the Windscale reactor were eroded. This contributed to the Windscale fire on the night of 10 October 1957, which broke out in the plutonium plant of Pile No. 1, and nuclear contaminants travelled up a chimney where the filters blocked some, but not all, of the contaminated material. The radioactive cloud spread to south-east England and fallout reached mainland Europe. Although scientists had warned of the dangers of such an accident for some time, the government blamed the workers who had put out the fire for 'an error of judgement', rather than the political pressure for fast-tracking the megaton bomb.
Concerned that public confidence in the nuclear programme might be shaken and that technical information might be misused by opponents of defence co-operation in the US Congress, Macmillan withheld all but the summary of a report into the fire prepared for the Atomic Energy Authority by Sir William Penney, director of the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment.Subsequently released files show that 'Macmillan's cuts were few and covered up few technical details',[162] and that even the full report found no danger to public health, but later official estimates acknowledged that the release of polonium-210 may have led directly to 25 to 50 deaths, and anti-nuclear groups linked it to 1,000 fatal cancers.
On 25 March 1957, Macmillan acceded to Eisenhower's request to base 60 Thor IRBMs in England under joint control to replace the nuclear bombers of the Strategic Air Command, which had been stationed under joint control since 1948 and were approaching obsolescence. Partly as a consequence of this favour, in late October 1957 the US McMahon Act was eased to facilitate nuclear co-operation between the two governments, initially with a view to producing cleaner weapons and reducing the need for duplicate testing.[165] The Mutual Defence Agreement followed on 3 July 1958, speeding up British ballistic missile development,[166] notwithstanding unease expressed at the time about the impetus co-operation might give to atomic proliferation by arousing the jealousy of France and other allies.
Macmillan saw an opportunity to increase British influence over the United States with the launching of the Soviet satellite Sputnik, which caused a severe crisis of confidence in the United States as Macmillan wrote in his diary: "The Russian success in launching the satellite has been something equivalent to Pearl Harbour. The American cockiness is shaken....President is under severe attack for the first time...The atmosphere is now such that almost anything might be decided, however revolutionary".[168] The "revolutionary" change that Macmillan sought was a more equal Anglo-American partnership as he used the Sputnik "crisis" to press Eisenhower to in turn press Congress to repeal the 1946 MacMahon Act, which forbade the United States to share nuclear technology with foreign governments, a goal accomplished by the end of 1957.[169] In addition, Macmillan succeeded in having Eisenhower to agree to set up Anglo-American "working groups" to examine foreign policy problems and for what he called the "Declaration of Interdependence" (a title not used by the Americans who called it the "Declaration of Common Purpose"), which he believed marked the beginning of a new era of Anglo-American partnership.[170] Subsequently, Macmillan was to learn that neither Eisenhower nor Kennedy shared the assumption that he applied to the "Declaration of Interdependence" that the American president and the British Prime Minister had equal power over the decisions of war and peace.[171] Macmillan believed that the American policies towards the Soviet Union were too rigid and confrontational, and favoured a policy of détente with the aim of relaxing Cold War tensions.
Macmillan had often play-acted being an old man long before real old age set in. As early as 1948 Humphry Berkeley wrote of how "he makes a show of being feeble and decrepit", mentioning how he had suddenly stopped shambling and sprinted for a train. Nigel Fisher tells an anecdote of how Macmillan initially greeted him to his house leaning on a stick, but later walked and climbed steps perfectly well, twice acting lame again and fetching his stick when he remembered his "act". However, in genuine old age he became almost blind, causing him to need sticks and a helping arm.
Macmillan died at Birch Grove, the Macmillan family mansion on the edge of Ashdown Forest near Chelwood Gate in East Sussex, four days after Christmas in 1986. His age was 92 years and 322 days—the greatest age attained by a British Prime Minister until surpassed by Lord Callaghan on 14 February 2005. His grandson and heir Alexander, Viscount Macmillan of Ovenden, said: "In the last 48 hours he was very weak but entirely reasonable and intelligent. His last words were, 'I think I will go to sleep now'."
On receiving the news, Thatcher hailed him as "a very remarkable man and a very great patriot", and said that his dislike of "selling the family silver" had never come between them. He was "unique in the affection of the British people".
Tributes came from around the world. US President Ronald Reagan said: "The American people share in the loss of a voice of wisdom and humanity who, with eloquence and gentle wit, brought to the problems of today the experience of a long life of public service."[236] Outlawed African National Congress president Oliver Tambo sent his condolences: 'As South Africans we shall always remember him for his efforts to encourage the apartheid regime to bow to the winds of change that continue to blow in South Africa.'[236] Commonwealth Secretary-General Sir Shridath Ramphal affirmed: "His own leadership in providing from Britain a worthy response to African national consciousness shaped the post-war era and made the modern Commonwealth possible."
A private funeral was held on 5 January 1987 at St Giles' Church, Horsted Keynes, West Sussex, where he had regularly worshipped and read the lesson.[264] Two hundred mourners attended,[262] including 64 members of the Macmillan family, Thatcher and former premiers Lord Home and Edward Heath, as well as Lord Hailsham,[261] and "scores of country neighbours".[264] The Prince of Wales sent a wreath "in admiring memory".[261] He was buried beside his wife and next to his parents and his son Maurice, who had died in 1984.
The House of Commons paid its tribute on 12 January 1987, with much reference made to his book The Middle Way.[265] Thatcher said: "In his retirement Harold Macmillan occupied a unique place in the nation's affections", while Labour leader Neil Kinnock struck a more critical note: "Death and distance cannot lend sufficient enchantment to alter the view that the period over which he presided in the 1950s, while certainly and thankfully a period of rising affluence and confidence, was also a time of opportunities missed, of changes avoided. Harold Macmillan was, of course, not solely or even pre-eminently responsible for that. But we cannot but record with frustration the fact that the vigorous and perceptive attacker of the status quo in the 1930s became its emblem for a time in the late 1950s before returning to be its critic in the 1980s."
A public memorial service, attended by the Queen and thousands of mourners, was held on 10 February 1987 in Westminster Abbey.Macmillan's estate was assessed for probate on 1 June 1987, with a value of £51,114 (equivalent to £152,955 in 2021.
courtesy-wikipedia
- Harold Macmillan

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