5 NOVEMBER 1994, Page 46

BOOKS

Our friendship and breach

J. Enoch Powell

LAIN MACLEOD: A BIOGRAPHY by Robert Shepherd Hutchinson, £25, pp. 608 Though recorded as having contributed to this new biography of Iain Macleod, I used to refuse involvement in biographical notices of him in obedience to the princi- ple, de mortuis nihil nisi bonum. But even- tually all abstentions must come to an end, and here, before I too depart, I will lay my own pebble upon the tumulus of a man who was my closest friend and confidant during the early years of political ascent 1946-52 and spasmodically thereafter.

I have been tempted by a sentence in which the new biography early on mentions two chief characteristics of the man which came for me to be explanatory as our life in juxtaposition went on: 'his inbuilt ambition for power' and 'a ruthless efficiency in per- formance in the political dogfight'. I remember his telephoning me (at that time a rare occurrence) on the morrow of the Conservative leadership election of 1965 at which I had scored a mere 15 votes against Heath and Maudling. 'Why did you stand?' he asked. What he thought of my reply CI meant to leave my visiting card') I cannot imagine; but that election was a crisis point, I think, in Macleod's life. Till then nothing but the Top Job was worth 'ambi- tion'; afterwards, it seemed to me that by some strange premonition — he was ley' as only a Highlander can be — he had `settled' for less: he was to die as Chancel- lor of the Exchequer. Alas, the closest of friends and confederates can fail to under- stand one another completely; and looking back, I perceive that always there was a great gulf of mutual incomprehension between lain and Enoch.

The new biography is a massive tome which pursues its subject laboriously and conscientiously from year to year and utilis- es extensively

the treasure trove of full access to the papers in the Conservative Party Archive for [Macleod's] earlier career, including the Shadow Cabinet minutes and policy papers that had previously been closed,

not to mention 'the release of classified Government documents relating to his ministerial and Cabinet careers'. It is prob- ably the use of this 'treasure trove' material which has contributed to the weaknesses of the biography — its innocence and its apparent conviction that everything pre- dictably worked up towards a triumphant and pre-determined culmination. 'Life', as I once heard my seven-year-old daughter remarking to her younger sister, 'is not like that.'

The new biography is a sad book. It describes a parabolic curve, as its subject, by a unique combination of talents, politi- cal judgment and good luck, rises by 1960 to a position from which he could reason- ably expect to be the next leader of the Conservative Party, only to lapse down- wards again into being content with that Chancellorship of the Exchequer whence he was destined to be removed by death. The precise turning-point, if such a turning-point has to be selected, came with the taunt 'too clever by half' from Salisbury at the height of Macleod's negotiations as Colonial Secretary with the ill-fated Central African Federation.

Among the fateful false steps of which Parliament has been guilty, the creation of the Central African Federation, comprising Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, deserves a very high place. It combined two territories which were Crown colonies with a third territory that had long been treated as self-governing, making one Minister (the Commonwealth Secretary) responsible for the Federation and a different one (the Colonial Secretary) for its component parts. Unfortunately, on taking up his office as Colonial Secretary in October 1959, Macleod was unequivocal in endorsing that blunder, which was destined to tie to his tail forever the fateful sobriquet 'too clever by half: 'I believe the Federation is the best, indeed the only, real solution for those territories', he had minuted the Prime Minister in 1959.

The acceleration of African self- government to which Macleod as Colonial Secretary (1959-61) rightly dedicated him- self was to prove him disastrously mistaken. With skill and determination he succeeded in conferring democratic self-government not only on Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda but also, within the Federation, upon Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia. The incompatibility of all that with the Federa- tion was what ultimately led to the long- running fiasco of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence and a deep and enduring fissure between Macleod and what is miscalled 'the right' of the Conser- vative Party. In handling the breach between Macleod and myself in the wake of my Birmingham speech on 20 April 1968 the biography does cast a ray of light. Some background is necessary. The Commonwealth Immi- grants Bill of 1962 restricted the right of abode and entry in Britain to (among others) those holding a passport issued `00 behalf of Her Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom'. This obviously did not apply to passports issued by governors before independence but did apply to those issued afterwards by high commissioners. Consequently Asians resident in Kenya who had not been given Kenyan citizenship were given free entry into the UK. Hence the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill intro- duced by Home Secretary Callaghan in 1968 to stop up the loophole thus created. No trace of any undertaking having been given in respect of Kenya high commission- er passport holders has ever been pro- duced. I was therefore amazed by Macleod alleging that Callaghan's Bill would 'break our word on which [the Kenyan Asians] have relied'. What was the 'word'? No such word was breathed in all the debates on the 1962 Bill, and Macleod himself admitted that it is of course true that no one said in terms to the Asian community 'we are providing for you a privileged back door entry etc'. What Macleod chose to construe as a deliberate provision in a bill (rather than a draughtsman's oversight) was, it now appears, a commitment to admit uncondi- tionally to the UK, read into 'the strictest safeguards for all minorities, demanded and given' in the course of Kenya's independence negotiations, which the Commonwealth Secretary Sandys had roughly paraphrased as 'there is no question of anybody becoming stateless as a result of Kenya independence'. Thus did the equation of 'statelessness' with lack of unconditional admission to the United Kingdom become the cause of Macleod attributing to me opinions and attitudes which he had good reason to know I did not hold, as one who had enthusiastically supported his African policies as Colonial Secretary. What the biographer does not include is the wording of the reasoned amendment, to the drafting of which I con- tributed, to reject on Second Reading after Easter 1968 the Labour Government's Racial Discrimination Bill.

The breach opened up by our mutual misunderstanding was never closed during Macleod's lifetime. His biography has produced the means for my doing so now.