Harold the First
AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS
The following excerpt is taken from the third volume of Mr Harold Macmillan's memoirs, 'The Dancing Years' (Vestpocket Papermac, 10 gns).
In 1945 the Second World War came to an end. The 'Coalition' over which Churchill had presided during the tedious and hectic days of the war was, as its name would suggest, com- posed of elements of more than one political party. It was now felt by some that this state of affairs had gone on long enough, and pre- parations were made for a general election, which would enable the electorate to choose, by secret ballot, representatives of the three main political parties, Conservatives, Liberals and Socialists. Churchill, for whom I had the very deepest admiration, was most anxious that I should be a member of his Cabinet as he approached this Hour of Decision when the winds of change were already stirring and the tides of fortune already on the turn. One night after dinner at Chequers he suggested to me over the brandy that I might like to be Foreign Secretary. I said I thought I'd had very little experience of that sort of thing, but that I left it to him. In the event I found myself Assistant Under-Secretary at the Ministry of Food.
I held this post, as it transpired, for a remark- ably short time, the general election being im- minent, and the various winds and tides already riffling our hair and lapping about our feet. I had, while I was still in Italy—actually it was on the corner of the Via dei Sacrissimi Bimbi in Taranto—received a very tempting invita- tion to abandon my constituency at Stockton in favour of a 'safe seat'. I thought it only proper in the circumstances to decline it. I had, for one thing, an immense affection for Stockton, although I had not been there for some years and I knew full well that the cam- paign would be neither a 'piece of cake' nor a fête accompli. Old Grabbers, my gardener, had done what he could in the way of gathering up constituency correspondence into neat heaps and burning it each autumn, but there was still a great backlog of resentment and pique that I should have to wade through, were the laurel wreath and victor's palm to be mine.
The campaign, as it emerged, was a quiet one, and the individual meetings were even quieter. On one occasion the silence was only broken by my wife turning to me to ask whether I thought that we had come to the right place. As our audience continued to remain inert, recumbent under white sheets on symmetrically arranged marble slabs, and asked no questions at all, I eventually came to the conclusion that we had not. This impression was confirmed, in a more general sense, at the polling stations, and my Labour opponent was returned with an enor- mous majority. My wife and I left on the train for London, as we had so many times before both in and out of office, and I was able to ponder philosophically on the vagaries of poli- tical life. Many people at the time were of the opinion that Churchill was personally respon- sible for our defeat. His description, when speaking on the wireless, of his former Socialist colleagues as 'Gestapo Thugs,' coupled with the thinly veiled suggestion that Mr Attlee was Adolf Hitler dressed up, were thought by such people to have been too extreme for the
average voter. On the contrary, I think the blame was ours. We expected too much of Churchill, and consequently came a cropper.
I saw Churchill, for whom I had the deepest admiration, on the day after the election. He seemed somewhat tearful, and obviously stunned by the news. As I noted in my diary at the time:
'P.M. no longer P.M. Awful bore. Dinner with Peter (McNudie), Agatha (The Mar- chioness of Nigg), Ben (Foureyes) Birtwhistle and Mae (West). Everyone was depressed.' I myself was unemployed. Then, with the tragic death of a sitting member, I was able to step into a safe seat and take my place once again in the tide of fortune. The atmosphere in the House of Commons, it is true, had changed: many of the newly elected Labour party mem- bers had little regard for the rules and tradi- tions of Parliament, and would whistle and cat- call, from time to time throwing their fish and chip wrappings down on to the front benches, and openly mocking the frail old Speaker, or 'Ref,' with questions as to the whereabouts of his spectacles. Despite such tedious moments I did not regret the time I spent in the Chamber, as it gave me an opportunity to put into some sort of perspective the great Prime Ministers of our epoch.
Churchill, for whom I had the deepest ad- miration, offered in opposition his own inim- itable brand of leadership, neither fanatical nor obsessive. Wisely, he found other things to do: there were world problems to be glanced at in the midday and sporting editions of the even- ing papers, which occupied much of his time. There were eighteen volumes of the History of the Second World War to be written, by hand. There were pictures to be painted. There were rumbas to be danced. There was the life of Riley to be lived. Much of his energy, too, was devoted to sleeping off the appalling effects of the war. And if there were those who ridiculed his somewhat ponderous oratory in the brash post-war House, it was surely because they failed to distinguish between greatness and pomposity.
Attlee has often been much underrated. He was, above all else, an inspired listener: I have seen him listen, blowing softly through his pipe, to five hours of heated discussion, condemna- tion of his appalling handling of the financial situation, criticism of his stealth in introducing the Independent Nuclear Deterrent, abuse at his commitment of British troops in Korea, never once interrupting, and sum up the entire meeting with a brief and incisive 'Good Egg!' Like his successor, Anthony Eden, he has been accused of weakness, lack of stature and panache, of failing to recognise the fresh winds and the unfamiliar tides that were blowing and moving about. But like Churchill and Eden, too, he had a role to play, and he played it like the good little man he was.
Next week—Taken at the Flood: the Consum- mation.
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