Macmillan had therefore seen at close quarters the reality of Britain’s position in Africa. It left him with a healthy distrust of all the parties involved. To his mind the South Africans had demonstrated themselves to be tinpot imperialists. The chartered company was exposed as a rapacious exploiter. Worst of all, the white settlers were revealed as turbulent bigots and potential traitors. All three posed a threat to the good governance of the Empire. Unlike his friend Crookshank, operating on the fringes of British power, Macmillan, sitting at the centre, took Smuts’s heady rhetoric with a large pinch of salt. Nevertheless his interest in politics was piqued quite as much. Billy Gore, a man only a few years older than himself, was very much the figure of the moment.
It was by now quite clear to Macmillan that if he wished to enter politics he would have do so under his own steam. Although Devonshire may have given him an outstanding insight into the workings of high policy, the duke was naturally much more concerned to bring forward his own son, Eddie Hartington, a mere year younger than Macmillan.78 He was determined to nurse a seat for Eddie and give him as much exposure to office as possible. Macmillan enjoyed regular conversations, but Hartington accompanied his father to the office each day to gain experience.79 Macmillan was never going to be the Cavendishes’ favoured son.
The Conservative party was, however, keen to recruit men like Macmillan. In 1923 he was adopted for the industrial seat of Stockton in north-east England. It was a world away from the kind of seats young aristocrats would be expected to fight. Macmillan faced an uphill struggle to win such a seat as a Conservative. The new leader of the Conservative party, Stanley Baldwin, favoured the introduction of protection – the levying of tariffs on foreign goods imported into Britain. He felt, however, that in order to requite previous promises he must call a general election before enacting such a policy. A year after Bonar Law had led the party to victory, Baldwin led it to defeat. Those contemporaries of Macmillan elected in 1923 tell the story: they were blue bloods in safe seats. Eddie Hartington entered Parliament much to his father’s delight – ‘a really very good, remarkable and satisfactory victory which he thoroughly deserves.’80 Two Eton and Grenadier contemporaries also entered Parliament in 1923. One, Dick Briscoe, a particular friend of Crookshank, with whom he had been at Magdalen, was the scion of a wealthy Cambridgeshire gentry family. The other, Walter Dalkeith, a close friend of Cranborne, was the heir of the Duke of Buccleuch – the wealthiest of the great aristocratic landowners. It was a rather different story in marginal constituencies in the north of England. These were the very areas where Baldwin’s embrace of tariff reform seemed like a vote for dear food. Although he made a good job of campaigning, Macmillan’s bid for the Stockton seat was doomed to failure.
It was fortunate for Macmillan, and indeed Crookshank, that the immediate post-war years saw such frequent appeals to the country: there were general elections in 1918, 1922, 1923 and 1924. They would soon have another opportunity of getting elected. Macmillan was determined to give Stockton another try and Crookshank was sure that he wanted to try for Parliament at the next opportunity. This was despite the fact that he had been transferred from Constantinople to a another plum posting in Washington, with all the discomforts of Turkey left far behind. He had a beautiful apartment and, because many of his investments were in American stocks, was flush with dollars. Yet he felt little warmer to diplomacy. Whereas in Constantinople he had seen too much of Rumbold and Henderson, now he rarely saw the ambassador, Sir Esme Howard. To make matters worse, Howard had specifically requested the services of Crookshank’s Eton contemporary Jock Balfour, for which ‘I am sorry for I have no particular passion for JB’. Since Howard was the brother-in-law of Balfour’s aunt and treated him ‘as a member of the family’ the omens did not look good.81
Although neither Crookshank nor Macmillan were favoured sons, they were exactly the kind of candidate the party was looking for to fight marginal but winnable seats. They were young, energetic, of good family, well-educated with good war records. Although Crookshank was not married, his sister Betty was devoted to him and willing to throw herself into constituency work. Of overriding importance for both Central Office and the local party, moreover, was their independent wealth. Both Macmillan and Crookshank could and did finance their own constituency organizations for both day-to-day running costs and campaigning. Such men needed no links with their constituencies – they could parachute in at short notice. As Crookshank said, ‘I rather hate to think that one would have to be a real carpet-bagger but in these days it is apt to happen and after all [our] training ought to count for something.’82 With a minority Labour government in power, both men felt their chance would come soon.
Thus in September 1924, when the prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate for Gainsborough in Lincolnshire fell ill, the party put the constituency in touch with Crookshank as a man who could fill in at very short notice. Within a fortnight of him having been adopted, it became clear that an election was imminent. To considerable irritation in Whitehall, Crookshank resigned from the foreign service with immediate effect. ‘I burnt my boats,’ he wrote a few days before the poll, ‘so far as the FO was concerned “on spec”.’ What made the gamble worthwhile for both Macmillan and Crookshank was the changing nature of British politics. Although the Liberals were a declining force in national politics, they still maintained some of their strength at local level. Both Stockton and Gainsborough were three-way constituencies. The anti-Conservative vote was strong but split. It made 1924 the optimum year to run.83
Apart from this feature of psephological geography, the two constituencies were quite dissimilar. Indeed, the different nature of their constituencies did much to shape Macmillan and Crookshank’s very different conduct in the 1924 Parliament. Stockton