Macmillan was unperturbed when, two months into his premiership, in March 1957, Lord Salisbury resigned from the Cabinet. Much nonsense was written about Macmillan’s relationship with Salisbury (they had both married Cavendish women), and the fracturing of the family circle. In truth Betty Salisbury, who was a nettlesome character, had shown longstanding (and reciprocated) animosity towards Dorothy Macmillan over the Boothby affair. The Conservative Party was not fazed by the rupture with Salisbury. Although constituency associations often had a local nobleman as honorary president, they were run by solicitors, prosperous shopkeepers, men with small businesses and their wives. For these roturiers, the Cecils were not a popular bodyguard to have gathered around the seat of power. Two months after the spluttering squib of Salisbury’s secession, Macmillan wrote to John Wyndham asking him to join his private office at Downing Street. ‘I did not really think my administration could last more than a few weeks; but we now seem to have got over quite a number of jumps in this Grand National course, and having just managed to pull the old mare through the brook and somehow got to the other side, with the same jockey up, and the Cecil colours fallen, I am plucking up my courage.’30
The Prime Minister had a salary of £10,000 a year (with £4,000 tax free) but, as there was no permanent domestic staff at Downing Street, Macmillan had to pay five household servants. Wyndham found him calm and considerate with his office staff. Macmillan kept a neat desk, never mislaid papers and had a tremendous power of work. His tastes were frugal. For breakfast he took tea and toast, sometimes with a boiled egg. He might have a gin and tonic or sherry before luncheon, but seldom drank alcohol during the meal. Cold roast beef was his favourite lunchtime dish. Before dinner he would have a glass or two of whisky, and wine at table. When possible on Fridays, before going to Birch Grove or Chequers for the weekend, he enjoyed a schoolroom high tea served at Downing Street in preference to dinner. He liked port, and champagne with agreeable companions. During Lent he forsook alcohol.
The Cabinet Room and secretaries’ offices, on the ground floor of 10 Downing Street, were reached by a red-carpeted corridor lined with photographs of defunct Cabinets and busts of bygone premiers. The ambience resembled a Pall Mall club with a historic past, but uneasy finances. Outside the Cabinet Room there was a small lobby with a round table. There, during Cabinet meetings, ministers who were not in the Cabinet would await a summons when the subject under their purview was reached on the agenda. It was, said one of them, ‘bleaker than a dentist’s waiting room’. When a minister was ushered in, he had to scramble to find an empty chair and hurriedly open his papers; usually he found that the Cabinet had started discussing his subject; indeed, from the glazed eyes as he began his remarks, he realised that somebody else had already said them.31
Kenneth Rose likened the Cabinet Room to ‘the dining room in a well-to-do boarding house in the neighbourhood of Russell Square’. Macmillan, though, thought like a clubman, not a boarding-house keeper. ‘The RAC or Boodle’s?’ he asked when, during the Cypriot settlement of 1959, the Cabinet had to decide whether Cyprus should receive full Commonwealth status after independence. ‘There was an element of the dining club about his conduct of Cabinets,’ Lord Hailsham reminisced. ‘There would be quotations from Homer, there would be vague historical analogies; the trade union leaders would be described as medieval barons in the period of the War of the Roses. And some of them would be relevant and some of them would be mildly misleading. But they would all be very amusing and detached.’ Ministers learnt ‘to watch what he was doing, as well as what he was saying’.32
‘For him Europe is the super-continent and Great Britain the super-country,’ wrote a recent Conservative parliamentary candidate, Lord Altrincham, of Macmillan in 1957. ‘In this he resembles Sir Winston Churchill, whom indeed he is clearly much too anxious to resemble. Here, perhaps, is the root cause of his psychological unbalance. He is a pawky Scottish businessman trying to convince himself and others that he is an English aristocrat of the old school.’ Although Macmillan was proud of his Scottish crofter ancestry, he projected a patrician English persona. ‘Like Sir Winston at the Other Club, Mr Macmillan holds forth in the grand manner at Pratt’s – only with this vital difference, that neither the manner nor the setting is his own. As a practical man he is genuine and acceptable; as an imitation grandee he is nauseating.’ Yet it was this bogus act – this game of playing the unregenerate grandee – which recommended Macmillan to backbenchers and ministers as they rallied to face the 1959 general election. He may not have been consistently militant during the Suez affair, but he had the air of militancy. Surveying Macmillan’s postwar record of Lloyd George-like opportunism, Altrincham predicted that England would soon resemble France, ‘where it is accepted that politicians have a code of their own, and most people have an instinctive repugnance to the idea of entering politics’. The appearance of the Prime Minister’s wife – the duke’s daughter in tweeds and sensible shoes – was part of his deceptive facade, as Altrincham wrote in a profile which uniquely hinted at the Macmillans’ domestic irregularities. ‘Lady Dorothy is not quite all that she seems in some respects, and a great deal more than she seems in others. To the casual observer she is just a typical English upper-class cup of tea; but on closer inspection he would find that it was laced with liquid of a more stimulating kind.’ Time & Tide, after interviewing Boothby in 1962, noted a photograph of Lady Dorothy, and a separate one of her husband, in Boothby’s Eaton Square drawing room.33
The provenance of Tory MPs changed markedly after 1951. Before his promotion to the Lords, Macmillan’s Lord Chancellor, Kilmuir, had instigated the Maxwell Fyfe reforms of the Conservative Party organisation (1948–49). These new rules ended the practice of candidates paying their own election expenses or subsidising constituency party funds. Kilmuir intended to discourage men who had made their pile of money in business from deciding that they wanted the status of a MP and collaring a provincial constituency: this malaise resulted in backbenches lined by complacent, inarticulate, politically obtuse money men with the reactionary, inflexible views of late middle age. The new rules also vested the constituency parties with independence in the selection of candidates. Retrospectively, Kilmuir believed that the quality of new MPs elected at the general elections of 1950 and 1951 was high, but thereafter plummeted. Local associations became dismaying in their choice of candidates in seats with handsome majorities. During the 1950s, to Kilmuir’s regret, they copied the cardinal error of Labour constituency parties, which had always weakened the efficacy of the parliamentary party by selecting tedious local worthies for safe seats while abler younger candidates were consigned to marginal or unwinnable constituencies. ‘Few of the new Members who entered the Commons in 1955 and 1959,’ wrote Kilmuir in 1964, ‘had achieved a reputation outside Westminster in any field, and far too many of them were obscure local citizens with obscure local interests, incapable – and indeed downright reluctant – to think on a national or international scale. What made this situation particularly annoying was that many excellent candidates, who would have made first-class Members and probably Ministers, were left to fight utterly hopeless seats … while the safe seats went to men of far lower calibre.’34
The Midlands conurbation, for example, was represented by nonentities with aldermanic paunches which they carried in a stately, self-satisfied way as if they contained dividend coupons: Harold Gurden (elected at Birmingham Selly Oak in 1955), Gordon Matthews (elected at Meriden, 1959), John Hollingworth (Birmingham All Saints, 1959), Leslie Seymour (Birmingham Sparkbrook, 1959), and Leonard Cleaver (Birmingham Yardley, 1959). Clever young William Rees-Mogg was condemned to contest the hopeless seat of Chester-le-Street in 1959 partly because of prejudice in better seats against his Catholicism. According to Rees-Mogg, there were only two Jewish MPs (Harry d’Avigdor-Goldsmid and Keith Joseph) on the Conservative side during the Parliament of 1955–59 and both had the advantage of inherited baronetcies. Margaret Thatcher