‘I am always hearing about the Middle Classes,’ Macmillan wrote to the Conservative Research Department after a month in office. ‘What is it they really want? Can you put it down on a sheet of notepaper, and then I will see whether we can give it to them?’44 He knew the answer, though, well enough: they wanted a steady onrush of material prosperity, and to recover their margin of advantage over the working class.
The half century between Macmillan’s seizing of the premiership in 1957 and the banking collapse of 2008 was exceptional in history as a time of abundance, not scarcity. In all other periods, privation was the common Western experience. Most people were kept on short rations, emotionally and materially; frustration, not satisfaction, provided the keynote of existence. Macmillan offered an end to the stingy circumstances in which women watered down their children’s marmalade to make it go further.
Six months into his premiership Macmillan went to Bedford, the county town of the dullest English county. Its population of 60,000 worked in factories making pumps, diesel engines, gas turbines, farm implements, switchgear, tube fittings, transistors, and sweets. There, at the football pitch of the local team on 20 July 1957, Macmillan was guest of honour at a political gala to celebrate the parliamentary career of his Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd, the long-serving Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire: a career begun under the aegis of the ancien régime Duke of Bedford. No tickets were needed to attend; no ‘spin doctors’ existed to control the audience; there were no stewards from security firms to evict hecklers, or threaten them under anti-terrorist legislation. It was one of the last open-air political speeches by an English statesman to a genuine mass gathering. Politicians had for generations learnt to pitch their voices to reach thousands, to captivate their audiences and to master the art of impromptu retorts to hecklers. Henceforth they would have to simulate sincerity for television audiences.
The Bedford gala was ‘unique in the political annals of the county’, reported the local newspaper. ‘The Premier received a great welcome from a crowd that had assembled from every part of Bedfordshire.’ Macmillan told those who talked of the disintegration of the Empire: ‘It is not breaking up; it is growing up.’ He warned against complacency at recent advances in prosperity. ‘Let’s be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had … in the history of this country. What is beginning to worry some of us is “Is it too good to be true?” or perhaps I should say “Is it too good to last?”’ The crowd cheered, perhaps because they were polite, perhaps because they were enjoying their afternoon in the sun, but surely not because they liked his warning that there might be bad times ahead. Indeed, the Bedfordshire Times, judging perhaps by his manner rather than his words, thought Macmillan had been over-optimistic about the economic future. The paper quoted his remark: ‘Most of our people have never had it so good’, and commented: ‘That is true, but Mr Macmillan said little enough about the slender foundations on which all this prosperity rests.’ There was no talk of measures to check inflation. The Prime Minister dismissed ‘the fashion for newspapers and political commentators to work up all kinds of stories of troubles and dangers ahead’. The Bedfordshire Times thought no ‘working-up’ was needed: ‘the dangers are very real ones, and it is time they are squarely faced’.45
At the rally a youngster in a boiler-suit persistently heckled the Prime Minister. One of his interruptions concerned the level of old-age pensions: the Labour Party was calling for the basic rate of old-age pensions to be raised to £3 a week and to be annually adjusted to the cost of living. ‘You’ve never had it so good,’ Macmillan cried back at the heckler, contrasting the youngster’s rising wages with the fixed income of a pensioner, rather than targeting everyone in Bedford football ground. According to another account (that of Quentin Skinner, the historian of political thought, then a sixth-former at Bedford school, who was present), the heckler shouted facetiously: ‘What about the workers?’ Macmillan responded as if a serious objection had been called. It was this phrase that beyond any other became associated with his premiership.46
If people’s material standards were improving, in Bedford and nationally, there was a perception that, perhaps in consequence, sexual standards were deteriorating. Two years after Macmillan’s football-pitch speech, Peter Kennerley of the Sunday Pictorial went to Bedford. ‘Good-time girls – drunken teenagers – mothers who leave home for the bright lights – and plain unvarnished vice – these are the problems … earning the town of Bedford the reputation of “BRITAIN’S SIN TOWN 1959”.’ Kennerley reported that seven brothels had been raided and closed by Bedford police in the preceding six months. Twenty children from Bedford had been taken into council care in the last four months because their mothers had deserted their homes. A probation officer was quoted as saying that the absconding mothers, like troublesome teenagers, ‘go where the money is’. Money in this case meant hundreds of American servicemen from three nearby airbases.47
Six weeks after Macmillan’s Bedford speech, on 4 September 1957, the Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in Great Britain published its report. This recommended that homosexual activity between consenting adult men should no longer be criminalised; that penalties for street-soliciting by women should be increased; and that landlords letting premises to prostitutes should be deemed as living off immoral earnings. The recommendations on heterosexual prostitution were adopted in the Street Offences Act, which came into operation in 1959, while the recommendations on homosexuality were resisted.
Although the Profumo Affair would be, exclusively, a tooth-and-claw heterosexual business, reactions to it were part of a continuum of sexual attitudes. The fears, insults and cant surrounding male homosexuality in this period were not restricted in their impact to the communities that were targeted. On the contrary, the obtuseness of intelligent people about sexual motives, the punitive urges, the notion that collective respectability was maintained by newspaper bullying and abasement of vulnerable individuals, the prudish lynch mobs, the deviousness behind the self-righteous wrath of the judiciary – all these defining traits of homophobia erupted nationwide during the summer of 1963, with the Profumo resignation, Ward trial and Denning report.
Writing about Ward’s mis-trial, the jurist Louis Blom-Cooper later commented: ‘The law does not care for social realities; it bases its action upon highly emotive opinion on what is best for the country’s morals.’ The truth of this was exemplified by sundry interventions from Lord Hailsham, a barrister who held several Cabinet posts under Macmillan and hoped to succeed him as Prime Minister in 1963. In an epoch when it was unthinkable for Cabinet Ministers to appear in shirtsleeves, Hailsham and Ian Macleod were pioneers among Tory politicians in trying to indicate that they were hustling, businesslike modernisers by tightly buttoning the middle button of their suit jackets. At the time of the Wolfenden committee’s appointment, while citing his courtroom expertise, Hailsham had published a scourging essay on homosexual ‘corruption’. He was emphatic that male homosexuality was ‘a problem of social environment and not of congenital