An English Affair

Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo

Richard Davenport-Hines

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780007435869
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

PART ONE

Cast

ONE

Prime Minister

‘I have news today that will bring a gasp from every Tory in Britain,’ reported Crossbencher, the political columnist of the Sunday Express, on 2 December 1956.

Mr Harold Macmillan is planning to retire from the Commons.

What a turnabout this is. Only the other day all the talk was of his rivalry with Mr Richard Austen Butler. He was alight with ambition, his Edwardian moustache bristling for the fray. It is true, of course, that he has lately been dropping a few little hints. In the Commons he talks of looking forward ‘to retirement from many of these troubles’. To the Tory 1922 Committee he says he is thinking ‘of the viscounty that is my right’. But these are laughed off by most people as typical Macmillan flourishes.

I report that Macmillan means exactly what he says. He intends to go. The reason? Not because of any personal clashes with his colleagues. Not because of any disagreement on policy. But he is sixty-three in February, three years older than [the Prime Minister] Sir Anthony Eden, nine years older than Mr Butler. And suddenly, with absolute clarity, he sees that the nation’s highest office is forever beyond his grasp. How sad a moment for a politician who has come so far. The moment when he realises that he is finally out of the race.

The only remaining question: When will Mr Macmillan claim his coronet?

One can imagine the poignant sorrow, the air of noble resolve, affected by Macmillan as he confided in the Sunday Express man. A few days later, Brendan Bracken, chairman of the Financial Times, reported a similar tale to the Express proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, but with a hard-headed gloss. ‘Macmillan is telling journalists that he intends to retire from politics and go into the morgue. He declares that he will never serve under Butler. His real intentions are to push his boss out of Number Ten.’ A month later, on 10 January 1957, after seductive courting of the parliamentary party, Macmillan became Prime Minister.¹

Only a consummate politician would brief that he is on the brink of retirement as a device to reach the highest office. Macmillan had foreseen, since November, when he had a privileged talk with Eden’s physician, Sir Horace Evans, that failing health would force the Prime Minister’s retirement. He knew, too, that many Tories felt, in the backbencher Robert Boothby’s words, ‘contemptuous disdain’ for Rab Butler as a boneless appeaser, and would not have him as Eden’s successor at any cost. His ruthless clarity and oblique tactics were outstanding.²

Lloyd George was the predecessor whom Macmillan most admired, the arch-spiv among Prime Ministers – shameless, improvising, compassionate, devious, inspired. Macmillan was a politician who mastered both appearances and realities, and understood the differences between the two. He was simultaneously a romantic escapist and sturdy materialist. He studied men’s wiles, and knew their weaknesses. He was a world-weary cynic about human vanity yet could be as shocked as a boy scout by the grubbiness of people’s motives. Outward calm masked high-strung agitation. He looked like a grandee, had the manners of an Edwardian man-about-town and was one of the last men in England who still put his tongue in his cheek when making a sardonic quip. His self-protective staginess, his toying with appearances, his patrician pose of authoritative nonchalance – all so artfully embedded in the past – were a source of strength and renewal when he was Prime Minister approaching the general election of 1959, but would prove a source of increasing weakness in the years before his resignation in 1963.

Macmillan had been born in 1894 in a tall, thin house in Cadogan Place, where Knightsbridge borders Belgravia. In his parents’ home solid comforts were joined with a dread of worldly show and admiration for spartan discipline. Maurice Macmillan, his father, was a partner in the publishing house of Macmillan, an outstanding example of Victorian self-help and constructive idealism, for it had been started by Maurice’s father and uncle, themselves the sons of a crofter, a poor tenant farmer, on the Scottish Isle of Arran. Macmillan’s mother was a physician’s daughter from Indiana, which made him the only Prime Minister (apart from Churchill) to have an American mother. She proved morbidly possessive, withdrawing him from Eton when he was fifteen and sacking his tutor when he was sixteen. His education was further disrupted, for he was an early volunteer in the First World War, which began when he had been only twenty months an undergraduate at Oxford.

Macmillan’s war experiences, which proved his courage but shredded his nerves, are of supreme importance in understanding him. Overall he was wounded five times, and bore his scars and disabilities for seventy years. At first, on the Western Front, he was a bomb officer with the Grenadier Guards, training men to throw grenades, and pacifying himself with the novels of Dickens and Scott. In the first battle in which he fought, Loos in 1915, he was shot in the hand and also suffered a head injury. In 1916 he was wounded during a reconnaissance mission to German lines. ‘The stench from the dead bodies that lie in heaps around is awful,’ he wrote to his mother after the Battle of the Somme. ‘We do all the burying that we possibly can.’ Once, leading an advance platoon down a moonlit lane near the devastated village of Beaumont-Hamel, he passed a dead German with an outstretched arm rigid in death: his orderly went up and shook it. A few days later, near Delville Wood, he was hit in the knee by shrapnel and in the pelvis by machine-gun bullets. A water bottle in his tunic deflected a bullet from hitting his heart. He rolled into a shell hole in no-man’s land, where he lay for twelve hours, feigning death when Germans approached, dosing himself with morphine, and scanning a copy of Aeschylus which he had secreted in his battledress, until a rescue party found him. He nearly died of his wounds, endured several operations and years of gruelling pain. ‘The act of death in battle is noble,’ he had written to his mother a few days earlier, ‘but the physical symptoms and actual appearances of death are, in these terrible circumstances, revolting.’ He learnt, as no one should have to learn, to tell how a man had died by the way their body lay. The war left him with sporadic pain, a shuffling gait, a limp handshake and spidery handwriting. It accentuated the apprehensions that had made him such a sad, morbid, unpopular boy at Eton: ‘the inside feeling that something awful and unknown was about to happen’ which still decoyed him as Prime Minister, and forced him to retreat from the world to spend weekends in bed.³

While recuperating from his wounds, Macmillan immersed himself in books to enrich an already well-stocked mind. He had been elected a King’s Scholar at Eton in 1906, and was the first K.S. to become Prime Minister since Walpole. He ranked with Asquith as the best-read twentieth-century Prime Minister. He had the longest uninterrupted hold on power of any premier between Asquith and Thatcher. His literary-mindedness intensified when he left the army to become a partner in the family publishing firm. He became responsible for such authors as Kipling, Hardy, Yeats, Hugh Walpole, and Sean O’Casey. Maynard Keynes, who had been the boyhood friend and perhaps lover of Harold’s elder brother Daniel, was a Macmillan author with strong influence on his economic ideas. There had not been so literary a Prime Minister since Disraeli, and his love of novels made him the most vivid and alluring of political leaders. He calmed his nerves by happily re-reading Austen, Trollope and Meredith; excited his imagination with Stendhal or Nevil Shute’s dystopic tale of radiation sickness after nuclear war; honed himself by reading Anthony Powell (‘witty but pointless’) as a preliminary training for Proust.⁴ His temperament – nervous, subtle and theatrical – was decisive to the colour, texture and shape of the modernisation crisis in British politics and society of 1957–64.

In 1924, Macmillan captured a difficult industrial constituency, Stockton-on-Tees, by unusual methods. He insisted that his local supporters contribute to election expenses, reorganised the local association along democratic lines, declined the help (or handicap) of speakers sent by the central party organisation in London, and left unopened the parcels of official propaganda. His distress at the unemployment and privation of north-east England made him a rebel against economic orthodoxies. In 1927 he and three other young MPs who were styled ‘Tory Democrats’ issued a milk-and-water Keynesian booklet entitled Industry and the State. ‘A Tory Democrat,’ sneered a socialist professor, ‘means you give blankets to the poor if they agree not to ask for eiderdowns.’ Nevertheless, Aldous Huxley found much sense in Macmillan’s 1931 publication Reconstruction: A Plea for National Unity, and told T. S. Eliot: ‘I’m glad the young conservatives are waking up.’⁵

Together with Sir Cuthbert Headlam, Macmillan formed the ‘Northern Group’ of Tory MPs lobbying on behalf of the region. ‘He is a curiously self-centred man, and strangely shy and prickly – and yet the more I see of him the more I like him,’ Headlam noted after a talk in 1934. Although Headlam advised him to continue pushing progressive ideas, but to stop speaking and voting against the government, Macmillan did not restrain his dissent. He affronted fellow Tories by telling a newspaper interviewer in 1936 that ‘a party dominated by second-class brewers and company promoters – a casino capitalism – is not likely to represent anyone but itself’. That year he was the only backbencher to resign the party whip when Baldwin’s government lifted sanctions which had been imposed on Mussolini’s Italy after the invasion of Abyssinia. Although he rejoined the party after Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister in 1937, he risked de-selection as a Conservative candidate by continuing opposition to appeasement of dictators. In 1938 he wrote a Keynesian treatise entitled The Middle Way, which indicted Conservative economics as callous and complacent, and argued for more consensual, corporatist, expansionist economics. The London Stock Exchange, he suggested, should be replaced by a National Investment Board. This was not the rebellion of a showy, self-seeking mutineer, but the dissent of a man who obstinately, perseveringly, worked out new lines for himself.⁶

In 1940, when Churchill became Prime Minister, he chose Macmillan as Parliamentary Under Secretary at the Ministry of Supply. About a month after this humdrum appointment, Headlam sat beside Macmillan at the long table where members dine together at the Beefsteak Club. ‘He is very much the Minister nowadays, but says that he has arrived too late to rise very high,’ Headlam noted. ‘I can see no reason (except his own personality) for his not getting on – even to the top of the tree – but he is his own worst enemy: he is too self-centred, too obviously cleverer than the rest of us.’ Shortly after this Beefsteak evening, Macmillan was motoring in a car with his private secretary, John Wyndham. After desultory conversation, Macmillan fell into brooding silence. Then suddenly, with intense emphasis, but as if talking to himself, he exclaimed: ‘I know I can do it.’⁷

These glimpses of Macmillan at forty-six – delighted to have reached office, but equivocal about his prospects – are telling. He felt his aptitude for power, but sensed he must disguise his clever ambition. His confidences to Headlam, his exclamation before his most trusted aide Wyndham, prefigure him briefing journalists in 1956 that his political career was over as he poised himself to take supreme control.

At the end of 1942 Churchill offered the post of ‘Minister Resident at Allied Forces Headquarters in Algiers’ to Macmillan, his second-best candidate, whom he had recently described as ‘unstable’. Macmillan accepted without a moment’s havering. It proved to be a hard job, unrewarding in outward prestige, but he won praise from those who knew of his behind-the-scenes adroitness. With both the American and Free French representatives he was direct in his approach but insinuating in his ideas. During the closing phase of the war, Macmillan headed the Allied Control Commission in Italy, becoming, said Wyndham, ‘Britain’s Viceroy of the Mediterranean by stealth’.⁸

By the war’s close Macmillan had been married for a quarter of a century. He had met Lady Dorothy Cavendish when he was serving as aide-de-camp to her father, the Duke of Devonshire, who was then Governor-General of Canada. They married – she aged nineteen, he twenty-six – at St Margaret’s, Westminster in 1920. The bride’s side of the church was filled with hereditary grandees: Devonshires, Salisburys, Lansdownes; the groom’s with Macmillan authors, including Thomas Hardy, who signed as one of the witnesses. The young couple took a London house, at 14 Chester Square, on Pimlico’s frontier with Belgravia. After 1926 they also shared Birch Grove, a large house newly built in Sussex under the directions of his mother. The marriage deteriorated after 1926, as Dorothy Macmillan chafed under her mother-in-law’s meddling intimidation.

One of the Tory Democrats to whom Macmillan was closest in the 1920s was Robert Boothby, a dashing young MP with an unruly mop of black hair and bombastic style of speechifying. Dorothy Macmillan was attracted to him when they met during a shooting and golfing holiday in Scotland in 1928: during a second holiday after Macmillan’s defeat in the general election of 1929, she squeezed Boothby’s hands meaningfully while they were on the moors. Their affair was consummated during a house party with her Lansdowne cousins at Bowood. Photographs of the pair, taken at Gleneagles, show her as clear-skinned and strong-limbed, with prominent eyebrows and chin, a saucy grin, and the air of an undergraduate. Of the two lovers, Dorothy Macmillan had the dominant temperament.

Boothby was intelligent, but wayward in his habits and ductile in his feelings. ‘A fighter with delicate nerves,’ Harold Nicolson called him in 1936. Boothby had a look of manly vigour, with a boisterous style, and a reputation as a coureur des femmes. Nevertheless, he enjoyed being chased by men during his trips to Weimar Germany, and supposedly enjoyed frottage with fit, ordinary-looking, emotionally straightforward youths. Homosexuality, however, drove public men to suicide or exile in the 1920s, and stalled careers; indeed it was a preoccupation of policemen and blackmailers until partially decriminalised in 1967. ‘I detected the danger and sheered away from it,’ Boothby later wrote.⁹

Dorothy and Harold Macmillan had one son and three daughters. She fostered the untruth that their youngest daughter Sarah, born in 1930, had been fathered by Boothby, in the hope of provoking her husband to agree to a divorce. Macmillan did not yield to this wish. A solicitor whom he consulted warned that divorce would be an obstacle to receiving ministerial office, and might make Cabinet rank impossible. It might even require him to resign his parliamentary seat (as happened in 1944 when Henry Hunloke MP was in the process of divorce from Dorothy’s sister Anne, and seemed likely for a time in 1949 when James Stuart MP, married to another sister, was cited in a divorce). There would have been outcry at Birch Grove, too. His brother Arthur had been ostracised by their mother for marrying a divorcee in 1931, despite consulting the Bishop of London before proceeding with the ceremony.

Until the divorce reforms of 1969, it was necessary for one of the married partners to be judged ‘guilty’ of adultery or marital cruelty before a divorce could be granted. It was considered deplorable, except in flagrant scandals, for a man to attack his wife’s reputation by naming her as the guilty party. Instead, even if the wife had an established lover, the husband was expected to provide evidence of guilt, by such ruses as hiring a woman to accompany him to a Brighton hotel, signing the guestbook ostentatiously, sitting up all night with her playing cards, but having sworn evidence from hotel staff or private detectives that they had spent the night together. Macmillan, who had been neither adulterous nor cruel to his wife, refused to collude in fabricating evidence of marital guilt: still less was he willing to sue her for divorce, and cite Boothby as co-respondent. ‘In the break-up of a marriage,’ Anthony Powell wrote of the 1930s, ‘the world inclines to take the side of the partner with most vitality, rather than the one apparently least to blame’.¹⁰ Sympathy, then, lay with Dorothy Macmillan.

She was too proud and ardent to bother with discretion as an adulteress; her bracing earthiness left no room for subtlety. Her telephone calls to Boothby were made in earshot of her husband and children; she left Boothby’s love letters visible about the Birch Grove and Chester Square houses. As he wrote to a parliamentary colleague in 1933, she was ‘the most formidable thing in the world – a possessive, single-track woman. She wants me, completely, and she wants my children, and she wants practically nothing else. At every crucial moment she acts instinctively and overwhelmingly.’ Over forty years later, in 1977, Boothby gave a similar recapitulation. ‘What Dorothy wanted and needed was emotion, on the scale of Isolde. This Harold could not give her, and I did. She was, on the whole, the most selfish and most possessive woman I have ever known.’ When he got engaged to an American heiress, she pursued him from Chatsworth, via Paris, to Lisbon. ‘We loved each other,’ he said, ‘and there is really nothing you can do about it, except die.’¹¹

Commentators have suggested that Macmillan’s distress at his wife’s lifelong infidelity (her affair with Boothby lasted until her death in 1966) made him chary of speaking to Profumo directly in 1963, or of confronting the implausibility of the minister’s disavowals of an affair with Keeler. This is doubtful, for Downing Street power relaxed Macmillan’s inhibitions. ‘The PM,’ wrote his niece, the young Duchess of Devonshire, in 1958, ‘has become much more human all of a sudden and talks about things like Adultery quite nicely.’ His prime ministerial diaries show his pleasure in playing the part of a man-of-the-world who knew about kept women, betrayal and divorce. In 1958, after reading the...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Epigraph
• Dedication
• Contents
• Overture
• Part One: Cast
• Part Two: Drama
• Picture Section
• Footnotes
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• Also by Richard Davenport-Hines
• Copyright
• About the Publisher