Cleared on all counts

Since the main purpose on earth of the Conservative party was, and still should be, to keep Britain’s ancient and well-proven social and political hierarchy in power — give or take a few necessary upward mobility adjustments — Harold Macmillan must rank very high in the scale of successful Conservative prime ministers; just below Benjamin Disraeli, whose skill in sugaring the pill of inequality and humanising the face of privilege is never likely to be bettered. Earlier biographies of Macmillan, blinded by the egalitarian zeitgeist, have never done justice to this particular dimension of his genius, preferring to see his successful manoeuvring to pass the torch on to a 14th earl as an anachronistic blunder rather than a masterstroke.

To his credit, D. R. Thorpe tells the story in its true blue colours. As he conclusively demonstrates, by the end of Macmillan’s period of grandee government, incredibly enough, all ranks of the Tory party — plebs as well as toffs — wanted a 14th earl as their next Conservative leader.

Contrary to the propaganda, Rab Butler never had a chance. In other words, the 14th earl was quite as much the democratic choice as the aristocratic, and had not Iain Macleod, out of selfish pique, written his deceitfully misleading ‘magic circle’ article in The Spectator suggesting the opposite, and Enoch Powell, out of perversity, been equally regardless of the truth, the Tories under Sir Alec Douglas Home, as he had by then become, could well have gone on to win the next general election.

This would have spared us both the Thatcher interlude, which put power into the greedy hands of what Macmillan called ‘the banksters’, and then the Blair/Brown years, which entrusted it to the equally grasping and disreputable New Labour cabal, which purported to be a meritocracy. But it is beginning to look as if a promising reaction has set in — not too late one hopes — and although David Cameron is not exactly a 14th earl, he is the next best thing; so Uncle Harold must be cheering in his grave.