David Cameron should look to Harold Macmillan for political guidance

When Harold Macmillan published The Middle Way in 1938, its title at once entered the political lexicon. As he anticipated, his message that there was an alternative to socialism and political individualism received a frosty reception from right and left. Even the Macmillan family nanny said ‘Mr Harold is a dangerous pink’. Yet correctives such as Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom in 1944 did not immediately dampen the impact of Macmillan’s philosophy. ‘In this illogical island,’ Harold Nicolson wrote to Hayek, ‘there exists an infinite capacity for finding middle ways’. Sixty years later, concepts such as President Clinton’s ‘triangulation’, Anthony Giddens’ ‘Third Way’ and the first ten years of New Labour showed the durability of the hare that Macmillan set running. The Middle Way is still an established vision of political Nirvana, despite Lady Thatcher’s view that consensus was ‘the process for abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies’.