Outmoded elegance

Harold Macmillan seemed well prepared when he succeeded a sick and humiliated Anthony Eden as prime minister after the disaster of Suez in 1957. An intellectual who knew about economics, a tough debater, an advocate of closer relations with Europe, Macmillan had been a ministerial success at Housing, the Foreign Office and the Treasury. He was also a puritanical hard worker, determined and self-contained. His wife, Lady Dorothy, the cheerful and dowdy daughter of a Duke, pleased a still deferential Tory party; he even had an American mother when Anglo-American relations needed reviving. No wonder Eden’s cabinet, with only two exceptions, thought Macmillan the best candidate, far ahead of his rival, Butler.

It is the shadows behind this that make him particularly intriguing. Macmillan had also been closely involved in the dishonest attempts to seize the Suez Canal back from Nasser, the Egyptian dictator who had nationalised it. He had, partly because of his party’s doubts, prevaricated over Europe.