Precious little warmth

There’s something wrong with these diaries.

There’s something wrong with these diaries. This is not to disparage the scholarly efforts of their editor, Dr Catterall, nor the skill with which he seems to have pruned the original papers (twice the length) into the greatest coherence achievable, nor his helpful contextualisation and calmly rational explanatory notes. Nor is it to question the importance for modern historians of the whole painstaking enterprise, to observe that the general reader will plough onward from summit, to cabinet, to dinner party, to pheasant shoot, to bilateral meeting, with a half-formed question growing in his mind. Who was Harold Macmillan writing all this for? For himself? For friends and family? For history? To answer questions? To settle scores? To win the approval of later generations?

Voracious reader and professional publisher that he was, Macmillan must surely have known that no writer should so much as pick up his pen without first having formed a mental picture, however hazy, of his intended audience. It can be yourself alone, a ‘Dear Diary’ diary. Sometimes these papers suggest as much: the self-pity (aches, pains, general exhaustion and protestations that he is feeling ‘shattered’ punctuate the narrative) and Macmillan’s incipient gloom:

6 Sept 1958: Last night there was a tropical storm … The harvest in East Anglia and the South will now be finally ruined, I fear. What is almost worse is that the potato crop is beginning to go mouldy. We are certainly not having much luck in my period of office. When I think of all the troubles since 1956, I feel we have had almost more than our share — and now the weather … keeps intruding.