Television: Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary

In Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary (Channel 4, Saturday) — Martin Durkin’s superb tribute to our greatest prime minister — there was some footage of Harold Macmillan giving his ‘selling the family silver’ speech that made me quite sick.

What nauseated me first was the sycophantic laughter from his black-tie Tory Reform Group audience oozing entitlement at some smoky St James’s club; and, second, the noisome cultural assumptions behind Mac’s ineffably grand remark. According to Mac’s Weltanschauung, it was not only right that people of his class should always keep hold of their silver, their Canalettos and Rembrandts, but that everyone else, a notch or two below, should also applaud them for doing so. ‘Gor blimey, Lord Stockton, you’re a right proper gent and no mistake.’

Hand in hand with this — and you can see why so many of his breed were drawn to Oswald Mosley — went Macmillan’s upper-class national socialist view that the best way to run Britain was as a cosy stitch-up between the landed élite and the licensed corporate stuffed shirts supervising the managed decline of the nationalised industries. Up until 1979, Britain was a fascist state where the trains didn’t run on time and the amazing thing was, hardly anyone realised it.

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One of the few who did — and they really were very few: mostly just Madsen Pirie and a handful of revolutionary, oiky whackos from the Adam Smith Institute and the Centre for Policy Studies — was a grocer’s daughter called Margaret Hilda Roberts. (You may have read a bit about her recently in the papers.) Young Margaret had read Hayek and knew what needed to be done. And she did it too — at the most terrible personal cost inflicted not so much by her enemies on the left as by her supposed allies on the ‘right’: the socialistic Tory wets of the Macmillan and Heath school to whom Cameron is the rightful true heir.