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.