Max Egremont

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.

Thirteen years ago, I was driving with a German friend through the Russian city of Kaliningrad (until 1945 the east Prussian city of Königsberg) when my friend said, ‘There’s the old German army barracks.’ As we stared glumly at the bleak building, darkness settled on me, brought on by three words, each — on its own — innocuous: German, army, barracks. The old clichés rose again: discipline, efficiency, inhumanity, conquest — images, I realised, not of Germany but of Prussia. There is, however, another view: that the austere but enlightened Prussian ethos — that of an impartial civil service, a liberal penal code, an excellent education system — was, under the Nazis, corrupted by uncouth Bavarians and Austrian sentimentalists.