ABSTRACT
M MACMILLAN ASSUMED the office of Prime Minister on 9 January 1957. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to describe him as the only Briton to gain from Suez. The actual succession was decided by the advice given by the senior party elders, Lords Kilmuir and Salisbury, to the Queen.1 Harold Macmillan, rather than Rab Butler, was the choice. Macmillan was considered more likely to be decisive then the notoriously vacillating Butler and that attribute was something that the Tories needed more then anything else in the dark days of early 1957.2 At the time of his departure from office Macmillan was viewed by many commentators as an indifferent premier at best. His reputation has steadily risen since thanks particularly to the advocacy of his official biographer, Alistair Horne.3 His rise to the highest office in the land was nothing short of extraordinary. For while he came from a rich-if uppermiddle-class rather than upper-class-background he had as an MP for a northern working-class constituency (Stockton) since the 1920s been on the left of the Conservative party and consequently was never considered for office in the national government. Clement Attlee claimed that he was close to joining the Labour party in the 1930s.4 He even outlined his beliefs in an interventionist state in a book, The Middle Way. His career may also have suffered because of his well-known marital difficulties, which left him prone to depression. While his contemporary, Anthony Eden, effortlessly climbed the ministerial ladder in the 1930s, Macmillan seemed destined for backbench obscurity. Macmillan’s stand against appeasement and Munich was his first breakthrough, as it caught the eye of Churchill, and when the latter became Prime Minister he at last achieved lowly ministerial rank. His real rise to prominence came in the autumn of 1942 when Churchill appointed him as British Minister resident in the Mediterranean with Cabinet rank at Allied Forces Headquarters in Algiers until the end of the war. There he forged long-term relationships with, among others, General
Eisenhower, de Gaulle and Robert Murphy, his American counterpart. As head of the Allied Control Commission in Italy, he was virtually viceroy of the Middle East. A victim of the Labour landslide in 1945 he managed to get back into Parliament almost straight away thanks to the fortunate -for Macmillan at least-death of a Conservative MP in the safe seat of Bromley. He became a leading advocate of reform in the Conservative party after the war, helping its tilt to the left of centre. Churchill made him Minister of Housing in 1951, where his success in reaching the target of building 300,000 houses a year propelled him to the front rank of the Conservative party. His next two appointments, Minister of Defence under Churchill and Foreign Secretary under Eden, were unhappy due to frequent interference from above and were anyway so brief that he had no opportunity to impose himself on either. His time as Chancellor was equally unhappy.
