An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo (2 page)

Afterwards, back on wheels, the Hilton behind us, my father stopped his car outside a large, abandoned house of dilapidated stucco on the corner of Hertford Street and Old Park Lane. It was awaiting demolition, he explained. Londonderry House, he added, had belonged to a proud, stupid family who had been friends of Hitler, but the last lord had been a helpless drunk who had died young. Now their day was done, the old house where prime ministers once dawdled on the marble stairs had been sold and was to be torn down. Londonderry House would be smashed for good. It represented a world that impeded progress. My father told me that another hotel for Americans was planned for this site next to the Hilton. It was glorious what competition was going to do. It was marvellous what future prosperity was promised to those who were quick to snatch their chances.

Then my father swung the car round into a full U-turn to head back to Park Lane: no unmanly glances back over the shoulder, no effeminate wing-mirrors to look in, just my father’s iron resolve as he pulled out. There followed an almighty screech of brakes, a squeal of tyres, and the sound of a horn held down hard. A black taxi cab behind us had made an emergency halt. As we completed the U-turn and passed the stationary taxi, my father stopped, looked at its driver and gave a harsh, defiant laugh: he was proud of having a chuckle that made people lose their temper or, if they were already angry, re-double their rage. The taxi driver was furious, temporarily powerless, but not, he reminded us, permanently disempowered. As my father drove off chortling, his victim shouted after him the deadly threat: ‘Wait until October!’

Everyone knew there was going to be a general election in October. ‘A Labour voter,’ my father said witheringly. He probably forgot the incident in a trice, but I never did. October came, Sir Alec Douglas-Home was displaced as Prime Minister by Harold Wilson, and I acquired the private incantation: ‘Wait until October’. For years, I would repeat the phrase to remind myself that however insecure life already seemed, there was greater instability to come.
Waiting for October
became the title of the self-pitying memoirs that I secretly wrote at the age of fifteen.

This book is not
Waiting for October
in another guise, although it is about insolence, envy and the politics of revenge. Rather, it is a history of the mentalities that made Miss Groom, Mr Wilcox, Mrs Soskin and the Edgware Road brunette. It is a study of
milieux
: the worlds of Harold Macmillan, Jack Profumo, Lord Astor, Stephen Ward. ‘How separate we keep ourselves in Britain,’ the Labour politician Richard Crossman reflected of the 1960s. ‘There is the legal world, the doctors’ world, the artistic world, the dramatic world, the political world. We are tremendously separate.’
²
The spheres of politics, medicine, law, journalism, smart society, new money, and espionage – each a discrete segment of British society – all converged into the Profumo Affair of 1963 and detonated a shattering blast. This is a London book, which depicts the capital’s good-time girls, property dealers and Fleet Street hacks, and the ways they pointed the rest of the nation. It is about the millionaire with his new Alvis who resented the old order, thought his time had come, and longed to see the demolition ball hit Londonderry House, as well as the taxi driver who hated the millionaire, and thought his time was coming in the October election. It describes the worlds they made, and how none of them got what they wanted.

PART ONE

Cast

ONE

Prime Minister

‘I have news today that will bring a gasp from every Tory in Britain,’ reported Crossbencher, the political columnist of the
Sunday Express
,
on 2 December 1956.

Mr Harold Macmillan is planning to retire from the Commons.

What a turnabout this is. Only the other day all the talk was of his rivalry with Mr Richard Austen Butler. He was alight with ambition, his Edwardian moustache bristling for the fray. It is true, of course, that he has lately been dropping a few little hints. In the Commons he talks of looking forward ‘to retirement from many of these troubles’. To the Tory 1922 Committee he says he is thinking ‘of the viscounty that is my right’. But these are laughed off by most people as typical Macmillan flourishes.

I report that Macmillan means exactly what he says. He intends to go. The reason? Not because of any personal clashes with his colleagues. Not because of any disagreement on policy. But he is sixty-three in February, three years older than [the Prime Minister] Sir Anthony Eden, nine years older than Mr Butler. And suddenly, with absolute clarity, he sees that the nation’s highest office is forever beyond his grasp. How sad a moment for a politician who has come so far. The moment when he realises that he is finally out of the race.

The only remaining question: When will Mr Macmillan claim his coronet?

One can imagine the poignant sorrow, the air of noble resolve, affected by Macmillan as he confided in the
Sunday Express
man. A few days later, Brendan Bracken, chairman of the
Financial Times
, reported a similar tale to the
Express
proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, but with a hard-headed gloss. ‘Macmillan is telling journalists that he intends to retire from politics and go into the morgue. He declares that he will never serve under Butler. His real intentions are to push his boss out of Number Ten.’ A month later, on 10 January 1957, after seductive courting of the parliamentary party, Macmillan became Prime Minister.
¹

Only a consummate politician would brief that he is on the brink of retirement as a device to reach the highest office. Macmillan had foreseen, since November, when he had a privileged talk with Eden’s physician, Sir Horace Evans, that failing health would force the Prime Minister’s retirement. He knew, too, that many Tories felt, in the backbencher Robert Boothby’s words, ‘contemptuous disdain’ for Rab Butler as a boneless appeaser, and would not have him as Eden’s successor at any cost. His ruthless clarity and oblique tactics were outstanding.
²

Lloyd George was the predecessor whom Macmillan most admired, the arch-spiv among Prime Ministers – shameless, improvising, compassionate, devious, inspired. Macmillan was a politician who mastered both appearances and realities, and understood the differences between the two. He was simultan-eously a romantic escapist and sturdy materialist. He studied men’s wiles, and knew their weaknesses. He was a world-weary cynic about human vanity yet could be as shocked as a boy scout by the grubbiness of people’s motives. Outward calm masked high-strung agitation. He looked like a grandee, had the manners of an Edwardian man-about-town and was one of the last men in England who still put his tongue in his cheek when making a sardonic quip. His self-protective staginess, his toying with appearances, his patrician pose of authoritative nonchalance – all so artfully embedded in the past – were a source of strength and renewal when he was Prime Minister approaching the general election of 1959, but would prove a source of increasing weakness in the years before his resignation in 1963.

Macmillan had been born in 1894 in a tall, thin house in Cadogan Place, where Knightsbridge borders Belgravia. In his parents’ home solid comforts were joined with a dread of worldly show and admiration for spartan discipline. Maurice Macmillan, his father, was a partner in the publishing house of Macmillan, an outstanding example of Victorian self-help and constructive idealism, for it had been started by Maurice’s father and uncle, themselves the sons of a crofter, a poor tenant farmer, on the Scottish Isle of Arran. Macmillan’s mother was a physician’s daughter from Indiana, which made him the only Prime Minister (apart from Churchill) to have an American mother. She proved morbidly possessive, withdrawing him from Eton when he was fifteen and sacking his tutor when he was sixteen. His education was further disrupted, for he was an early volunteer in the First World War, which began when he had been only twenty months an undergraduate at Oxford.

Macmillan’s war experiences, which proved his courage but shredded his nerves, are of supreme importance in understanding him. Overall he was wounded five times, and bore his scars and disabilities for seventy years. At first, on the Western Front, he was a bomb officer with the Grenadier Guards, training men to throw grenades, and pacifying himself with the novels of Dickens and Scott. In the first battle in which he fought, Loos in 1915, he was shot in the hand and also suffered a head injury. In 1916 he was wounded during a reconnaissance mission to German lines. ‘The stench from the dead bodies that lie in heaps around is awful,’ he wrote to his mother after the Battle of the Somme. ‘We do all the burying that we possibly can.’ Once, leading an advance platoon down a moonlit lane near the devastated village of Beaumont-Hamel, he passed a dead German with an outstretched arm rigid in death: his orderly went up and shook it. A few days later, near Delville Wood, he was hit in the knee by shrapnel and in the pelvis by machine-gun bullets. A water bottle in his tunic deflected a bullet from hitting his heart. He rolled into a shell hole in no-man’s land, where he lay for twelve hours, feigning death when Germans approached, dosing himself with morphine, and scanning a copy of Aeschylus which he had secreted in his battledress, until a rescue party found him. He nearly died of his wounds, endured several operations and years of gruelling pain. ‘The act of death in battle is noble,’ he had written to his mother a few days earlier, ‘but the physical symptoms and actual appearances of death are, in these terrible circumstances, revolting.’ He learnt, as no one should have to learn, to tell how a man had died by the way their body lay. The war left him with sporadic pain, a shuffling gait, a limp handshake and spidery handwriting. It accentuated the apprehensions that had made him such a sad, morbid, unpopular boy at Eton: ‘the inside feeling that something awful and unknown was about to happen’ which still decoyed him as Prime Minister, and forced him to retreat from the world to spend weekends in bed.
³

While recuperating from his wounds, Macmillan immersed himself in books to enrich an already well-stocked mind. He had been elected a King’s Scholar at Eton in 1906, and was the first K.S. to become Prime Minister since Walpole. He ranked with Asquith as the best-read twentieth-century Prime Minister. He had the longest uninterrupted hold on power of any premier between Asquith and Thatcher. His literary-mindedness intensified when he left the army to become a partner in the family publishing firm. He became responsible for such authors as Kipling, Hardy, Yeats, Hugh Walpole, and Sean O’Casey. Maynard Keynes, who had been the boyhood friend and perhaps lover of Harold’s elder brother Daniel, was a Macmillan author with strong influence on his economic ideas. There had not been so literary a Prime Minister since Disraeli, and his love of novels made him the most vivid and alluring of political leaders. He calmed his nerves by happily re-reading Austen, Trollope and Meredith; excited his imagination with Stendhal or Nevil Shute’s dystopic tale of radiation sickness after nuclear war; honed himself by reading Anthony Powell (‘witty but pointless’) as a preliminary training for Proust.
⁴
His temperament – nervous, subtle and theatrical – was decisive to the colour, texture and shape of the modernisation crisis in British politics and society of 1957–64.

In 1924, Macmillan captured a difficult industrial constituency, Stockton-on-Tees, by unusual methods. He insisted that his local supporters contribute to election expenses, reorganised the local association along democratic lines, declined the help (or handicap) of speakers sent by the central party organisation in London, and left unopened the parcels of official propaganda. His distress at the unemployment and privation of north-east England made him a rebel against economic orthodoxies. In 1927 he and three other young MPs who were styled ‘Tory Democrats’ issued a milk-and-water Keynesian booklet entitled
Industry and the State
. ‘A Tory Democrat,’ sneered a socialist professor, ‘means you give blankets to the poor if they agree not to ask for eiderdowns.’ Nevertheless, Aldous Huxley found much sense in Macmillan’s 1931 publication
Reconstruction: A Plea for National Unity
, and told T. S. Eliot: ‘I’m glad the young conservatives are waking up.’
⁵

Together with Sir Cuthbert Headlam, Macmillan formed the ‘Northern Group’ of Tory MPs lobbying on behalf of the region. ‘He is a curiously self-centred man, and strangely shy and prickly – and yet the more I see of him the more I like him,’ Headlam noted after a talk in 1934. Although Headlam advised him to continue pushing progressive ideas, but to stop speaking and voting against the government, Macmillan did not restrain his dissent. He affronted fellow Tories by telling a newspaper interviewer in 1936 that ‘a party dominated by second-class brewers and company promoters – a casino capitalism – is not likely to represent anyone but itself’. That year he was the only backbencher to resign the party whip when Baldwin’s government lifted sanctions which had been imposed on Mussolini’s Italy after the invasion of Abyssinia. Although he rejoined the party after Neville Chamberlain became Prime Minister in 1937, he risked de-selection as a Conservative candidate by continuing opposition to appeasement of dictators. In 1938 he wrote a Keynesian treatise entitled
The Middle Way
,
which indicted Conservative economics as callous and complacent, and argued for more consensual, corporatist, expansionist economics. The London Stock Exchange, he suggested, should be replaced by a National Investment Board. This was not the rebellion of a showy, self-seeking mutineer, but the dissent of a man who obstinately, perseveringly, worked out new lines for himself.
⁶