Harold Macmillan was the last prime minister born in the reign of Queen Victoria, the last to have fought in the first world war, and the last to wear a moustache. He is also the only prime minister to have been reanimated at the National Theatre by an Oscar-w­inning actor, his shuffling mannerisms beautifully captured by Jeremy Irons in Howard Brenton’s sympathetic play Never So Good. And although his legacy now seems distinctly thin, he remains the most fascinating character to occupy No 10 since the war: a shy, sensitive boy who turned himself into a feline political conspirator, and a highly cultivated man whose public insouciance hid the agony of a disastrous private life.

Since Macmillan’s six volumes of self-justifying memoirs are hard going even for the enthusiast, Charles Williams’s thoughtful and well-informed new life, livelier than Alistair Horne’s rather stolid authorised biography, comes as a welcome treat. While there are few surprises, he captures better than any other writer the tensions between the different facets of Macmillan’s personality, from the Eton scholar and Oxford Anglo-Catholic to the Flanders hero and Stockton radical. But Williams is hardly uncritical: the word “devious” appears repeatedly, while he is refreshingly caustic about ­Macmillan’s “irritating” Edwardian act, which apparently annoyed the Queen so much that she detailed a junior secretary to distract him for long walks at Balmoral.

But Macmillan was always playing a part. Even as a boy he was driven by the desire to impress his mother Nellie, a self-absorbed American socialite, though his Eton schoolfellows seem to have found him a cool, distant character. Williams gives credence to the idea that Macmillan was forced out of Eton a year early after being accused of “buggery”. That his early relationships were homosexual seems beyond doubt, although that was hardly remarkable in Edwardian public schools. Indeed, the most influential figure in Macmillan’s life was Ronnie Knox, a brilliant homosexual old Etonian who tutored him to a Balliol exhibition, became chaplain at Trinity next door, and coaxed him towards an intense Anglo-Catholicism that dominated his spiritual imagination for the rest of his days.

As a young man Macmillan cut an unprepossessing figure, with his strange shambling gait, round glasses and comical moustache, and when Lady Dorothy Cavendish (who was six years his junior) agreed to marry him in 1920, her family were horrified. Even in Tatler’s honeymoon photo, as Williams dryly notes, the supposedly happy couple looked like complete strangers. At the end of 1929, Dorothy began a flagrantly public affair with the bisexual Tory rake Bob Boothby. Their relationship lasted for decades, an open secret in upper-class circles, and the toll on Macmillan was so great that he fled to a Munich sanatorium.

Williams does his best for Dorothy, but she seems to have been an utterly ghastly, selfish woman, even forcing her daughter Sarah (possibly conceived with Boothby) to have an abortion for the sake of Harold’s political career. The operation went wrong and left poor Sarah unable to have children; not surprisingly, she took to the bottle and died tragically young.

The extraordinary thing, however, is that Macmillan managed to conceal his private agony from the public as he clambered up the greasy pole. He enjoyed plenty of luck along the way, and had it not been for the second world war he might have remained on the paternalistic fringe of the Tory party. But there was also considerable skill in the way he made himself indispensable to Churchill and Eden in the 1940s, and in the way he handled the tempestuous de Gaulle after being appointed Churchill’s top man in the Mediterranean.

While Williams’s account of Macmillan’s ascent is adept and compelling, his book loses momentum when he becomes prime ­minister in 1957. In the style of politicians’ memoirs, there is rather too much of the “From Ceylon the party flew on to Singapore” school of narrative. One summit meeting blurs inevitably into the next, while domestic affairs fade from view.

We get little sense of what it was like to live in Macmillan’s Britain, and it is telling that when Peter Thorneycroft and Enoch Powell resign over public spending in ­January 1958 — an event often seen as a crucial harbinger of Thatcherism — Williams spends as much time on the dull Commonwealth tour that followed as he does on the public rebellion of Macmillan’s Treasury ministers.

But the blame, I think, lies with Macmillan, not his biographer. For all the time he wasted on summits with Eisenhower and de Gaulle, he failed to secure his biggest diplomatic objective, British entry to the Common Market. And although he won a comfortable victory in the 1959 election, there remained a palpable sense of distance from the people he led. Distracted by his deliberate performance as an ­international statesman, Macmillan seemed a ludicrously old-fashioned figure: in Williams’s words, “his language, the way he dressed, his shuffle, his affectations, all made him seem even more of an anachronism than was truly the case”.

When Macmillan resigned, struck down by prostate trouble after the Profumo scandal in 1963, few mourned his passing. And although his famous remark that “most of our people have never had it so good” epitomised the unprecedented prosperity of the late 1950s, in retrospect his ­premiership looks like a gigantic missed opportunity, a last chance to modernise Britain’s industrial economy before the rot set in. Of course, Macmillan would have had to drop the mask of Edwardian insouciance and play a different part. But by that stage, as Williams’s fine book suggests, it was too late. After so long, the mask had become the man.

Harold Macmillan by Charles Williams
Weidenfeld £25 pp548

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