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Great-grandson of a crofter and son-in-law of a Duke, Harold Macmillan (1894-1986) was both complex as a person and influential as a politican. Marked by terrible experiences in the trenches in the First World War and by his work as an MP during the Depression, he was a Tory rebel - an outspoken backbencher, opposing the economic policies of the 1930s and the appeasement policies of his own government. Churchill gave him responsibility during the Second World War with executive command as 'Viceroy of the Mediterranean'. After the War, in opposition, Macmillan was one of the principal reformers of the Conservatives, and after 1951, back in government, served in several important posts before becoming Prime Minister after the Suez Crisis. Supermac examines key events including the controversy over the Cossacks repatriation, the Suez Crisis, You've Never Had It So Good, the Winds of Change, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Profumo Scandal. The culmination of thirty-five years of research into this period by one of our most respected historians, this book gives an unforgettable portrait of a turbulent age. Shortlisted for the Orwell Prize.
Even 35 years after Harold Macmillan's resignation in 1963, opinions are sharply divided over his achievements as a politician and prime minister. This volume contributes to the debate about Macmillan's political role, his successes and his failures, by examining key aspects of his political life. Biographers, historians, and contemporaries present facets of Macmillan's life, his political visions, his skills, successes and failures in his personal life as well as in his domestic and foreign policies. With most official papers covering his active political life until his resignation now in the public domain, a more considered judgement about his party political and his governmental activities is possible. Taking account of this newly-available documentary evidence, there is much yet to be written on Harold Macmillan's career, but this collection bears witness to the fact that his was a magnificent life.
A masterly biography of a great Conservative Prime Minister (and publisher) - Harold Macmillan (1894-1986). Harold Macmillan was a figure of paradox. Outwardly, it was Edwardian elegance and civilised urbanity. Inwardly, it was emotional damage from his wife's open adultery and his progressive perplexity at the onward march of time. The First World War showed the courageous soldier. From then on, it was politics, rather than the family business of publishing, which was to be his future. Nevertheless, although he supported Churchill in the 1930s he was deemed boring - and certainly not ministerial material. All changed with the Second World War. Appointed Minister in Residence in North Africa, Macmillan's career flowered. After the War he became indispensable to Conservative Cabinets and as Churchill's Minister of Housing in the early 1950s he achieved the target, against all expectations, of 300,000 houses annually. Thereafter, he was Eden's Foreign Secretary and Chancellor but by then Macmillan had become openly ambitious. Over the Suez affair in 1956 he played a difficult - and somewhat devious - hand. Eden's resignation left him as the clear choice of his Cabinet colleagues to become Prime Minister. From 1957 to 1962, Macmillan was a good - some would say a great - Prime Minister. By 1962, however, his government was looking tired. The Profumo affair in 1963 was particularly damaging, and in the autumn of 1963 his health forced him to retire.
Documents the unlikely friendship between the British Prime Minister and the thirty-fifth President, tracing their collaborative efforts during the Bay of Pigs, the construction of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Prime Minister's Questions is the bear pit of British politics. Watched and admired around the world, it is often hated at home for bringing out the worst in our politicians. Yet despite successive leaders trying to get away from Punch and Judy politics, it's here to stay. Ayesha Hazarika and Tom Hamilton spent five years preparing Ed Miliband for the weekly joust, living through the highs and lows, tension and black humour of the political front line. In this insightful and often hilarious book, including an updated afterword discussing the key events of 2018, they lift the lid on PMQs and what it's really like to ready the leader for combat. Drawing on personal recollections from key players including Tony Blair, David Cameron, Harriet Harman, William Hague and Vince Cable alongside their unique knowledge, Hazarika and Hamilton take you behind the scenes of some of the biggest PMQs moments.
From August 1950 until 1966 Harold Macmillan kept one of the fullest and most entertaining political diaries of the twentieth century. This first volume starts in the last full year of the post war Labour government, follows his rise through the Churchill and Eden governments via a succession of high offices, and culminates with his becoming Prime Minister in 1957. He was an acute observer of events and people not just in his own country or party, but on the wider international and political scene. His Diary provides wry portraits of many of the leading political figures of the period and records his personal take on the great issues and events of the day. In the process Macmillan's wider activities and inner concerns are also revealed, casting light beyond the famously 'unflappable' exterior onto the character of one of the most enigmatic figures in modern British political history.
Following Never Again and Having It So Good, the third part of Peter Hennessy's celebrated Post-War Trilogy 'By far the best study of early Sixties Britain ... so much fun, yet still shrewd and important' The Times, Books of the Year Harold Macmillan famously said in 1960 that the wind of change was blowing over Africa and the remaining British Empire. But it was blowing over Britain too - its society; its relationship with Europe; its nuclear and defence policy. And where it was not blowing hard enough - the United Kingdom's economy - great efforts were made to sweep away the cobwebs of old industrial practices and poor labour relations. Life was lived in the knowledge that it could end in a single afternoon of thermonuclear exchange if the uneasy, armed peace of the Cold War tipped into a Third World War. In Winds of Change we see Macmillan gradually working out his 'grand design' - how to be part of both a tight transatlantic alliance and Europe, dealing with his fellow geostrategists Kennedy and de Gaulle. The centre of the book is 1963 - the year of the Profumo Crisis, the Great Train Robbery, the satire boom, de Gaulle's veto of Britain's first application to join the EEC, the fall of Macmillan and the unexpected succession to the premiership of Alec Douglas-Home. Then, in 1964, the battle of what Hennessy calls the tweedy aristocrat and the tweedy meritocrat - Harold Wilson, who would end 13 years of Conservative rule and usher in a new era. As in his acclaimed histories of British life in the two previous decades, Never Again and Having it so Good, Peter Hennessy explains the political, economic, cultural and social aspects of a nation with inimitable wit and empathy. No historian knows the by-ways as well the highways of the archives so well, and no one conveys the flavour of the period so engagingly. The early sixties live again in these pages.
First published in 1966, Robert Blake's biography of Disraeli is one of the supreme political biographies of the last hundred years. An outsider, a nationalist, a European, a Romantic and a Tory - Disraeli's story is an extraordinary one. Born in 1804, the grandson of an immigrant Italian Jew, he became leader of the Conservative Party and was twice Prime Minister. Famous for the 1867 Reform Act, his purchasing of the Suez Canal and his diplomatic triumphs at the Congress of Berlin, he was also the creator of the political novel and, in Sybil, wrote the major 'Condition of England' work of fiction. 'An outstandingly successful biography . . . Disraeli has never been brought so vividly to life.' Sir Philip Magnus, Daily Telegraph 'A huge, scholarly and remarkably readable work which makes us revise vast tracts of our assumptions about nineteenth-century politics.' Sir Michael Howard, Sunday Times 'A book that people will still be reading in fifty years' time and long after.' Times Literary Supplement
Harold Macmillan's 'Wind of Change' speech, delivered to the South African parliament in Cape Town at the end of a landmark six-week African tour, presaged the end of the British Empire in Africa. This book, the first to focus on Macmillan's 'Wind of Change', comprises a series of essays by leading historians in the field.