Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan [Hardcover]

Good all-rounders are getting rarer in our specialised world. To rise to the highest office in the land you have to tick more boxes than most. Harold Macmillan ticked boxes in the worlds of the university, commerce, the military and religion. His politics were liberal yet conservative, rebel yet loyalist. He was a crofter's great-grandson yet his father-in-law was a Duke. Possessing all these qualities guarantees personal complexity and an interesting biography.

Constitutional historian D.R.Thorpe's Supermac is close on the heels of Charles Williams' 2009 biography but it is a fuller and more revealing work. Thorpe has written previous biographies of Tory politicians and the authority he bears expresses itself in bibliography and notes that make up a third of his magnum opus.

Great men and women are usually people who have suffered. In this way their humanity appeals through the braving of fear. Macmillan's courage was forged in the trenches of the First World War and a near death experience in the Second World War. His family life was traumatic but he braved humiliation sticking it seems to Christian principle and refusing to contemplate divorce. The courage he possessed made him his own man. He stood alone in cabinet when he told the aged Churchill his days as Prime Minister needed to end. Macmillan even dared to suggest to Pope Pius XII he would serve Christian unity by recognising the orders of Anglican priests - to be received by silence!

His brilliant intellect made him too clever for some, including Churchill who saw him as an opinionated subordinate. Macmillan saw his undergraduate reading parties as the very anticipation of heaven. Throughout his life his work was energised by his reading times. His experience at the sharp end of things did something to redeem his cerebral tendency but a negative image persisted. His Labour political opponent Aneurin Bevan saw him as a poseur. Bevan concluded cruelly that having watched the man carefully for years `behind that Edwardian countenance there is nothing'. His fellow Tory rival Butler was kinder and saw two sides to him `the soft heart for and the strong determination to help the underdog, and the social habit to associate happily with the overdog'.

Harold Macmillan's life spans the 20th century. His first memories from his Chelsea childhood were of the pervasive smell of horses and the sound of the blacksmith at work. D.R.Thorpe describes the strong influence of his American mother, Nellie and the muscular Christianity he imbibed that mellowed later in an Anglocatholicism born through the influence of his mentor Ronnie Knox. After the 1914-18 war he married Lady Dorothy Cavendish whose unfaithfulness to him with Bob Boothby has been well chronicled. Dorothy kept up appearances, a stolid politician's wife seeing Harold elected as MP in Stockton and then Bromley. She stood by him through a political ascent after war service in the Mediterranean to Minister of Housing, Minister of Defence, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and then Prime Minister from 1957 to1963.

Two phrases applauding his stewardship as premier are, on the domestic front, `You've never had it so good' and on foreign affairs, `The winds of change', the heading for a speech encouraging Africa to shake off its colonial yoke. Two negatives cited are the 1945 repatriation of Cossacks to their execution in Russia and the 1956 Suez crisis. Like any successful politician Macmillan seized the `glittering prizes offered those who have stout hearts and sharp swords' (F.E.Smith).

His wit is captured well in this expansive book. Interrupted in a speech by Khruschev banging his shoe on the table at the United Nations he looks up and says quietly, `Well, I would like it translating if you would.' Unveiling a bronze of Mrs Thatcher at the Carlton Club he makes an audible stage whisper, `Now I must remember that I am unveiling a bust of Margaret Thatcher, not Margaret Thatcher's bust.' On a trip to Russia, told `dobry den' means `good day' he regales everyone with the words `double gin'!

My own interest in Macmillan is fuelled by having a similar shade of Christian conviction as well as by serving as priest in the parish of Horsted Keynes where he worshipped and is now buried. D.R.Thorpe provides several anecdotes of local interest, like his persuading one of my predecessors to change the lesson he read the Sunday Churchill died to `let us now praise famous men'. Thorpe indicates Macmillan possessed a clear sense of divine providence working through the historical events that propelled his career and the illness that saved his addressing the prime ministerial succession. To his Christian sensibilities we owe the appointment of two of the Church of England's most famous 20th century clerics, Michael Ramsey and Mervyn Stockwood.

D.R.Thorpe writes of Macmillan's observation on the self-preoccupation that has grown up in the wake of the decline in Christian allegiance. He ends the book quoting his call to `restore and strengthen the moral and spiritual as well as the material' rather countering the materialist `you've never had it so good' association of his subject.

Supermac is a good read in both senses, well written and in its length, though this and the detail are not overwhelming since the author's narrative keeps a human interest all through. It is very favourable to the subject but does not skirt round negative perceptions of the man.

The Revd Dr John Twisleton, Rector of St Giles, Horsted Keynes September 2010

This must be the finest biography of the year. It is immensely thoroughly researched and very well-written.Very few people know the period half as well as Thorpe does. When writing his biographies of Selwyn Lloyd, Alec Douglas-Home and Anthony Eden he interviewed a great number of the people at the centre of events, including Macmillan himself, and those interviews are full of insights into the Supermac era. He has been indefatigable too in searching out every scrap of information to be found in archives and personal collections. But all this learning is worn lightly. The book is stuffed with anecdotes, for which the author has a great ear,and the book is written with ease and humour. It is that rare thing, a definitive work which is also a thoroughly good read.

It isn't so much D. R. Thorpe's full and readable tome that puts one off writing a review, it is the Rev Twistleton's brilliant review of the book which is a work of art in its own right and shouts "follow that" to any subsequent reviewer. Anyway, here goes ... Harold Macmillan was the first politician I remember as I was growing up, and he seemed to run the country with a headmasterly air of natural authority that to have his late-premiership difficulties explained so clearly here serves to tarnish, if not quite shatter, an illusion, as do the details of his difficult private life with Lady Dorothy. It is interesting to read how the two world wars shaped him: one proving his bravery, the other his administrative skills: the suggestion of a scandal behind the repatriation of the Cossacks is investigated thoroughly and Macmillan is largely exonerated, so he seems to have had two "good wars" a firm foundation for a political career. His political astuteness is also shown as he emerged from Suez with reputation untarnished, even enhanced, and his early years in the premiership coincided with the end of austerity and the country's economic expansion until we had "never had it so good". The patrician manner suited the deferential fifties, but seemed less at home in the more bumptious sixties, and that too comes across in the book: problems of sex, within ones own marriage or outside of marriage as with the Profumo affair, were best left unconfronted, and there comes a point in any government when it no longer mirrors the spirit of the time and government and governed cease to understand each other, as happened in the latter years. D. R. Thorpe's biography confirms the accepted view of Macmillan without unearthing any radical new interpretations, and as such is a full and in many ways comfortable read. His style is appropriately erudite: he loves the Latin or French phrases, italicised but untranslated, which his subject would have understood but his reader, well, this reader, didn't always; and he is thankfully clear when explaining potentially difficult areas, as with the aforementioned repatriation of Cossacks and White Russians.