Harold Macmillan

"This divide between the American and British attitudes to diplomacy was not absolute, of course. Diplomats on both sides were skeptical about letting their leaders loose at the summit, and not all Americans believed that dialogue with the Soviets was pointless. But Republican exploitation of the Cold War and of the Yalta myths made it particularly difficult for U.S. policymakers to show much flexibility in the 1950s, whatever their inclinations. Consequently the initiative for summitry tended to come from Europe. On the Western side in the late 1950s it was Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, who made the run for a summit— rather surprisingly, it might seem, considering his past. In 1938 he had been one of the few Tory opponents of Munich. He felt Yalta had been “a failure and a disaster” because “in an atmosphere of fervid rush and hurry, vast decisions were reached in a few crowded days.” And he noted in his diary in February 1957, weeks after taking office: “I am said to have lost touch with public opinion in England because I have not already set out for Moscow to see Khrushchev. All this is pure Chamberlainism. It is raining umbrellas.” But, as Churchill once observed, “how much more attractive a top-level meeting seems when one has reached the top!” Once into his stride as premier, Macmillan saw the political benefits of summitry and in February 1959 he contrived a personal visit to Moscow. Politically the trip was a great success, helping Macmillan win an election by a landslide later that year. But Britain, like France, was no longer a serious presence at the top table. The real momentum for a summit in the late 1950s came not from Western capitals but from the Kremlin."

"I know the PM personally (he has been my publisher for twenty years) and think that I know his character. I know him as a gay, cavalier figure, ready for battle, fond of life and an occasional skirmish, and, above all, a rebel: a rebel against the Establishment. He was a rebel in the Tory party in the 1930s, and, in a sense, he is a rebel still. In this sense he is very like Winston Churchill, whom he greatly admires. Throughout his career, as throughout Winston's, the official Tory party has been against him, or at least (even when, ultimately, accepting him as its leader) has distrusted him. This is one reason why I admire him. He is in the great tradition of Disraeli and Winston as opposed to that other tradition of Bonar Law and Baldwin – men who, by their mediocrity, really represented instead of commanding the dull, impersonal, conventional, respectable forces of the Establishment."

"Introducing SuperMac."

"The Dudley Committee's space standards began to be eroded in 1951, and were soon to be abandoned altogether by Harold Macmillan, Minister of Housing and Local Government in the new Conservative government. His task was to achieve the target of 300,000 dwellings per year, which was accomplished in 1953. It was in part attained by relaxing building licensing in the private sector and also by substantial increase in the public supply, to over 229,000 completions in that year. A drastic reduction in dwelling size in Macmillan's "people's house" contributed to the achievement: in 1953 the average five-person council house was over 110 sq ft smaller than in 1951, a reduction in floor area of 11 per cent."