Autobiographers From The United Kingdom

"In later years I was to find economists and newspaper editors arguing against the principle of full employment, to which after the Second War all political parties attached so much importance. While I recognise the dangers of "over-employment", I have little sympathy with those who, writing from pleasant suburban retreats or comfortable editorial chairs, dilate upon the disciplinary values of pre-war conditions. It was my fate to live with the problems of heavy unemployment for fifteen years. They were not substantially eased by any conscious effort either in the industrial or economic field. Rearmament under Hitler's pressure and ultimately under war brought their own grim solution."

"I have listened to Harold Macmillan in the House of Commons many times and, however much I may have disagreed, I could never deny that throughout his life he has been consistent in his detestation of unemployment and in his belief that government has a major role to play in solving this human problem."

"Indeed, let us be frank about it. Most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had in my life time—nor indeed ever in the history of this country. What is beginning to worry some of us is, is it too good to be true?—or perhaps I should say, is it too good to last? ... Our constant concern to-day is, can prices be steadied while at the same time we maintain full employment in an expanding economy? Can we control inflation? This is the problem of our time."

"The most striking of all the impressions I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of this African national consciousness. In different places it may take different forms but it is happening everywhere. The wind of change is blowing through this continent. Whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. We must all accept it as a fact. Our national policies must take account of it. This means, I would judge, that we must come to terms with it. I sincerely believe that if we cannot do so we may imperil the precarious balance between East and West on which the peace of the world depends."

"Forever poised between a cliché and an indiscretion."

"[Macmillan] said that another round of wage increases such as there had been in the past two years could be disastrous... Such increases would not bring any benefit to anyone. They would only benefit men in a particular industry if they were the only ones to get them. But they would not be. If one industry started, others would follow. No one would gain anything, except more and more paper money, which would buy less and less."

"What is the flaw in our present prosperity? What has gone wrong is that our competitors are taking some of our share in the export markets. The Germans and the Americans and the Japanese and other people, who were not competing actively with us until recently, are doing better than we are. The world's trade is growing all the time, but our share of it is creeping downwards all the time. Why are we not doing as well as our competitors? One reason is that we are spending so much money here that too many goods are bought at home which ought to be sold abroad. Besides, our prices go up faster than other people's, and that makes our goods harder to sell. Too easy to sell at home, too hard to sell abroad—all the result of too much spending power."

"I cannot forget the twenty-five years when I sat for a Tees-side constituency. I cannot forget those terrible times when some 17,000 out of 25,000 able-bodied men in my constituency walked the streets looking for jobs."

"We must export to get necessities. We could not produce more than perhaps half our food. We had no raw materials, except coal and iron. Now we were importing both. We were even bringing coals to Newcastle, at least figuratively. All these imports must be paid for by exports... At first our main competitors—Germany and Japan—were out of the race. Now they were coming along very fast. We must not relax; on the contrary, we must make even greater efforts."

"Since the war we had produced a quarter more goods and services—and paid ourselves 80 per cent more money for doing it. That is why there is too much demand—too much spending power—and you will not stop that by fixing prices. What we have got to do is to stop pumping money in, or only pump it in at the same rate as the extra production we succeed in turning out."

"In the course of some ninety years, the wheel has certainly turned full circle. The Protectionist case, which seemed to most of our fathers and grandfathers so outrageous, even so wicked, has been re-stated and carried to victory. Free Trade, which was almost like a sacred dogma, is in its turn rejected and despised... [M]any acute and energetic minds in the ’forties “looked to the end.” They foresaw what seemed beyond the vision of their rivals—that after the period of expansion would come the period of over-production... Disraeli] perceived only too clearly the danger of sacrificing everything to speed. Had he lived now, he would not have been surprised. The development of the world on competitive rather than on complementary lines; the growth of economic nationalism; the problems involved in the increasing productivity of labour, both industrial and agricultural; the absence of any new and rapidly developing area offering sufficient attractive opportunities for investment; finally, the heavy ensuing burden of unemployment, in every part of the world—all these phenomena, so constantly in our minds as part of the conditions of crisis, would have seemed to the men of Manchester nothing but a hideous nightmare. Disraeli would have understood them. I think he would have expected them."

"Although I am still in favour of a National Government in these difficult times, and shall probably be found in the great majority of cases in the Government Lobby, there are some issues that have arisen, or are likely to arise, upon which I am unable to give the Government the support which it has, perhaps, the right to expect from those receiving the Government Whip. It occurs to me, therefore, that it would perhaps be more satisfactory if I was no longer regarded as being among the supporters of the present Administration."

"It is not enough to deplore and condemn the political excesses and the economic inadequacies of the totalitarian states. We must prove that democracy can do better."

"The only answer to Socialism was to build up by every means a property-owning democracy. Socialism promised to build up a great pauper State by its schemes for State relief, nationalization and doles, while the Conservative Party promised to build up a great property-owning, thrifty, and industrious State."

"Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about a modern battlefield is the desolation and emptiness of it all... One cannot emphasise this point too much. Nothing is to be seen of war or soldiers—only the split and shattered trees and the burst of an occasional shell reveal anything of the truth. One can look for miles and see no human being. But in those miles of country lurk (like moles or rats, it seems) thousands, even hundreds of thousands of men, planning against each other perpetually some new device of death. Never showing themselves, they launch at each other bullet, bomb, aerial torpedo, and shell. And somewhere too (on the German side we know of their existence opposite us) are the little cylinders of gas, waiting only for the moment to spit forth their nauseous and destroying fumes. And yet the landscape shows nothing of all this—nothing but a few shattered trees and 3 or 4 lines of earth and sandbags; these and the ruins of towns and villages are the only signs of war anywhere visible. The glamour of red coats—the martial tunes of flag and drum—aide-de-camps scurrying hither and thither on splendid chargers—lances glittering and swords flashing—how different the old wars must have been."

"America is “the new Roman empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.”"

"We need not so much the gallantry of our fathers; we need (and in our army at any rate I think you will find it) that indomitable and patient determination which has saved England over and over again. If any one at home thinks or talks of peace, you can truthfully say that the army is weary enough of war but prepared to fight for another 50 years if necessary, until the final object is attained."

"By the achievement of this period of our rule in India, the British stand justified. Much will be left in the material sense—railways, dams, irrigation schemes, health services and the like—but perhaps the greatest contribution which the British genius has made has been the sense of equal justice, incorruptible and unchangeable, carried out equally for Hindu and for Muslim, for the poor as for the rich, the humble as for the exalted. This has set a standard of equity unrivalled in the history of the world."

"We must rely on the power of the nuclear deterrent or we must throw up the sponge. (1957)"

"It breaks my heart to see (I can't interfere or do anything at my age) what is happening in our country today – this terrible strike of the best men in the world, who beat the Kaiser's army and beat Hitler's army, and never gave in. Pointless, endless. We can't afford that kind of thing. And then this growing division which the noble Lord who has just spoken mentioned, of a comparatively prosperous south, and an ailing north and midlands. That can't go on."

"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."

"What is our weakness then? ... We insist on getting extra money without turning out as many extra goods. We try to protect our standard of living by getting more pound notes, even if in the very act of getting them we make certain that they will not buy so much... Wages, salaries, and dividends cannot continue to go up faster than production. We must beat inflation or the inflation will beat us... When next you think about a wage or salary claim or a case for higher profits or dividends, just stop and ask yourself whether the firm's production is going up enough to make sure that prices will not have to rise, too."

"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."

"He represented a generation of Tories who recognized duty and pursued the objective of one nation."

"He certainly cut a dash. The photographs in this book show a wonderfully dandyish figure, posing eccentrically among the soldiers and looking curiously like Dr Roy Strong. This highlights the third quality which vindicates the book: its sense of fun. For the "diaries" are not in fact diaries at all, but a continuous, practically daily, letter to his wife describing the food, the climate and the landscape as much as the politics; the tone is light, even frivolous, gently satirical, self-deprecating in a deliberately English way. It is a pose, of course, but an attractive one, expertly maintained to this day. He mislaid it only in his sub-Churchillian memoirs, which buried many of the best moments from these letters in a turgid surround of ponderous history, recalling the earnest Macmillan of the Thirties. On reflection, one would trade a dozen volumes of this diary for the six memoirs any day."

"The masses now took prosperity for granted... The country simply did not realize that we were living beyond our income, and would have to pay for it sooner or later."

"In 1959 Harold Macmillan had no cause to be wary of possible rivals. Two-thirds of the electorate thought he was doing a good job. That figure rose to 72 per cent in January 1961, before dropping to 35 per cent in March 1963. Macmillan's average popularity during his tenure in Downing Street was only just below that of Churchill and Eden and considerably above that of every subsequent Prime Minister. In performance, too, he was probably the third best premier since the war; Churchill was easily the best, Attlee was a distant second, and Macmillan a similarly distant third. A complicated character, he was courageous, immensely intelligent, hard-working, extraordinarily well-read, witty and humorous, often far-sighted, a man of broad social sympathies, but also vulnerable, inhibited, crafty and surprisingly insecure."

"Introducing SuperMac."

"It is always a matter of regret from the personal point of view when divergences arise between colleagues, but it is the team that matters and not the individual, and I am quite happy about the strength and the power of the team, and so I thought the best thing to do was to settle up these little local difficulties, and then turn to the wider vision of the Commonwealth."

"The two greatest men of our time – you and Jack. How marvellous you were with him...he always kept in his office a picture of you."

"Best of all was the summer term of 1914, more than two years before greats (the final school) had to be faced; a term, therefore, devoted almost wholly to enjoyment. It was, as so often again in a year of dramatic events, a perfect English summer. Oxford, not yet an industrial town or crowded with the buildings which science has brought in its train, was hardly changed from the Oxford of past centuries. The only concession to modernity (apart from the railway, which was some way from the town) were the trams. But these were horse-drawn. All that summer we punted on the river, bathed, sat in the quad, dined and argued with our friends, debated in the Union, danced at the Commemoration Balls."

"Of course the Empire had to be wound up; but on top of Macmillan's strenuous but equally doomed efforts to stay at the top table as America's nuclear partner in the Cold War, these distractions — which, for all his complaints, Macmillan much preferred to more mundane problems nearer home — fatally diverted attention away from the reality of Britain's relative economic decline, in precisely the years when the rest of Europe was re-equipping itself and forging ahead. Macmillan's preference for globe-trotting was not compensated for by two of the least imaginative Chancellors of the post-war period, Derrick Heathcote Amery and Selwyn Lloyd. This was the true legacy Macmillan left to his successors. There was a good deal of truth in "thirteen wasted years"."

"I'd like that translated, if I may."

"During the 1980s the most effective opposition to the principle of privatisation in fact came not from the Labour party, whose defence of the public sector seemed merely a reflex function of its backward-looking dependence on the trade unions, but from her [Margaret Thatcher's] own side. A single phrase in a characteristically nostalgic speech by Harold Macmillan did more damage to the idea of privatisation than all the outraged anathemas of Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley. Speaking to the Tory Reform Group at the Carlton Club in November 1985, the former Prime Minister was said to have likened privatisation to a once-wealthy family fallen on hard times "selling the family silver". In fact, as is so often the case with famous phrases, Macmillan never used the words reported. What he actually said was: "First the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go..." Despite the remoteness from most voters' experience of the aristocratic world he conjured up, Macmillan's words touched a cord. Quite ordinary families have some inherited "family silver", little used but which they do not like to sell. The image of minsters like a lot of dodgy house-strippers, knocking down the nation's heirlooms at a cost well below their true worth subtly undermined Mrs Thatcher's carefully created reputation for thrifty housekeeping. In vain the Government's supporters retorted that the industries being sold off were not assets at all, but liabilities which the Treasury was well rid of."

"[To Neil Kinnock, Labour leader at the 1992 general election, who lost] I realise you were up against the mighty charisma of John Major. That's a tough one, isn't it. The man who ran away from the circus to become an accountant."

"It may be inverted snobbishness but I don't want old style, Old Etonian Tories of the old school to succeed me and go back to the old complacent, consensus ways. John Major is someone who has fought his way up from the bottom and is far more in tune with the skilled and ambitious and worthwhile working classes than Douglas Hurd is."

"I will tell you in confidence; he was the best of a very poor bunch."

"Seeing John Major govern the country is like watching Edward Scissorhands try to make balloon animals."

"If the answer is more politicians, you are asking the wrong question."

"...so unpopular, if he became a funeral director people would stop dying"

"I said, "He told me that he is the only person at the Treasury who hadn't got a double First." She [Margaret Thatcher] said, "He would have got a double First if he had been able to go to a university. But they were very poor. His father was a circus performer and he had to leave school when he was sixteen." I said, "He has got a first-class brain and he is a very solid person, very sound and very good." She said, "I am glad you like him because I think he is splendid.""

"He was a fairly competent chairman of Housing [on Lambeth Council]. Every time he gets up now I keep thinking, "What on earth is Councillor Major doing?" I can't believe he's here and sometimes I think he can't either."

"Their approach is profoundly un-Conservative and, whatever its short-term effect, will do permanent damage to the reputation of the Conservative Party."

"That must be the first agreement in history that was signed by people who decided it was useless in the first place."

"The protocol is a mess. It was very poorly negotiated [...] I think some of the promises made after the protocol that there would be no checks on trade from Britain and Northern Ireland, how those promises came to be made I cannot imagine because they were patently wrong. The protocol needs changing. I am baffled as to how we could have reached a situation where that protocol was accepted."

"The rebellious radicals of right and left argue for partisan policies that appeal to the extremes of their party base. As they do so, political divisions widen, consensus shrinks, and a minority of the party begins to manipulate the majority. This is dangerous territory. The malcontents should remember that, without some give-or-take, without some effort at consensus, our tolerant party system can become ungovernable. In politics, as in life, consensus is wise, not weak; and tolerance is a virtue, not a failing."

"A soundbite never buttered any parsnips."

"I said [to Margaret Thatcher], "When you do finally decide to go, you will have to wait until he is in a position to take over from you." She said, "That has always been my intention, as you know.""

"The Conservative Party must make its choice. Every leader is leader only with the support of his party. That is true of me too. That is why I am no longer prepared to tolerate the present situation. In short, it is time to put up or shut up."