Can We Afford Macmillan?

By DESMOND DONNELLY, MP WHEN Mr. Harold Macmillan finished his now famous 'Ramsay MacDonald speech' to the Assembly of Western European Union on May 29, I turned to my neighbours, offering a modest bet that in the national interest Britain would have to have a new Prime Minister before the year was out. There were no takers.

The question now before us is how much longer can we afford the luxury of Mr. Mac- millan's presence at Admiralty House? The British economy continues in general torpor. Our defence policy lies in the ruins where Mr.

Sandys left it. It is not surprising that there has been a cry from amongst the clattering hammers and scaffolding in Printing House Square : 'The difficulty has for long been to discern where the Prime Minister and his colleagues believe they are heading; what ultimate goal they have in mind.'

The plain fact about Mr. Macmillan's adminis- tration, during this past year, is that it has con- sistently lost grip since the disastrous collapse of the Prime Minister's policy at the Paris Summit Conference of May, 1960. Although the arrival of Mr. Kennedy in the White House has served to illuminate the moth-eaten nature of Many British policies, the run-down began long before either of these events. Specifically, and in retrospect, I now place the beginning of the de- cline at the point at which Mr. Macmillan him- self, having won the 1959 General Election by his shameless appeal to our national com- placency, failed to take steps to alert the govern- ment machine to the continuing realities and needs of modern Britain.

Nor was he helped in this problem by his selec- tion of Ministers : one by one, men in the Cabinet, of independent mind or possible critical judgments, have been isolated, removed or allowed—perhaps encouraged—to leave. Thus Mr. Macmillan lost in rapid succession not only that ageing Tory Bevanite, the Marquis of Salis- bury, but also Mr. Alan Lennox-Boyd and then Mr. Derick Heathcoat Amory. Personally, I would have been as glad to have been rid of Lord Salisbury as I am sure Mr. Macmillan was; but Mr. Lennox-Boyd and Mr. Heathcoat Amory were in a different category. Given the Tory out- look they were both extremely able Ministers, powerful assets to any Conservative administra- tion.

Then there was the strange case of Mr. Aubrey Jones. Mr. Jones, who clearly had grave mis- givings about the Sandys defence policy, was regarded by the Prime Minister as a confounded nuisance. His position was made impossible.

Finally, his Ministry (the Ministry of Supply) was abolished, even whilst he sat in it. As it turns out from his subsequent series of notable speeches from the back benches, he is now performing a national service. But how much better it would have been for Mr. Mac- millan's mediocre array ii: Mr. Jones's ability and intellect had been still at the service of this Government.

Finally there have been simple human prob- lems of man management, keeping people re- freshed by new jobs, opportunities and chal- lenges. Ideas may have been lacking but Mr. Macmillan has not even attempted to put the old wine into new bottles. No wonder men like Mr. Derek Walker-Smith said that they had had enough and wanted to be off, back to their previous occupations. They were wasting the most fruitful years of their lives in this fusty, snobbish, personalised administration.

The Prime Minister has not let matters—nor his critics—rest at removing independent men from his immediate circle. He has been anxious to get them out of the country altogether. Hence Mr. Anthony Head's departure to Africa, like some coroneted remittance man, following his speeches criticising the appalling defence muddle. And Mr. Heathcoat Amory's departure for Ottawa, after a speech indicating some concern about the economy.

Those are some of the personnel problems. From the human factors stem the Government's NEXT WEEK CAN WE AFFORD GAITSKELL? BY JULIAN CRITCHLEY, MP political problems, as Messrs. Selwyn Lloyd, Henry Brooke, Harold Watkinson, Alec Home and other less dynamic characters sit making their apocalyptic decisions about minutiae. No wonder Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller's recommendations for dealing with that upstart Wedgwood Benn were accepted readily. After all, once the public knew the law, the public would quickly lose sympathy for Benn. It never even occurred to the men occupying offices once held by such predecessors as Lloyd George, Bevin, Churchill and Bevan that the public would consider that `the law is an ass' and the Attorney- General another.

True, there are Mr. Butler and Mr. Macleod. But Mr. Butler, somewhat naturally, appears to have 'gone rogue' in desperation; and started to repeat his earlier Spanish dances to the slow old tunes of Iberia. As for Mr. Macleod, easily the outstanding intellect and character of the younger men in the Cabinet—is there not some- thing profoundly disagreeable in the current mood of a party which permits the game of bridge to be used as a term of McCarthyite abuse, without standing up and smiting hip and thigh the man who said it? Nevertheless, the question remains, what went wrong following the Britain we glimpsed, briefly, lying chequered in the autumn sunshine of 1959? The answer lies in the unreality of Mr. Mac- millan's battlefield of the Cloth of Gold.

Mr. Macmillan's case before the electorate was that he was a wise, far-sighted leader, Had he not led us back in 1957 across the Red Sea from Egyptian bondage? _Behind his apparently dated exterior there was a modern compulsion. Or as Colonel Varley might be tempted to put it, his appearance was as deceptive as the old familiar radiator of Rolls-Royce. And he was so calm that the loudest noise you could hear in the Cabinet room as he took Britain into the space age was the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece.

Unfortunately for this political prospectus, something else happened in Europe in 1957-58, in addition to Mr. Macmillan's rehabilitation of the Tory Party. The Treaty of Rome was being negotiated and signed. It had consequences that were apparently beyond the range of his political far-sightedness and also unnoticed by his talented colleagues as they sat at their desks. For this omission, Britain has now lost four years and as yet uncounted bills for industrial inertia re- main for payment. We have sustained an eco- nomic defeat as grievous as 1940 was a military one. And, as in 1940, we are now having to begin again at the beginning.

Secondly, because Mr. Macmillan envisaged his Britain as being a great power, he was determined to retain all the trappings of a great power. Yet he failed to discern that his Britain lacked the means of sustaining this position. Nor was he willing to indicate the policies or sacrifices that might have sustained the illusions de grandeur a little longer. Instead he preferred the cosy course in order—I believe—to achieve electoral victory. The consequence is that this country's military forces today are in worse shape than when Caligula's horse (Sir Thomas Inskip) was appointed Minister for Co-ordination of Defence in 1936. And the bearskins and redcoats outside Buckingham Palace will soon be as militarily efficacious as our tired old V-bomber force.

There could be clemency for the Prime Min- ister if it could be argued that the British people were tired, insular and decadent. Perhaps they are? Certainly this was Mr. Baldwin's plea of defence in similar circumstances, a quarter of a century ago. There had been the Peace Ballot— and was not the Reverend Dick Sheppard a much more substantial (and attractive) figure than the Rev. L. John Collins? And were we not equally preoccupied with the irreproachability of our Royal family—only Mrs. Simpson and Edward VIII presented a much bigger political headache than Princess Margaret and either Group Captain Townsend or Mr. Armstrong-Jones?

The answer at that time was given by the generation who flew against the sun in that sum- mer of 1940; and the nation that responded in the face of almost total calamity. It was that Mr. Baldwin was wrong—monstrously wrong. I say that Mr. Macmillan presented a false prospectus to this nation in 1959, as Stanley Baldwin did in 1935. I say that Mr. Macmillan shows himself as incapable as Neville Chamberlain of mobilising the spiritual and physical resources of this nation. I say that what we now need is a brave old Leo Amery, to stand up and invoke again those words : 'In the name of God, go l'