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Harold Macmillan's premiership (January 1957–October 1963) saw Britain grapple simultaneously with decolonisation, the first application to join the European Economic Community, rising consumer affluence, and the social and cultural changes — satire, the early "permissive" stirrings, the questioning of deference — that would transform British public life. Macmillan is remembered for his unflappable Edwardian style (the "unflappability" was carefully cultivated), his association with the phrase that Britons had "never had it so good," and his humiliating exit amid the Profumo scandal and a succession crisis that exposed the closed, aristocratic world of the Conservative leadership.
Macmillan's years are pivotal in the depth study because they crystallise two of its central problems. First, the problem of affluence: was the prosperity real, was it shared, and did it dissolve old class loyalties or merely paper over Britain's relative economic decline? Second, the problem of Britain's role in the world: the "Wind of Change" speech and the EEC application together mark Britain's attempt — after Suez — to find a new place between a vanishing empire, an ambivalent Europe, and a dominant United States.
Key Question: How successfully did Macmillan manage Britain's adjustment to a post-imperial, affluent age between 1957 and 1963 — and were the failures of his final years personal, political, or structural?
Key Definition: "Supermac" — originally a satirical 1958 cartoon by Vicky (Victor Weisz) in the Evening Standard, intended to mock Macmillan as a fading Superman impersonator, but which backfired by lodging an image of effortless mastery. The gap between the "Supermac" image and the troubled reality of 1961–63 is a key analytical theme.
This lesson sits within Paper 2, Option 2S — The Making of Modern Britain, 1951–2007, Part One ("Building a New Britain, 1951–1979"). As a depth study, the paper rewards command of the specific — the precise sequence of decolonisation, the exact terms of the EEC application, the named ministers sacked in 1962 — rather than vague generalisation about "the affluent fifties."
Macmillan's appointment was not inevitable. When Eden resigned in January 1957, many expected R.A. Butler to succeed him. The party's informal consultation process — the Marquess of Salisbury and Lord Kilmuir canvassed Cabinet members individually — produced a clear majority for Macmillan, partly because Butler was distrusted on the right (for his association with appeasement and his perceived coolness over Suez) while Macmillan had been a Suez hawk who then engineered the orderly retreat. The Queen appointed Macmillan on 10 January 1957.
| Key Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Background | Eton, Balliol College Oxford, Grenadier Guards (wounded three times in the First World War); married Lady Dorothy Cavendish, daughter of the Duke of Devonshire — connecting him to the heart of the Whig aristocracy |
| Publishing | A partner in the family firm Macmillan Publishers — genuinely bookish, given to quoting Trollope and the classics |
| Pre-war politics | MP from 1924; a "One Nation" critic of mass unemployment in his Stockton-on-Tees constituency; an opponent of appeasement; his 1938 book The Middle Way argued for economic planning and a managed mixed economy |
| Housing success | His delivery of 300,000 houses a year as Housing Minister (achieved 1953) had made his administrative reputation and his claim on the top job |
Macmillan's first task was to repair the wreckage of Suez. He restored the "special relationship" at the Bermuda Conference with Eisenhower (March 1957) and presented himself as a calming, experienced hand — the deliberate antithesis of the overwrought Eden. His cultivated unflappability ("Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles every knot," he liked to say) was a political performance designed to project stability after crisis.
On 20 July 1957, Macmillan told a Conservative rally at Bedford: "Let us be frank about it — most of our people have never had it so good." The phrase — borrowed from a 1952 US Democratic slogan — became his trademark, and eventually a weapon his critics used to imply complacency. Crucially, in the same speech Macmillan added a warning about inflation that is usually forgotten — a nuance worth deploying to show that the soundbite oversimplifies his actual argument.
The late 1950s and early 1960s saw genuine rises in living standards:
| Indicator | Data |
|---|---|
| Real wages | Rose by roughly 20% between 1951 and 1959; average weekly earnings continued climbing into the early 1960s |
| Consumer goods | Television ownership rose from around 4% of households in 1950 to roughly 75% by 1961; car ownership roughly doubled in the 1950s (from about 2.25 million to over 5 million) |
| Unemployment | Remained low, generally below 2.5%, for most of the decade |
| Housing | Continued expansion of both council and owner-occupied housing |
| Hire purchase | Credit-fuelled consumption transformed retail — washing machines, refrigerators and televisions became mass-market goods, though "stop-go" controls on HP terms were repeatedly used to manage demand |
Historiographical anchor. David Kynaston (Modernity Britain, 1957–62, 2013–14) provides the most richly textured portrait of everyday life, documenting both genuine improvement and persistent inequality — regional disparity, the condition of the industrial working class, the slum, and the discrimination faced by Commonwealth immigrants. Dominic Sandbrook (Never Had It So Good, 2005) argues the affluence was real but uneven, and that the cultural changes of the period were evolutionary rather than the "revolution" of legend.
Macmillan led the Conservatives to a third successive — and increased — victory on 8 October 1959, raising the majority to around 100 (365 seats) and winning 49.4% of the vote. The slogan "Life's better with the Conservatives — don't let Labour ruin it" captured the mood of affluent optimism, and the result triggered an anguished Labour debate (the "revisionist" controversy associated with Anthony Crosland's The Future of Socialism, 1956) about whether prosperity had made the working class permanently Conservative. This is a key causal point: 1959 looked like the high-water mark of the "property-owning, telly-owning" Conservative ascendancy — which makes the rapid reversal of 1961–63 all the more striking.
On 3 February 1960, Macmillan addressed the South African Parliament in Cape Town, declaring that "the wind of change is blowing through this continent," and that the "growth of national consciousness is a political fact" which policy must accept. Delivered in the citadel of apartheid, the speech signalled that Britain would not resist African independence and implicitly criticised South African racial policy. It enraged white settlers and the Conservative right (the "Suez Group" and, later, the Monday Club), but it framed Macmillan as a realist reading the direction of history.
| Year | Territory | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1957 | Ghana (Gold Coast) | First sub-Saharan African colony to independence; Kwame Nkrumah its leader |
| 1960 | Nigeria, British Somaliland, Cyprus | Nigeria was Britain's most populous African colony |
| 1961 | Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Kuwait; South Africa left the Commonwealth | South Africa withdrew under pressure over apartheid |
| 1962 | Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda | Caribbean and East African decolonisation |
| 1963 | Kenya, Zanzibar, and (under Douglas-Home) the formation of Malaysia | Kenyan independence followed the brutal suppression of the Mau Mau (Hola Camp scandal, 1959, had already shaken Conservative consciences) |
Key analysis. Decolonisation under Macmillan was driven by interacting pressures: the economic burden of empire weighed against the City's continued faith in sterling and the Commonwealth; the surge of African nationalism; Cold War competition (both superpowers courted the new states); the chastening lesson of Suez; and a Colonial Office, under Iain Macleod, that judged orderly withdrawal wiser than costly resistance. Macleod's accelerated timetable was condemned by the right as a "scuttle"; defenders argue it spared Britain the colonial wars that scarred France in Algeria.
Britain had declined to join the European Coal and Steel Community (1951) and stood aside from the EEC at its founding (Treaty of Rome, 1957), preferring Commonwealth ties, the sterling area, and the Atlantic "special relationship." By 1961 Macmillan's calculus had shifted, and in July 1961 Britain opened negotiations.
| Factor | Detail |
|---|---|
| Economic | The Six's growth rate outstripped Britain's; the Commonwealth was waning as a trading bloc; the rival European Free Trade Association (EFTA, 1960) was too small to substitute |
| Political | Washington encouraged British entry; Britain's independent global influence was visibly contracting; Europe offered a new role to replace empire |
| Strategic | Macmillan feared exclusion from a continental bloc that might develop without British influence; a British presence inside the EEC would also serve Anglo-American interests against de Gaulle's vision of a Europe independent of America |
On 14 January 1963, President Charles de Gaulle vetoed Britain's application at a Paris press conference. His reasons:
Significance. The veto was a grievous personal blow to Macmillan, who had staked his strategy on it. It demonstrated the limits of British influence in the very arena Britain had hoped to lead, and it crystallised a question that would dominate British politics for half a century: was Britain's destiny in Europe or in the Atlantic relationship? The application's failure also fed the sense of national drift that satirists and the press were beginning to exploit.
The confident Conservatism of 1959 unravelled with remarkable speed, and a depth-study answer must be able to explain why the government declined after 1961. The roots were partly economic and partly political.
| Episode | Detail and significance |
|---|---|
| The "pay pause" (1961) | Faced with another sterling crisis and inflation, Chancellor Selwyn Lloyd imposed a wages freeze in the public sector in July 1961. It was deeply unpopular, alienated the unions, and symbolised the failure to find a durable answer to inflation without provoking conflict |
| National Economic Development Council ("Neddy") | Created 1962 — a tripartite body of government, employers and unions to plan for growth. It marked a turn towards French-style "indicative planning" and corporatism — an admission that the free play of the market was not delivering modernisation |
| The "dash for growth" | After Lloyd's dismissal, Reginald Maudling (Chancellor from 1962) deliberately reflated the economy to engineer a pre-election boom. It produced rising imports and a worsening balance of payments — the "stop-go" cycle in its purest form, and a poisoned inheritance for the next government |
| By-election collapse | The Orpington by-election (March 1962), a safe Conservative seat won sensationally by the Liberal Eric Lubbock on a huge swing, signalled that affluent middle-class voters were deserting the government |
In a single day Macmillan sacked seven Cabinet ministers — a third of his Cabinet, including the Chancellor Selwyn Lloyd — in an attempt to rejuvenate his government and shift blame for the pay pause. Far from projecting decisive renewal, the purge looked like panic, and it wounded Macmillan's carefully cultivated image of unflappable calm. The Liberal Jeremy Thorpe's barbed inversion of scripture — "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life" — captured the impression of a Prime Minister sacrificing colleagues to save himself. For the historian, the reshuffle is a textbook example of a tactical move that produced a strategic loss of authority.
The early 1960s brought a sequence of security and sex scandals that corroded the government's reputation for competence and probity — the Vassall spy case (1962) and, above all, the Profumo affair.
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| The scandal | The Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, had a brief affair with Christine Keeler, who was also associated with Yevgeny Ivanov, a Soviet naval attaché — raising (largely unfounded but politically explosive) fears of a security breach |
| The lie | On 22 March 1963 Profumo denied any impropriety in a personal statement to the House of Commons; when the denial collapsed he resigned on 5 June 1963, having lied to Parliament |
| Impact | The affair fused sex, espionage and class into a sensation that the satirists exploited mercilessly. Macmillan, of an older generation, appeared bewildered and out of touch — unable even to credit that a colleague might lie to him |
| The Denning Report (Sept 1963) | Lord Denning's official inquiry into the security aspects became a publishing sensation; while it found no real security damage, the spectacle deepened the impression of establishment decadence |
The cumulative effect of Orpington, the EEC veto, the reshuffle and Profumo was to transform "Supermac" from a figure of mastery into a figure of mockery within barely eighteen months — a collapse of authority that is itself a central analytical theme of the period.
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