Iain Macleod
Iain Macleod was a very professional politician in both the good and the bad senses of the word. Although he had a darting crossword-puzzle mind, fortified by a phenomenal memory, he was not an intellectual. But as he had a touch of magic about him, he was able to inspire a considerable range of people who were intellectually more gifted and more interested in ideas than he was himself.
I am not convinced that he was a particularly nice man, but he had insight and insolence, which latter quality put him in the tradition of Disraeli, Joseph Chamberlain and F. E. Smith, and sharply contrasted him with Austen Chamberlain, R. A. Butler and James Callaghan, three politicians who in their differing ways were notably deficient in daring unorthodox thrusts. But the political figure in British history to whom, across a gap of 150 years, Macleod bore an almost uncanny resemblance was George Canning. They both lived for within a few months of fifty-seven years. They were both financially insecure, socially a little indeterminate and had rakish aspects to their lives. They were both compact men with a riveting eye, who stood for a popular (not populist) but sometimes unpredictable Toryism. They were both good at banking their treasure in the hearts of their friends and followers, so that their resonance has been somewhat greater than their achievements. Canning attained higher office than did Macleod (after two periods as Foreign Secretary he had been Prime Minister for six months when he died) and he also accomplished the feat, unique I think for a politician as opposed to a poet, although Gladstone, Disraeli and Churchill might come close, of putting four phrases into the English language.
So Macleod ought to be pleased with the comparison. He contributed no comparable hand of phrases (indeed the most remembered one associated with him was Salisbury’s discreditable claim that he was ‘too clever by half’) but he was a very considerable orator, inspirational at a party conference, often with a mordant deadliness of phrase in the House of Commons, to whom many would give third place in the pantheon of British speakers of the past fifty years, after only Churchill and Bevan. I am torn in deciding whether he ought to be there. On the one hand I can think of no challenger to topple his oratory off its bronze medal plinth. On the other, I engaged in many parliamentary jousts with him and did not feel intimidated as I certainly would have done with either of the other two.
I did not find him an amiable ‘shadow’. Quintin Hailsham, Reggie Maudling, Peter Thorneycroft and James Prior, who at one time or another also occupied this position in relation to me, were all much easier to get on with. Macleod had been friendly enough to me before I went to the Treasury, which he had already been shadowing for a couple of years, at the end of 1967. Then for the next two and a half years he became increasingly sour, partisan and withdrawn. He made a tremendous fuss about small change parliamentary procedure issues in relation to the Finance Bill, rather embarrassing his backbenchers by forcing them to walk out of the Committee at one stage. When I followed his advice in 1968 and introduced a National Lottery, subject to a free vote of the House of Commons, he turned round like a squirrel in a cage and successfully voted against it, claiming that the times had become too grave for such frivolity. When I eventually got him to lunch alone at 11 Downing Street (probably a mistaken venue) he sulked throughout the meal, declining both conversational gambits (which was occasionally his habit) and alcoholic refreshment (which was not). No doubt he was in pain from the crippled back and neck which began with a war injury. Perhaps he also had a premonition that time was running out for him. He desperately wanted to be Chancellor, and it was a tragedy for himself, the Heath Government and the country that he occupied the post for only one month. Although he resented me as Chancellor in a way that inevitably diminished the warmth of my feelings for him at the time, this did not kill my longer-term admiration for many of his political qualities. Nor, I hope, does it now make it impossible for me to see and appraise him in perspective.
Macleod came of Hebridean stock on both sides, but I doubt if, apart from going to school in the ruggedly conformist atmosphere of Fettes in Edinburgh and enjoying holidays of fishing and rough shooting on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland meant a great deal to him. He was born at Skipton in the Yorkshire Dales, where his father was a family doctor, and brought up in a quiet middle middle-class way. He went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was an undistinguished undergraduate, save for his high skill at bridge and his liking for betting at Newmarket. Apart from an unsuccessful year’s apprenticeship in the De la Rue banknote and playing-card company he did no job between coming down from Cambridge in 1935 and the outbreak of the war. He earned a substantial but insecure living from playing bridge, but used it to support a life which was more purposeless than gilded.