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By:Roy Jenkins


He enlisted early and was an officer in time to spend a few weeks in France before the collapse. He was quite badly wounded in a leg and thigh and sent home via St Nazaire before the retreat to Dunkirk. He then had a rather mixed army career. He ended a major on a divisional staff but as the division was in the forefront of the 1944 invasion this brought him no red-tabbed safety. He was back in France on D-day. His degree of promotion was about average for someone of his background and age (he was thirty-two when the war ended). He was not like one of those civilian (that is, non-regular army) brigadiers who were to be his companions on the Conservative benches in the House of Commons - Selwyn Lloyd, Enoch Powell, John Foster, Toby Low (Lord Aldington) - who had risen inexorably. Indeed, accounts of this phase of his life give the impression that he was a feckless, doubtfully disciplined officer. But his four months at the Staff College at the end of 1943 engaged him intellectually in a way that Cambridge never had. He discovered that he was remarkably good at solving the finite problems with copybook answers, and this gave him a new self-confidence which expressed itself in political ambition.

In 1945, because he happened to be on leave at his father’s holiday house there, he more or less adopted himself as a sort of makeshift Conservative candidate for the Western Isles, and ran third to both the sitting Labour member and the Liberal challenger. Within two months of finally getting out of the army at the beginning of 1946 he had - together with Enoch Powell and Reggie Maudling - been taken on by the Conservative Research Department as part of the parliamentary secretariat. The director thought Macleod was intellectually the least good of the three, but ten years later he decided that Macleod balanced this by being the most formidable politician amongst them. By either criterion it was a distinguished trio amongst whom to compete.

After another couple of months he was adopted as candidate for Enfield. With a Labour majority of 12,000 it was not an obvious plum of a seat, but a redistribution before the next election (which could be foreseen at least as easily as the run of the cards in a bridge game) gave Macleod only the much more favourable western half of the borough to fight, a comfortable majority in 1950, and no real constituency worries throughout the six subsequent elections that he fought there.

For his first thirteen years in Enfield he lived there. In 1941 he had married a war widow of striking good looks who had been born Evelyn Blois, a descendant of Essex baronets on her father’s side and of a Disraeli-created peer on her mother’s, and who is now Lady Macleod of Borve, longer-lived but no less dependent upon courage to overcome pain than was her husband. By the end of the war they had two children and had settled in a moderate-sized 1920s house on a sylvan suburban ridgeway. Perhaps surprisingly the Macleods seemed to like suburban living, for although they moved to an SW1 flat when he was Colonial Secretary and then Leader of the House of Commons they were back in Potter’s Bar, just over the Hertfordshire county boundary from Enfield, for much of the 1960s.

Macleod, more than any other politician I can think of, made both his career and his reputation with a single highly effective House of Commons intervention. F. E. Smith in 1906 sprang at least as much into the public eye with a coruscating maiden speech. But it did not directly make his career, for he was in opposition for the next nine years and on the back benches for the first six of them. Aneurin Bevan achieved his first fame from the impact of his iconoclastic wartime attacks upon Churchill, but it was a cumulative effect rather than a single speech that produced the result. And, amongst Macleod’s own contemporaries, Enoch Powell’s 1959 speech on the Hola Camp massacre in Kenya remains in the minds of those who heard it at least as strongly as does Macleod’s 1952 oration. But, as with Smith, it had no direct career impact, partly because it was a further attack on a government from which Powell had recently resigned and partly because its primary appeal was to a swath of cross-party opinion which he was subsequently bitterly to affront.

Macleod’s speech, on the other hand, was manna to the ears of his party leaders and admirably attuned (although not necessarily calculatingly so) to bring its reward. Following on his Research Department experience he thought of himself as a health specialist. He had made his maiden speech on the subject with unspectacular success. Two years later his speciality gave him the opportunity to engage in and win a joust with Bevan. Bevan’s debating reputation was at its height and he regarded the National Health Service as almost a personal political fief, although, brooding increasingly on wider issues, he had in fact become somewhat rusty on the subject. The Speaker had intended Macleod to precede Bevan, but he changed his mind and put in a maiden speaker so that Macleod immediately followed the great gladiator. Because he had the verve to exploit his opportunity it was a greater piece of luck than he had ever experienced at a gaming table. He began with an unusually phrased and riskily provocative sentence of invective: ‘I want to deal closely and with relish with the vulgar, crude and intemperate speech to which the House of Commons has just listened.’ Churchill had come in to listen to Bevan and rose to depart as Macleod said these words. Hearing them he sat down again and stayed. Macleod, benefiting from his phenomenal factual memory, his quickness of reaction and the deadly beam of his delivery, fully justified his opening statement of intention. Early on Churchill turned to his Chief Whip and asked who Macleod was. Then he turned again and said ‘Ministerial material?’ Six weeks later he made Macleod Minister of Health. The post was not then in the Cabinet, but it none the less meant that Macleod at thirty-eight had moved ahead of his contemporaries and leap-frogged over the frustrations of junior office into a department of his own.