Portraits and Miniatures(17)

The circumstances of his appointment to that department were, however, more dramatic than his tenure of it. He stayed there three and a half years, identified well with the Health Service ethos and always looked at home in photographs with nurses or doctors. But he innovated little and achieved little extra money for a demanding service. Ironically, having used anti-Bevanism as a launching pad, he became a defender of the structure that Bevan had bequeathed as well as a mild friend and modified admirer of Bevan himself. This illustrated two points about Macleod’s attitudes. The first was that, although he was always an overt campaigner for the centre ground, he preferred those on the other side who did not compete with him for it. He did not like Gaitskell any more than he liked me, and much preferred Bevan and maybe Foot and Crossman too. The second was that he regarded invective as a politician’s stock-in-trade rather than as an expression of genuine indignation. He cared deeply about some mostly worthy causes, but his strictures on the moral turpitudes of his opponents had a certain calculated coldness about them. He frequently said that opposition was sterile and unimportant. It was office that counted, and there was almost an indifferent frivolity about his attacks on those who stood in his way of getting it. This was paradoxical, for it is at least arguable that he was better as a destructive critic than he ever was in any ministerial office.

After Health came promotion to the Cabinet in a major reshuffle at the end of 1955 and nearly four years, one under Eden (who had at last succeeded Churchill in April 1955) and three under Macmillan, as Minister of Labour. To that department of conciliation Macleod brought a more abrasive style than his predecessor, the famously emollient Walter Monckton. Was this a difference only of style or of substance as well? Mostly of style, I think. His main confrontation was with the London busmen under the new and truculent leadership of Frank Cousins. But it took place only after he had secured his flank by a compromise settlement of a more important and more dangerous dispute with the railwaymen, and only too after the Cabinet had forced him into a more intransigent (and arguably duplicitous) handling of Cousins than he might himself have chosen.

Macleod compensated, as was often his way, with a viciously successful House of Commons speech. Also typically, he muted his criticism of Alf Robens, who had moved a motion of censure upon him, and turned the blast of his invective against Gaitskell, the bigger target and never Macleod’s favourite: ‘I cannot conceal my scorn and contempt for the part that the Leader of the Opposition has played in this … We are having the debate because the Leader of the Opposition, in a parliamentary scene on Monday, could not control himself. Because of his refusal on Friday to say a single word that would uphold the authority of an arbitration award; because of his mischievous speech over the weekend; because of his lack of authority on Monday. If we are to vote then let the censure of the House be on the right honourable gentleman tonight and from the country tomorrow.’

Most people would now think there was a good deal more mischief, and indeed irresponsibility, in Macleod than in Gaitskell, but it was high-order jugular debating. In fact Macleod beat the busmen and improved his own and the government’s standing as a result, but it is none the less the case that throughout nearly his whole career he scored more triumphs with words than with deeds.

The exception was his period in his next office. Just as he had been eager to leave the Ministry of Health in 1955 so he looked for a move from the Ministry of Labour in 1959. They were perfectly reasonable desires in both cases. He had served more than adequate stints in both offices. In 1959 he was looking for a change rather than for a great promotion, and the office on which he had fixed his sights was the Colonial secretaryship. This office, which was historically the third of the secretaryships of state, had reached its apogee under Joseph Chamberlain, who chose it when he was the second man in the Salisbury Government in terms of power and the first in terms of public impact. For the Colonial Office it had mostly been gently downhill after that, and the path was to be far more precipitately so after Macleod, although this was because of the success and not the failure of his policies. The department was abolished in 1967.

In 1959-61, however, the job had plenty of political content. It was the period of the ‘wind of change’ in Africa, the affairs of the dark continent stood near the centre of the Westminster stage, and there was both risk and opportunity in being involved with them. Even so Macmillan was surprised that Macleod wanted the department, although it at first suited the Prime Minister very well that he did. In offering it Macmillan talked about ‘the poisoned chalice’, but his surprise probably came at least as much from the fact that it was so far from the previous bent of Macleod’s interests. The new Colonial Secretary had never made a significant speech on the subject, had cultivated no contacts with African or Caribbean leaders, and had never set foot in a colony. For the last deficiency there were plenty of near precedents in British imperial history. Gladstone’s commitment to Irish Home Rule was not made less intense by the fact that only once in his life did he cross the sixty-five miles of St George’s Channel. Baldwin showed more courage on India than on any other issue, but never even contemplated visiting the sub-continent. Macleod had plenty of colonial travel during his two years in the responsible office, but his previous abstinence did illustrate a certain insularity. Although he was politically a staunch pro-European throughout the 1960s, he was never much of a traveller across the Channel. He had seen more of France as a soldier than he was to do in any other way. His favourite European destination was a frequently revisited hotel on the Costa Brava. The capitals in which he seemed most at home were Washington and New York in the Kennedy/Johnson era.