Portraits and Miniatures(18)

Despite this lack of preparation or previous interest, Macleod did not approach the Colonial secretaryship as a routine ‘stage in a career’ appointment. He treated it as a vocation, even if a short-term one, and for the sake of doing it, rather like a temporarily holy man going into a monastery and renouncing the temptations of the flesh, he gave up the practice at which he was best and therefore enjoyed the most, which was the flailing of the opposition parties. In view of his office and his policy within it, which was to hasten the drive to independence and give paramountcy to the interests of the black majorities, he had no choice. There were no battles to fight with Labour or the Liberals. They were on his side. His potential opponents were the African whites (or at least most of them) and their sympathizers in the Conservative Party at home. He was successful, particularly in his first year, in disarming a lot of the latter. In doing so he could not resist a few party flicks (the dismissive phrases came to him so easily), but he could not get much leverage out of them. The peroration of his 1960 Conservative Party Conference speech, which secured a thunderous ovation from an audience much of which had little enthusiasm for his policy, illustrates the skill with which he could put together familiar, even hackneyed, phrases in an order that was resonant, persuasive and applause-provoking:


I cannot promise you a popular colonial policy. There will be toil and sweat and tears; but I hope not blood and I hope not bitterness - although in the turmoil that is Africa today, of even that one cannot be certain. But this is the road we must walk, and we can walk no other. The Socialists can scheme their schemes and the Liberals can dream their dreams, but we, at least, have work to do. I make you one pledge only; nothing more than this and nothing less - that we will at all times, and to all peoples, in all these territories, carry out our duties faithfully, steadfastly and without fear.



By the end of 1960 he had achieved a lot. Nigeria had reached independence. Tanganyika (Tanzania) and Sierra Leone were well on the way to it. There had been a successful conference on the future of Nyasaland (Malawi) and considerable progress had been made towards a reconciliation in Kenya, the most difficult nut to crack because of the combination of the Mau Mau revolt and a higher proportion of white settlers. Outside Africa a settlement and independence, although hardly stability for the future, had also been achieved in Cyprus.

Nineteen sixty-one was a more difficult year for Macleod. He got himself impaled on three nasty bits of barbed wire: Sir Roy Welensky, the fifth Marquess of Salisbury, and Duncan Sandys, who as Commonwealth Secretary was the Cabinet colleague with whom his responsibilities marched most closely. Welensky was a formidable although ultimately unsuccessful leader of the white settlers and wrote disparagingly of Macleod’s ‘mixture of cold calculation, sudden gushes of undisciplined emotion and ignorance of Africa’. Salisbury had become sour and malevolent. The implication of his notorious House of Lords attack was that Macleod was an upstart card-sharper. It caused a lot of resentment and damaged Salisbury. But it also damaged Macleod who was much interested in his own future, which Salisbury no longer was. Sandys was a minister of monumental stubbornness. Macleod and he got their horns completely locked, which was a natural posture for Sandys but an unnatural one for Macleod, who had a darting not a stolid personality. Furthermore, their constant conflict bored Macmillan, who blamed the one who seemed to be acting out of character. Macleod began to lose the Prime Minister’s confidence and his days at the Colonial Office became numbered.

He was again reshuffled in October 1961. In form certainly, and to some extent in substance, he was promoted not demoted. He replaced Rab Butler as Leader of the House of Commons and Chairman of the Conservative Party. The press hailed his promotion as the creation of a new crown prince, and the days after his appointment to these posts were the apparent peak of his position in the Prime Ministerial stakes. Yet there were a number of maggots in the cheese, and the reality was that he was then like one of those countries - Britain in 1890, the United States in 1960, maybe Germany in 1990 - whose competitive position was already weakening when their power and affluence looked greatest.

The first of the maggots was that he had made a lot of Conservative enemies as Colonial Secretary and that he had been moved for negative reasons as well as promoted for positive ones. The second was that the leadership of the House and the chairmanship of the Party are two wildly incompatible horses to ride. The first requires its incumbent to be the least partisan of ministers and the second requires him to be the most. Even Butler with his built-in ambiguity had found the dual role difficult and unsatisfactory. Macleod, who was more brittle and had less depth than Rab, found it bifurcating. Third, and least important, the sinecure office which he was given in order that he might have a salary, that of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, was well below the prestige of the Lord Presidency of the Council or the Lord Privy Sealship which normally goes with leading the House of Commons. In any event, while he was by no means an abject failure at either of his incompatible posts, they did not give him the pivotal position in the government and Party that the two in combination might have been expected to do. The leadership (not just of the House but of the Conservative Party) was twice to fall vacant in the next four years. On neither occasion was Macleod a possible runner or even a seriously consulted kingmaker.