Portraits and Miniatures(20)

Macleod was shadow Chancellor for almost five years, the longest time for which he ever did any job. For the last half of this period I was too close to his performance to be able to judge it objectively. Looking back, and leafing through his speeches, I am struck by the contrast between the splendour of his phrases and the vacuity of his economic prescriptions. In so far as he endeavoured to be constructive (which was not much, for he was a great believer in the Churchillian doctrine that the business of an Opposition is to oppose), it was about taxation rather than the management of the economy. On the latter he claimed no expertise and preferred scepticism to precision. Even on taxation, however, he operated with a broad-brush blandness which is today treated as the hallmark of a would-be profligate Chancellor. His speech at the 1967 Party Conference was thus summarized by Nigel Fisher: ‘He promised that a Conservative Government would abolish the Selective Employment Tax and reduce the burden of direct personal taxation. He did not think it necessary to increase indirect taxes by an equivalent amount because he relied on larger savings and a higher growth rate to fill the revenue gap under a Conservative Administration.’

He was much happier at general raillery. In the same speech he said: ‘Secretaries of State come and go. We started with George Brown. Happy days. Three per cent mortgages. The National Plan. Where have all the flowers gone? Gone to the graveyard, every one. Then you will remember Michael - [pause]. No, of course you do not remember Michael Stewart … In nominal charge we have the Prime Minister himself, a man whose vision is limited to tomorrow’s headline.’ He always liked getting Harold Wilson in his sights. In that same year in the House of Commons, having described Wilson as persuading himself and trying to persuade the country that he was in turn Napoleon, Churchill, Abraham Lincoln and the Duke of Wellington, Macleod moved to his cheer line: ‘J. F. Kennedy described himself in a brilliant phrase as an idealist without illusions. I could describe the Prime Minister as an illusionist without ideals.’

When it came to my period as Chancellor I thought Macleod was much better at Party Conferences than in the House of Commons. I sat before a TV set lost in reluctant and apprehensive admiration as he riveted the faithful at Blackpool or Brighton, but I never found him especially formidable across the despatch boxes. I think he was bored and frustrated as his sixth year out of office turned into the seventh and also the last year of his life. I cannot say that I believe he would have been a great Chancellor. He was too concentrated on taxation, perhaps too much of a politician, and above all too ill for that. He was also curiously and obsessively unrealistic about unemployment. His mind was struck in the early post-war years on the issue and he genuinely believed that any level much over 300,000 was a certain sign of socialist incompetence and bureaucratic indifference. How he would have accommodated himself to the Conservative performance in the 1980s I cannot imagine. But he would certainly have been a very much better Chancellor than Anthony Barber.

He was also a considerable general loss to the Heath Government. ‘We have lost our trumpeter,’ someone said when he went. But he was more than that. He had an empathy which eluded Heath and a sense of direction which eluded every other member of that administration. He would not have succeeded Heath had he survived to 1975, when he would have been sixty-one and old for his years. Also he had some quality of self-destructiveness which made him not nearly as papabile as he sometimes looked. But he might have prevented a Thatcher succession. As it is, he remains an ambiguous figure, romantic and perverse, with a capacity for leadership which frustrated itself by his incapacity to conciliate those who were not under his spell.





Dean Acheson





Dean Acheson is best remembered in this country for his 1962 speech at the West Point Military Academy in which he said: ‘Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role.’ It touched a sore spot only six years after Suez and on the threshold of General de Gaulle’s veto on our first but belated application to join the Common Market (as it was then called). But he should be still more remembered for his part in the Marshall Plan, in the putting together of NATO, and in the rallying of the Western world from a post-1945 slough of despond which led on, after forty years of long and often tense waiting, to the great bloodless victory of 1989. Acheson was not an unduly modest man, but when he called the second (1969) volume of his memoirs Present at the Creation it was an under- rather than an overstatement.

The late 1940s and very early 1950s were as dangerous as they were creative, and Acheson’s nerve was as good as his vision. With Truman and Bevin, Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, he was an architect who built a Western world which was first a secure bastion and then a lighthouse that sent out a beam of attraction which destroyed the Soviet empire. Yet, to illustrate the paradoxes of life, he ended his four years as US Secretary of State (1949-53) under heavy attack from Senator McCarthy and his allies as a quasi-Communist, and ended his life, twenty years later, by embracing some views of which the deplorable Senator, had he still been alive and with the intelligence to understand Acheson’s typically taut and sophisticated expression of them, might have been proud.