Harold Macmillan
Harold Macmillan was prime minister of the United Kingdom from January 1957, when Eden resigned after Suez and the Queen chose him over Butler on the advice of Churchill and Salisbury, to October 1963, when a prostate operation and the Profumo affair took him out, the Edwardian in the moustache and the shooting tweeds, publisher, duke's son-in-law, three times wounded on the Somme. He repaired the American alliance with Eisenhower at Bermuda within two months of Suez. He told the country in July 1957 that most of its people had never had it so good. He won the election of 1959 by a hundred seats on that. He told the South African parliament in Cape Town in February 1960 that the wind of change was blowing through the continent, after which his colonial secretary Macleod gave independence to a dozen colonies in three years. The government also had the first motorways and the Beeching axe on the railways. There were the hydrogen bomb tested in 1957, the Skybolt missile the Americans cancelled and the Polaris submarines Kennedy gave him at Nassau in December 1962 instead, and the partial test ban treaty of 1963 that he had pressed on Kennedy and Khrushchev. There was the application to join the European Economic Community in 1961 that de Gaulle vetoed in January 1963. There was the night of the long knives in July 1962 when he sacked a third of his cabinet. There was the war minister Profumo, who had shared a mistress with a Soviet naval attaché and lied to the House about it, whose resignation in June 1963 left the prime minister looking, as the cartoons had him, like the old actor in the empty theatre. He was born in London in 1894 into the publishing family, went to Eton and Balliol, was wounded three times with the Grenadier Guards, and married Lady Dorothy Cavendish in 1920, who spent thirty years with Robert Boothby and stayed his wife. He sat for Stockton-on-Tees from 1924, where the unemployment of the 1930s made him a Keynesian before the word. He was Churchill's minister resident in North Africa in 1943-45, where he learned to run the Americans. He was then housing minister, who built the three hundred thousand houses a year, defence minister, foreign secretary and chancellor under Eden. In that office he had backed Suez and then turned first when the pound ran. He refused the peerage in 1963 and took it in 1984 as Earl of Stockton, at ninety. His maiden speech in the Lords on the miners' strike and the selling of the family silver was the last Tory speech against Thatcher that the country listened to. He died at Birch Grove in December 1986, the last prime minister who had fought in the Great War, and the one whose unflappability was the act the others copied.
- Lived: 1894 CE – 1986 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: prime minister, politician
