It's not often that I really want to see a West End play, but this is one of them, although I doubt I will get the chance.
Obviously given my politics, there are not many Conservative Prime Ministers who are heroes of mine, but there are two postwar PM's who I hold in high esteem. Churchill being one and Macmillan being another.
Perhaps it was the fact that Harold Macmillan was possibly the most left-wing Tory PM there was (honestly, those of us on the left never had it so good ;) ), but also he was someone who never let the sufferings that were inflicted on him in life get the better of him; whether it was the painful wounds he suffered during the First World War, his unhappy marriage and his wife's long affair with a politically dangerous maverick (plus the knowledge that he was not the father of "their" youngest child), his years of isolation as one of Churchill's supporters against appeasement, or indeed being mocked by the younger generation as an out-of-touch Edwardian fuddyduddy who was perhaps more aware of the shifting sands of political power and culture than they were. Macmillan overcame all that and proved himself to be one of the most capable and long-lasting of the postwar PM's. History has indeed been kind to him since his passing some twenty years agoand he has deserved it.
2 comments:
As a Conservative, I'd say you're welcome to him! He let his country down over Suez and as the arch manipulator. He followed Churchill's lead in accommodating socialist levels of government interference that crippled the post-war British economy until 1979.
Wow. If Britain's economy was crippled during the post-war decades - the mostprosperous in British history, before or since - how does one describe the state it's been in since 1979? Bed-ridden? A rotting corpse?
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