The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II

Lacklustre diary

Name of the book: The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II

Writer: Harold Macmillan

Editor: Peter Catterall

Publisher: Macmillan

Number of pages: 796

Price: Rs 1,650

Harold Macmillan went to Eton where he didn’t finish because his mother pulled him out. Later he went up to Oxford where also he didn’t finish because he volunteered to fight in the First World War. Macmillan fought bravely and was very proud of this all through his life. The prime ministership came to him when he was a month shy of his 63rd birthday.

By all accounts, he was a nice man to know. When his son, Maurice, wondered why his own career was nowhere near that of his father, Macmillan senior retorted, “Because you weren’t ruthless enough.’’ On the face of it, his life was colourful. He carried out a ruthless political act — a drastic reshuffle of his cabinet in July 1962 — that is remembered in British politics as the “Night of the Long Knives’’. He became the Chancellor of the University of Oxford, an honour he loved perhaps because he had never finished from Oxford — “sent down by the Kaiser’’, he was fond of saying. For the better part of his life he was London’s best known cuckold: his wife, Dorothy, carried on a long affair with the politician, Bob Boothby, a well known seducer of both sexes and a cad. Macmillan and his wife met only at dinner time. In spite of his many accomplishments, Macmillan was a lonely and an introverted man perhaps because of his wife’s affair and the revelation by her that their youngest daughter, Sarah, had been sired by Boothby.

Such men make good diarists as they often tend to use the diary to express their innermost thoughts and angst. In this sense, Macmillan’s diaries are a disappointment. There is hardly anything personal and no startling revelation or gossip. But this may not entirely be the fault of the diarist, it could be a result of the editorial principles followed.

Peter Catterall writes in his introduction,“Omissions...had to occur to reduce the original text to less than half its length. It has been possible to achieve some of that by cutting out repetitions… it has also been necessary to omit Macmillan’s reading, social activities and family life.’’ This means that the man has been taken out of the diary. What has been retained is the political stuff. There is no denying that politics dominated Macmillan’s life but it certainly wasn’t everything to him. The omission of his reading is surprising. When Macmillan was wounded in World War I, he spent ten hours in a shell-hole reading Aeschylus and doping himself with morphine. Surely, such a man could not have spent his years as prime minister without reading. What did he read? That he was reading, there is no doubt as there are stray references to books in the diaries.

Macmillan, unlike someone like Harold Nicolson, was an intermittent diary keeper. During the First World War he wrote to his mother and these letters are somewhat akin to a diary of his military service. During the Second World War when he was minister resident in Algiers, Greece and Italy between 1943 and 1945, he wrote to his wife and these were published as War Diaries in 1984. From 1950 for six years he filled 22 foolscap notebooks. The 23rd, covering the final stages of the Suez Crisis, was in all probability destroyed. In 1957, he came back to keeping a diary. These diaries begin with an entry dated February 8, 1957 in which Macmillan writes, “We have now settled in No 10 [ Downing Street]. It is very comfortable. I have a good room as a study...The house is rather large, but has great character and charm. It is very ‘liveable’.’’ A quiet opening of a record of a tumultuous premiership. It is also the statement of a confident man who had been looking forward to life in No 10.

Over the next 10 years, Macmillan according to the editor wrote around 5,10,000 words in the foolscap notebooks. The writing of the diaries continued even after Macmillan had stood down from parliament in the general elections of 1964. But the diaries stop after May 20, 1966. It is not difficult to guess the reason. His wife suffered a fatal heart attack the day after and Macmillan did not take up his pen again to write a diary. This is a touching withdrawal since his wife’s affair that began in 1929 had caused him enormous anguish. He hadn’t sued for divorce because he had been advised that a divorce would ruin his political career.

The diary is lacklustre. One illustration of this is that nowhere in the diary does he mention the phrase for which he is most famous, “You’ve never had it so good.’’ The historian, Quentin Skinner, has suggested that when Macmillan was writing the diary he only had the prepared text before him whereas the quip had been delivered off the cuff to put down a heckler. This about sums up the diaries: they are too much of a prepared set-piece.

RUDRANGSHU MUKHERJEE

Published on November 11, 2011

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1111111/jsp/northeast/story_14719637.jsp