The Guardsmen: Harold Macmillan, Three Friends and the World they Made. Simon Ball

      was always busy and exciting. ‘All the world is here,’ wrote the editor of The Times. ‘It’s like a gigantic cinema-show of eminent persons.’ ‘A vast caravanserai,’ thought Lord Milner, ‘not uncomfortable, but much too full of all and sundry, too much of a “circus” for my taste.’²¹ For all the people that there were milling around, very few seemed to be doing any useful work.²² Betty Cranborne joined her husband. Bobbety’s sister was already there with her husband, Eddie Hartington, who was working for Lord Derby, the British ambassador in Paris. Paris may have been a jamboree, but Cranborne saw some serious work and some serious high politics. His uncle was at the pinnacle of his influence. ‘President Wilson says,’ recorded James Headlam-Morley in January 1919, ‘that Lord Robert Cecil is the greatest man in Europe – the greatest man he has ever met.’²³ Indeed on the very evening that Jim and Robert Cecil agreed that Cranborne should come out to Paris, Lloyd George was telling his dinner companions that Cecil was one of his most formidable rivals.²⁴

      When Cranborne arrived in Paris the conference was entering its second phase.²⁵ Most of the work on the creation of the League of Nations, which made Cecil’s name as its architect, was finished. Considering his main work done the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, had sailed for America. The fact that his and Cecil’s handiwork would be rejected by the US Congress was still not apparent to those left behind in Paris.²⁶ The great issue to them was whether the Allies should impose a ‘Carthaginian peace’ on Germany. As chairman of the Supreme Economic Council, Cecil was immediately swept up into the bitter arguments about whether to feed Germany. With the threat of revolution in Germany and actual revolution in Hungary the situation seemed bleak.²⁷ Unlike many of his colleagues in 1919, Cecil saw that it was Britain’s relationship with the United States rather than its relationship to its European allies that was the key factor.²⁸ Lord Robert believed that if the Americans were to be involved in an overall settlement, the Europeans had to be lenient to the Germans. In the run-up to the crucial meetings of the British Empire delegation at the end of May and the beginning of June 1919, Cecil tried hard to persuade Lloyd George to follow the path of moderation. The French were deeply suspicious of his influence. Clemenceau accused Lloyd George of being beguiled by Cecil ‘to open his arms to the Germans’.²⁹

      Although Cranborne’s position was in the ante-rooms of the great rather than in the conference hall, Lord Robert’s method of proceeding gave him a particularly close acquaintance with events since Cecil chose to act in those ante-rooms rather than in council. In his efforts to convince Lloyd George to stand up to the French, Cecil relied on the impact of carefully drafted and reasoned written argument. On a range of issues, whether territorial, such as the Saarland or Poland, or financial, above all reparations, he contended that the proposed settlement was ‘out of harmony with the spirit, if not the letter, of the professed war aims’. The terms were not ‘suitable for a lasting pacification of Europe’ and in the inter-allied negotiations that had produced them ‘our moral prestige had greatly suffered’. He even went so far as to point to the ‘moral bankruptcy of the Entente’.³⁰ Cecil was cogent and persuasive, but having made his point he chose not press the issue in public.³¹ ‘You do no good,’ he noted, ‘by jogging a man’s elbow. If you can’t manage a thing in the way you think right, it is better to leave someone else to do it altogether rather than, by making pushes for this or that change, reduce the whole scheme to incoherence, without curing its injustice.’³² It was an early lesson in the possibilities and limitations of indirect influence for Cranborne.

      Cecil himself soon came to regret the fact that he had not jogged Lloyd George’s arm more forcefully. Before he left Paris, Cecil had told a meeting that, ‘There is not a single person in this room who is not disappointed with the terms we have drafted…Our disappointment is an excellent symptom; let us perpetuate it.’ Six months later when he had read John Maynard Keynes’s indictment of Versailles, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Cecil no longer thought disappointment an excellent symptom: ‘I am quite clear that we shall have to begin a campaign for the revision of the Treaty as soon as possible,’ he announced. It was Lord Robert’s emergence as a crusader that attracted young men to the Cecil banner.³³ His mixture of ‘the crusading instinct strongly developed’ with ‘an amiable touch of vanity’ appealed to those repelled by Lloyd George’s perceived cynicism. As Macmillan commented in a letter congratulating Cranborne on his role in Paris, ‘I suppose our nasty little Prime Minister is not really popular any more, except with the International Jew.’ Cecil’s League of Nations campaign gave Cranborne the opportunity to cut his teeth on political oratory. As someone who knew the inside story of the Peace Conference as the nephew and confidant of its hero he was in considerable demand as a speaker. Few seemed to mind that he spoke with a pronounced lisp that caused him to pronounce his ‘r’ as ‘w’. Lord Robert was encouraging. He told his friends that his nephew had become a ‘very good speaker’ through all his experience with the League of Nations Union.³⁴ In truth Cranborne was not particularly attracted to Lord Robert’s new revivalist brand of politics. Although it was politic to be associated with his uncle’s liberal conservatism in public, in private he had more sympathy with his father’s die-hard version. The 1919 League of Nations campaign was, however, the start of his apprenticeship.³⁵ Most important was the fact that on his return from Paris not only his uncle but his father began to take him into their political counsels.³⁶

      If Cranborne witnessed the first act of the post-war peace settlement at close quarters, then Crookshank saw its final act from an even closer and much more uncomfortable vantage. He had some regrets about his decision to join the Foreign Office and still hankered after the Guards. He was on first-name terms with the Guards generals who had been company commanders in 1915. The Foreign Office seemed in contrast rigidly hierarchical. Its dominant figure, the foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, was capable of great charm and kindness. An old friend of Alfred Lyttelton, he treated Oliver ‘like a nephew, almost like a son’. Junior clerks such as Crookshank, however, encountered him only at the risk of fierce rebuke.³⁷ Nevertheless Crookshank found that the Foreign Office did have some of the same appeal as the Guards, such as an insistence on the ‘proper’ way of doing things, rituals that clearly marked off insiders from outsiders. If the work was tedious, there was at least the prospect of better things to come. Before the war the Foreign Office and the Diplomatic Service had been different entities – men who joined the former spent most of their careers in London, those who entered the latter served mainly in embassies overseas. In the year Crookshank joined, the two services were merged and the more modern system of rotation was introduced: a new group of generalists, of whom he was one, would be expected to split their time between Whitehall and the embassies. Thus, in 1921, Crookshank was posted to the British High Commission in Constantinople. It was a plum appointment.

      Not only was Constantinople one of the great embassies of the ‘old diplomacy’, but when Crookshank arrived it was overseeing one of the most important tests of the new world order. As a result of his experiences in 1917 and 1918, Crookshank himself did not think much of the Greek contribution to Allied victory in the Great War. ‘In ancient times the Greeks at Thermopylae