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

Gainsborough folk as a little yokelish. Neither candidate had much knowledge of local conditions. ‘It is really comic,’ Crookshank wrote soon after his election, ‘when you come to think of it that I represent an agricultural area…I shall never become an agricultural expert: I don’t want to!’⁸⁴ He was lucky in as much as he did not have to. Although he had to face a powerful local farming lobby which was often dissatisfied with the Conservatives, the combination of his support for protectionism and strong constituency work enabled him to convince his constituents that he was doing his best for them.⁸⁵ The most important gains that won the Conservatives the 1924 election, however, had been in industrial areas. These seats had once more become winnable because Baldwin abandoned protection in the wake of the 1923 defeat. Early declarations in the north had foretold the overall result: Salford, Manchester, Wakefield and then Macmillan’s Stockton, ‘a very fine performance’,⁸⁶ were the first seats to be announced, all swinging to the Conservatives.⁸⁷ The volatility of these seats was bound to make their MPs activists.

      Both Macmillan and Crookshank knew that any institution had rules for getting on in life. As at school and university, there would always be competition from similarly equipped rivals. ‘Four recent Foreign Office people all got in,’ Crookshank noted, ‘Bob Hudson, Duff Cooper, John Loder and I – I am also one of the twelve Magdalen men and one of the twelve Old Grenadiers!’⁸⁸ The trick was to find a good approach and stick to it. Both arrived at Westminster with well-thought-out strategies for advancement. Both had every chance of success.

      Crookshank’s plan was fairly conventional. He would establish himself as a noted speaker and expert. His impact would be such that the front bench would take notice and promotion would follow. As someone inspired by Smuts’s rhetoric, it was natural that he should be drawn towards foreign affairs. Given his family background and his own more recent diplomatic experience, he believed that he was splendidly equipped to make a big impression. He felt he would be marching to the same tune as the party hierarchy. ‘I have every confidence in Baldwin,’ he told a friend, ‘and I’m sure he is out for a big Imperial policy which is what we want.’⁸⁹ Even international events seemed to be moving in his favour. On 19 November 1924 Sir Lee Stack, the sirdar, or governor, of the Sudan had been murdered by an Egyptian nationalist in Cairo. As the new House of Commons assembled, the political world was abuzz with a new crisis in Anglo-Egyptian relations. Crookshank planned to use the opportunity of the debate on the address to make his maiden speech, creating what he hoped would be maximum exposure. Unfortunately for him, another Etonian, Grenadier diplomat had exactly the same idea. As Crookshank was working on his speech, Duff Cooper was at Hatfield working on a similar speech with the help of his friend Bobbety Cranborne.⁹⁰

      Three years senior to the quartet, Cooper had established himself in London before the outbreak of the war. He had caused a stir by obtaining an appointment to the Foreign Office: the son of a successful surgeon, Cooper was one of the first non-aristocrats to be recruited to the administrative grade. He had ostentatiously not volunteered for the army but had been conscripted into the Guards and won a DSO towards the end of the war. Cooper’s greatest coup, however, was to marry Diana Manners, daughter of the Duke of Rutland and reputedly the most beautiful woman in England. The Rutland connection further enhanced Cooper’s standing. The Rutlands’ London home was next door to that of the Salisburys, for instance, and the two families were close. Cooper assiduously worked his connections – the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Winston Churchill, the whips, the Speaker, the press lord Max Beaverbrook – to make sure he was called.⁹¹ His hard work was not in vain. Crookshank and other new MPs had to watch, consumed with jealousy, as Cooper was put on at a ‘wonderfully fortunate moment’.

      He rose at seven o’clock in the evening. ‘Ministers and ex-Ministers hadn’t left the House – Lloyd George was there throughout and so was Baldwin.’ Austen Chamberlain came in and was heard to say to Baldwin, ‘I hear he’s very good.’ Cooper began by twitting the recently defeated government about the Zinoviev letter, a document published by the Daily Mail which purported to show that the Soviet Union was trying to stir up revolution in Britain, which many Labour MPs believed had lost them the election. It did not matter whether or not the letter was a forgery, Cooper claimed, the Labour party and the electorate knew ‘that Bolshevist propaganda was taking place in this country’. Moving on to the Egyptian situation, he mocked any suggestion that the League of Nations should become involved. ‘When,’ he asked, ‘you have appointed this commission of broad-minded, broad-browed, learned Scandinavian professors, what are you going to do?’ He lauded British rule to the skies. ‘We restored an independence which Egypt had not enjoyed since some time before Alexander the Great.’ He excoriated the idol of the Egyptian nationalists, Sa’ad Zaghloul, for having ‘indirectly inspired the hand that held the revolver and threw the bomb’.⁹²

      The speech was a tour de force, as even his rivals had to admit. Crookshank could not contain his envy. ‘Duff Cooper made a very good speech for his maiden effort on Egypt. Subject matter good and a fair delivery, though rather too like a saying lesson at school. It was frightfully advertised – he lives (like or because of his wife) in a press atmosphere.’⁹³ ‘Duff Cooper,’ noted Cuthbert Headlam, Lyttelton’s fellow ADC in 1915, himself a new Tory MP in 1924, ‘is now a marked man.’⁹⁴ Headlam was quite right. One well-timed and well-delivered speech could make a political career. The plaudits poured in on Cooper. ‘I had,’ he wrote to his wife the next day, ‘a letter of congratulation from the Speaker which I gather is a rather unusual honour – and also one from Winston – all the evening people whom I didn’t know were coming up to me and congratulating me. In other words, baby, it was a triumph.’⁹⁵

      The lead Cooper established over his contemporaries that night lasted for the rest of the decade. In 1929 William Bridgeman, a senior member of Baldwin’s Cabinet who had been much concerned with party management, noted that after Cooper ‘there did not seem to me anyone so markedly brilliant as to deserve immediate promotion from the back benches’.⁹⁶ Although Crookshank subsequently pursued his interest in eastern affairs, having missed his opportunity in December, it was to little effect. His first parliamentary question two months later on the subject of the ecumenical patriarch was hardly likely to set the heather on fire. His maiden speech was given not in the early evening of a great debate, as was Cooper’s, but late at night to a thin house. It was not a succès d’estime. It did cover foreign policy, but was chiefly noted for the dictum that, ‘The conduct of foreign affairs must be in the hands of the few,’ which, stated in such an unvarnished fashion, led to unflattering comparisons with Jim Salisbury.⁹⁷ Crookshank, who had come into politics knowledgeable about and fascinated by imperial affairs, was never able to take an opportunity to become involved in them.

      Crookshank was nevertheless an able and quick-witted parliamentary speaker, in contrast to Macmillan, who tended to the ponderous. But this only seemed to gain him a reputation for idiosyncrasy, one of the last attributes desirable in a ministerial careerist. He was not helped by two aspects of his physical appearance. One he could not help. Early hair loss revealed a large cranium. He looked like nothing other than the spitting image of William Shakespeare. No newspaper seemed able to mention his name without alluding to this resemblance. His dress, on the other hand, was entirely his own choice. Until the outbreak of the Second World War he insisted on wearing a shiny topper to the House. He looked like a shorter version of Sir Austen Chamberlain – which was probably worse than looking like the Bard. No newspaper seemed able to mention his name