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

well.¹⁰⁷ Some people regarded Stanley as an empty suit. The perceptive Cuthbert Headlam had dinner with Stanley and Macmillan at the end of their first year in Parliament. Of ‘the two rising hopes of the Conservative Party’ he said, ‘The latter strikes me as much the abler of the two, but of course the former has the greater backing’.¹⁰⁸ As a result it was Stanley who came to be regarded as a future liberal Conservative prime minister. Boothby was quite different. He was very young. Born in 1900, his war service had amounted to nothing more than training with the Scots Guards. There was something wild, even a little dangerous about Boothby. Both Macmillan and Boothby were offensive about the opposition in their maiden speeches. Whereas Cooper and Stanley had got their digs in by using humour, and had been well received, many were offended by Boothby and Macmillan. The difference was that Boothby was offensive with brio and panache. Macmillan tried to savage his opponent by reading him an essay.¹⁰⁹

      Within two years, the eager young men of 1925 had acquired a more enduring sobriquet, the YMCA. It implied that they were keen but priggish, lecturing their elders on the best way to run things. Like all young, talented and ambitious men they aroused their share of animus. Yet they always kept on the right side of the party managers, claiming as their inspiration Baldwin himself. It suited the prime minister to be seen encouraging voices of progressive Conservatism. Part of his political strategy was to reach out to all non-socialists and form a grand union of the centre and the right.¹¹⁰ The YMCA were a useful tool in pursuit of that goal. Macmillan was convinced that ministerial office was just round the corner.

      Like his model, Edward Wood, he intended to make his mark with a short book publicizing the ginger group. His first trial balloon for the book was a letter to The Times