An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo. Richard Davenport-Hines

action – and survived another half century. He was the only member of the staid Athenæum club to marry a captain of the British women’s ski team. Promoted to the Cabinet by Eden, his support for Eden’s Suez policies was the most anomalous of all the Cabinet, for he was a man (like his fellow Scottish earl, Perth, at the Colonial Office) with staunch independent integrity. Macmillan thought him ‘a fine, earnest man’, and did right to trust him. Similarly, the Earl of Dundee, whom Macmillan selected as Minister without Portfolio in 1958, and as Minister of State at the Foreign Office in 1961, was no duffer, despite his resemblance to Bulldog Drummond, pace a journalist who saw him dealing effectively with Patrice Lumumba during the Congo crisis of 1960: ‘a tall handsome presence with a square jaw, a clipped moustache and greying hair’.²⁵

      There was an assumption that self-made businessmen made more efficient, canny and decisive ministers than the privileged sons of rich men. Some, however, proved as vain, bombastic and calculating as might be expected of men who forsook the boardroom for the public platform. The foremost example was Ernest Marples, who joined Macmillan’s first administration as Postmaster General in 1957 and brought automated letter-sorting and subscriber trunk-dialling to British communications. Two years later Marples reached the Cabinet as Minister of Transport. Just as Belisha beacons commemorated a prewar Minister of Transport, so parking meters were the innovative street furniture that symbolised Marples’s power. The grandson of the Dukes of Devonshire’s head gardener at Chatsworth, and son of an engine fitter, he was educated at a grammar school in Manchester’s suburbs. One of his earliest jobs was as gatekeeper at a football ground in Manchester. He made money as a London property developer converting Victorian houses into flats before starting a construction company called Marples Ridgeway, which specialised in docks, power stations and motorways. He married his secretary, and used prostitutes. His self-confidence was boundless. He imagined himself taking large, sure strides towards a great destiny. His appetite for seeing his name in headlines never slaked. A bicycling and fitness fanatic, he died at the age of seventy. John Boyd-Carpenter, the Minister of Pensions, never saw Macmillan laugh more than at a Cabinet meeting when a name was mooted for a public appointment. ‘Does anyone know him?’ asked the Prime Minister. ‘Yes,’ volunteered Ernie Marples, ‘he once made a proposition to me. I didn’t accept. It wasn’t quite straight, and anyhow there was nothing in it for me.’²⁶

      Macmillan, who had been a railway company director before Labour’s nationalisation in 1947–48, trusted Marples with the bold scheme of transport rationalisation that was intended to prove the modernity of the Conservatives in the 1960s. The ramshackle railway system was crushed by its accumulated debts and operating deficit. The British Transport Commission, which had a mishmash of responsibilities for running railways, docks, canals and London transport, was ill-managed as well as submissive to the National Union of Railwaymen and Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen. Both unions disrupted services with exorbitant pay claims and enforced a regime of restrictive practices: their conservative obstinacy made Bournemouth Tories seem progressive.

      Marples convinced Macmillan to appoint a bracing new chairman of the British Transport Commission named Richard Beeching, an accountant who was technical director of ICI (Beeching’s annual salary of £24,000 aroused the envious carping in 1961 that then characterised Britain). The choice of Beeching proved calamitous. He was not the infallible cost accountant as pictured by Marples, but botched his analysis of railway costs, and proved cocksure yet unimaginative in his thinking. His recommendations to close one-third of the 18,000-mile railway network were published in March 1963, and endorsed in one of the Cabinet’s worst decisions: his proposals were based on false premises, fudged figures and dodgy political expediency; they moreover failed in their purpose of securing the railways on a profitable basis.

      ‘A really remarkable figure,’ Macmillan wrote after a two-hour meeting with Marples in April 1963. ‘I only wish we had more ministers with his imagination and thoroughness.’ However, controversy over the Beeching Axe brought obloquy upon his government, partly because the ministerial presentation was self-advertising, truculent and weak. ‘When Mr Marples presented the Beeching Report,’ noted a future Labour minister, George Thomson, ‘the biggest thing of its kind, we were given to understand, since the Beveridge Report, the operation was intended to show the Conservatives looking forward to the seventies, while the socialists, tied to the railway unions, timorously looked back to the forties. But Mr Marples muffed it monumentally, and suffered a press universally worse than I can remember a minister receiving.’ Macmillan, despite his susceptibility to territorial grandees, was hoodwinked by the bouncy self-promotion of rough diamonds, and the myths of infallibility boomed by self-made men.²⁷

      Derick Heathcoat-Amory’s appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1958 was a better choice by Macmillan than Marples as Minister of Transport in 1959. The assessment of Heathcoat-Amory by Lord Altrincham who, under his later pen name of John Grigg, was one of the canniest political commentators of his generation, had a perfect justness. ‘He is often described as “sound”, an adjective which in this specialised usage connotes a decently concealed intelligence, more than average efficiency, a willingness to take pains (for instance, in not hurting the feelings of moronic colleagues), a belief in good relations between management and the (not so easily) managed, a fine war record and a squirearchical background. There is, indeed, one feature which might make him suspect – he is opposed to the death penalty – but his friends can plead in mitigation that he has been a zealous huntsman. He is the sort of man who not being first-class pretends to be third-class, and so receives a quite disproportionate amount of credit for being top second-class.’²⁸

      What of the England and the parliamentary party of which Macmillan took charge in 1957, where men became Prime Minister by pretending to be old-and-done-for and Chancellor of the Exchequer by concealing their intelligence?

      In the spring of 1957, Macmillan saw a newspaper story about a seventeen-year-old man, Derek Wiscombe, whose home town of Jarrow-on-Tyne had suffered high unemployment since the 1930s. Wiscombe had applied for a licence to carry furniture and building materials with the intention of passing his driving test and buying a lorry to replace his pony and cart. His application was however rejected after objections from local hauliers, and the state-owned haulage company Pickfords. Macmillan, who never lost his sympathetic interest in the north-east, was vexed by this example of tyrannical regulations protecting vested interests from competition. He prompted William Elliott, the newly elected Tory MP for Newcastle-upon-Tyne North, to organise a fund to pay for Wiscombe’s driving lessons and buy him a lorry. With Elliott’s help, Wiscombe successfully re-applied for a licence to carry furniture on a lorry bearing L plates. A local businessman was induced to pass Wiscombe some business for starters. Macmillan closed the file with the single word: ‘Good’. A few months later, the municipal council at Jarrow found that one of its tenants, Norah Tudor, was supplementing her husband’s income by doing embroidery at home. The council ordered her to stop. ‘Mrs Tudor is the wife of a worker who earns a good salary,’ declared the socialist chairman of the local housing committee. ‘It will be no hardship for her to give up her needlework.’ As a Tory backbencher commented, ‘this utterance (which Mr Harold Wilson himself could hardly improve on) conveys the politics of envy in a nutshell’. The persecution of Derek Wiscombe and Norah Tudor both occurred in Jarrow, but the mean, restrictive spirit shown by these cases was a national force.²⁹

      England was a country where the gravy served at main meals made everything taste alike. Dominated by the memory of two world wars, it was more drilled and regimented than at any time in its history, and more strictly regulated. Restaurants and pubs were controlled under onerous rules derived from the Defence of the Realm Act of 1914; audiences stood in respectful silence when the National Anthem was played at the end of every cinema performance; pedestrians still doffed their hats as they passed the Cenotaph memorial to the war dead in Whitehall; family-planning clinics did not dare to give contraceptive advice to the unmarried; every foreigner had to register with their local police station, and report there regularly; businesses needed clearance from the Bank of England for the smallest overseas expenditure; there was a rigid obsession about preserving fixed exchange rates for sterling; the system of Retail Price Maintenance safeguarded shopkeepers from undercutting, and ensured that shoppers could seldom find competitive prices. Though entrepreneur John Bloom was