Stop valorising dead centrist Tories

Eden and Macmillan’s old-timey aesthetics don’t redeem their failures

The Queen Mary University of London’s History Department could be described as a bastion of the modern Labour Party centre-left. An academic clique — Robert Saunders, Colm Murphy, and David Klemperer, amongst others — have devoted themselves to the rehabilitation, and indeed valorisation, of various post-war social democratic intellectuals and politicians. Outside of academia, Nick Thomas-Symonds, Labour MP for Torfaen and member of the Shadow Cabinet, has written an entire biography of Harold Wilson, perhaps aptly entitled Harold Wilson: The Winner. Thomas-Symonds, a former academic and barrister, is one of many to draw comparisons between Wilson and Starmer — whether that be in their approach to party management, in their ideological position within the Labour Party, or in the fraught economic situation that they will be inheriting upon their victory at the ballot box. This is not a new intellectual trend, but it is one that, at least to those in the Labour Party, seems more relevant than ever.

Conservative Party centrists, looking over to their left, have not been immune to similar tendencies, longing to contribute some rehabilitations of their own to the historiography. As such, they have attempted to initiate a parallel process to that of their centre-left counterparts, also looking nostalgically back to a lost post-war ‘golden age’, but now from a centrist or centre-right perspective. For instance, Lee David Evans — Ramsden Fellow at the Mile End Institute — has repeatedly plastered Twitter with tedious anecdotes about how great and nice and amusing such post-war Conservative Prime Ministers as Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, and (somehow) Edward Heath were.

We must first note that these Tory centrists demonstrate an apparent inability to understand a basic selection effect. Of course post-war Prime Ministers, even those Prime Ministers we dislike, were more competent than the average person, and indeed the average politician: after all, if you have become Prime Minister, you have successfully convinced the other MPs in your party that you are the best person for the job. This takes a degree of political tact and competence which is, by definition, greater than most other MPs. This is even more the case if you have managed to win an election, which is something that usually requires a lot of skill: Harold Macmillan was a master of spin; Harold Wilson was extremely intelligent, a good electioneer, and an excellent party manager; Jim Callaghan had a special ability to communicate policy to the average voter. Ted Heath…? Well, he could drive a yacht. These were successful and intelligent men — yes, even Ted Heath — by any normal standard.

Yet it is completely different being capable by the standards of an ordinary person and being capable by the standards of a Prime Minister. When you vote in an election, the choice is between the incumbent Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition — not between the incumbent and a random member of the public, or even a random MP. It goes without saying that most major politicians of the post-war era were, by the standards of the ordinary man or woman, competent and charismatic, and followed the policies that they thought were best given the political and other constraints that they worked under. However, that is a minimum standard to be elected. The proper judgement would be to consider be their relative success compared to other politicians in Britain (and comparable countries in Western Europe and North America) that held a similar (or the same) office in the same era. In particular, when judging ‘success’ (as opposed to whether we like someone), we should consider the extent to which they achieved what they set out to do during their time in office.

For leftists and liberal-centrists alike, the prospect of worshiping post-war leaders is entirely compatible with such criteria. From 1945 to 1979, Labour nationalised large swathes of the economy, maintained eye-watering rates of income tax (with peak marginal rates of up to 90%), and set up R NHS. By nearly all metrics, they were more socialist than all other British politicians in government, both before and since. Social liberals, too, can cheer that Britain was brought into the European Economic Community; they can also celebrate the wave of ‘permissive’ reforms: legalising homosexuality and abortion, liberalising divorce, and opening the borders (if only slowly at first) to mass migration.

Yet for those on the Right, it is far more difficult to argue that the post-war Conservative Party was ‘successful’ by any reasonable metric, except perhaps at winning elections. As such, there is little obvious reason for Conservatives to engage in the same process of rehabilitation, let alone valorisation, as their centre-left counterparts. To demonstrate this, we must first briefly explain what early post-war ‘One Nation’ conservatism actually was, the historical context in which it appeared and developed, and how it ultimately failed.

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The making of Macmillan

Before 1914, British politics was dominated by the centrist Liberal Party and the centre-right Conservative Party. Between the end of the First World War and the outbreak of the Second, the Liberal Party gradually disintegrated, and the Liberals were replaced by Labour as the main party of opposition, with the Tories remaining the main party of government. As a general rule, the left-wing of the Liberal Party joined the Labour Party, while the right-wing of the Liberal Party joined the Conservative Party. As such, despite first being elected to parliament as the Conservative MP for Stockton-on-Tees in 1924, Harold Macmillan was, in essence, a right-wing Liberal (despite his frequent jibes against ‘Whigs’). He corresponded (and seemingly mostly agreed) with actual Liberals, such as David Lloyd George and John Maynard Keynes, who advocated for economic planning and a more aggressive programme of public works in order to combat unemployment.

The National Government of 1931 to 1940 — a Conservative-dominated coalition led in turn by Ramsay MacDonald (National Labour, 1931-35), Stanley Baldwin (Conservative, 1935-37), and Neville Chamberlain (Conservative, 1937-40) — was less violently opposed to intervention in the economy than most of its predecessors. It nonetheless remained cold towards the more ambitious schemes of Lloyd George and Keynes. As such, Macmillan spent the 1930s as a backbencher. One unexpected upside to this decade in the political wilderness was that Macmillan had plenty of free time to think and write, and was not beholden to the party line. This allowed Macmillan to do two main things: first, he wrote a rather underwhelming 390-page tome, The Middle Way, which advocated for a modern, centrist Tory Party that could chart a ‘middle way’ between the three evils of Socialism, Fascism, and so-called laissez-faireism; and, second, he joined Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill in opposing appeasement in the late 1930s. Eden was a far more conventional Conservative than Macmillan and, despite today mainly being remembered for the Suez debacle, a foreign policy specialist. Eden was appointed Foreign Secretary in 1935, but resigned in 1938 in opposition to Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement towards Fascist Italy. After Chamberlain himself was replaced as Prime Minister by Churchill in 1940, both Eden and Macmillan were rewarded with government positions.

After the end of the War, the Conservative Party suffered a crushing defeat in the General Election of 1945, losing 189 seats and gifting Clement Attlee’s Labour Party a landslide majority of 145. The ageing Churchill, who remained Leader of the Conservative Party — if from this point in name only — delegated the task of rebuilding the Party and developing a winning programme to Eden. Eden, always primarily concerned with foreign policy, in turn delegated much of the domestic policy work to others: in particular, to Macmillan, who would ‘modernise’ the party by shifting it towards the centre — although much of the actual policy detail was drawn up by younger ‘boffins’ at the Conservative Research Department, the most famous among them being Enoch Powell and Iain Macleod.

This programme was effectively a defensive strategy that sought to claw back as many votes from the Labour Party as possible in order to protect private property and prevent yet further moves towards socialism and state planning. This would be achieved by creating a grand coalition of every possible loser from the post-war socialism of Clement Attlee. As well as expanding the Welfare State, the Attlee Government promoted a doctrinaire system of state planning. Important industries, such as steel, mining, and most housebuilding were nationalised; access to materials, consumer goods, and food was controlled by a system of permits and rationing. This system had support from most workers and the trade unions, as this level of state control helped the Attlee government to guarantee full employment and the provision of welfare services.

The Conservative Party maintained the support of business and the wealthy, but this was not sufficient to win an election. As a way around this, the Conservative strategy was simple, if somewhat unorthodox: if they couldn’t win the votes of enough working men, they could still win over their wives. There is a pattern in recent history writing to shoehorn ‘gender’ as a category of analysis into every aspect of political behaviour. In this case, however, it is actually warranted. In 1940s and 1950s Britain, most women were housewives who spent their time at home managing the household on a shoestring allowance from their husbands. Rationing (which the Labour Party wished to continue well into peacetime) and the continued housing shortage severely impacted their lives. The Conservative Party policy programme was simple: they would continue the policies of full employment and the expansion of the welfare state, but they would use the resources freed up from ending the Labour Party’s nationalisation programme to instead end rationing and improve housing conditions.

This strategy worked. During the 1950s, the Conservatives received a twenty percent greater share of female than male votes. Grassroots organisations such as the British Housewives League helped increase Conservative Party membership to nearly three million by 1953. Combined with continued support from the middle classes this eclectic mass movement was sufficient to reduce Labour’s landslide majority to just 5 in 1950, and then to give the Conservatives a slim majority of 8 in 1951. Socialist planning in Britain had been, at least temporarily, longhoused. Further nationalisations were scrapped, private house building was liberalised, and rationing was finally abolished in 1954.

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Socialism longhoused

Churchill was officially Prime Minister once again, but by 1951 he was 77, and was increasingly unable to govern. Anthony Eden was now the de facto leader. Eden would finally become Leader of the Conservative Party in 1955, and won another election in that year, increasing the Tory majority from 8 to 22. Yet in a cruel irony, Eden — who had for so long been heir apparent to Churchill — was given the ultimate job in politics very soon after he became incapable of performing it: in 1953, a surgeon's knife slipped during a routine operation, wrecking his health and leaving him physically unfit to run a government. However, he was unable to admit this to himself, and so accepted the position of Prime Minister anyway.

Eden’s judgement was impaired by frequent illness and hospitalisations from the very beginning of his term. His previous diplomatic finesse evaporated, culminating in the disastrous decision to occupy the Suez Canal with Israel and France in 1956 without first confirming American support. After the operation was launched, President Eisenhower threatened to call in British war debts, which would immediately bankrupt the country. It remains an open question whether a more resolute man could have called the American bluff. Yet Eden was certainly not that politician: his fragile health immediately broke under the stress, and he fled to Jamaica to recuperate. Harold Macmillan, who had been appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1955, was left in charge to pick up the pieces. He immediately bowed to American pressure, called off the operation, and used the intervening time to manoeuvre his way into the position of Prime Minister after Eden finally resigned in 1957.

Macmillan was highly capable as a politician, both in terms of managing his party and in terms of public relations. Of all the post-war Prime Ministers, only Harold Wilson was his equal in this regard. However, it is clear that many Conservatives who look back fondly upon this time take Macmillan’s masterful spin at face value. Macmillan consciously presented himself to the public and his party as a ‘sensible’ unifier who could bring stability to the realm. To make this point clear to all, he pinned up a piece of paper on the door to his private office. On it was a handwritten quote from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers: ‘Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles every knot’. (Pragmatic compromise! Grown-ups in the room!)

To further emphasise his personal style of government, Macmillan also developed a highly effective public persona. To the public, Macmillan was now marketed as some kind of paternalistic conservative aristocrat. (Macmillan, while Eton-educated and very well-established, was not actually an aristocrat: he was from a famous publishing family.) It was a clever piece of PR, because it implied different things to different groups. To Conservative MPs and the old core of Tory support, he was cast in the mould of a traditional leader who would protect their material interests. Meanwhile, to the average voter — to the lower-middle classes, or to working class housewives — he appeared a ‘natural’ leader, calm and capable, yet also in touch with their real concerns, unlike some Tories of decades past.

Macmillan’s message to the general public chimed with his immediate political priorities. He would quietly sort out the dumpster fire that was British foreign policy — largely by doing whatever the Americans wanted and gradually cutting defence spending as much as circumstances would allow — while putting the political spotlight on the continuance of the Conservative domestic policies of full employment, housebuilding, and the steady expansion of the welfare state. How could he do otherwise? After Suez, the Conservatives were in chaos, their reputation for competence tarnished. With only a small majority, Macmillan’s immediate priority was to keep his government together, maintain the Conservative electoral coalition that had delivered them a workable majority in 1955, and consolidate just in time for the General Election of 1959.

Luckily for Macmillan, there were genuine domestic achievements that could appeal to core Conservatives and marginal voters alike. Britain’s economy was performing tolerably, although it was still growing slower than most of the rest of Europe. Unemployment was extremely low, inflation was still modest, taxation and thus government spending as a proportion of GDP were falling (albeit frustratingly slowly), and living standards were rising quickly. Rationing and wartime ‘controls’ had been abandoned, and housebuilding was proceeding apace.

Macmillan relentlessly focused on this as part of his messaging, famously declaring that people ‘had never had it so good’. ‘Affluence’ helped smooth over the many divides over economic policy within the Conservative Party. On the Right, many MPs wanted to reduce tax and government spending much more rapidly. Many wanted the Government to act more decisively to resolve Britain’s interminable external difficulties through deflation and increased unemployment — anathema to someone like Macmillan. A few mavericks even supported the more radical solution of Britain departing from the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates by floating the pound, as had first been proposed by Treasury Civil Servants in the aborted Operation ROBOT of 1952.

In 1958, Macmillan’s Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, and his two young lieutenants at the Treasury, Enoch Powell and Nigel Birch, resigned in protest of Macmillan’s refusal to cut government spending by anywhere near as much as they had demanded. Yet Macmillan was able to prevent this causing a more serious split in the Party, brushing off these resignations by declaring them to be nothing more than ‘little local difficulties’. Just a couple of years later, both Thorneycroft and Powell would be reintegrated into the Conservative mainstream through appointments as Minister of Aviation and Minister of Health respectively, thus muzzling them and preventing them from doing mischief on the backbenches. ‘Supermac’ indeed.

Promoting rising standards of living meant something good, at least at some time in the future, for everyone. The Right could take it to mean more significant economic reforms — and importantly, much lower taxes — if the Conservatives won a larger majority. Centrists, on the other hand, could take it to mean the continuance of the status quo, with more money available to build houses and expand the Welfare State.

Macmillan’s combination of canny political positioning and diligently-crafted PR worked. It allowed Macmillan to win a substantial majority of 42 at the 1959 General Election, much assisted by a lacklustre Labour campaign that was centred on combating barely-existent unemployment in… the North… and increasing pensions. The Labour Party, having lost three consecutive elections, was in crisis. Macmillan — and the Tories — reigned supreme.

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One Nation’s hollow victory

If those who idolise ‘One Nation’ conservatism stopped in 1959, their position would be far more tenable. After the catastrophic defeat of 1945, the Conservatives had rebuilt their party and successfully mounted a defensive campaign against a genuine socialist threat by forming an unorthodox coalition. If their policies — such as failing to reverse Attlee’s nationalisations (excepting steel) — were underwhelming from a Conservative standpoint, this could be justified by the fact they didn't have a sufficient majority to push through any radical restructuring until 1959. However, lovers of dead centrist Tories do not make this distinction. For them, the personalities and policies of all post-war Conservatives before Thatcher are commendable. This is despite the fact that, after 1959, the record of ‘One Nation’ conservatism was no more than a litany of failures and unfilled promises that ultimately pushed both the party and, eventually, the country as a whole to the brink of catastrophe.

Upon reelection in 1959, Macmillan had to grapple with the severe structural problems of the post-war British economy. Before the Second World War, the main problem for policymakers was unemployment. After the War, however, this seemed to have been solved: unemployment was very low. Unfortunately, a new set of problems had emerged. Economic growth was unimpressive, especially by the standards of Britain’s competitors, such as France, West Germany, Italy, and Japan. In the early 1950s, much of this could be chalked up to ‘catch-up’ growth in these countries, but by the end of the decade, this excuse had become less and less plausible, as these countries had by then not just made up lost ground, but seemed set to overtake Britain. Britain’s external balance remained fragile: imports had a nasty tendency to rise rapidly during a boom, putting the parity of the sterling under pressure; and while export growth was in some ways impressive, it was not sufficient to offset this. This created what became known as ‘stop-go’. The economy repeatedly lurched from mini-boom to mini-bust, as each boom would soon put pressure on the pound, forcing deflation, thus stopping growth in its tracks. Industrial relations were dysfunctional: Britain combined the worst of both worlds, with fragmented yet powerful trade unions, emboldened by ultra-low unemployment rates and many years of industrial appeasement under Churchill and Eden. This led to wages constantly outpacing productivity, with negative consequences for inflation and for the competitiveness of British goods abroad. The question was whether to confront them — with all the chaos that would ensue — or to attempt to integrate into a corporatist system that gave them both rights and responsibilities, rather than merely their traditional ‘immunities’. On top of all this, these difficulties were further exacerbated by the continuation of Attlee’s regional and planning policies, which restricted the building of homes, offices, and factories in the South and the Midlands, as well as the persistence of exceptionally high marginal rates of tax.

The generally negative sentiment about British economic performance only increased as the economy suffered a mild recession between 1960 and 1961, as external pressure on the pound forced two successive bouts of deflation in the aftermath of the pre-election boom. Macmillan had staked both his and the Conservative Party’s reputation on economic competence, so resolving these difficulties was a top priority. He also probably had a sufficient majority to pass some degree of economic liberalisation. Cutting the top rate of income tax (in the event, only very minor concessions on surtax were made), loosening planning restrictions (no progress on this front), and codifying trade union behaviour (no progress here either) may have all been politically in reach. If more was done, it might have revived the economy; these measures would most likely have also been popular with very many Conservative voters, both new and old.

Yet ultimately we do not know, as Macmillan never attempted any of this. Instead, he fell back on Europe and ‘planning’. First, Macmillan successfully coaxed his reluctant cabinet into applying for membership of the European Economic Community (‘The Six’) in 1961, rather than sticking with the European Free Trade Association (‘The Seven’), which lacked a common external tariff. It was hoped that this would stimulate British industry through providing new markets and increasing competition. Second, he attempted to engage in the corporatist ‘planning’ that he had always favoured as a backbench MP in the 1930s. This meant setting up the National Economic Development Council (NEDC), featuring close consultation between representatives of government, industry, and the trade unions, and the creation of an ‘Office’ independent of all three (NEDO). The core idea behind NEDC was, in effect, the confidence trick: if you instil the right psychology into all the relevant economic agents — if you really make them believe that the economy would grow faster, so long as everyone cooperated as they promised — then, lo and behold, the economy actually would grow faster. And unlike the sort of ‘planning’ favoured by the Labour Party there was to be no ‘compulsion’ — no handlebars! Businesses would not be punished for refusing to act in accordance with the ‘plan’. Additionally, it was hoped that frank discussion at NEDC would help moderate wage demands. If this all sounded too good to be true, it’s probably because it really was too good to be true.

All this, perhaps unsurprisingly, came to naught. Internally, NEDC did nothing to increase growth rates; nor did it help restrain wage demands from the mighty trade unions, who had been given a few small carrots, but no sticks. As a last-ditch effort, Macmillan (and his successor Alec Douglas-Home) stoked up the economy in the lead up to the election, much as the Conservatives had previously done in 1955 and 1959, with cuts to tax and interest rates, as well as a grab-bag of ‘regional policy’ goodies as part of his misleadingly named ‘Modernisation of Britain’ programme. This was unsustainable: demand yet again outstripped supply in the boom that ensued, leading to inflation and a surge of imports over exports. It would fall to Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour Government to pick up the pieces after their victory over the Conservatives in October 1964. Externally, the French President Charles de Gaulle finally vetoed British entry into the European Economic Community in 1963, leaving Britain’s geopolitical future uncertain.

With both his internal and external policies floundering, Macmillan unexpectedly made the decision to sack his Chancellor, the unfortunate Selwyn Lloyd, and along with him one-third of his Cabinet in July 1962. Despite the mass sackings — in what would become known as the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ — he made the error of retaining the Secretary of State for War (the equivalent of the Defence Secretary), John Profumo. Profumo was having an affair with Christine Keeler; Keeler was also the lover of, among others, a KGB agent. When the scandal finally broke in early 1963, it destroyed what was left of Macmillan’s reputation. With all his plans in tatters, his government undermined, and his health in decline (he was now a septuagenarian), he used the excuse of a hospital visit to resign on health grounds in October 1963.

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The failure of One Nation

By any standards, Macmillan was a highly capable politician. After all, he became Prime Minister and increased his majority at a General Election. Yet by Prime Ministerial standards — which is what we should be judging him by — Macmillan was undeniably mediocre. Yes, he held his government together and was unusually good at ‘comms’, but the hard truth is that almost all of his much-vaunted ‘centrist’ domestic policy ultimately failed.

So why does a fairly unexceptional Prime Minister inspire such a devoted following? Some of it is simply taking Macmillan’s public image and statements — the product of clever public relations — at face value. There may also be some degree of nostalgia. Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s was still a fairly united, homogeneous, and ‘high trust’ society. The economy, although in relative decline, still performed well enough to deliver healthy wage growth for all and full employment.

Yet perhaps the most obvious reason for this is the weakness of all other centrist Conservative politicians in this period. Macmillan may have been a deeply average Prime Minister by any normal standards, but of all the post-war Tory Prime Ministers, he was still the most successful — the very much not ‘centrist’ Margaret Thatcher excepted. Before Thatcher, we have Churchill, who was borderline senile by 1951; Anthony Eden, who was ruined by the Suez debacle; Alec Douglas-Home, whose time in office had barely started by the time he was voted out; and Edward Heath, who lost three out of four elections, abandoned his manifesto pledges, destroyed the economy, and was constantly defeated and humiliated by the trade unions. After Thatcher, we have John Major and David Cameron: both struggled to control the Party, achieved embarrassingly little, and ended their stint as Prime Minister with a deeply humiliating defeat, the 1997 General Election and the Brexit Referendum respectively. And more recently, centrist or not, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak are hardly going to be competitive with Thatcher either. As such, whether Tory centrists like it or not, there is no real competition: Thatcher was by far the best Conservative Prime Minister since the Second World War.

Ironically, Macmillan’s triumph in 1959 is arguably the only time in post-war British history in which the Conservative Party have won a substantial majority on an explicitly centrist policy platform. Macmillan in effect went on to deliver a set of policies that, if adjusted somewhat in their detail from decade to decade, have in their fundamental principles remained typical of centrist Conservatives in Britain to this very day: eschewing root-and-branch reform, Macmillan instead promoted European integration, consultation with major ‘stakeholders’ and ‘experts’, the expansion of the Welfare State, and the general maintenance of the status quo. Sound familiar? Yet even by the end of Macmillan’s time in office, this mode of government had proven to be wholly ineffective in resolving any serious issues that were affecting Britain. Nothing over the past sixty years has given us any evidence to the contrary.