Macmillan seemed, in his very person to embody the national decay he supposed himself to be
confuting. He exuded a flavour of mothballs. His decomposing visage and somehow seedy attire
conveyed the impression of an ageing and eccentric clergyman who had induced to play the part of a Prime minister in dramatised version of a snow novel put on by a village amateur dramatic
society.
We like to persuade ourselves that our leaders betray the trust imposed in them and distort the
aspirations of those who elect them. Actually, the represent us all too exactly. The melancholy
tale of our Prime ministers from Lloyd George and Baldwin, through Ramsay McDonald and
Neville Chamberlain, to Atlee, Anthony Eden and Harold Wilson, provides a perfect image of our fate. No one is miscast. Each left the country poorer and weaker both spiritually and materially
than when he took over, giving an extra impetus to the Gadarene rush already under way.
Churchill may be separated from the others in that he was confronted in 1940 with an
evidently desperate situation to meet which he invoked desperate remedies. Yet it may be doubted whether the overblown rhetoric he feed the English, in the written and the spoken word was in its ultimate consequences, appreciably different from Macdonald’s exuberant incoherence or Eden’s relentless banalities.
Macmillan in any case provided a symbolism, which was perfectly appropriate. The crafter and the ducal connection, that antique rig with its faint flavour of burlesque; grouse-moor spats and
evenings wreathed in cigar smoke and rich with port; those meandering disquisition, Trollopian,
historical, floating loose, as it were, upon some aimless and inexhaustible tide - who could more
fittingly direct ones affairs in the mid-twentieth century?
Never can I forget him in Kiev during his visit to the U.S.S.R and Mr. Kruschev. He was dressed
in a tweed ensemble suitable for rural occasions, worn, I should suppose at many a conservative
garden fete. His speech, delivered with old style elegance, referred to how in the eleventh century
a Ukrainian princess married into the English royal house. Might not this union he went on be
regarded as a happy augury for future relations between the two countries whose history and
traditions had so much in common?
The crowd, as is usual on such occasions in the U.S.S.R consisted largely of government officials,
with a top dressing of plainclothes policemen solidly built, grey faced men in issue suitings,
containing ample room for a slung gun and with wide end trouser-ends. I studied their granite
expressions as the Prime ministers oratorical flow washed over them. In just one or two of their faces I thought I detected a faint trace of wonderment; a tiny flicker of an eyelid, a minute fold of incredulity round the mouth. The others remained inscrutable, their pleasure in their former princesses London nuptials well under control.
As Macmillan walked away with little Selwyn Lloyd, the foreign secretary, trotting along behind
him, I realised that those two had walked the world before; in the parched plains of Spain, the one
mounted on the lean mare Rosinante, and the other on the donkey, looking for wrongs to redress
and maidens in distress to champion. Unmistakably, they were Don Quixote, the knight of the woeful countenance, and Sancho Panza,
his Squire.