Macmillan: a View from the Foreign Office

Abstract

One of the many pleasures of taking part in the Macmillan Conference was to go back to Alistair Home’s splendid two-volume biography of him who was known affectionately to his staff as Uncle Harold, to refresh memory and sort out fact from accrued fiction. Indeed, one judges a book about someone who, like Harold Macmillan, played a central role in one’s professional life, by whether the author gets right, in fact and judgement, the events of which one has first-hand experience. By this test Home gets a Triple A rating. His accounts - for example of the Cuban missile crisis, of Nassau and Polaris, of de Gaulle’s first veto - strike me as being bang on target. One has confidence that if he is right about things one knows about, he is not likely to be wrong on matters which one doesn’t.