Harold Macmillan Quotes (1894-1986)

“First of all the Georgian Silver goes, and then all that nice furniture that used to be in the salon. Then the Canalettos go.”

“Everything would get better and better. This was the world I was born in. . . . Suddenly, unexpectedly, one morning in 1914 the whole thing came to an end.”

“We do not intend to part from the Americans and we do not intend to be satellites. I am sure they do not want us to be so. The stronger we are, the better partners we shall be; and I feel certain that as the months pass we shall draw continually closer together with mutual confidence and respect.”

“A Foreign Secretary—and this applies also to a prospective Foreign Secretary—is always faced with this cruel dilemma. Nothing he can say can do very much good, and almost anything he may say may do a great deal of harm. Anything he says that is not obvious is dangerous; whatever is not trite is risky. He is forever poised between the cliché and the indiscretion.”

“Baldwin...was undoubtedly looked up to with something like affection by Members in every part of the House. The young and progressive wing of his party had a special regard for him. His speeches, particularly on industrial problems, struck just the note which we thought appropriate and illuminating. The fact that the Right wing and especially the so-called "Industrials" had little love for him, confirmed our feelings... In these early days, I knew him only as the man who had led us to a great electoral victory and who had made it possible, through his reputation for decency and fair-mindedness, to win the support of working men and women throughout the country.”

“[T]he British people found it difficult, when they first heard of him, to take Hitler too seriously, with his Charlie Chaplin moustache and his everlasting raincoat. Naturally, nobody had bothered to read Mein Kampf. Nor could anybody see below the apparent insignificance of his appearance the deep, cunning, malignant brain. Here was concealed a combination of deceit and wickedness under a certain guise of plausibility, which can only now be fully grasped, when all the documents have been published and the whole evil story fully displayed to the world.”

“Eden's appointment as Foreign Secretary in place of Hoare was well received, especially by the younger Members of the party. We had more confidence in him than in any other member of the Government.”

“What Baldwin failed to understand was the genius of the greatest war leader that Britain had known since Chatham, only destined to be equalled and surpassed by Churchill. With Lloyd George's departure, a certain dynamic energy disappeared from Whitehall, which never returned until Churchill took control.”

“Edward Halifax was a man of extraordinary charm, strong religious convictions, and long experience of public affairs... [N]either Halifax nor Chamberlain had any real experience or knowledge of foreign affairs. If Chamberlain approached them from a somewhat provincial point of view and believed almost to the end in the possibility of a "business deal" with Hitler and Ribbentrop, Halifax, as a great gentleman and aristocrat, found it quite impossible to understand the minds of such men. He could hardly bring himself to accept that statesmen who were in charge of a great country could be so absolutely devoid of any sense of truth or honour.”

“Chamberlain was not a favourite of the House, and he never obtained that attention from the Opposition which it is necessary for a leading Minister to secure. This was a defect partly of manner and partly of feeling. He had a certain intellectual contempt for people whose views he thought ridiculous; and most of the Labour Party he put into that category. But he was not able to conceal this, and his tone revealed a degree of sarcasm and even rudeness towards his opponents, which is contrary to the true House of Commons tradition, at least at the top. Hard blows can be taken and given in our Parliamentary system. They are not long remembered. But superciliousness and arrogance are much more wounding. Nevertheless, he was a commanding personality. His speeches were admirably prepared and argued. If his voice was rasping and often weak, his Parliamentary style was good. He marshalled facts and statistics with ease. His slim figure, conventionally dressed (he usually wore a tail coat and stiff wing-collar), his well-groomed appearance, his corvine physiognomy, his perfect self-control: all these made him an outstanding Parliamentarian. I can still see him standing at the box, erect and confident. But he was respected and feared, rather than loved, except by the few who were his intimates and knew the kindliness that lay behind his bleak exterior.”

“Macmillan was himself very much of the small 'l' liberal wing of the Conservative party, a loyal creature of the so-called "post-war consensus", an appeaser by deepest instinct, especially in matters of industrial conflict. His political speciality as Prime Minister (and one emulated by his Labour successor, Harold Wilson) would be to dose the populace with a comforting mixture of warm opium and treacle rather than dunk them in a cold but invigorating bath. Safe in his hands, therefore, would be the "managed economy", cosily complete with exchange controls and Exchequer-inflated, union-empowering "full employment". Safe too would be the welfare state, though ever more greedy in its demands on the taxpayer, ever more corrupting in its encouragement of dependency. In 1957, after all, a general election was in the offing, and Macmillan was the last man at such a time to snatch the warm teat of state maternalism out of a sucking voter's mouth.”

“I have listened to Harold Macmillan in the House of Commons many times and, however much I may have disagreed, I could never deny that throughout his life he has been consistent in his detestation of unemployment and in his belief that government has a major role to play in solving this human problem.”

“During the 1980s the most effective opposition to the principle of privatisation in fact came not from the Labour party, whose defence of the public sector seemed merely a reflex function of its backward-looking dependence on the trade unions, but from her [Margaret Thatcher's] own side. A single phrase in a characteristically nostalgic speech by Harold Macmillan did more damage to the idea of privatisation than all the outraged anathemas of Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley. Speaking to the Tory Reform Group at the Carlton Club in November 1985, the former Prime Minister was said to have likened privatisation to a once-wealthy family fallen on hard times "selling the family silver". In fact, as is so often the case with famous phrases, Macmillan never used the words reported. What he actually said was: "First the Georgian silver goes. And then all that nice furniture that used to be in the saloon. Then the Canalettos go..." Despite the remoteness from most voters' experience of the aristocratic world he conjured up, Macmillan's words touched a cord. Quite ordinary families have some inherited "family silver", little used but which they do not like to sell. The image of minsters like a lot of dodgy house-strippers, knocking down the nation's heirlooms at a cost well below their true worth subtly undermined Mrs Thatcher's carefully created reputation for thrifty housekeeping. In vain the Government's supporters retorted that the industries being sold off were not assets at all, but liabilities which the Treasury was well rid of.”

“The two greatest men of our time – you and Jack. How marvellous you were with him...he always kept in his office a picture of you.”

“This divide between the American and British attitudes to diplomacy was not absolute, of course. Diplomats on both sides were skeptical about letting their leaders loose at the summit, and not all Americans believed that dialogue with the Soviets was pointless. But Republican exploitation of the Cold War and of the Yalta myths made it particularly difficult for U.S. policymakers to show much flexibility in the 1950s, whatever their inclinations. Consequently the initiative for summitry tended to come from Europe. On the Western side in the late 1950s it was Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, who made the run for a summit— rather surprisingly, it might seem, considering his past. In 1938 he had been one of the few Tory opponents of Munich. He felt Yalta had been “a failure and a disaster” because “in an atmosphere of fervid rush and hurry, vast decisions were reached in a few crowded days.” And he noted in his diary in February 1957, weeks after taking office: “I am said to have lost touch with public opinion in England because I have not already set out for Moscow to see Khrushchev. All this is pure Chamberlainism. It is raining umbrellas.” But, as Churchill once observed, “how much more attractive a top-level meeting seems when one has reached the top!” Once into his stride as premier, Macmillan saw the political benefits of summitry and in February 1959 he contrived a personal visit to Moscow. Politically the trip was a great success, helping Macmillan win an election by a landslide later that year. But Britain, like France, was no longer a serious presence at the top table. The real momentum for a summit in the late 1950s came not from Western capitals but from the Kremlin.”

“I know the PM personally (he has been my publisher for twenty years) and think that I know his character. I know him as a gay, cavalier figure, ready for battle, fond of life and an occasional skirmish, and, above all, a rebel: a rebel against the Establishment. He was a rebel in the Tory party in the 1930s, and, in a sense, he is a rebel still. In this sense he is very like Winston Churchill, whom he greatly admires. Throughout his career, as throughout Winston's, the official Tory party has been against him, or at least (even when, ultimately, accepting him as its leader) has distrusted him. This is one reason why I admire him. He is in the great tradition of Disraeli and Winston as opposed to that other tradition of Bonar Law and Baldwin – men who, by their mediocrity, really represented instead of commanding the dull, impersonal, conventional, respectable forces of the Establishment.”

“The Dudley Committee's space standards began to be eroded in 1951, and were soon to be abandoned altogether by Harold Macmillan, Minister of Housing and Local Government in the new Conservative government. His task was to achieve the target of 300,000 dwellings per year, which was accomplished in 1953. It was in part attained by relaxing building licensing in the private sector and also by substantial increase in the public supply, to over 229,000 completions in that year. A drastic reduction in dwelling size in Macmillan's "people's house" contributed to the achievement: in 1953 the average five-person council house was over 110 sq ft smaller than in 1951, a reduction in floor area of 11 per cent.”