Volume 36, Number 7 · April 27, 1989
The Unhappy Winner
By David Cannadine
Harold Macmillan: Vol. I, 1894-1956
by Alistair Horne
Viking, 535 pp., $24.95
Harold Macmillan was prime minister of England from 1957 to 1963, and died in 1986 at the age of ninety-two. But his British contemporaries were never exactly sure who he was. To his critics, he was little more than a second-rate actor, implausibly and cynically posturing in a variety of superficial and contradictory parts—the crofter's grandson, middleclass publisher, ducal son-in-law, vulgar showman, world leader, stag at bay, elder statesman, and poor man's Churchill. Not for nothing was Anthony Sampson's interim biography acutely subtitled 'A Study in Ambiguity.' But to his admirers, he was a rich man's Disraeli, a virtuoso performer, who was brilliantly gifted in the arts of political management and party leadership, who recognized the essential importance of gesture and theatricality in playing (and winning) the great game, and who was a past master at saying one thing, while resolutely and effectively doing something completely different. In appearing to be an actor, he was only pretending to pretend, and the fact that his critics never noticed this merely demonstrated how completely—and how successfully—they had been beguiled and deceived.
Review, 3406 words
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