loosened his grip. Although he had occupied the
senior offices of state during the short space of
1951–7 – Housing, Defence, the Foreign Office
and the Exchequer – Macmillan had been the out-
sider among Conservatives in the 1930s, accept-
ing the new economic theories of John Maynard
Keynes and castigating the policies that he blamed
for the unemployment of that decade. Intensely
patriotic, he wished to rebuild Conservatism to
embody the vision of ‘one nation’, the creation
of harmony between the classes. By promoting
social mobility, the Conservatives would loosen
adherence to the Labour cause. The large univer-
sity expansion of the 1960s helped to serve this
end among others. The working people of
Britain were not the enemies to be kept at bay,
in Macmillan’s philosophy, but the ‘sturdy men’
who had defeated the Kaiser’s and Hitler’s armies.
They would respond to a policy of fairness that
gave them a share in growing prosperity. Un-
employment was an evil and not an option of pol-
icy. The majority of his countrymen, Macmillan
believed, would respond to an emphasis on tradi-
tional British values and to a paternalistic aristo-
cratic style of leadership. It was a cleverly packaged
update of Disraeli’s Tory vision.
Macmillan was the first British politician to
master the new television medium. He presented
himself as the disinterested statesman–gentleman
who would lead the country to reform without
tears, the antithesis of the puritan ethic, which
preaches that only what hurts can be truly bene-
ficial. His style of government was conciliatory
rather than confrontational, both at home and
abroad. After the shock of Suez a more careful
alignment of policy to match British resources in
the world had become necessary. Indeed the
Conservatives were at a low ebb when Macmillan
took over. Yet, less than three years later,
Supermac (as a cartoonist christened him) had
restored the party’s morale and increased its share
of the vote in the October 1959 election suffi-
ciently to win an overall majority of 100 seats in
the House of Commons. The Labour Party, it is
true, was not well placed to fight that election, its
rank and file divided between unilateral disarmers
and Gaitskell’s majority in favour of retaining the
bomb, and between those who wished to extend
nationalisation and Gaitskellites who believed that
nationalisation was not only irrelevant but an
electoral handicap. The Liberal vote had more
than doubled, but in the absence of proportional
representation the party was left with exactly the
same number of MPs as before – a mere six.
How had Macmillan brought about the recov-
ery? What had the Conservatives achieved? In
foreign affairs, the deleterious effects of Suez were
overcome and good relations with the US
restored. Macmillan also played the role of world
statesman with relish, attending summits with
Eisenhower in Bermuda and Khrushchev in
Moscow before the abortive Geneva Conference
in 1960. He had the sangfroid to react coolly
to Soviet threats over Berlin and the vision to
press on with independence for former African
colonies. And he was astute enough to recognise
that a world role could place unacceptable
burdens on the British economy and frustrate the
goal of greater prosperity. Britain still kept
700,000 men under arms and maintained con-
scription, devoting a larger share of its gross
national product to defence than did its conti-
nental neighbours. The far-reaching Defence
White Paper of 1957 saw the solution in relying
on a nuclear deterrent, reducing the armed forces
to 400,000 and abandoning conscription in
favour of professional forces. Meanwhile, almost
unnoticed in Britain, the European Economic
Community had been created by the Rome
Treaties of 1957. Britain had rejected the oppor-
tunity to become a founder member on the
ground that it did not wish to weaken its
Commonwealth ties. Macmillan still saw Britain
as playing a world role, not as just another
European nation such as the Federal Republic
of Germany, France or Italy. But rather than be
isolated, Britain formed the European Free Trade
Association (EFTA) with Austria, Denmark,
Norway, Sweden and Switzerland. These nations
undertook to eliminate tariffs between each other,
but they did not adopt a commontariff. This was
one essential difference between them and the
EEC, which levied a common tariff against exter-
nal agricultural imports in order to protect the
less efficient French and German farmers. Britain
remained free to import cheap agricultural544 THE RECOVERY OF WESTERN EUROPE IN THE 1950s AND 1960s