Macmillan was unperturbed when, two months into his premiership, in March 1957, Lord Salisbury resigned from the Cabinet. Much nonsense was written about Macmillan’s relationship with Salisbury (they had both married Cavendish women), and the fracturing of the family circle. In truth Betty Salisbury, who was a nettlesome character, had shown longstanding (and reciprocated) animosity towards Dorothy Macmillan over the Boothby affair. The Conservative Party was not fazed by the rupture with Salisbury. Although constituency associations often had a local nobleman as honorary president, they were run by solicitors, prosperous shopkeepers, men with small businesses and their wives. For these roturiers, the Cecils were not a popular bodyguard to have gathered around the seat of power. Two months after the spluttering squib of Salisbury’s secession, Macmillan wrote to John Wyndham asking him to join his private office at Downing Street. ‘I did not really think my administration could last more than a few weeks; but we now seem to have got over quite a number of jumps in this Grand National course, and having just managed to pull the old mare through the brook and somehow got to the other side, with the same jockey up, and the Cecil colours fallen, I am plucking up my courage.’30
The Prime Minister had a salary of £10,000 a year (with £4,000 tax free) but, as there was no permanent domestic staff at Downing Street, Macmillan had to pay five household servants. Wyndham found him calm and considerate with his office staff. Macmillan kept a neat desk, never mislaid papers and had a tremendous power of work. His tastes were frugal. For breakfast he took tea and toast, sometimes with a boiled egg. He might have a gin and tonic or sherry before luncheon, but seldom drank alcohol during the meal. Cold roast beef was his favourite lunchtime dish. Before dinner he would have a glass or two of whisky, and wine at table. When possible on Fridays, before going to Birch Grove or Chequers for the weekend, he enjoyed a schoolroom high tea served at Downing Street in preference to dinner. He liked port, and champagne with agreeable companions. During Lent he forsook alcohol.
The Cabinet Room and secretaries’ offices, on the ground floor of 10 Downing Street, were reached by a red-carpeted corridor lined with photographs of defunct Cabinets and busts of bygone premiers. The ambience resembled a Pall Mall club with a historic past, but uneasy finances. Outside the Cabinet Room there was a small lobby with a round table. There, during Cabinet meetings, ministers who were not in the Cabinet would await a summons when the subject under their purview was reached on the agenda. It was, said one of them, ‘bleaker than a dentist’s waiting room’. When a minister was ushered in, he had to scramble to find an empty chair and hurriedly open his papers; usually he found that the Cabinet had started discussing his subject; indeed, from the glazed eyes as he began his remarks, he realised that somebody else had already said them.31
Kenneth Rose likened the Cabinet Room to ‘the dining room in a well-to-do boarding house in the neighbourhood of Russell Square’. Macmillan, though, thought like a clubman, not a boarding-house keeper. ‘The RAC or Boodle’s?’ he asked when, during the Cypriot settlement of 1959, the Cabinet had to decide whether Cyprus should receive full Commonwealth status after independence. ‘There was an element of the dining club about his conduct of Cabinets,’ Lord Hailsham reminisced. ‘There would be quotations from Homer, there would be vague historical analogies; the trade union leaders would be described as medieval barons in the period of the War of the Roses. And some of them would be relevant and some of them would be mildly misleading. But they would all be very amusing and detached.’ Ministers learnt ‘to watch what he was doing, as well as what he was saying’.32
‘For him Europe is the super-continent and Great Britain the super-country,’ wrote a recent Conservative parliamentary candidate, Lord Altrincham, of Macmillan in 1957. ‘In this he resembles Sir Winston Churchill, whom indeed he is clearly much too anxious to resemble. Here, perhaps, is the root cause of his psychological unbalance. He is a pawky Scottish businessman trying to convince himself and others that he is an English aristocrat of the old school.’ Although Macmillan was proud of his Scottish crofter ancestry, he projected a patrician English persona. ‘Like Sir Winston at the Other Club, Mr Macmillan holds forth in the grand manner at Pratt’s – only with this vital difference, that neither the manner nor the setting is his own. As a practical man he is genuine and acceptable; as an imitation grandee he is nauseating.’ Yet it was this bogus act – this game of playing the unregenerate grandee – which recommended Macmillan to backbenchers and ministers as they rallied to face the 1959 general election. He may not have been consistently militant during the Suez affair, but he had the air of militancy. Surveying Macmillan’s postwar record of Lloyd George-like opportunism, Altrincham predicted that England would soon resemble France, ‘where it is accepted that politicians have a code of their own, and most people have an instinctive repugnance to the idea of entering politics’. The appearance of the Prime Minister’s wife – the duke’s daughter in tweeds and sensible shoes – was part of his deceptive facade, as Altrincham wrote in a profile which uniquely hinted at the Macmillans’ domestic irregularities. ‘Lady Dorothy is not quite all that she seems in some respects, and a great deal more than she seems in others. To the casual observer she is just a typical English upper-class cup of tea; but on closer inspection he would find that it was laced with liquid of a more stimulating kind.’ Time & Tide, after interviewing Boothby in 1962, noted a photograph of Lady Dorothy, and a separate one of her husband, in Boothby’s Eaton Square drawing room.33
The provenance of Tory MPs changed markedly after 1951. Before his promotion to the Lords, Macmillan’s Lord Chancellor, Kilmuir, had instigated the Maxwell Fyfe reforms of the Conservative Party organisation (1948–49). These new rules ended the practice of candidates paying their own election expenses or subsidising constituency party funds. Kilmuir intended to discourage men who had made their pile of money in business from deciding that they wanted the status of a MP and collaring a provincial constituency: this malaise resulted in backbenches lined by complacent, inarticulate, politically obtuse money men with the reactionary, inflexible views of late middle age. The new rules also vested the constituency parties with independence in the selection of candidates. Retrospectively, Kilmuir believed that the quality of new MPs elected at the general elections of 1950 and 1951 was high, but thereafter plummeted. Local associations became dismaying in their choice of candidates in seats with handsome majorities. During the 1950s, to Kilmuir’s regret, they copied the cardinal error of Labour constituency parties, which had always weakened the efficacy of the parliamentary party by selecting tedious local worthies for safe seats while abler younger candidates were consigned to marginal or unwinnable constituencies. ‘Few of the new Members who entered the Commons in 1955 and 1959,’ wrote Kilmuir in 1964, ‘had achieved a reputation outside Westminster in any field, and far too many of them were obscure local citizens with obscure local interests, incapable – and indeed downright reluctant – to think on a national or international scale. What made this situation particularly annoying was that many excellent candidates, who would have made first-class Members and probably Ministers, were left to fight utterly hopeless seats … while the safe seats went to men of far lower calibre.’34
The Midlands conurbation, for example, was represented by nonentities with aldermanic paunches which they carried in a stately, self-satisfied way as if they contained dividend coupons: Harold Gurden (elected at Birmingham Selly Oak in 1955), Gordon Matthews (elected at Meriden, 1959), John Hollingworth (Birmingham All Saints, 1959), Leslie Seymour (Birmingham Sparkbrook, 1959), and Leonard Cleaver (Birmingham Yardley, 1959). Clever young William Rees-Mogg was condemned to contest the hopeless seat of Chester-le-Street in 1959 partly because of prejudice in better seats against his Catholicism. According to Rees-Mogg, there were only two Jewish MPs (Harry d’Avigdor-Goldsmid and Keith Joseph) on the Conservative side during the Parliament of 1955–59 and both had the advantage of inherited baronetcies. Margaret Thatcher was selected at Finchley in 1959 solely because a woman seemed less objectionable than her rival, who was Jewish. Julian Critchley, who was one of the 1959 intake, thought it contained ‘more than its share of those who could talk nonsense with distinction’.35
In January 1957, just before Macmillan replaced Eden, a retired Conservative MP, Christopher Hollis, noted that Eton had ten times as many MPs and ten times as many members of the government than any other school, a disproportion greater than before 1832. He did not think this was inherently undesirable. At the height of the Suez crisis, it was Etonians – the Macmillans’ son-in-law Julian Amery and future brother-in-law Victor Hinchingbrooke among the hawks, Jakie Astor, Boothby, Edward Boyle, Anthony Nutting among the doves – who had the courage to refuse blind loyalty to Eden’s blunders. Hollis argued ‘that in a generally egalitarian society, those who have positions of responsibility will be apt to be too timidly conformist and that a few Old Etonians about the place, bred in a tradition of liberty, ready in their very insolence to value other things above immediate success, are no bad leaven to the general lump’. Hollis had been an intelligent, independent-minded MP who had retired at the 1955 general election because he had not received political advancement, probably because he was suspected of homosexuality. Such was the parliamentary party’s fearful recoil from unorthodox opinions or temperament that, as one young backbencher later recalled with shame, ‘had I been more mature I might have benefited from his friendship, but as it was I brushed him off as swiftly as I decently could’.36
Responding to Hollis, Henry Kerby, a Tory backbencher with links to MI5, stressed the importance in party counsels of men whose families were neither traditional gentry nor hereditary nobility, but had got their wealth, and possibly recent titles, from shareholdings in large businesses. ‘The House of Commons is packed with Old Etonians who are no more members of the aristocracy than I am. The Government benches are crowded with Members of Parliament who are Old Etonians only because their fathers could afford to send them to that school.’ These MPs were ‘representatives of a moneybags plutocracy, however much many of them may try to disguise their origins. The House is crammed with first-generation descendants of hard-faced men who have done very well for themselves in trade of every sort – honourable and otherwise.’ (Kerby’s point was backed by a survey in 1959 of the country houses in Banbury district, just south of Profumo’s constituency of Stratford-on-Avon, which found that of the forty-three houses large enough to be named on the one-inch ordnance survey map, only four had been in the same family for more than two generations.) Constituency selection committees, continued Kerby, were ‘dumbstruck’ by the sight of prospective candidates sporting the black ties, with thin blue stripes, that showed the old Etonian. They realised that young men, with that particular fabric round their necks, would quickly reach political patronage and power. ‘Money,’ Kerby complained, ‘lies at the bottom of Old Etonian dominance.’37
Angus Maude, a Tory MP who would succeed Profumo at Stratford, explained that once constituency parties were debarred from extracting election expenses and big subscriptions from candidates, they instead demanded that MPs spent more time in constituencies attending to local fusses. Old Etonians, with inherited incomes that exempted them from the need to earn a living, had the free time that constituency associations required. Moreover, the MPs who were most likely to reach office were those who could devote most time to politics. ‘OEs’, overall, had more free hours than professional and company director MPs. There was a higher proportion of OEs in government posts than on the backbenches because of the low pay of junior ministers: many MPs could not accept office without financial hardship. Macmillan’s government, Maude calculated, had seventy ministers, of whom about ten might be called ‘self-made’. This scarcely mattered, he argued, because ‘a parliamentary party consisting entirely of very clever men would prove the devil to run and might prove extremely dangerous’.38
‘Those who hope to rule must first learn to obey,’ a Harrow housemaster had written thirty years earlier. ‘To learn to obey as a fag is part of the routine that is the essence of the English Public School system, and … is the wonder of other countries. Who shall say it is not that which has so largely helped to make England the most successful colonising nation, and the just ruler of the backward races of the world?’ The instinctive, automatic obedience to their leader felt by most Tory MPs was based on fear of party whips, who reminded them of prefects brandishing canes, or of scragging from other backbenchers. Mark Bonham Carter described his experience after being elected in a Liberal by-election coup in 1958. ‘It’s just like being back as a new boy at public school – with its rituals and rules, and also its background of convention, which breeds a sense of anxiety and inferiority in people who don’t know the rules. Even the smell – the smell of damp stone stairways – is like a school. All you have of your own is a locker – just like a school locker. You don’t know where you’re allowed to go, and where not – you’re always afraid you may be breaking some rule … It’s just like a public school: and that’s why Labour MPs are overawed by it – because they feel that only the Tory MPs know what a public school is like.’ Robin Ferrers, who was appointed as a lord-in-waiting by Macmillan in 1962, found front-bench life just like school. ‘There are the clever guys. There are the silly clots, too. Like football, you do the best that you can when the ball comes to you in order not to let the side down. At Question Time, if you can make them laugh, it is very satisfying. The schoolboy ethos is never far away – and that is good.’39
Sticklers resented any challenge to the prefects’ authority. When a decision of the Deputy Speaker’s was criticised by Lady Mellor, wife of a Tory MP, at a garden party, Labour MPs complained, and the Commons Privileges Committee censured her. No words that might weaken house esprit de corps could be tolerated, especially from anyone as objectionable as a woman with forthright and informed views. During crises, the Conservative parliamentary party resembled a boarding house in which any boy who challenged the housemaster’s decisions would be biffed or given a bogging. Even in private sessions, it was bad form to bestir the deferential placidity. When Macmillan, or his successors Douglas-Home and Heath, addressed the 1922 Committee of backbenchers, questions were confined to the closing minutes of the meeting. The questions seldom exceeded the level of those at a constituency ward meeting.40
There was a striking homogeneity in the appearance of the Conservative parliamentary party: MPs wore a uniform of stiff white collars or cream silk shirts; dark, well-pressed suits or a black jacket with striped black and grey trousers; sleek Trumper’s haircuts and oils. On Fridays, which were called Private Members’ Days, when government business was not taken, and the Commons was thinly attended, the Conservative whips wore weekend tweed suits and brogue shoes. Julian Critchley was once standing in the crowded ‘No’ lobby, waiting to vote, when Sir Jocelyn Lucas, a crusty baronet who bred Sealyhams, accosted him, seized his elbow, hissed ‘You’re wearin’ suede shoes’, and stalked off. Lucas never addressed Critchley again. Excessive importance was attached to social standing. ‘Some able middle-class Conservatives – like Enoch Powell or Iain Macleod – have gone a long way,’ Anthony Wedgwood Benn commented in 1957, ‘but one senses that many Tory MPs would prefer to be in the top drawer and out of office than to be out of the drawer and in office.’41
Once he became Prime Minister, Macmillan began attending the Derby, cricket matches, and other jollities to settle his image with his party faithful. He excelled in striking poses which projected his personality until it was a palpable force over others. The Tory die-hards had not been fooled by so brilliant a man since Disraeli. His address to Tory peers before the general election of 1959 was ‘the best speech I think I have ever heard from a leader addressing his followers’, noted blimpish Lord Winterton, who had fifty-five years’ parliamentary experience. There were sweeping historical parallels to flatter his auditors’ intelligence, and patriotic pride to rouse them. In international affairs, Britain was speeding towards danger ‘like a man on a monorail’, Macmillan warned the peers, ‘but mankind had never known security save perhaps in Antonine age of Ancient [Rome] & Victorian age’. The achievement of full employment with ‘one of the highest standards of living in the world’ by a nation with few natural resources was possible because Britain was ‘rich in brain power as in the time of the first Elizabeth when Europe looked on us as Barbarians who couldn’t use a fork’. The Lords – backwoodsmen and activists alike – were rallied by such High Table urbanities.42
Critchley recalled a dinner that was arranged for the Prime Minister to meet newly elected backbenchers after the 1959 general election had been won with an improved majority. ‘We dined in one room, and then moved to another, where some of us literally sat at his feet. Macmillan was the ideal speaker for the intimate occasion: splendid after dinner, witty, elegant of phrase, skilled at flattering his audience, taking us apparently into his confidence. He was especially beguiling with the young. He told us, “Revolt by all means; but only on one issue at a time; to do more would be to confuse the whips”.’ Critchley studied Macmillan’s mannerisms at close quarters: ‘the nervous fingering of his Brigade tie; his curiously hooded eyes which would suddenly open wide, and the famous baring of the teeth. He told us that no one who had not experienced Oxford before the Kaiser’s War could know “la douceur de vivre”.’ Humphry Berkeley, a pompous youngster who was among the 1959 intake, admired Macmillan’s skill in disguising from his die-hards his intention to grant independence to African colonies as swiftly as possible. He recalled the Prime Minister charming backbenchers after his return from Africa in 1960 with references to the Scottish earl – collateral descendant of a Victorian Viceroy of India – whom he had appointed as Governor-General of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland: ‘It’s awfully good of Simon Dalhousie to have taken out to Salisbury the viceregal gold plate which was presented to his ancestor. It’s so good for morale.’43
‘I am always hearing about the Middle Classes,’ Macmillan wrote to the Conservative Research Department after a month in office. ‘What is it they really want? Can you put it down on a sheet of notepaper, and then I will see whether we can give it to them?’44 He knew the answer, though, well enough: they wanted a steady onrush of material prosperity, and to recover their margin of advantage over the working class.
The half century between Macmillan’s seizing of the premiership in 1957 and the banking collapse of 2008 was exceptional in history as a time of abundance, not scarcity. In all other periods, privation was the common Western experience. Most people were kept on short rations, emotionally and materially; frustration, not satisfaction, provided the keynote of existence. Macmillan offered an end to the stingy circumstances in which women watered down their children’s marmalade to make it go further.
Six months into his premiership Macmillan went to Bedford, the county town of the dullest English county. Its population of 60,000 worked in factories making pumps, diesel engines, gas turbines, farm implements, switchgear, tube fittings, transistors, and sweets. There, at the football pitch of the local team on 20 July 1957, Macmillan was guest of honour at a political gala to celebrate the parliamentary career of his Colonial Secretary Alan Lennox-Boyd, the long-serving Conservative MP for Mid-Bedfordshire: a career begun under the aegis of the ancien régime Duke of Bedford. No tickets were needed to attend; no ‘spin doctors’ existed to control the audience; there were no stewards from security firms to evict hecklers, or threaten them under anti-terrorist legislation. It was one of the last open-air political speeches by an English statesman to a genuine mass gathering. Politicians had for generations learnt to pitch their voices to reach thousands, to captivate their audiences and to master the art of impromptu retorts to hecklers. Henceforth they would have to simulate sincerity for television audiences.
The Bedford gala was ‘unique in the political annals of the county’, reported the local newspaper. ‘The Premier received a great welcome from a crowd that had assembled from every part of Bedfordshire.’ Macmillan told those who talked of the disintegration of the Empire: ‘It is not breaking up; it is growing up.’ He warned against complacency at recent advances in prosperity. ‘Let’s be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good. Go around the country, go to the industrial towns, go to the farms, and you will see a state of prosperity such as we have never had … in the history of this country. What is beginning to worry some of us is “Is it too good to be true?” or perhaps I should say “Is it too good to last?”’ The crowd cheered, perhaps because they were polite, perhaps because they were enjoying their afternoon in the sun, but surely not because they liked his warning that there might be bad times ahead. Indeed, the Bedfordshire Times, judging perhaps by his manner rather than his words, thought Macmillan had been over-optimistic about the economic future. The paper quoted his remark: ‘Most of our people have never had it so good’, and commented: ‘That is true, but Mr Macmillan said little enough about the slender foundations on which all this prosperity rests.’ There was no talk of measures to check inflation. The Prime Minister dismissed ‘the fashion for newspapers and political commentators to work up all kinds of stories of troubles and dangers ahead’. The Bedfordshire Times thought no ‘working-up’ was needed: ‘the dangers are very real ones, and it is time they are squarely faced’.45
At the rally a youngster in a boiler-suit persistently heckled the Prime Minister. One of his interruptions concerned the level of old-age pensions: the Labour Party was calling for the basic rate of old-age pensions to be raised to £3 a week and to be annually adjusted to the cost of living. ‘You’ve never had it so good,’ Macmillan cried back at the heckler, contrasting the youngster’s rising wages with the fixed income of a pensioner, rather than targeting everyone in Bedford football ground. According to another account (that of Quentin Skinner, the historian of political thought, then a sixth-former at Bedford school, who was present), the heckler shouted facetiously: ‘What about the workers?’ Macmillan responded as if a serious objection had been called. It was this phrase that beyond any other became associated with his premiership.46
If people’s material standards were improving, in Bedford and nationally, there was a perception that, perhaps in consequence, sexual standards were deteriorating. Two years after Macmillan’s football-pitch speech, Peter Kennerley of the Sunday Pictorial went to Bedford. ‘Good-time girls – drunken teenagers – mothers who leave home for the bright lights – and plain unvarnished vice – these are the problems … earning the town of Bedford the reputation of “BRITAIN’S SIN TOWN 1959”.’ Kennerley reported that seven brothels had been raided and closed by Bedford police in the preceding six months. Twenty children from Bedford had been taken into council care in the last four months because their mothers had deserted their homes. A probation officer was quoted as saying that the absconding mothers, like troublesome teenagers, ‘go where the money is’. Money in this case meant hundreds of American servicemen from three nearby airbases.47
Six weeks after Macmillan’s Bedford speech, on 4 September 1957, the Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in Great Britain published its report. This recommended that homosexual activity between consenting adult men should no longer be criminalised; that penalties for street-soliciting by women should be increased; and that landlords letting premises to prostitutes should be deemed as living off immoral earnings. The recommendations on heterosexual prostitution were adopted in the Street Offences Act, which came into operation in 1959, while the recommendations on homosexuality were resisted.
Although the Profumo Affair would be, exclusively, a tooth-and-claw heterosexual business, reactions to it were part of a continuum of sexual attitudes. The fears, insults and cant surrounding male homosexuality in this period were not restricted in their impact to the communities that were targeted. On the contrary, the obtuseness of intelligent people about sexual motives, the punitive urges, the notion that collective respectability was maintained by newspaper bullying and abasement of vulnerable individuals, the prudish lynch mobs, the deviousness behind the self-righteous wrath of the judiciary – all these defining traits of homophobia erupted nationwide during the summer of 1963, with the Profumo resignation, Ward trial and Denning report.
Writing about Ward’s mis-trial, the jurist Louis Blom-Cooper later commented: ‘The law does not care for social realities; it bases its action upon highly emotive opinion on what is best for the country’s morals.’ The truth of this was exemplified by sundry interventions from Lord Hailsham, a barrister who held several Cabinet posts under Macmillan and hoped to succeed him as Prime Minister in 1963. In an epoch when it was unthinkable for Cabinet Ministers to appear in shirtsleeves, Hailsham and Ian Macleod were pioneers among Tory politicians in trying to indicate that they were hustling, businesslike modernisers by tightly buttoning the middle button of their suit jackets. At the time of the Wolfenden committee’s appointment, while citing his courtroom expertise, Hailsham had published a scourging essay on homosexual ‘corruption’. He was emphatic that male homosexuality was ‘a problem of social environment and not of congenital make-up’. For most men, ‘the precipitating factor in their abnormality has been initiation by older homosexuals while the personality is still pliable’. Homosexuality was indeed ‘a proselytising religion, and initiation by an adept is at once the cause and the occasion of the type of fixation which has led to the increase in homosexual practices’. Hailsham, with his authority as a Queen’s Counsel and Bencher of Lincoln’s Inn, held that ‘homosexual practices are contagious, incurable, and self-perpetuating’, that ‘homosexuality is, and for fundamentally the same reasons, as much a moral and social issue as heroin addiction’. Homosexuals, he averred, were pederasts by preference. ‘No doubt homosexual acts between mature males do take place … but the normal attraction of the adult male homosexual is to the young male adolescent or young male adult to the exclusion of others.’
As so often, hostility to same-sex activity splayed into asinine condemnation of heterosexual behaviour. ‘Adultery and fornication may be immoral but, on the lowest physical plane, they both involve the use of the complementary physical organs of male and female,’ Hailsham explained. However, ‘between man and woman the persistent misuse of these organs in any other way is often fraught with grave dangers, emotional, or even physical, to one or both of the participants’. This seems to be a verbose warning that people who enjoyed using either mouths or fingers in their sex lives were in peril of nervous or bodily collapse. Homosexual practices were worse because they used ‘non-complementary physical organs’, Hailsham continued. ‘The psychological consequences of this physical misuse of the bodily organs cannot in the long run be ignored … nearly all the homosexuals I have known have been emotionally unbalanced and profoundly unhappy. I do not believe that this is solely or exclusively due to the fear of detection, or of the sense of guilt attaching to practices in fact disapproved of by society. It is inherent in the nature of an activity which seeks a satisfaction for which the bodily organs employed are physically unsuited.’48
Hailsham sounded moral alarms monotonously, although the miscreant modernity that he despised was tied to material ease promoted by the government of which he was a member. His inaugural address as Rector of Glasgow University in 1959 flailed ‘the emotional, intellectual, moral, political, even the physical litter and chaos of the world today, when truth has almost ceased to be regarded as objective, when kindness is made to depend on political, class or racial affiliations, when only the obvious stands in need of publicity’. He felt revulsion, he declared, ‘when I look at popular pin-ups, playboys, millionaires and actresses with the bodies of gods and goddesses and the morals of ferrets lurching from one demoralising emotional crisis to another and never guessing the reason; when I view the leaders of great states, the masters of immense concentrations of power and wealth, gesticulating like monkeys and hurling insults unfit for fishwives; when I reflect on the vapidity of so much that is popular in entertainment, the triteness of so much that passes for profundity, the pointlessness and frustration in the popular mood.’ In these rounded periods lay the quandary of the Macmillan era, and the trap for Jack Profumo.49