Harold Macmillan

Harold Macmillan was a fan of Bagehot’s writings, even if not of his politics, as his Diaries reveal.  As the editor of his Diaries states, Macmillan, who came from the famous publishing family, was “a discerning collector [of books], proudly, for instance, acquiring complete sets of [Daniel] Defoe or Bagehot in 1954… He was an avid and fast reader.” [Peter Catterall, The Macmillan Diaries: the Cabinet Years 1950-1957, 2003, p.xv].

On 1 January 1955, Macmillan wrote: “I am now starting on Bagehot (of which I have recently acquired the collected edition.”  This was presumably the set edited by Bagehot’s sister-in-law, Emilie Barrington, and published by Longman’s Green in 1915, alongside a Life of Bagehot volume by her, all now available online, (eg https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/barrington-the-works-and-life-of-walter-bagehot-10-vols).  The following day he wrote: “A lot of desultory talk, reading, writing. My lumbago is worse.  More Bagehot, including The English Constitution – these essays or books are very interesting to read in the light of the next 90 or 100 years. The Victorians were great people, but how certain they were that they were right.  Bagehot, a typical liberal, has a magnificent contempt for everyone, except the middle classes.  How short their rule has been!”

At the end of a long entry for 7 January 1955, he expanded on these thoughts: “I have finished the 9 volumes of Bagehot.  It has been amusing, as well as instructive, to read them – all so confident and often so wrong.  Bagehot edited and wrote in the Economist for many years.  [Geoffrey, later Baron] Crowther (the present editor) is as complacent, as confident, and as sadly wrong as his great predecessor.  Liberalism has fine things about it, but it was too sanctimonious and too patronising.  The toughs and the toff have combined against it, It’s a pity, for with the end of Liberalism has come the elimination of the economic strength and political power of the middle classes …”

Macmillan was more rather diplomatic and uncritical when giving remarks at The Economist’s launch of the three volumes of Economic Essays as part of Norman St John-Stevas’ Collected Works of Walter Bagehot (vols 9-11), on 30 December 1978 [reproduced in vol 15 of that Collection, 1986, pp219-222].  Describing Bagehot as a “gifted amateur”, who “didn’t claim that absolute certainty of knowledge which we all have now when competing doctrines are put forward … He was an amateur, and he approached problems from a practical point of view… There was this man – solid, sensible, perfectly straightforward, and saying exactly how the thing really did work.  And that is the charm of reading Bagehot today.”  He continued: “Seems to me he was the kind of man we’d all awfully like to have known.  The combination, I say, of common sense and genius … [H]e is extraordinarily up to date, extraordinarily modern, objective … In that sense he is still a living force.”

As a footnote to that 1978 occasion, it is clear that Norman St John-Stevas was bowled over by Macmillan’s speech, as can be seen from two editorial comments in the later volumes of the Collection.  Macmillan “spoke entirely without notes, carried off a notable tour de force” [vol 15, p215]; “No one who heard the extraordinary oration delivered noteless … is ever likely to forget it.” [vol 14, p4].