Harold Macmillan’s Controversial Resignation Honours
The Civil Service begged him to think again. But in 1963, Harold Macmillan stood firm and insisted that his resignation honours list was accepted - no matter the consequences. Here's the story.
Harold Macmillan’s Controversial Resignation Honours
by Lee David Evans
'I beg that you will not take a step which would be widely thought to lower the standards of political impartiality of which the Civil Service is rightly proud.' These were the pleading words of Sir Laurence Helsby, Head of the Home Civil Service, to outgoing Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in October 1963.[1] The controversial action proposed by Macmillan concerned an issue that has cursed his predecessors and successors alike: resignation honours.
The primary beneficiaries of Macmillan’s resignation honours were his Private Office team, with whom he had enjoyed a close relationship throughout his premiership. Freddie Bishop, who served both Anthony Eden and Macmillan as Principal Private Secretary before departing in 1959, reflected on how Eden would never consult private secretaries for policy advice, but Macmillan almost always did. Often before lunch, and again after working hours, Macmillan would hold ‘sherry sessions’ for his team where they would discuss the issues of the day. As a group they helped clarify Macmillan’s thinking and focus his policy agenda. The achievements of the Macmillan premiership can be credited to the Number 10 Private Office as well as the politicians who so often attracted the glory and blame.
Macmillan’s resignation in October 1963, after a year in which political storm clouds threatened to overwhelm his premiership, was confirmed by an 'unhappy stroke of fate' - the inflammation of his prostate gland - which necessitated urgent medical intervention.[2] He informed the Queen that he would be resigning and was taken to hospital for an operation. His final days as Prime Minister were physically and mentally draining for the sixty-nine-year-old premier. In such circumstances, it would have been easy to overlook the interests of his soon-to-be erstwhile staff. Yet from his bed at King Edward VII Hospital for Officers, he crafted a resignation honours list that would leave scarcely a member of his close and loyal private office neglected.
Among the honours on this 'inflationary' list, to use the description of Macmillan’s official biographer Alastair Horne, was a peerage for his Private Secretary, baronetcies (hereditary knighthoods) for his Parliamentary Private Secretary, PR Advisor and Physician, and a KBE for his Principal Private Secretary.[3] This list continued with a CBE, three OBEs and one MBE, before concluding with four British Empire Medals shared between a detective, driver, ladies’ maid and cook.[4]
Macmillan’s desire to reward his team in this manner was met with firm resistance from the Civil Service. Records in the National Archive show it was not the length of the list that caused concern, but its challenge to what Harold Evans, Macmillan’s PR Adviser and himself the beneficiary of a baronetcy in the honours, called 'the delicate traceries of the mandarin pattern.'[5] Macmillan was judged too generous to several members of the civil service and, in his benevolence, posed a threat to civil service impartiality.
Helsby, the recently appointed Head of the Home Civil Service, was the man to take the fight to Macmillan. He set the KBE due to Timothy Bligh, Macmillan’s Principal Private Secretary, firmly in his sights. After seemingly speaking to Bligh first - who had already suggested to Macmillan that a KBE would be an overly generous reward - Helsby penned a memorandum to Macmillan:
I should fail in my duty as Head of the Civil Service if I did not advise you that the appropriate honour for Bligh at this stage in his career is C.B. His predecessors in the post of Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister have received this distinction - and nothing higher - for many years.[6]
Helsby’s note was sent on 18th October 1963, a testing day for Macmillan’s nerve. The day before, Macmillan had settled on the Earl of Home as his replacement.[7] As the news began to percolate around Westminster, senior members of the government plotted to frustrate his choice and reassert the case of Deputy Prime Minister Rab Butler. Macmillan heard of the plot early on the morning of the 18th and, determined to frustrate the conspirators, hastily resigned. He wrote to the Queen, who subsequently visited him in hospital, and advised her to send for Home. The plot fell apart.
Later on that dramatic day, and clearly still in a mood to assert his will, Macmillan (by now stripped of Downing Street letter paper) responded to Helsby:
This, for Macmillan, was the crux of it: if he wanted to give the honour, and the Queen would accept his advice to do so, then the honour would be given. The London Gazette soon confirmed Macmillan’s victory over the civil service.[9]
Whereas recent resignation honours controversies have dominated the headlines, the furore about Macmillan’s was internal and almost completely overlooked in the press. One reason for this is the somewhat trivial nature of the concerns raised; nobody seriously claimed that the beneficiaries were undeserving of honours (as was the case when Harold Wilson issued his infamous resignation honours list in 1976). It was the pride and the traditions of the Civil Service which were at risk from the list, something unlikely to incite the emotions of those beyond the service itself.
If Macmillan’s will triumphed, he did not necessarily win the argument. Many of the civil servants Macmillan rewarded chose to leave the service of government soon after he did, perhaps suspecting that their position had been compromised by their closeness to the former premier. Philip de Zulueta, a Private Secretary who was widely tipped to rise to the top of the Foreign Service, went into the City in 1964.[10] Sir Harold Evans, Macmillan’s PR advisor, left for a role at the Independent Television Authority.[11] Bligh, the focus of Helsby’s memorandum, also found himself leaving the civil service for the media, working for part of the global media conglomerate now known as Thomson Reuters before his premature death aged 50.
In spite of the controversy, Macmillan appeared pleased with his decisions. On 30th July 1964, he recorded in his diary a gathering of the key members of his former team using their new titles:
I gave a dinner at HofC to my own 'staff’, who have been so loyal. Ld Poole; Ld Egremont; Sir T Bligh; Sir Philip de Zulueta; Ld Normanbrook; Freddy Bishop; Sir A Rumbold; Ted Heath and Martin Redmayne (my Chief Whip) Knox-Cunningham and Maurice... The party was agreeable but rather sad. I have certainly been wonderfully served.[12]
Macmillan felt their service deserved commensurate honours, even if they defied the established norms of the Civil Service. Like premiers before, and many since, he was willing to risk his own reputation to ensure they got them.
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Footnotes
[1] The National Archives (TNA), T 352/31
[2] Harold Macmillan (1973) At the end of the day: 1961-63. London: Macmillan. pg. 505
[3] Alistair Horne (1989) Macmillan: 1957-1896, Volume II of the Official Biography. London: Macmillan. pg. 571
[4] TNA, op. cit.
[5] Harold Evans (1981) Downing Street Diary: The Macmillan Years 1957/63. London: Hodder & Stoughton. pg. 303
[6] TNA, op. cit.
[7] Harold Macmillan (1973) op. cit. pg. 514
[8] TNA, op. cit.
[9] London Gazette, Supplement of 18 October 1963, issue 43136 (22 October 1963), pg. 8597
[10] Alistair Horne op. cit.
[11] Harold Evans, op. cit., dust jacket
[12] Harold Macmillan (2011) The Macmillan Diaries Vol II: Prime Minister and After: 1957-1966, ed Catterall, P. London: Macmillan, pg. 638.
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Of course, Wyndham was heir to Lord Leconfield and inherited his father's title in 1967, so Macmillan was only pre-empting his elevation to the Lords (a kind of cut-price writ of acceleration, a device of blessed memory).