Supermac

"I think that Thorpe is interesting because he was originally a schoolmaster and I am always interested in people who have been working at schools, because to be a schoolteacher is a massive burden and to be in a boarding school is an even greater burden. Anyone who has not worked in them can’t really understand how tremendously time-consuming they are. Here is a quiet historian who works away on his biographies and produces work of meticulous quality. One could fairly say that he could be more detached and more critical but you could say exactly the same of me and my own biographies. I think it is rather refreshing to have biographies that let the reader make up their own mind, rather than pointing heavily to a particular conclusion. Yes, what he gives you is a complete picture. You are left with a very clear image of the humanity of Harold Macmillan and I think that he is a very underrated writer because his books don’t come up with saucy and spicy new details. He isn’t one of these people who try to make their books into vehicles for titillation, and the fact is that most lives don’t deserve that, even if serialisation demands it. He is an Aston Martin DB6 kind of writer, who is very English, very stately."

"Harold Macmillan was the Conservative Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963. And the title of the book is taken from the Vicky cartoons of Harold Macmillan in his prime. He did for a time give the impression that he was in charge of everything. He was unflappable and was not thrown off his balance by anything. But, actually, those who worked for him knew that wasn’t true. There were things that threw him off his balance. He had a strain of pessimism in him which meant that he always saw the worst of a situation and that threw him. He appeared to be languid and very self-contained but there were strong emotions bubbling away below the surface. Absolutely. He was an actor and he played the parts in turn. Sometimes he was a grandee and sometimes he prided himself on being, as you say, a crofter’s great-grandson. So he was very popular for a time but then things went wrong. We had the Profumo scandal in 1963 and he wasn’t at ease with the younger generation. He didn’t understand the world in which Profumo and Christine Keeler lived. He was not at his best and he didn’t handle that with his usual mastery. Yes, he did do that. He didn’t lack courage. He was wounded in the First World War . But the business of being an actor really prevailed. For example, he lived for a long time after he resigned and he played at being a very, very old man and he had affectations and ways of speaking which were brilliantly satirised in the TV programme That Was The Week That Was. And he played different parts, as an actor does."