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Then began the ritual dance of the choice of the chieftain. The members of the Cabinet
were called individually, ‘like schoolboys to the headmaster’s study’, as most of them
described the experience, to be interviewed by Salisbury, accompanied by the Lord
Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, in Salisbury’s room at the Privy Council offices. Salisbury, who
mispronounced his ‘r’s’, was brief and to the point: ‘Well, which is it?’ he asked each
one. ‘Wab [Butler] or Hawold [Macmillan]?’ The consensus of opinion was
overwhelmingly for ‘Hawold’; only one minister plumped for ‘Wab’. Salisbury also
consulted the Chief Whip, Edward Heath, the Party Chairman and the Chairman of the
1922 Committee, all of whom recommended Macmillan. Butler’s equivocation over Suez
had won him no friends; Heath’s findings mirrored those of the Cabinet majority, that
there was a lot of strong feeling in the party against Butler but not much against
Macmillan. The following day Salisbury went to the Palace to tell Elizabeth the results
of the soundings while Adeane consulted two influential Conservative peers, Lords
Chandos and Waverley. Churchill arrived at the Palace; no one at court had at first
thought to contact him nor had he wanted to be involved, having refused a call from
Eden to come up to London from Chartwell. But his secretary, Anthony Montague-
Browne, thought of appearances. ‘I prompted Adeane,’ he told Churchill’s biographer.
‘He ought to be seen to go to the Palace.’ Churchill also recommended Macmillan, as he
later told Butler: ‘Well, old cock, you’re not such a bad old thing. You looked after me
when I was ill. But I told her to choose the older man. Harold’s ten [he was actually
eight] years older than you…’
And so, the sixty-two-year-old Harold Macmillan, calming his nerves by reading Pride
and Prejudice as he waited at his official residence, No. 11 Downing Street, next door to
the Prime Minister’s at No. 10 and symbolically linked to it by the umbilical cord of an
internal corridor, became the Queen’s next Prime Minister. Elizabeth was brief but
friendly as she received him at the Palace shortly after two o’clock on the afternoon of
10 January. She already knew him; as Secretary of State for Defence, Foreign Secretary
and Chancellor of the Exchequer in Churchill’s and Eden’s administrations, she had had
occasion to see him several times on official business, but this, as Macmillan wrote in his
diary, was the beginning of a quite different relationship. In other words, Elizabeth
knew Macmillan superficially and by reputation; she was soon to know him intimately.
Macmillan was a complex man; as a politician he was a curious mixture of idealism,
histrionics, Machiavellian guile and ruthlessness. As a man he was inhibited, vulnerable,
intelligent and highly cultivated, yet uncertain of himself and given to fits of depression
– the ‘Black Dog’ which haunted Churchill. All this he concealed under an impeccably
establishment exterior: the erect bearing and strict dress codes of an officer of the elite
Brigade of Guards in which he had served during the First World War. He was a member
of the exclusive White’s Club in St James’s, then the preserve of the land-owning
aristocracy, and he was married to a daughter of one of England’s grandest dukes, the
Duke of Devonshire, owner of Chatsworth and numerous other houses and estates,
including that ultimate symbol of privilege, a first-class Yorkshire grouse moor. His
wife’s, Lady Dorothy’s, reaction to the summons to the Palace typified that of the real