GREAT BRITAIN: The Art of the Practical

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The Silver Spoon. Despite the dramatic revolution he has worked in Britain's economic fortunes, Harold Macmillan is still not every Englishman's cup of tea. Though he assiduously keeps alive the memory of his grandfather, a Scottish tenant farmer who in 1843 walked penniless into London, there to found the publishing house of Macmillan & Co. Ltd., Harold Macmillan himself was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Endowed with the best upper-class English education (Eton and Oxford), he served as a company officer with the elite Grenadier Guards during World War I—in which he was three times wounded. Soon after the war he married Lady Dorothy Cavendish, daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, thereby acquired bonds with most of England's remaining great Tory families.

With his country-squire manner, his tweedy attire, and his speech so casual and so polished as to invite suspicion that it has been rehearsed, Macmillan sometimes reminds his countrymen of Walter Savage Landor's lines: "I strove with none, for none was worth my strife." Even a Tory sympathizer, watching Macmillan on television a fortnight ago, found himself "suddenly and strangely aware of an awful feeling of class consciousness." But those who have listened to and watched Macmillan longest remain unimpressed by such nuances, remember instead that he is a shrewd business executive and, above all, a supreme politician.

The Clubman. Unlike the moody, ill and meddling Eden, Macmillan gets the best out of his ministers and civil servants by keeping hands off their departments, taking pains to parcel out praise for good jobs, but not so profusely that the coin is devalued. An early riser, he tackles state papers as early as 6 a.m., works with such dispatch that seven secretaries, arriving at 10, find their in-boxes stuffed with documents, some inscribed with marginal notes in red ink, others with summaries of the Prime Minister's views or orders. "Things are never on top of him; he is on top of them," said one secretary.

Suave in a large crowd, shy in a small one, Macmillan is really at home only in the professional, forensic atmosphere of the House of Commons, in the tweedy domesticity of his Sussex country place, or in the intimate company of a few Establishment friends. He is a member of seven clubs, including those exclusive rivals, The Club and The Other Club. The night Dwight Eisenhower telephoned about the Lebanon-Jordan crisis last year, Macmillan was finally tracked down at the Buck's Club, a tight little islet of ducal, military and shooting types. It is in such exclusive places, where he can put his long legs up with an after-dinner brandy, that Macmillan—like Palmerston, Melbourne and Asquith before him—talks out the ideas by which Britain is going to be governed in the next five years.