Winds of change: learning from the 1960s | thearticle

The Labour Party in special measures. The Conservative Party is donning a cloth-cap. Times are a-changing. Or so it seems. The unelectable Mr Corbyn and his unbelievable pledges,

unprecedented mistrust in politics, and an overwhelming sense of national frustration combined to give Boris Johnson his majority. From the June 2016 referendum to formal withdrawal in

January 2020 — if that goes according to plan — will be a period of three and a half years. Yet, from our application for EEC membership, to formally joining in January 1973 took much

longer. Peter Hennessy tells the story in his _Winds of Change: Britain in the Early Sixties_. General de Gaulle firmly blocked our entry in 1962, with a tearful Prime Minister Harold

Macmillan privately denouncing him as the new “Napoleon”. For Macmillan, failure to gain entry to the EEC was a tragedy. For us, achieving withdrawal from the EU was a farce. The two UK

parties’ rhetoric was reversed in the early 1960s. The Labour Party, under Hugh Gaitskell’s leadership, opposed entry. “It means the end of a thousand years of history,” he declared at party

conference. The UK would become “a province of Europe.” Not “a vassal state,” but near enough. The impact on the Commonwealth, of joining the EEC, loomed large. But the strategic argument

has remained constant: fear of a politically federalist Europe versus benefits of economic membership. _Plus Ça Change . . . _ Peter Hennessy is Britain’s most sophisticated and entertaining

political historian, both a respected academic, broadcaster, and active crossbench peer. _Winds of Change_ is his third book in a chronological trilogy which started with the Atlee

government of 1945. Some background social history is sprinkled into most chapters. But his passion is for the history of government, political process and personalities. Armed with

Macmillan’s diary and newly-opened national archives, we have an insider’s view of the great transformative events of the early 1960s: the Berlin blockade; Cuban missile crisis;

decolonisation; Britain’s struggle for EEC entry; Trident and CND; Wilson and the “white heat of the scientific revolution”. There is something endearing about Macmillan, in Hennessy’s

portrayal. The reader discovers a different, healthier, British political culture. Decent men admire each other’s oratory, disagree about how to move forward but, on the whole, agree about

fundamental values and the society they want. Hennessy loves this Britain with a romantic intensity, even with its dissenters and mavericks like Enoch Powell. There is a sharper edge when it

comes to describing the Labour leader, Harold Wilson, just as there is to the man himself. Here is the 1964 Labour Party/Wilson’s Manifesto on Polaris — the nuclear deterrent at the time:

“It will not be independent, and it will not be British and it will not deter.” Nonetheless, Wilson as prime minister kept Polaris, reneging on his pledge to renegotiate the Nassau agreement

with the US which “shared” Polaris (it was manufactured in the US). Two recurrent themes emerge in the book: the inextricable link, mainly but far from exclusively in Conservative thinking,

between Britain’s image as a global power and its ownership of nuclear weapons, and its corollary — the almost secondary importance of these weapons for defence. Despite holding up the

Commonwealth as a fig-leaf covering the loss of Empire, it was the Bomb that kept us at the top table. Macmillan, though, obsessed by the danger of nuclear war, had internalised the picture

of the mushroom cloud that hung over the 1960s. As Hennessy points out, apart from his steady-as-she-goes steering of the ship of state, Macmillan’s greatest achievement was the negotiation

of a Partial Test Ban Treaty between the UK, US and the Soviet Union in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis. We have foolishly lost his salutary anxiety about nuclear war today. What

we haven’t lost is the taste for a good sex scandal. Like any red-blooded male who lived through the Profumo affair, Hennessy enjoys telling the tale: a Minister of Defence sharing a “call

girl” with a Soviet agent posing as a diplomat, and their joint contribution to Macmillan’s decline and downfall, an inglorious story of sex, spies and toffs. Who could not enjoy? Hennessy

is too famous a writer for severe editing; some joyous but diversionary anecdotes survive publication. One digression, dealing with Lord Denning’s report into security leaks during the

Profumo scandal, reads: “Denning, by the way, spoke in what was usually called a rich Hampshire burr, a sound rarely heard on the early post-war bench (though it was made famous in the

cricket commentary box by that poet amongst journalists, John Arlott)”. In an instant, you are back in the 1960s, watching TV, or tuning in to a _sotto voce_ conversation in the Athenaeum;

De Gaulle, Hennessy confides, declared that the Profumo scandal “taught the British a lesson for trying to imitate the French”. Why is Lord Hennessy so important? Because he provides a

political plumb-line. To the left of him you’re on the Left, to the right, you’re on the Right. The trouble with this simple test is that the ground shifts. And we are in the midst of an

earthquake at the moment. But for those who were discovering politics in the early sixties, _Winds of Change_ is an enriching journey down memory lane with an erudite, entertaining guide.

Readers below the age of seventy will re-learn that the past is another country, though with many recognisable landmarks. In 1962, both President Kennedy and Prime Minister Macmillan read

Barbara Tuchman’s _The Guns of August_ detailing the miscalculations that lead to the First World War. Hennessy implies that the book influenced them during the Cuban Missile Crisis, if only

as a warning. His _Winds of Change_ may help future generations in crises to come. At the very least, Hennessy’s gentle judgements and search for the truth will become a poignant and, I

hope, influential history.