That said, I did not try to conceal my delight when the telephone rang and I was summoned to see the Prime Minister. Harold Macmillan was camping out in some style at Admiralty House while 10 Downing Street was undergoing extensive refurbishment. I had already developed my own strong impressions of him, not just from speeches in the House and to the 1922 Committee, but also when he came to speak to our New Members’ Dining Club — on which occasion he had strongly recommended Disraeli’s Sybil and Conings by as political reading. But Disraeli’s style was too ornate for my taste, though I can see why it may have appealed to Harold Macmillan. It is now clear to me that Macmillan was a more complex and sensitive figure than he appeared; but appearance did seem to count for a great deal. Certainly, whether it was striking a bargain and cementing a friendship with President Kennedy, or delivering a deliciously humorous put-down to a ranting Khrushchev, Harold Macmillan was a superb representative of Britain abroad.
In both foreign and home policies Macmillan always prided himself on having a sense of history. In his attempts to establish harmony between the two superpowers, as in his fervent belief that Britain’s destiny lay in Europe, he was much affected by the experience of two world wars. Indeed, as he would remind us, he was one of the few surviving members of the House who had fought in the Great War. In his preference for economic expansion over financial soundness and his long-standing belief in the virtues of planning, he was reacting against the deflation and unemployment of the 1930s which he had seen as MP for Stockton-on-Tees. It is said that when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer Treasury officials kept a tally of how many times he mentioned ‘Stockton’ each week. But history’s lessons usually teach us what we want to learn. It was possible to take a very different view of the causes of war and of the historic achievements of capitalism. Things looked different from the perspective of Grantham than from that of Stockton.
INTO OFFICE…
I sorted out my best outfit, this time sapphire blue, to go and see the Prime Minister. The interview was short. Harold Macmillan charmingly greeted me and offered the expected appointment. I enthusiastically accepted. I wanted to begin as soon as possible and asked him how I should arrange things with the department. Characteristically, he said: ‘Oh well, ring the Permanent Secretary and turn up at about 11 o’clock tomorrow morning, look around and come away. I shouldn’t stay too long.’
So it was the following morning — rather before eleven — that I arrived at the pleasant Georgian house in John Adam Street, just off the Strand, which was at that time the headquarters of the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance. In a gesture which I much appreciated — and which I myself as a Cabinet minister always emulated — John Boyd-Carpenter, my minister, was there at the front door to meet me and take me up to my new office. John was someone it was easy to like and admire for his personal kindness, grasp of detail and capacity for lucid exposition of a complex case. He was an excellent speaker and debater. All in all, a good model for a novice Parliamentary Secretary to follow. After his promotion to become Chief Secretary to the Treasury in 1962, my new minister was Niall Macpherson, who in turn made way for Richard Wood. I was very lucky in all of them. A Parliamentary Secretary’s job is only as interesting and worthwhile as the senior minister makes it. I felt that they gave me every opportunity. This first day at John Adam Street was more or less a whirl of new faces and unfamiliar issues. There was little time to do more than take my bearings and receive my briefing.
On Friday (my birthday) I was given a prominent place on the platform at the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton. The cameras were once more active when I appeared at the Conference emerging, as it was remarked, from a royal blue car and wearing a royal blue dress and hat. Both my appointment and my appearance were something of a contrast to the general mood of the Conference which, like the limited reshuffle itself that had brought Iain Macleod to the Party Chairmanship, was widely seen as moving the Party in a leftward direction.
Back at the Ministry I was not at all displeased to substitute grind for glamour. The issues dealt with by what was then the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance and is now the Department of Social Security are more technically complicated than those falling to any other branch of government, with the possible exception of the tax side of the Treasury. It was not just a matter of avoiding being caught out in the House of Commons. If one was to make any serious contribution to the development of policy one had to have mastered both the big principles and the detail. This I now set out to do.
The first step was to re-read the original Beveridge Report in which the philosophy of the post-war system of pensions and benefits was clearly set out. I was already quite well acquainted with its main aspects and I strongly approved of them. At the centre was the concept of a comprehensive ‘social insurance scheme’, which was intended to cover loss of earning power caused by unemployment, sickness or retirement. This would be done by a single system of benefits at subsistence level financed by flat-rate individual contributions. By the side of this there would be a system of National Assistance, financed out of general taxation, to help those who were unable to sustain themselves on National Insurance benefits, either because they had been unable to contribute, or had run out of cover. National Assistance was means tested and had been envisaged as in large part a transitional system, whose scope would diminish as pensions or personal savings rose.
It is easy in retrospect to poke fun at many of Beveridge’s assumptions and predictions. He greatly underestimated the cost of his proposals, though this was partly because the post-war Labour Government introduced full rate old-age pensions immediately, without the twenty-year phasing-in period which Beveridge had envisaged. There were other problems too. The relationship, which in any individual case was always bound to be indirect, between contributions on the one hand and benefits on the other became ever more obscure as pensions were increased and as the proportion of elderly people in the population grew. Far from diminishing, National Assistance and its successors, Supplementary Benefit and Income Support, swelled to become an alarming burden on the taxpayer. Anomalies between the two notionally complementary, but in practice often contradictory, systems became a perpetual headache.
But for all that, Beveridge had sought to guard against the very problems which later governments more or less ignored and which have now returned to plague us, in particular the debilitating effects of welfare dependency and the loss of private and voluntary effort. Whatever the effects in practice, the Beveridge Report’s rhetoric has what would later be considered a Thatcherite ring to it:
…The State should offer security for service and contribution. The State in organizing security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family. [Paragraph 9]… The insured persons should not feel that income for idleness, however caused, can come from a bottomless purse. [Paragraph 22]