53rd anniversary of Macmillan's Night of the Long Knives

It’s fifty-three years today since Harold Macmillan’s Night of the Long Knives, when Macmillan dismissed a third of his cabinet.

Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, who heard about his dismissal on the wireless, told the Prime Minister, 

'You have given me less notice than I would a housekeeper' 

to which Harold Macmillan answered,

'But good housekeepers are so hard to find.'

Brutal. 

Jeremy Thorpe famously observed that

'Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life.'

Jeremy Thorpe was to have experience in sacrificing friends' lives for his own political career, or trying to do so. Thorpe found he was a lot more brutal than Supermac.