Monday 13 July 2015

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

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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.

3 comments:

  1. Not a little local difficulty...

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  2. Harold Macmillan was a good talker - but a bad Prime Minister. The 1960s really started when he became Prime Minister - obessed with the short term, filled with "ironic" contempt for sound principles, nodding at every fad and fashion...... A fake conservative - not really a conservative at all.
    Paul

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    Replies
    1. A Whig. Semi-socialist as he admitted. His family were Liberal Unionists.

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