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By morning, that tacitly agreed decision was conveyed to the Tory leaders by means and methods that are beyond any outsider's comprehension: at that moment London newspapers were still proclaiming Butler the probable choice.
The Phone Call. The Queen summoned only two men to advise her. First was Lord Salisbury, 62, widely regarded as the ablest Tory of them all, but disbarred from becoming Prime Minister by the unwritten 20th century understanding that he must be a member of the House of Commons. Next came Sir Winston Churchill himself. Both are longtime friends of Macmillan but only colleagues of Butler. Both, presumably, advised her to call Macmillan. But neither could have tendered that advice if the Tory Party had not reached its mysterious concurrence in the course of the long night. And what if the Queen had preferred Butler? It would have been necessary for someone to tell her, as Melbourne told Victoria, that she risked having a government formed against her known wishes.
All morning long, Butler and Macmillan worked at their desks as usual, each waiting for the fateful phone call summoning him to Buckingham Palace. At 1:30 widower Butler went home to a lonely lunch. A few moments later the phone rang in 11 Downing Street, official residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Macmillan rushed off to "kiss hands upon his appointment."
The New Man. Britain's new Prime Minister has the elegance of an aristocrat, the literacy of a scholar, the drive of an executive. His oratorical gestures are as widely expansive as his mustache, his eyes are hound-dog sad, but his wit is quick and cheerfully malicious.
He is proud that his grandfather was a Scottish crofter, or tenant farmer (he keeps a picture of the croft on his desk). In 1843 grandfather left his farm on the barren Isle of Arran and walked to London, there founded the famed publishing house, Macmillan & Co. Ltd. Macmillan's mother was an American girl, Helen Belles, from Spencer, Ind.,* who met his father when she, recently widowed, had gone to Paris to study singing and he to study music. Young Harold won scholarships to Eton and Oxford, where he was secretary of the Oxford Union and hailed by the undergraduate paper as "quite the most polished orator in the union—perhaps just a little too polished."
Called from his studies by World War I, Macmillan served gallantly in the Grenadier Guards, was wounded three times. After the war he served long enough as aide to the Duke of Devonshire, then Canada's Governor General, to meet and marry his daughter. Lady Dorothy Cavendish. Through his marriage, Macmillan acquired links with one of the few remaining great families which (as left-wing politicians like to say) "control the Tory Party." His wife's brother married a sister of Lord Salisbury, a member of the great Cecil family who have been advisers and ministers to Britain's Kings since the first Elizabeth. Through these connections, Macmillan is related to at least 200 members of the ruling class—in Commons, the Lords, and the higher reaches of the civil and foreign services.