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Macmillan constantly polishes and practices his speeches, to achieve what Churchill calls "calculated improvisation." When a happy phrase occurs to him, he jots it down for use later—a process he calls "hatching eggs"—and deposits it in what he calls "the eggbox." When composing a speech for Commons, he often fishes out an appropriate sentence and uses it. He reads prodigiously, found time last summer between official papers to read all of George Eliot, Lucretius (in Latin), several Trollope novels, and Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir in French. (In Flanders, wounded and pinned down in a shell hole, he had whiled away the time by reading a volume of Aeschylus in the original Greek.) Weekends, he repairs to his big, sprawling house in Sussex, where he gets in some shooting and presides over the large-scale family gatherings. He has one son, an M.P., three daughters (one of them married to another M.P., angry Suez Rebel Julian Amery), and ten grandchildren.
As he took over as Her Majesty's First Minister last week, Macmillan was greeted with relief, but no wild acclaim. The Tories themselves seemed chiefly relieved that an open split had been avoided. "At least he will do a better job of holding the party together than Butler could," said one ex-minister. Said former Party Chairman Lord Woolton: "Macmillan is tougher." The London Times, conceding that he was "essentially a man of good will," regretted that "he is generally believed to stand on the right half of the party." The Manchester Guardian grumbled that "a greater change of leadership would have been preferable." "Almost the worst Prime Minister possible from the national point of view," growled the Laborite Daily Herald, which might also be read as grudging acknowledgment of a formidable opponent. From Harvard, where he was lecturing, Labor Leader Hugh Gaitskell demanded an immediate general election, and on his instructions, the Labor Party began a foolish outcry that the Queen had somehow been put upon in her choice.
After formally clearing his new Cabinet with the Queen, Macmillan made it public. Selwyn Lloyd, as much tarred as Eden with the diplomatic evasions of Suez, remained as Foreign Secretary, at least for a while: removing him now might be taken as a victory for Nasser. Rab Butler, the man who had lost out, stayed on as Lord Privy Seal (a job with no important duties), and became as well Home Secretary, a post equivalent to Secretary of the Interior. To a reporter he confided: "It was a very close thing—closer than many people imagined—but let us say that the best man won. Those who missed the bus must resign themselves to walking. It would be foolish to pretend that I was not disappointed by the Queen's decision . . . I am still comparatively young." Two even younger men who got top promotions were: Peter Thorneycroft, 47, who succeeded Macmillan at the Treasury, and Winston Churchill's son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, 48, who became Defense Minister in place of a Suez casualty, Antony Head. Most people had expected, and hoped for, more sweeping changes.