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As Macleod explains it, there was another Neville Chamberlain who "seemed utterly different from the public image which all but his friends seemed to accept." As a humanitarian industrialist, the progressive Lord Mayor of Birmingham and a dedicated Minister of Health who was damned as a "Tory socialist," Chamberlain had worked tirelessly in the '205 and '305 for the "noble and fascinating ideal" of fashioning a better life for Britain's workingman. This is the side of Chamberlain that particularly appeals to his biographer (who never met him). Far more than any other postwar Tory—like Chamberlain, he hates being called a Conservative—Iain Macleod has fulfilled his hero's aim of giving the party a heart and conscience. But as eminent Oxford Historian Robert Blake pointed out last week: "When national security is at stake, one does not judge a statesman by his successes in slum clearance."
Ill-Timed Apologia. Literary and historical critics aside, some politicians believe that, by the obscure barometer of Tory careermanship, Iain Macleod's political prospects have taken a dip as a result of the book. Politicos fault him for publishing an apologia for appeasement at a time when the voice of appeasement is again being heard in Britain. A more damaging criticism is that, instead of rehabilitating a hero, he has merely disinterred a ghost whose miasmal presence still haunts the Conservative Party.
After Sir Harold Nicolson, Labor-lining author and onetime Foreign Office staffer, had accused the Tories of "cruelty, indifference, selfishness," Iain Macleod retorted in the Observer last week: "I don't know why people like him don't realize that if ever their picture of the Tory Party had any truth in it, it's now hopelessly out of date." Once an "upper-class" party, it has undergone "a strengthening of the center." Said Macleod: "Those who want to be empirical and rational, see the virtue of avoiding extremes, and want to discuss everything in moderate temper in the hope of coming to common ground, are becoming more and more influential. We are the only party that looks at things as they really are."