243. Sex, spies and a slippery slope

Last time we looked at the continuing disintegration of the British Empire. In this episode we look at two other key aspects of Macmillan’s foreign policy, Britain’s relations with the US and with potential European partners.

Towards the US, what the experience confirmed is Britain’s declining influence and its increasing dependence on, and even subordination to, American policies. Towards Europe, Britain became directly hostile towards the European Economic Community (EEC), trying to build a rival to it in the European Free Trade Area (EFTA). As it became increasingly clear that this was never going to really fly, and as the British economy weakened, Macmillan found himself having to swallow his pride, reverse his position and apply for membership of the EEC after all. To the government’s shock, the perception of Britain as increasingly dominated by the United States led to the French president, Charles de Gaulle – never an Anglophile and now increasingly mistrustful – applying the French veto to British accession.

To top all that, Macmillan’s increasingly battered and unpopular government was further hit by a series of three scandals: John Vassal was found to be an Admiralty employee spying for the Soviet Union; Kim Philby who Macmillan had backed against suspicions that he was a Soviet spy confirmed that he actually was by defecting to Moscow; and the scandal around Christine Keeler and the Secretary of State for War, John Profumo, did even further damage to the government’s credibility.

By October, Macmillan could stand it no longer and, genuinely not well, he decided to resign as Prime Minister on health grounds.

This episode runs a little longer than most, because it also mentions the new German translation of the podcast. It’s available at:

https://open.spotify.com/show/08M357CvtiWJsnEGyxitco?si=64613c2919df4a27

Illustration: Christine Keeler 1963, photograph by Lewis Morley. Keeler claimed that she wasn’t actually naked. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London/Lewis Morley

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License