Harold Macmillan

Good all-rounder In our specialised world good all-rounders are getting rarer. To rise to the highest office in the land you have to tick more boxes than most. Harold Macmillan (1894-1986) ticked boxes in the worlds of the university, commerce, the military and religion. His politics were liberal yet conservative, rebel yet loyalist. He was a crofter’s great-grandson yet his father-in-law was a Duke. Possessing all these qualities guarantees personal complexity and an interesting biography. My own interest in Macmillan has been fueled by serving as parish priest of St Giles, Horsted Keynes where he’s buried and by reading D.R.Thorpe’s Supermac (2010) and Charles Williams’ 2009 biography. Anglocatholicism My interest in Macmillan is fuelled by having a similar shade of Christian conviction. He held to an Anglo Catholicism true to the understanding of the Church of England as ‘the ancient church of this land, catholic and reformed’. Tempted in his youth towards Roman Catholicism