Harold Macmillan's First Carlton Lecture (1982)

Private members’ clubs tend to be, well, private. They generally shun publicity around their proceedings. They have often been particularly suspicious of any filming inside their buildings. As I recently highlighted, the 1956 film The Man Who Never Was appears to be the first time that film cameras were allowed inside a London club - and then no further than the front lobby. Financial difficulties in 1960s and 1970s Clubland brought some loosening of these restrictions, with clubs being made available for filming locations and photoshoots - but these typically involved private bookings when a clubhouse was shut over the weekend, rather than any insight into weekly club life.

This makes the following all the rarer: a video of a major club event, from 1982. For the Carlton Club’s 150th anniversary celebration, the Club’s president - former prime minister Harold Macmillan - was invited to deliver the first Carlton Lecture. The video of this event was publicly shared a few days ago by the ITN Archive, and can be watched in its entirety by clicking below.

This lecture was something of a throwback to when private clubs saw themselves as playing a public role, as was common in the 19th century, hosting press lunches and briefings, with a sense of occasion.

The talk was given in what is now the Churchill Room, at the rear of the ground floor of the Carlton Club. Macmillan’s successor as prime minister, Lord Home of the Hirsel, and Telegraph editor Bill Deedes, can be seen in the audience. For ITN’s coverage, Macmillan was interviewed after the lecture by Alastair Burnet, in the Club’s then-library.

The video forms an important historical document, capturing Macmillan’s own blend of One Nation Toryism, Keynesianism and Whig history.

Macmillan was an actor of no mean ability, and he played no part more fully or with more aplomb than his Edwardian public persona; part politician and part publisher. And the performance was classic Macmillan: an extremely dated (even at the time), patrician delivery of a message which remains controversial and surprisingly timely. He covered the crises of his own lifetime, including world wars, recessions, the challenges of demagoguery, the breakup of old balances of power, and the partitioning of the world through international conferences.

Most surprising to modern ears are Macmillan’s views on Europe, which are hard to imagine hearing from most of his successors:

“The Western world has not made the progress we dreamed of when I was young. The united Europe has not been what we meant it to be. One of the tragedies of history was that Churchill, who was almost the founder of European thought, was unable, in his second administration, to put England in the position of taking the lead. When we could have moulded and created the machinery of Europe as one of its founders he held back, partly because of old age and weakness, partly because of the opposition of nearly all his colleagues and, I am bound to say, of all what is called ‘expert opinion’…

“The tragedy is, therefore, that Europe has not come into being. It is a society which has useful purposes but it has not become what we dreamed it to be: a confederation of the civilised powers of Europe that remain - with a single military policy, a single foreign policy and a single monetary policy. That would have been a real counter-balance to the powers with which we are faced. And that has not happened…

“[Detente with Russia] ought to be revived, but it cannot be unless we on our side are equally powerful politically; until Europe has been made into the organisation that we dreamed, not necessarily a federal system but a confederation which will be united upon the only things that matter: military policy, foreign policy and monetary policy. Instead we have drifted on - and not so badly. But the warnings are there.”

Macmillan had a propensity for delivering surprisingly radical and controversial messages in a traditional, reassuring style; and with his slow, deliberate delivery, and the occasional twinkle in his eye, the 88-year-old former prime minister, born in the Victorian era and three times wounded in World War I, was able to say things to his audience that few others in the 1980s would have been able to say.

The talk - entitled ‘Civilisation Under Threat’ - was published the following year, as an appendix of Barry Phelps’ history of the Carlton Club, Power and the Party: A History of the Carlton Club, 1832-1982.

The Carlton Lecture itself ran to four more instalments. The second lecture was delivered in 1984 by Margaret Thatcher, the third in 1986 by Lord Home, the fourth in 1987 by Lord Hailsham, and the fifth and (so far) final one in 1995 by John Major. Each offered their own perspective on a different kind of conservatism. This was only fitting, for as the introduction to Phelps’ history of the Carlton begins:

“The Carlton Club is a political club or it is nothing. Politics and the Conservative Party are its raisons d'être.”

You can read the full and varied backlog of Clubland Substack articles, by visiting https://clubland.substack.com/archive