The British Imperial Establishment, Post Imperial Era, and the ‘Churchillian’ World View, 1945-2016. (Adjustments & Challenges in Contemporary British Diplomatic Strategy)

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diplomatic experience. “As one anonymous verse writer put it during the 1945
loan
negotiations:

In
Washington Lord Halifax
Once whispered to Lord Keynes:
‘It’s true they have the money
bags,

But we have all the
brains.”39

Churchill also felt
that it was his duty to assist the Americans into “world
easement, America is very powerful but very
clumsy,”40 as he said on 28th April
1953.

Harold MacMillan, however, like Churchill, was half-American. He also
had established a close
relationship with Eisenhower during the war as the British
Minister Resident in Eisenhower’s
Mediterranean Allied Force Headquarters in
1943-44. Eisenhower bad trust in MacMillan’s “skill, his
insight, his intelligence,
his ability to handle complex issues and advise on them in a way in
which
Eisenhower had great confidence.”41 Eisenhower also
wanted to come to grips
with the political complexity of dealing with the allies and the Soviets.
Therefore,
MacMillan was the most suitable leading figure in the Conservative Party to
become the
Prime Minister and re-establish the transatlantic relationship which
had almost disintegrated during the
Suez Canal crisis.

Macmillan, his Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, and Lord Home, the
Secretary of State for
Commonwealth Relations, had long been troubled by the
threat from communism, which I have shown earlier
on in this chapter. Therefore,
like Churchill, MacMillan saw that a ‘special relationship with the
United States
was a necessity. Although Britain had the technology for developing both the
atomic
bomb and the hydrogen bomb, and had exploded them, she was financially
unable to keep up with the costs
involved in their military development. Fear of

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