Harold Macmillan became Prime Minister 60 years ago on 10 January 1957. TMS, the daily diary column published in The Times, marked the anniversary with a light-hearted piece about an evening visit to the Turf Club where Ted Heath, then Chief Whip, was the new Prime Minister’s guest for dinner.
They hoped they would be undetected by the press. But, as Macmillan recalled in his memoirs, “unhappily, the news was obtained by some source or another, and as we came out our way was barred by all the usual paraphernalia of press and television, to which I had not yet become accustomed”. There was great interest in what they had had for dinner. An inaccurate report got into circulation, and was repeated by TMS. On 12 January Patrick Kidd, author of the TMS piece, corrected the mistake:
“I wrote on Monday about it being 60 years since Harold Macmillan became prime minister and that he spent his first night in charge dining on oysters at the Turf Club, which I found in a biography. Lord Lexden, the historian, says that Supermac’s memoirs note that it was game pie. He chose the Turf because it was so uninterested in politics. Indeed, when he walked into the club as the new prime minister the first thing a member said to him was: ‘Had any good shooting lately?’ “