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Harold MacMillan’s second term as Prime Minister had been marked by a series of policy failings. A series of wage freezes imposed in 1961 by the Chancellor Selwyn Lloyd made the government unpopular and saw them lose a number of by-elections in March 1962. Fearing his own position, MacMillan sacked eight ministers, including Selwyn Lloyd, in a major cabinet reshuffle in July 1962. It was seen as an act of panic and self-preservation and by December, the ageing MacMillan had become increasingly isolated by his party and within a year he would resign and retire from politics.
In Illingworth’s cartoon, Macmillan sits ‘semi-detached’, seemingly awaiting retirement, and struggling to ‘keep up with the Joneses’ – the superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union – as tensions rose over the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. The profile portrait behind him symbolises the large-scale decolonisation of Africa that took place during MacMillan’s Premiership, following his famous ‘winds of change’ speech in Cape Town in 1960. The ‘nuclear plant’ in the corner is a reminder of the fire at the Windscale Nuclear facility, the worst nuclear accident in the UK’s history which took place in October 1957.
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