I KEEP THINKING it is time someone really turned over ‘the posthumous reputation of Harold Macmillan, but when books like this appear by his own hand I realise that such an exercise is hardly necessary. Macmillan already has his own monument in the six self-regarding, pompous and fraudulent volumes of memoirs he published in the decade after his resignation from the prime ministership in 1963. There is also Alistair Horne’s painstaking and serious two-volume official biography from the late 1980s, written before all the papers from the period of his highest office were available. But in these diaries, we see what a truly ghastly, deceitfd and nasty old man ‘Supermac’ really was.

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