The Almost Impossible Ally By Peter Mangold

The Entente Cordiale with France, not the US "Special Relationship", has been Britain's most enduring alliance. During two world wars, France alone was Britain's chief ally from start to finish, with the US coming late each time. But the French connection usually meant conflict rather than cordiality. The high point came with Lloyd George and Clemenceau in 1918; three years later, Clemenceau denounced his wartime friend as an enemy of France. The monstrous egoisms of Churchill and de Gaulle made relations during the second war fraught indeed. There followed a sequence of disputes (ironically, the Suez conspiracy being one exception) from the 1969 "Soames affair" to finger-wagging confrontations between Chirac and Blair over Iraq.

A crucial relationship was that between Harold Macmillan and Charles de Gaulle, two complex, theatrical leaders with different visions of national greatness. Peter Mangold's absorbing study is admirably fair towards both primadonnas. He begins in North Africa in 1943, when Macmillan had a central role in resolving the leadership of the Free French groups.

De Gaulle faced immense problems - the suspicions of Churchill, the hostility of Roosevelt, rivalry with Giraud. His triumph and return home as national icon owed much to Macmillan's skills in handling the Americans. North Africa was almost a happy ending. It made Macmillan excessively optimistic about managing his "almost impossible" French associate. And it left de Gaulle deeply resentful of American ambitions.

The climax came after 1958, with de Gaulle as president and Macmillan as prime minister. The Suez débâcle had left Macmillan mending fences with the Americans at the expense of Europe. An unspoken gulf emerged between de Gaulle's grand design of national greatness - keeping the US at bay, preventing internal disintegration - and Macmillan's, of Britain as a bridge between the old world and new.

Row followed row: the Anglo-American invasion of Lebanon and Jordan; failed attempts to link the Common Market with the European Free Trade Area; arguments about defending West Berlin. Anglo-American diplomacy fatally alienated de Gaulle, who forged his own special relationship with the German Chancellor Adenauer.

In the Nassau conference, dominated by Macmillan's plea for America to renew the British nuclear deterrent, de Gaulle saw only a cosy Anglo-Saxon defence agreement after Macmillan had promised British nuclear aid for France's own force de frappe. De Gaulle's diplomacy during negotiations over British membership of the EEC was duplicitous. But his charge of British "allegiance to the Americans" could hardly be denied. Macmillan, who underestimated de Gaulle's anti-American obsessions, found Britain's application to join Europe humiliatingly rebuffed. Dean Acheson, accusing Britain of losing an empire and failing to find a role, danced on the ashes.

It was Britain's greatest postwar external defeat; Macmillan's historical reputation plunged. Mangold sees him as "outclassed". But how far it was a long-term French victory is debatable. De Gaulle's own departure in 1969 was as humiliating as Macmillan's. The vision of an integrated Europe dominated by France is disappearing.

But for Britain the outcome has been melancholy: damaging insistence on a non-independent deterrent, marginalisation in Europe, a strangling subordination to the Americans, with its ghastly legacy in Iraq. Macmillan and de Gaulle were visionaries, who both chose wrong options. De Gaulle famously quoted Edith Piaf, Ne Pleurez pas, Milord. His policy ended in tears - but without regrets.

Kenneth O Morgan, the biographer of Hardie and Callaghan, has completed his life of Michael Foot