The 1963 Cabinet Papers / The Leadership Crisis: The Queen sent 'reviver' to sick Macmillan

A RARE handwritten note from the Queen to the Prime Minister at his time of personal and political crisis is among the documents.

Harold Macmillan, one of the Queen's favourite politicians, entered the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers already resigned to standing down because of the prostatic obstruction which had afflicted him just as he had resolved - after weeks of indecision - to stay on and lead the Tory party into the next election.

On 14 October 1963 - four days after the official announcement of his resignation - came the note from the Queen: 'My dear Prime Minister, I have just returned this morning from Scotland and I send you this small 'reviver' with all my good wishes for a speedy and complete recovery, and I hope it will make you feel much better] Yours sincerely, Elizabeth R'

Macmillan dictated an immediate reply, in the faintly Edwardian style at which he was so adept: 'Madam, Mr Macmillan with his humble duty to the Queen. I have been deeply touched by Your Majesty's kind messages in my illness. Today I received Your Majesty's reviver which encourages me to think I am on the way to recovery. I must confess that I have been in much pain from time to time but I have been comforted by the knowledge that I have been in your thoughts. Indeed I am very conscious of the consideration which Your Majesty has always extended to Your Majesty's faithful and devoted servant.'

We would not know what the coyly-described 'reviver' was if it had not been for Macmillan's faithful private secretary, Tim Bligh, perhaps with the release of the correspondence 30 years later in mind, scrawling the word 'champagne' in the margin of the carbon copy of his master's reply. But the warm friendship between the Queen and her first minister, Macmillan, highlighted again four days later when the Queen visited him at the hospital, and talked for the last time with him before he stepped down, cannot eclipse the emotional and political agony that Macmillan suffered when he realised that illness was robbing him of office.

The newly-disclosed records throw a new light on the account given of the fateful evening of 8 October by Harold Evans, his press secretary, and quoted in Alistair Horne's official biography. Evans, having to draft the announcement that Macmillan was going into hospital, asked him bluntly whether he should say the Prime Minister was going to resign. 'Of course I am finished,' Evans quotes him as saying. 'Perhaps I shall die. You can say that is quite clear that I shall be unable to fight the election.'

Yet the new records show how deep was the turmoil in the mind of Macmillan and his closest officials. There are, for example, five separate drafts of the Foreign Office guidance telegram for dispatch to overseas embassies. In one, a sentence recalling the Prime Minister's stated view that he 'will continue in office if he feels that to do so would be in the best interests of the country' is excised.

In the end, a press release at 9.50pm on 8 October made no mention of resignation. The 'notes to editors' said: 'The decision about the future must now depend on the outcome of the operation.' The announcement was made two days later by Lord Home at Blackpool, and it plunged the Tory conference into pandemonium.

(Photograph omitted)