On This Day: Seven Cabinet ministers sacked in ‘Night of the Long Knives’

JULY 13, 1962: Prime Minister Harold Macmillan sacked seven Cabinet ministers – including his Chancellor - in the biggest ever government reshuffle on this day in 1962.

The purge was so radical that the press mockingly called it the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ after Adolf Hitler's brutal move against Ernst Rohm’s SA brownshirts.

The usually mild-mannered Macmillan made move over fears that his Conservative party was in meltdown after 11 years in government and the economy now ailing.

The Tories had also lost several by-elections and his Cabinet – entirely composed of ageing, former public schoolboys – looked out of touch in a rapidly changing Britain.

So, with just two years to before an election had to be called, he tried to modernise his party by reducing the average age of seven ministers from 59 to 50.

Furthermore, he used the reshuffle to finally rid the National Liberal Party – a Tory-supporting Liberal splinter group - from Government.

In this vain he got rid of John Clay as Secretary of State of Scotland and Charles Hill, the Minister of Housing and Local Government.

They were replaced with rising stars Michael Noble and Keith Joseph, who became one of Margaret Thatcher’s closest advisors and helped shift the party to the right.

In defence, Harold Watkinson was replaced with Peter Thorneycroft, another strident supporter of the radical Thatcherite economic policy of monetarism.

Sir Edward Boyle replaced David Eccles in Education, Bill Deedes took Lord Mills’s Minister without Portfolio brief and Lord Dilhorne came in for Lord Kilmuir as Lord Chancellor.

[On This Day: Margaret Thatcher vows to ban free school milk]

But Macmillan’s biggest scalp of the night was Selwyn Lloyd, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had been plotting against the Prime Minister.

He was replaced by Reginald Maudling, who when leaving office in 1964 left a note to his Labour successor: ‘Good luck, old cock... Sorry to leave it in such a mess.’

Ultimately, the reshuffle - planned for October but was splashed across the Daily Mail after Home Secretary Rab Butler accidently let slip to the proprietor - backfired.

Macmillan, who had formerly been known as Supermac after presiding over a period of prosperity after the 1956 Suez Crisis, was now nicknamed Mac the Knife.

Furthermore the old Etonian’s new ministers were still all public schoolboys during a time when the public were increasingly fed up of such elitism.

The final nail in his government’s coffin was the 1963 Profumo Affair between a Tory minister and a showgirl mistress of an alleged Soviet spy.

[On This Day: Backbench Tory MPs vote to end the party’s last coalition with the Liberals]

The public were appalled when Secretary of State for War John Profumo, a married Old Harrovian, admitted he lied to Parliament about his fling with Christine Keeler, a woman 27 years his junior.

Macmillan himself resigned shortly afterwards, as shown in a British Pathé newsreel.

Until then, trust in politicians had been relatively high – and the scandal marked a permanent sea change in attitudes.

Traditional deference to the upper classes had also been further eroded by the affair and added more momentum to a 1960s social revolution that was already underway.

Indeed, after the 1964 election of Labour’s Harold Wilson, a Yorkshire grammar schoolboy, few believed another public schoolboy would ever again be PM.

[On This Day: Ruth Ellis is the last woman to be hanged in Britain]

Wilson’s administration in a raft of social changes such as abolishing the death penalty, legalising abortions and decriminalising homosexuality.

And for the next 33 years – until Tony Blair’s election - both Labour and Tory premiers were all educated at state schools.