The Conservative Party Chairman, Quintin Hogg, Viscount Hailsham, was dressed as a commissionaire presiding over a "house full", while astonished members of the public, queuing for seats at the outrageous price of 12 shillings and sixpence, marvelled at the image of Supermac.
[4] The creation of Supermac reflected an age in which, following the austerity of the post-Second World War period and the débâcle of the Suez Crisis of 1956, Britain was enjoying increasing prosperity and a general upturn in the national mood.
Other examples of Macmillan's apparent air of confidence and "unflappability" (a characteristic frequently attributed to him during this period,[6] despite his apparent nervousness on big Parliamentary occasions[7]) included his reference in 1958 to the resignation of Chancellor of the Exchequer Peter Thorneycroft and two other Treasury Ministers, Nigel Birch and Enoch Powell, as "little local difficulties",[8] and his mocking promise during the 1959 general election campaign - "I challenge Mr Gaitskell [Labour opposition leader] to meet this one" - that it would rain on polling day.
[11] Similarly, although Macmillan told journalist Jocelyn Stevens in 1963 that he had three shooting suits and "rather like[d] them",[12] the "grouse-moor" image which had, only a few years earlier, been seen as "enhancing the backdrop of the Prime Minister's unflappability",[13] now seemed something of a liability.
Arguably the best remembered cartoon of that year (which the poet Philip Larkin famously identified as the one in which "sexual intercourse began"[15]) was Trog's in Private Eye showing Macmillan walking away with a ladder and a tin of paint from a wall on which had been emblazoned the words, "We've Never Had It So Often".