The contest would end sadly for both leaders. Through significant diplomatic skill, Macmillan carried his party only to lose to a more formidable foe: President Charles de Gaulle had no wish to see Britain join the six members of the EEC. De Gaulle let the whole application process play out in public and then, as Macmillan always feared, said non. The French president offered a calculated insult, announcing his veto of British membership at an Élysée press conference while standing next to American President John F. Kennedy, and thus enlisting the world’s media and Corps Diplomatique as witnesses.

The Big Freeze bites: Piccadilly Circus, New Year's Eve, 1962

In Winds of Change: Britain in the early sixties, Peter Hennessy counts the cost. De Gaulle’s decision, he argues, ‘deprived Harold Macmillan of his place in the very top flight of British prime ministers’. Supermac was close to tears when the news broke. Such is the detail in this new 600-page history of Britain between 1960 and 1964 that we are treated to cabinet minutes as Macmillan inched his way toward Conservative agreement and then to extended extracts from De Gaulle’s media conference. Britain, declared the president, has ‘in all her work, very original habits and traditions … In short, the nature, structure, circumstances peculiar to England, are different from those of the other continentals.’ The account concludes with Macmillan’s private diary entry; his pen ‘scorched the page’, says Hennessy, as Supermac recorded his anger and bitterness at being denied this long-term goal for his premiership.

Soon, speculation began about how long the sixty-nine-year-old Macmillan could remain in the role. The prime minister equivocated between leaving a successor plenty of time before the next election and staying to steer Britain through the difficulties of currency crises, Rhodesia, ministerial scandals, and the insurmountable challenge of reviving growth in a listless British economy. Within a year of his defeat in Paris, Macmillan would be forced from office by a combination of illness and Conservative Party nervousness.

Hugh Gaitskell too would not survive long the debate about Britain and Europe. Gaitskell’s health was failing before the Labour conference, and his warning about the loss of British independence would prove his last major public statement. Four days after de Gaulle’s veto, Gaitskill died at the age of just fifty-six of an autoimmune disease at Middlesex Hospital. It would be Harold Wilson who led Labour to a narrow victory over Macmillan’s successor, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, in the general election of 15 October 1964; and Wilson who overturned Labour policy and applied for EEC membership, finally achieved in 1973, during Edward Heath’s Conservative premiership.

Winds of Change is traditional state history superbly done. Hennessy, doyen of British political journalism, moves readers through the many layers of his subject, a Britain struggling to define its role in the world as it shed colonies and suffered economic eclipse. The contemporary resonances are hard to miss – not just the central narrative about Europe but concerns about immigration, debates about Polaris missiles and Britain’s future as a nuclear power, and changing mores about sex, media, deference, and social mobility.

Hennessy locates himself in this grand narrative: a schoolboy through the Macmillan years, watching his peers seek places in the new universities then opening across England.

Popular culture intrudes occasionally – The Beatles make a cursory appearance, television ownership spreads through the land, Private Eye begins publication, and, inevitably, Philip Larkin is quoted on 1963. But this is, unapologetically, a political history. Hennessy tells a story of slow political transformation toward a meritocratic Britain. He drifts from the topic only when recounting his childhood love of trains. Hennessy recalls the snowy winter of 1962–63 as the Greater Western Class 2800 engines would ‘steam past the playing fields of Marling School’ where he was a student. The political reporter can describe vicious political coups and humiliating ministerial disgrace with equanimity, but his sadness when the elegant A4 steam locomotives stop running is hard to miss.

Winds of Change includes evocative photos, from Enoch Powell on a pogo stick to extol the virtue of exercise to Bertrand Russell at a disarmament march in Trafalgar Square. Perhaps the most telling image is Harold Macmillan, uncomfortable in the back of an open-top limousine during a visit to Florida, sitting next to a youthful John Kennedy, the embodiment of American power and prestige. When a year later the world came close to nuclear war over Cuba, Britain would be consulted but remain largely irrelevant in the tense negotiations that followed. Its time was past. Macmillan, with a lifetime of international and military experience, could only watch like the rest of the world, and hope that neither Kennedy nor Khrushchev made a fatal miscalculation. Then, with a sigh, he had to turn back to the irresolvable economic crisis that underscored every moment of his administration. As Supermac put it simply in a private note to the queen, ‘as always, one never seems to have enough money’.

Winds of Change is a cogent and compelling account of just four years in the making of modern Britain, 1960 to 1964. To convey Britain’s story, Peter Hennessy draws on archives and contacts, personal encounter with players, and a journalist’s eye for the small detail. He looks ahead, too, noting the first signs of collapse in the Keynesian consensus, and the rise of Margaret Thatcher, a young MP from Grantham who, as prime minister, would turn over much of the policy architecture that Macmillan embraced.

In this third volume of Hennessy’s series on postwar Britain, we see again how the past shapes the present. As Macmillan steered Britain toward Europe, he opened only the first chapter of a long-unresolved debate. We may yet test Supermac’s private hypothesis that Britain has no future without Europe.