Politics & Power Quote by Harold MacMillan

Macmillan’s line is pure patrician defiance dressed up as a dirty joke. “Determined” signals not just resolve but a premise: that government should fall only to matters of state, not to the tabloid-grade sabotage of sex and scandal. The phrase “two tarts” does two things at once. It cheapens the threat by reducing it to punchline material, and it quietly blames the women rather than the men whose behavior created the vulnerability in the first place. That’s not an accident; it’s a rhetorical containment strategy. If the crisis can be framed as farce, it can be managed as farce.

The context is the early-1960s tremor running through British public life as deference began to crack. The Profumo affair didn’t merely expose an extramarital relationship; it exposed the security-state anxieties of the Cold War, the hypocrisy of a governing class, and the growing power of mass media to convert private misconduct into public legitimacy crises. Macmillan is trying to hold the old line: institutions are supposed to be sturdier than gossip.

The subtext is more revealing than the quip. He’s asserting that the state has its own dignity, separate from the moral lapses of its stewards, even as those lapses prove the opposite. The coarseness of “tarts” also functions as class shorthand: a man educated in restraint reaching for blunt slang to show he’s not shocked, not shaken, not about to surrender the keys of government to what he wants the public to see as low-life melodrama. That posture couldn’t survive the new era, but you can hear him trying to out-stiff-upper-lip the headline.