Having It So Good, by Peter Hennessy

Unexploded British bombs

The Fifties were a turning-point at which British history refused to turn. The economy needed overhauling, the "great power" posture was out of date. But industrial change was evaded by mass consumerism, while Britain pressed on with nuclear weaponry. Crucial decisions - on joining Europe, decolonisation, immigration and Northern Ireland, capital punishment and decriminalising homosexuality - were deferred. Women got nothing (the only woman discussed here is the Queen). People cherished Fifties comfort after post-war austerity. The Labour party looked back, unavailingly, on "13 wasted years".

Peter Hennessy is the perfect chronicler of this decade, combining nostalgic patriotism with subtle subversiveness. He has written an engaging, memorable book. The journalist's eye for detail (Dad's Finchley allotment, London smog, the Goons) goes alongside profound scholarship. He also unveils the civil servants. They are perhaps his heroes: Robert Hall, "Otto" Clarke, Sir Frank Lee, Harold Shergold, the man who revamped MI5, crowd into his bureaucratic Valhalla. Oliver Franks, mandarin extraordinary, is different, calling for a managerial civil service. It never came. All other scholars are hugely in Hennessy's debt for making contemporary history possible, and even fun.

Tory governments sought to modernise industry without sacrificing the post-war "New Deal" of the welfare state and full employment. There were two pivotal moments. Butler's Robot scheme in early 1952 sought to float the pound and "let the reserves take the strain", but was rejected in favour of sustaining a welfare democracy. The second, in January 1958, saw the Chancellor, Thorneycroft, and his ministers cast out when they demonstrated we were living beyond our means. Consensus and social peace prevailed.

David Eccles's campaign for technical education was a rare novelty. Reform was crushed by the dead weight of social class, bred in the public schools and Oxbridge. Even in cricket, an integrating sport, "Gentlemen" bowled to "Players" at Lord's.

Overseas, the problem was propping up "great power" status. The Foreign Office agonised over whether Churchill's "triangulation" (between the US alliance, Europe and the Commonwealth) still made sense. There was little modification until after the 1956 Suez invasion. Eden and Macmillan ignored constitutional convention in dismissing legal advice over Suez and environmental advice over the Windscale disaster.

After 1957, change was inescapable. Decolonisation speeded up under Iain Macleod. Even a commitment to join Europe - where Butler had been bored and ignorant, and Franks had argued before a male clubland audience the merits of mere "country membership" - was messily agreed. The cutting down of worldwide commitments, US pressure and the challenge of de Gaulle forced Macmillan into a reappraisal. By 1960 the Cabinet felt compelled to rein in the great-power impulse - though only partially since the "Union Jack option" on the Bomb was still maintained.

Our leaders were mired in deference, sexism and the cult of secrecy (this was the real "English disease"). From Churchill to Stanley Matthews, we were led by veterans. Yet the politicians had merits. Eden's premiership emerges with predictably little credit. But Churchill retained his golden glow. He was deteriorating mentally, unable to understand any economic proposition, averse to modern ideas. Yet the statesman's visionary gleam emerged over the Bomb's threat to humankind. His final meeting with Eisenhower was a deeply moving, if unavailing, attempt to convince the US of the need for disarmament talks.

The star of the show is Harold Macmillan, a compound of arrogance and angst, ruthless and sensitive, clear-eyed on the options ahead. Some lesser ministers are brilliantly highlighted - Heathcoat-Amory at the Treasury, Sandys at Defence, James Stuart, the Queen Mother's old boyfriend, at the Scottish Office. One surprising absentee is the cultured, progressive Tory Sir Edward Boyle. The Labour opposition gets short shrift - Gaitskell ticked off for obstinacy, Wilson a riddle wrapped in an enigma, the Bevanites ignored.

For Hennessy, the Fifties end with the decision on Europe in May 1960. For me, they finished during my year in New York, 1962-3. When I arrived, Macmillan was in command, British productions dominated Broadway; we played Greece to America's Rome. When I left, Britain seemed almost a joke country, of spies, train robberies and sex scandals, its geriatric Establishment shredded by satirists. A cultural chasm loomed between generations and genders; families and neighbourhoods dissolved.

In 1963, people looked back to Fifties equipoise. They thought it was all over. It is now.

Kenneth Morgan's life of Michael Foot is published by HarperCollins in March