At the Conservative Party Conference, which took place in Brighton shortly after the reshuffle, Macleod made a farewell speech, which, according to DR Thorpe, was seen by his supporters as the greatest of his career. He ended by quoting Robert Burns’ A Man's A Man For A' That:
Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.
When Macleod’s successor at the Colonial Office, Reginald Maudling, first met his officials shortly afterwards, he said, “‘I suppose I’m looking at a lot of people who believe in the ‘brotherhood of man’”.
Obviously the idea of brotherhood, particularly between Black & White, between African & European, carried particular potency at the time.
In September 1962, as reported in NY Journal-American, Martin Luther King gave his reassurance that he wanted the white man to be his brother, not his brother-in-law, that civil rights were not the same thing as miscegenation.
No wonder that a quotation from a probably not-very-distinguished British political novel of the same era, in which a rising Conservative star puts a block on his career by remarking to a fellow dinner guest 'I said I wanted the African to be my brother, not my brother in law' sticks so firmly in my memory bank.
