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James R Brennan, Duncan Sandys and the Informal Politics of Britain’s Late Decolonisation. By Peter Brooke, Twentieth Century British History, Volume 31, Issue 2, June 2020, Pages 277–279, https://doi.org/10.1093/tcbh/hwz025
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Duncan Sandys was the last of Harold Macmillan’s four Colonial Secretaries who oversaw the dismantling of Britain’s postwar empire and also the last to receive serious biographical study. Philip Murphy’s biography of Alan Lennox-Boyd (1955–9) portrays a Colonial Secretary conservative by disposition but deferential to the political judgments of his Governors, who recommended trading constitutional power to nationalist leaders as the best means to retain control. Following colonial scandals in Kenya and Nyasaland in 1959, the pace of decolonization accelerated under Ian Macleod (1959–61) and Reginald Maudling (1961–62), both of whom, unlike Lennox-Boyd, had embraced the ideological case for decolonization. Where Lennox-Boyd had happily accepted the Colonial Office as the summit of his political career, Robert Shepherd and Lewis Baston show in their respective biographies that the job was very much a stepping stone for Macleod and Maudling, two liberal Tories whose quests for party leadership were undercut by Macleod’s tragic premature death and Maudling’s sad dissolution by corruption and drink. By the time Duncan Sandys (1962–64) was appointed Colonial Secretary, only a handful of difficult cases remained—Kenya, the Central African Federation, and Southern Arabia most prominently. An effective bureaucratic brawler and hatchet man, Sandys continued the government’s frenetic pace of decolonization, overseeing Kenya’s independence and the dismantling of the Central African Federation. Yet Sandys’ appointment was paradoxical—unlike Macleod and Maudling, he was among the strongest ideological objectors to decolonization and would freely express and pursue these objections once out of office.
