Iain Macleod
Macleod met Evelyn Hester Mason, "née" Blois, (1915–1999) in September 1939 whilst he was waiting to be called up for army service and she interviewed him for a job as an ambulance driver. After her first husband was killed in the war, they married on 25 January 1941. The Macleods had a son and a daughter, Torquil and Diana, who were born in 1942 and 1944 respectively. They had a somewhat stormy marriage in which they retained a strong bond despite Macleod conducting a number of what his biographer describes as "romances" with other women (he quotes love letters written by Macleod but does not specifically say they went as far as sexual affairs). As was common for MPs' wives of the era, Eve looked after constituency matters whilst her husband concentrated on his career at Westminster.
Iain Macleod
After the "Spectator" article Macleod was censured by 15 votes to 14 (with 7 abstentions) by his local Conservative Association Executive Committee, but survived a No Confidence vote by 29 votes to 7. Peregrine Worsthorne attacked him as a social climber who had done his best to climb into the class at which he now sneered (e.g. by becoming a member of White's Club), but his biographer comments that a Conservative politician of that era had little option but to play the game by those social rules, and that Macleod had regarded himself as "commander class" since his time at Staff College during the war. Colleagues "cut" Macleod in the House of Commons after the article and the affair permanently damaged his chances of becoming leader. Macmillan later advised Home, if asked why the Conservatives could not find a Prime Minister in the Commons and had had to appoint a Lord, to retort that ""The Spectator"" could not find an editor from amongst the journalists' profession and had instead had to appoint Iain Macleod.