This Sporting Life

R.W. Johnson

• Iain Macleod by Robert Shepherd
  Hutchinson, 608 pp, £25.00, November 1994, ISBN 0 09 178567 7

It was one of the most attractive aspects of Iain Macleod that he was not easily taken for a professional politician. After depressing his hard-working doctor father by getting a lower second at Cambridge, he was quickly sacked from his first job at De la Rue’s, mainly because he found it an almost impossible struggle to get to work in the morning after staying up into the wee hours playing bridge and poker at Crockfords. Sometimes he would have to write his father urgent letters asking him to bail him out of his card debts; but more often he won. He was earning £3 a week but sometimes won £100 at a sitting. After he got the sack he became a full-time card-player and, until war broke out, earned up to £2500 a year tax free (at a time when average male earnings were about £200 per annum). An international player, he and his friends sat up late into the night at a club in Acol Road in Hampstead, devising the Acol system – still the most widely used in the bridge world.