You’ve never had it so good

The expression ‘You’ve never had it so good’ was made popular by Harold Macmillan, who was British Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, who obtained it from a US political slogan.

In 1957, Macmillan made a speech in Bedford, UK to his fellow Conservatives, in which he offered the opinion that:

“Let us be frank about it: most of our people have never had it so good”.

In the speech he celebrated the success of Britain’s post-war economy while at the same time urging wage restraint and warning against inflation. He was mimicking the line of the US Democratic Party which used ‘You never had it so good’ as a slogan in the 1952 US election campaign. That slogan may have been picked up from popular idiomatic usage in the US, as this piece from the US newspaper The Sunday Morning Star, September 1945 indicates:

We used to have a little joke in the Army, when GIs were griping, “What are you complaining about? You never had it so good in your life.”

The line remains one of the few things that many British people now remember of Macmillan.