Sir Alec Douglas-Home had a brief and undistinguished
ministry in 1963-4 as Prime Minister of Britain wedged between that of Tory
Harold MacMillan and Labour’s Harold Wilson. He did much better in his two periods
as Foreign Secretary and his career sheds some light on the tortured history of
Unionism in Scotland.
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| Sir Alec Douglas-Home |
Early Political Experience and Inheritance
Alec Douglas-Home (1903-95) was the eldest son of the 13th
Earl of Home, a Scottish aristocratic family with estates in and around
Coldstream, Berwickshire. Educated at Eton and Christ
Church, Oxford, his most obvious talent was skill at
cricket. Alec was influenced by the Unionist (Scottish Tory) intellectual Noel
Skelton - an early advocate of a “property-owning democracy” - to enter
parliament and Alec did so as member for Lanark in the National Government
landslide of 1931, known then by his courtesy title Lord Dunglass. He became
the modest Parliamentary Private Secretary to Skelton at the Scottish Office,
learning the ropes of government, but moved upwards to be PPS to Neville
Chamberlain in 1936, then Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Neville Chamberlain retained Dunglass as his PPS when he
became Prime Minister in 1937 on Baldwin’s
retirement. Dunglass was helpful to Chamberlain, who was a distant and
unsociable character, by sedulously promoting his master’s policies and views
to back-benchers. He accompanied Chamberlain to his fateful third meeting with
Hitler in Munich
in 1938, advising him against making grandiose claims: despite this,
Chamberlain returned claiming “Peace in our Time” and waving his piece of paper
signed by Hitler, all soon to be shown worthless.
Dunglass somehow avoided being tarred as a “man of Munich” as was for example Rab Butler, but always claimed Munich gave Britain a vital extra year to
prepare for war. When war broke out Dunglass was soon diagnosed with a
tubercular spine and was hospitalised for a lengthy period, reading voraciously
and not returning to the Commons until 1943. He spoke from the back-benches on
foreign affairs, particularly warning about Soviet ambitions, and sufficiently
impressed his party to become briefly an undersecretary at the Foreign Office
under Eden in
Churchill’s caretaker government of 1945.
Dunglass lost his seat at Lanark when Labour swept into
power in the1945 election. He surprisingly regained it in 1950 but his father
died in 1951 and Dunglass became the 14th Earl of Home with a seat
in the House of Lords. One might have expected his political career to have effectively
ended.
The Unionist Party of Scotland
The party which Dunglass, by some measure anachronistic, had
represented in Parliament was becoming an anachronism itself although it
reached its apogee in the 1955 election holding 36 of the 71 Scottish seats.
The Unionists were in origin an alliance of the old minority Scottish Tories
and those Liberals who opposed Home Rule for Ireland in 1886. They were
enthusiasts for the integrity of the United
Kingdom and Ireland
and for the growth of the British Empire. The
word “Conservative” was always avoided, as it was too English in its
connotations while Scotland
had a strong Liberal tradition. The Unionists were independent constitutionally
but in practice took the Conservative whip at Westminster.
The Unionists were champions of Protestantism, gaining much
support from Presbyterian Church of Scotland members and from working-class
people fearful of losing their jobs to Irish immigrants. There was a sectarian
aspect to Unionism including sympathy for the Orange Order. However by the
1950s and 1960s the Empire was visibly crumbling and religious passions were
largely spent. The Unionists steadily lost seats, often to the SNP and
Liberals. In 1967 the Unionists were absorbed by the Conservatives but Scotland
was not enchanted by Heath, Thatcher or Major and Conservative support
nose-dived leaving the party with a feeble single MP.
Leadership of the Unionists came from a very narrow social
base, largely anglicised Episcopalian (the church of a small minority), upper
class landowners. There was a thicket of toffs with double-barrelled names –
Sir Colin Thornton-Kemsley, Sir Alick Buchanan-Smith, Patrick Wolridge-Gordon,
Jock Bruce-Gardyne, clever but disreputable Sir Robert Boothby or Lady
Tweedsmuir, whose idea of meeting the people of Aberdeen South was touring its
housing estates in a slow-moving Rolls-Royce and waving a gloved hand to the
plebs from the back seat! Too late, the Conservatives backed ordinary (if
confrontational) candidates like Teddy Taylor. All this added to the
off-putting toothy and chinless grouse-moor image of the Scottish Tories of
which Sir Alec was a prize specimen.
Promotion to Cabinet and Foreign Secretary
Home however did not fade away in the House of Lords. He was
appointed a Minister of State in the Scottish Office in 1951 serving under the
powerful Unionist grandee James Stuart, a one-time serious suitor for Elizabeth
Bowes-Lyon, later George VI’s Queen and Mother of the present Queen. When Eden succeeded Churchill in 1955 Home entered the cabinet
becoming Commonwealth Secretary and had to keep the organisation together after
the sharp disagreements over Eden’s failed Suez invasion. MacMillan
kept Home at the Commonwealth Office and when Lord Salisbury resigned in 1958
over the return from exile of Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus,
Home added Salisbury’s
portfolios to his own becoming Leader of the House of Lords and a central
figure in the government. When in 1960, MacMillan wanted to appoint Selwyn
Lloyd to the Exchequer, he broke an unwritten rule by appointing Home, a member
of the unelected Lords, to the Foreign Secretaryship with Edward Heath
deputising for foreign affairs in the Commons. Quite soon after, it became
possible, after a campaign by Anthony Wedgwood Benn, for hereditary lords to
renounce their peerages.
Home was Foreign Secretary for 3 years during the momentous
period of the erection of the Berlin Wall, the Cuban Crisis and the
assassination of Kennedy. Britain
was not a central player but Home was well-respected by Dean Rusk and by Andrei
Gromyko, maintaining a wary view of the Soviets. He clashed sharply with his
successor Iain Macleod at the Commonwealth Office whose African decolonisation
policies Home thought too rapid.
Prime Minister
MacMillan’s government was struggling through the hilarious
but damaging Profumo scandal in 1963 when MacMillan fell ill with prostate
problems. Believing the problem to be worse than it was (he lived another 23
years), MacMillan resigned, throwing the Conservatives into a frantic
leadership contest. The expected successor was the highly experienced but
colourless Rab Butler; the other candidates were the younger Reginald Maudling,
then a worthy but dull Chancellor, and rumbustious, self-publicising Lord
Hailsham, then Tory Chairman, who electrified the party by announcing the
renunciation of his peerage.
There was no election in those days, the Tory Leader
“emerging” through some backstairs process of osmosis. To much astonishment the
undeclared candidate Home was the choice and he became Prime Minister though
two Cabinet ministers, Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell declined to serve under
him, Macleod complaining of the “Magic
Circle” which had supported Home.
Home had to renounce his earldom – his son David eventually
became the 15th Earl – and won a by-election as Sir Alec
Douglas-Home to enter the Commons again. In the event his ministry was a
stop-gap one. He passed a liberating Act ending Retail Price Maintenance and
internally introduced elections for the choice of future Tory leaders. Sir
Alec, with his skeletal face and half-moon spectacles was by no means telegenic
and his good natured but unwise admission that he needed to move about a box of
matches to understand economic problems probably did not impress the voters. An
election in October1964 was inevitable and after his 11-month tenure Sir Alec
did quite well only to lose the election to Wilson’s Labour by 4 seats. Sir Alec soon
enough stepped down as Leader to be succeeded by an elected Edward Heath.
Foreign Secretary again
Sir Alec accepted the Shadow Foreign Secretary portfolio
under Heath and took a strong line against UDI in Rhodesia, which became a running
sore. He also supported Heath’s pro-EEC policy. To general surprise Heath won
the 1970 election and Sir Alec returned to the Foreign Office. The UK duly joined the EEC in 1973: Sir Alec
expelled 105 Soviet diplomats after the spying activities of the KGB became too
blatant: the Rhodesian rebellion rumbled on without solution: Middle
East tensions needed diplomatic effort. Sir Alec ran his ministry
competently but when Heath lost the first election of 1974 Sir Alec resigned
from parliament accepting a life peerage as Baron Home of the Hirsel (his
stately home at Coldstream).
His legacy
Lord Home retired from politics, enjoyed fly-fishing on the Tweed, wrote his unrevealing memoirs and died at the ripe
old age of 92 in 1995. It was not easy to dislike him: he was courteous and
charming to all. He represented a past governing class which was becoming a
curiosity; without his highly privileged birth it is not obvious where his life
would have gone. No record remains of any bright idea, memorable phrase,
ambitious project or beautiful object created by him. The same is surely true of
many Britons, but they did not effortlessly rise to the office of Prime
Minister of their nation.
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| The Hirsel, Sir Alec's ancestral home |
SMD
21.02.13
Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2013
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