Alec Douglas-Home

Alec Douglas-Home, 14th Earl of Home

Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, 14th Earl of Home; and Baron Home of the Hirsel, KT., PC., (a Life Peerage), (2 July 1903 – 9 October 1995), styled Lord Dunglass in his father's lifetime, between 1918 and 1951, and Earl of Home from 1951 - a Scottish hereditary peer. He became a Conservative Party politician who served as Foreign Minister of Great Britain and later, a year as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1963 - 1964. He is notable for being the last Prime Minister to hold office while being a member of the House of Lords, before renouncing his peerage and taking up a seat in the House of Commons for the remainder of his premiership, following which he was awarded a new Life Peerage. His reputation, however, rests more on his periods as Foreign Secretary.

Early life

Douglas-Home was born at 28 South Street, in Mayfair, London, the first of seven children of Charles Douglas-Home, 13th Earl of Home and his wife, Lady Lilian Lambton, daughter of Frederick Lambton, 4th Earl of Durham. The boy's first name was customarily abbreviated to "Alec". Among the couple's younger children was the future playwright William Douglas-Home.

The young Alec, Lord Dunglass, was educated at Ludgrove School, followed by Eton College. At Eton his contemporaries included Cyril Connolly, who later described him as:

A votary of the esoteric Eton religion, the kind of graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy who is showered with favours and crowned with all the laurels, who is liked by the masters and admired by the boys without any apparent exertion on his part, without experiencing the ill-effects of success himself or arousing the pangs of envy in others. In the 18th century he would have become Prime Minister before he was 30.

After Eton, Dunglass followed in his father's footsteps to Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated with an Bachelor of Arts degree (Honours) in Modern History in 1925 (the same subject his father had graduated in).

Lord Dunglass began serving in the Territorial Army in 1924 as a lieutenant in the Lanarkshire Yeomanry, and was promoted to Captain in 1928.

Politics

Lord Dunglass secured the Unionist candidacy at Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, for the 1929 General Election. It was not a seat that the Unionists expected to win, and he lost to his Labour Party opponent with 9,210 votes to Labour's 16,879. It was, however, valuable experience for Dunglass, who was of a gentle and uncombative disposition and not a natural orator; he began to learn how to deal with hostile audiences and get his message across. When a coalition National Government was formed in 1931 to deal with the financial crisis, Lord Dunglass was adopted as the Unionist candidate for Lanark in Scotland. The electorate of the area was mixed, and the constituency was not seen as a safe seat for any party; at the 1929 election Labour had captured it from the Unionists. However, with the pro-coalition Liberal party supporting him instead of fielding their own candidate, Dunglass easily beat the Labour candidate. He was then appointed parliamentary Private Secretary at the Scottish Office. Lord Dunglass was then appointed official PPS to Anthony Muirhead, junior minister at the Ministry of Labour, in 1935, and less than a year later became PPS to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain.

It was as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Neville Chamberlain that he was present at the 1938 Munich Conference partitioning the Sudetenland] from Czechoslovakia. Dunglass witnessed at first-hand the Prime Minister's attempts to prevent a second world war. When Chamberlain had his final meeting with Hitler at Munich in September 1938, Dunglass accompanied him. Following Chamberlain's death Lord Dunglass entered hospital for a dangerous operation on his spine and spent over two years convalescing. In July 1943 He reattended the House of Commons for the first time since 1940, and began to make a reputation as a backbench member, particularly for his expertise in the field of foreign affairs. In 1944, with World War II now turning in the Allies' favour, Dunglass spoke eloquently about the importance of resisting the Soviet Union's ambition to dominate eastern Europe. Dunglass lost his parliamentary seat in the 1945 landslide General Election to the socialists.

In 1950 the Labour Prime Minister, called a General Election and the King dissolved Parliament. Dunglass was invited to stand once again as Unionist candidate for Lanark. Having been disgusted at personal attacks during the 1945 campaign by Tom Steele, his Labour opponent, Dunglass did not scruple to remind the voters of Lanark that Steele had warmly thanked the Communist Party and its members for helping him take the seat from the Unionists in 1945. However, by 1950, with the Cold War at its height, Steele's association with the communists was a crucial electoral liability. Dunglass regained the seat with one of the smallest majorities in any British constituency: 19,890 to Labour's 19,205.

In July 1951 the 13th Earl of Home died. Dunglass succeeded him, inheriting the title along with the extensive family estates, including the Hirsel, the Douglas-Homes' principal residence in Berwickshire. The new Lord Home resigned his parliamentary seat and entered the House of Lords. He was appointed to the new post of Minister of State at the Scottish Office. Churchill referred to him as "Home sweet Home". In addition to his ministerial position Lord Home was appointed to membership of the Privy Council (PC), an honour granted only selectively to ministers below cabinet rank. Throughout Churchill's second term as Prime Minister (1951–55) Lord Home remained at the Scottish Office, although both Anthony Eden at the Foreign Office and Lord Salisbury at the Commonwealth Relations Office invited him to join their ministerial teams.

When Eden succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister in 1955 he promoted Lord Home to the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations. At the time of this appointment Lord Home had not been to any of the countries within his ministerial remit, and he quickly arranged to visit Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, India, Pakistan and Ceylon. He had to deal with the emotive subject of immigration from and between Commonwealth countries, where a delicate balance had to be struck between resistance in some quarters in Britain and Australia to non-white (i.e: non-European) immigration on the one hand, and on the other the danger of sanctions by India and Pakistan against British commercial interests if discriminatory policies were pursued. Churchill retired in 1955 and was replaced by Eden. The Suez Canal invasion by Britain & France was firmly supported by Lord Home. However the failure, mainly due to pressure from the United States led Eden to stand down in 1957. In the new government Home remained at the Commonwealth Relations Office.

Lord Home was decidedly unsympathetic to African independence than several of his his colleagues. This placed him at odds with Iain Macleod, Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1959 to 1961, who was on the liberal wing of the Conservative Party. He was convinced, as Lord Home was not, that Britain's colonies in Africa should have majority rule and independence as quickly as possible. Their spheres of influence overlapped in the Central African Federation. Lord Home had been heard to say (of Africans) “they didn’t even invent the wheel” and “you’ve got to go out there to really understand them”. In 1959 he declared “Britain and South Africa are two countries on the same side in the essential task of securing the safety and the liberty of the free peoples of the world”. He was pro-Rhodesia. Macleod threatened to resign unless he was allowed to release the leading Nyasaland independence activist, Hastings Banda, from prison, a move that Lord Home and others thought unwise and liable to provoke distrust of Britain among the white minority in the Central African Federation. Macleod won this round and Lord Home resigned from the Commonwealth Relations Office.

In 1960 Harold Macmillan appointed two Foreign Office Cabinet Ministers: Lord Home, as Foreign Secretary, still in the Lords, and Edward Heath, as Lord Privy Seal and Deputy Foreign Secretary, sitting in the Commons.

Cold War

Lord Home's attention was now mainly concentrated on the Cold War, where his forcefully expressed anti-communist beliefs were tempered by a pragmatic approach to dealing with the Soviet Union. His first major problem in this sphere was in 1961 when on the orders of the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, the Berlin Wall (the anti-Fascist barrier) was erected to stop East Germans escaping to West Germany via West Berlin. Home wrote to his American counterpart, Dean Rusk, "The prevention of East Berliners getting into West Berlin has never been a casus belli for us. We are concerned with Western access to Berlin and that is what we must maintain." During the Cuba missile crisis the following year Lord Home, whose calm was genuine and innate, strengthened the Prime Minister's resolve, and encouraged him to back up president Kennedy's defiance of Soviet threats of nuclear attack. The Lord Chancellor (Lord Dilhorne), the Attorney General (Sir John Hobson) and the Solicitor General, (Sir Peter Rawlinson) privately gave Home their opinion that the American blockade of Cuba was a breach of international law, but he continued to advocate a policy of strong support for Kennedy. In a speech to the Institute of Directors Lord Home said:

There has been a good deal of speculation about Russia's motives. To me they are quite clear. Their motive was to test the will of the United States and to see how the President of the United States, in particular, would react against a threat of force. If the President had failed for one moment in a matter which affected the security of the United States, no ally of America would have had confidence in United States protection ever again.

Nuclear test Ban Treaty

The principal landmark of Lord Home's term as Foreign Secretary was also in the sphere of east–west relations: the negotiation and signature of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. He got on well with his American and Soviet counterparts, Dean Rusk and Andrei Gromyko. The latter wrote that whenever he met Home there were "no sudden, still less brilliant, breakthroughs" but "each meeting left a civilised impression that made the next meeting easier." Gromyko concluded that Lord Home added sharpness to British foreign policy. Gromyko, Home and Rusk signed the treaty in Moscow on 5 August 1963.

Macmillan resigns

On the 7th October 1963, the night before the Conservative Party Conference, both Lord Home and Lord Poole (a Joint Chairman of the Party) “had plainly told Harold Macmillan that it was his duty to retire.” Macmillan, now seriously ill, resigned the leadership on the 10th. The Cabinet split on who should succeed him (although Macmillan’s recommendation to The Queen was actually Lord Home) Coming out of a BBC TV studio where he had been interviewed with Lord Home, Reginald Maudling remarked “I do admire the political skill that our aristocracy have acquired. It seems to me that he wants the job [of Prime Minister] and that [therefore] it’s all over.” It was one of the few true prophecies of that week.

Prime Minister

The 14th Earl of Home became the Conservative Party Leader and Prime Minister on Saturday 19th October 1963. He was the first peer to be Prime Minister of Great Britain since the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury resigned in 1902. Iain Macleod, then joint Party Chairman, told a journalist suggesting Lord Home’s appointment was imminent that “it simply is not possible”. Alan Clark suggests this was due to McLeod’s “feeling of social inferiority”, McLeod having later said “that the whole contest had been stage-managed by a group of Old Etonians” and went on to state that the Tory Party was now “being led from the Right of Centre”. R. A. Butler, in an angry tirade, stated that an Earl being Tory leader made a mockery of everything he had tried to achieve since 1945. If ever there was a damning condemnation of Butler & McLeod as supposed Tories it was these class war utterances more akin to Marxists.

1964 Election campaign

When campaigning for the 1964 General Election Lord Home addressed a gathering at Crieff in Perthshire, Scotland, in September where he said:

Socialist propaganda sounds like ‘an anthology of Gibbon, Marx, Dante’s Inferno and Theodore White’...‘The great thing the next [Labour] government will do is to introduce planning into every aspect of our life.

Lord Home was also opposed to alien immigration. In a speech at Bradford, Yorkshire, on 6th October 1964, he said:

What had been a trickle of immigrants from the Commonwealth was developing into a flood. We saw that if it was not brought under control it would create very serious social and economic problems—problems of employment, housing and education, for instance. So we brought in legislation. The socialists, aided by the Liberals, opposed it all along the line. He continued: But for the Immigration Act there would now be an additional three hundred thousand immigrants with their families – an influx of nearly a million people, an influx which it would have been impossible to manage.

Lord Home’s leadership was also an opportunity for the liberal-left media, who were now in the ascendancy, to demonstrate their opposition to Lord Home and to make use of the mediums they now controlled for political ends.It is often said today what a ‘tolerant’ non-violent society Britain is (another of the Big Lies) but The Left have always been violent, and this election campaign was to have some graphic examples. One of these sudden storms of electoral violence swept the country on Tuesday 6th October, only nine days before the polls. (An egg had struck Lord Home at Ashton-under-Lyne the previous Friday.) At Leeds Town Hall scores of communists screamed “Out, out, out.....Go Home, Home, and a huge banner was unfurled bearing the legend ‘Leeds University Labour Club’. Home battled on with his speech. Not until the end did his temper flare when he said “The Labour Party must be very hard up if they have to hire these people….”. (It was known that Labour often hired hecklers). It was now Lord Home’s turn to face a crowd of 5,500 people in the infamous Rag Market, in Birmingham. He was forced to fight his way up the aisle and was kicked repeatedly. Outside the mob kicked and dented his car. Fifteen minutes before his speech had even started the great hall was rocking with shouts of ‘Tories Out! We Want Wilson! Home go home!’ There was a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament banner, and placards screeching (British) ‘Terror in Ireland’ and ‘Tory Rule Means Gestapo Rule in Ireland’. 99% of Lord Home’s speech was lost in the noisy atmosphere. Afterwards a Birmingham Conservative MP, Geoffrey Lloyd, who had sat on the platform with Lord Home, naively said: “what took place tonight was un-British”. In a tour of the London marginal seats he was treated not much better than at Birmingham. Used to deference all his life, the shocking insults of the left-wing rabble greatly upset the Conservative leader, although he bravely took the insults.

The General Election was held on October 15th. The Conservative Party lost the election to the socialist Labour Party, whose leader, Harold Wilson, was friendly with the Soviets. Lord Home resigned as both Prime Minister and Leader of his Party. He was then given the shadow Foreign Affairs portfolio in Edward Heath's Conservative shadow cabinet.

The Annual Dinner of the Conservative Monday Club took place a month later at London's famous Savoy Hotel on November 25th. The guests-of-honour were Lord and Lady Home. About one hundred and thirty members enthusiastically welcomed them. His speech dwelt upon the Party’s duty to the nation in the future. He was given a standing ovation. The Club’s November Newsletter had also carried an extract from Lord Home's speech to the Institute of Directors on the 5th of that month.

Returns to Government

In 1970 the Conservative Party won the General Election and the new Prime Minister, Ted Heath, invited Lord Home to join the Cabinet, taking charge of Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs. The Labour government had merged the Colonial Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1966 into the Commonwealth Office, which, two years later, was merged with the Foreign Office, to form the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). Heath appointed Home to head the department, with, once again, a second cabinet minister, Anthony Barber, to be principally responsible, as Heath had been in the 1960s, for negotiations on Britain's joining the EEC. Barber's cabinet post was officially the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.