Anecdotes on PMs and kissing hands: part 1
This began as introductory paragraphs to an essay about Alec Douglas-Home, but became heftier than I expected, so I will split it into two parts
We have had 56 prime ministers since the office emerged unofficially and was attributed to Sir Robert Walpole. In April 1721, he was appointed First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons, and he was quite clearly the most powerful and important minister serving George I; but the phrase “prime minister” was at that time a term of abuse. As late as 1741, on a motion to dismiss Walpole from his offices, Samuel Sandys, the Whig MP for Worcester, proclaimed “According to our Constitution we can have no sole and prime minister”. Walpole parried the blow with agreement. “I unequivocally deny that I am sole or Prime Minister and that to my influence and direction all the affairs of government must be attributed.”
Protestations would continue for decades. George Grenville, First Lord of the Treasury from 1763 to 1765, called it “an odious title”, while Lord North, chief minister from 1770 to 1782 and generally remembered as the man who lost the American colonies, complained that he “would never suffer himself to be called Prime Minister, because it was an office unknown to the Constitution”. (He would be called worse.) By the end of the 19th century, however, the fiction was wearing gossamer-thin (insofar as anyone really remembered why it had begun); Benjamin Disraeli signed the 1878 Treaty of Berlin as “First Lord of the Treasury and Prime Minister of her Britannic Majesty”, and the Official Report of the House of Commons, commonly known as Hansard, listed the “prime minister” in a list of ministers in 1885. The prime minister, by right of that office, was added to the official order of precedence in 1905, and the Chequers Estate Act 1917 included the first reference to the prime minister in statute.
This complicated history flowered briefly last summer as Liz Truss was elected leader of the Conservative Party, kissed hands with a sovereign who was dead two days later, and who wobbled through a disastrous premiership which concluded on her 50th day in office. The history books were suddenly retrieved from high shelves: was the shortest-serving prime minister of all time? Yes, it was concluded, she was, and comfortably. Her 49 days in office had not even reached half the length of the next man up, George Canning, who died after 119 days in office in 1827. As a young girl, she can hardly have imagined she would reach Downing Street and then leave occupying the part of the leader board where great names like Viscount Goderich, the Earl of Shelburne and the 4th Duke of Devonshire were to be found.
(An incredibly niche argument is to be had over two 18th century peers. In 1746, the Earl of Bath, a Whig not long elevated to the House of Lords, was invited by George II to form a ministry in the wake of the resignation of Henry Pelham. He had the assured support of the Earl Granville, a former Northern secretary, who agreed at least for the time being to take on both the Northern and Southern Departments (forerunners of the Foreign and Home Offices); in addition the Earl of Winchelsea agreed to be First Lord of the Admiralty while the Earl of Carlisle would be Lord Privy Seal. But after two days, it was clear that a Bath premiership was not going to work. The earl reported his failure to the King, one imagines with chastened disappointment on both sides, and George II invited Pelham to come back, which he did on the Feast of St Valentine, 14 February 1746.
This sorry story was played out again just over a decade later. In November 1756, the Duke of Newcastle had resigned as First Lord of the Treasury and had been succeeded by the Duke of Devonshire. But real authority in the government had passed to William Pitt (the Elder), Southern Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons. George II disliked Pitt, thinking him hard-faced and ruthless, and in April 1757 dismissed him and Devonshire. Instead he turned to the Earl Waldegrave, a close friend who had been a lord of the Bedchamber and governor of the Prince of Wales, later George III. Like Bath before him, Waldegrave was appointed First Lord of the Treasury, but unlike his less-than-illustrious predecessor he could not even find willing ministers. Four days later, fearing that the premiership would in any event endanger his friendship with the King, he admitted defeat.
The point is, were Bath (two days) and Waldegrave (four days) actually prime ministers? If they are to be counted then they spare Truss’s blushes a little, keeping her off the bottom of table of length of service. But most historians now think not: they are not counted in the official list of 56 premiers, they certainly never appointed, let alone presided over, full governments. Bath received the seals of office, but it is not clear that either he or Waldegrave ever kissed hands. So alas they are probably not Truss’s salvation after all.)
A word on the phrase “kissing hands”. It is used to describe the appointment by the sovereign of prime ministers and other senior ministers: when a new premier takes office, he or she is said to travel to the Palace to “kiss hands”. It derives, of course, from the mediaeval practice of kissing a feudal superior’s hands to demonstrate fealty and allegiance, and, as with so many aspects of our constitutional arrangements, it has not been changed because there has been no need to do so. While the Court Circular, the official record of royal activities, still describes this ceremony as “kissing hands”, there is no longer an expectation that the action will be played out as one might imagine.
Sir Tony Blair—not always a reliable witness as he likes to make comic mileage of protocol and portray himself as an amused and amusing everyman—claims that, when he went to Buckingham Palace after the 1997 General Election, he was told merely to brush the Queen’s hands with his lips. However, so his narrative goes, when he was ushered into the royal presence, he tripped on the carpet and fell on to the sovereign’s hands. I will leave readers to decide how likely that sounds. In 2007, before Gordon Brown went to the Palace, a spokesman for the Royal Household was clear: “There will be no kneeling or kissing of hands—that is not something that has happened in modern-day politics.” Dr David Torrance of the House of Commons Library, whose knowledge of this lore is deep indeed, declared last year that kissing hands for a new prime minister had “fallen into abeyance”. This may cast further doubt on Blair’s larky tale.
But these things are shrouded in murk. Also in 2007, Alan Cowell, writing in The New York Times, cried almost gleefully that Peter Morgan’s brilliant snapshot of royal life, The Queen (2006), had “got it wrong”, because “these days, there is no actual hand-kissing”. By contrast, Michael White, the Venerable Jorge of The Guardian, wrote in 2016 that “the kissing of hands is, by all account, more of an air kiss”, suggesting that some nod towards the act was still performed.
When Jeremy Corbyn, having recently and somewhat surprisingly been elected leader of the Labour Party in 2015, was invited to join the Privy Council, the report which emerged from the ceremony was that he had not knelt before Her Majesty, but that his lips had brushed the royal hand. John Prescott revealed that he had also made physical contact on his appointment in 1994 (I sometimes forget that Prescott resigned from the Privy Council in 2013 in protest at weak press regulation: he probably expected it to make a bigger splash than it did).
One can certainly imagine the more excitable sort of Conservative monarchist dropping to his or her knees and reaching for an outstretched royal hand. I cannot believe, for example, that Norman St John Stevas (later Lord St John of Fawsley), who operated at a level of such exquisite high camp that he offered his own hand to be kissed by those meeting him, passed up the opportunity to make the constitutional phrase an osculatory reality when he was sworn of the Privy Council in 1979. I met Lord St John once, when he was very old: he did not require me to kiss his hand.
(Chris Patten once told St John Stevas that Lady Thatcher found his, Norman’s, incessant name-dropped an irritant. “Oh I know,” Stevas said airily, “the Queen Mother tells me exactly the same.”)
It is said that the last person regularly to kiss the royal hand as a greeting, rather than as a formality, was Viscount Esher. Reginald Brett, 2nd Viscount Esher, was peculiar and elusive man. His father had been an MP, solicitor-general under Disraeli and eventually Master of the Rolls, the most senior judge in England and Wales after the Lord Chief Justice; but Reggie was a born socialite. He was Liberal MP for Penryn and Falmouth from 1880, but contested and lost at Plymouth in 1885 and stepped away from elected politics, seeing much greater opportunities in the shadows. By 1895 he had found his way to being Permanent Secretary at the Office of Works, a government department responsible for royal residences and properties, and became close to the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII.
Succeeding to his father’s peerage in 1899, he flourished as a “fixer”, smoothing over a dispute between the Secretary of State for War, the Marquess of Lansdowne, and the Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley; and when the Earl of Elgin chaired a royal commission in 1902-03 to examine the military conduct of the South African War, the pen which produced the report was Esher’s. In 1904, he chaired a committee in his own right, a subordinate body of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), to make sweeping changes to the Army. The Esher Report was dramatic and revolutionised the Army, but it is extraordinary that it was conceived primarily by someone who authority came from a friendship with the King.
Esher was a man of strong passions. Married and with children, he certainly had powerful same-sex attractions, especially for handsome young men, and these were widely enough known for them to be a subject of gentle teasing by his friends. He once mused that he could not remember a day when he had not been in love with one young man or another. Whether these passions were consummated is very difficult to say; recent scholarship has suggested that some were very much real, very much with underage boys (although all homosexual acts were illegal anyway) and included, unpleasantly, a physical intimacy with his own younger son, Maurice. If Queen Victoria apocryphally did not believe in lesbianism, it’s hard to know what she would have made of incestuous paedophilia.
In any event, Esher exhibited this same kind of unbridled, almost reckless romanticism towards monarchy. He met or wrote to Edward VII virtually every day, and, having organised the celebration of 1897’s Diamond Jubilee, he was a leading member of the executive committee organising Edward VII’s coronation in 1902. He insisted that everyone involved, not just military personnel, should wear uniforms; and he also insisted on exhaustive rehearsals. He is much criticised for his theatrical flourishes and adoration of pomp, but things have not, it should be observed, gone badly wrong since. It does, however, seem entirely in character that he should have kissed his monarch’s hand at every opportunity.
This essay has not gone at all where I expected, and what began as a handful of amusing anecdotes to set the scene has taken on a life of its own. So be it: this will be part 1, of—you can be forgive for not guessing—a consideration of the short premiership of Sir Alec Douglas-Home (1963-64). I hope it has at least amused or intrigued. Do come back for the actual essay.