Part 2: the Tory succession in 1963
Moving inexorably towards my point, I look at the circumstances leading up to Alec Douglas-Home's succession as prime minister in 1963, and what a close thing it was
The opening paragraphs of this essay sprawled and unfurled into a stand-alone piece which you may or may not have enjoyed; but to try to explain, I began by making a few remarks about the length of tenure of prime ministers. The 56 holders of that office really run the gamut. While Liz Truss languishes at the bottom of 49 days (as my dear friend Dr Alastair Dunn was wont to say in a different context, “I’ve got milk in my fridge that’s older than that”), and eight of her fellow premiers come in under a calendar year, at the other end of the scale Sir Robert Walpole, generally accepted as the first prime minister, served for 20 years without interruption, while William Pitt the Younger came very close to 19 years in office, despite dying at the age I will attain later this year, 46.
Our historical knowledge is getting worse, I suspect; or, certainly, our mental retention of lists and dates is smaller now. Perhaps with Google and Wikipedia—what my stepfather refers to as his “second memory”—so readily available, that doesn’t matter. Nevertheless, I think it would be rare school pupil now who had heard of Viscount Melbourne (1834, 1835-41), the Earl of Rosebery (1894-95) or even Stanley Baldwin (1923-24, 1924-29, 1935-37). I don’t want to get sidetracked here by an argument over whether that matters, but I think it is fair to say that it is easiest to be forgotten if you held office a long time ago and/or did not last very long.
Sir Alec Douglas-Home—whom I actually wanted to talk about—falls into the latter category. He was prime minister for not quite a year, 363 days from October 1963 to October 1964, and is largely overlooked for a number of reasons. As the fourth of four Conservative premiers in a 13-year stretch in office, he is always slightly dismissed as a kind of dying ember, simply a bridge between the decay of the later Macmillan years and the “proper 1960s” of Harold Wilson, the white heat of technology and MBEs for the Beatles.
He also had an extraordinary afterlife. He was 61 when he left Downing Street, neither young nor terribly old, but he would live until 1995, almost all the way to Tony Blair’s arrival (apart from their mutual public-school-and-Oxford education, it is hard to think of much they had in common). Alec (I never knew him but his warmth suffuses so much of what you read about him that it seems harsh and distant to call him anything else) was one of the most decent and gentlemanly people ever to hold the highest office, a quality many believe contributed to his apparent unsuitability for it, and he had the charm and self-effacement of the Edwardian schoolboy he had been.
His home, the Hirsel just outside Coldstream in the Scottish Borders, was his refuge and consolation in political life, and he was a frequent sight on the train to Berwick. During one journey, an elderly woman approached him. “My husband and I think it was a great tragedy that you were never prime minister,” she said, meaning it as a compliment. “As a matter of fact, I was,” replied Alec, “but only for a very short time.” I can’t think of another 20th century prime minister who would have answered in quite that away, at least not one who would have meant in sincerely and kindly. Perhaps Balfour would have mused with the woman on the nature of holding office and whether anyone truly was prime minister. Eden would have smiled but smarted. Heath would have sulked even more profoundly and talked about Europe.
Alec’s niceness is invoked to build a narrative that he was hopelessly unsuited to be prime minister: too old-fashioned, too aristocratic, too out-of-touch, not sharp or agile enough to take on Harold Wilson, at that time 47 and regarded as a whizz-kid, pipe and Gannex raincoat notwithstanding. The great Conservative historian Lord Blake, in his obituary of Alec in The Independent in 1995, described him as “the real-life Duke of Omnium in Trollope’s The Prime Minister, honourable, decent, straightforward”. It was a nice thing to say, but it reinforced the idea of a man presented with a challenge he could not possibly match.
There were all sorts of anecdotes which shored up this popular image. Sometimes he scored an own goal: as a former foreign secretary and Commonwealth relations secretary, he had no real experience in economic affairs, and he artlessly, and unwisely, told the press: “When I have to read economic documents I have to have a box of matches and start moving them into position to simplify and illustrate the points to myself.” This came after a jocular remark that he faced two kinds of problem. “The political ones are insoluble and the economic ones are incomprehensible.” It was a self-deprecating quip that Macmillan, the consummate actor-manager, could have pulled off to his advantage. When Alec said it, there was a worry that he actually meant it.
He was no fool and could be sharp. Harold Wilson, in full populist cry, dismissed him as ipso facto unsuitable because of his aristocratic title. “After half a century of democratic advance, of social revolution, the whole process has ground to a halt with a fourteenth earl!” Alec’s response was polite but deflating. “I suppose Mr Wilson, when you come to think of it, is the fourteenth Mr Wilson.” More pointedly, he said that the Labour Party was “the only relic of class consciousness in the country”. Wilson had misjudged the mood. The opposition quickly issued a press release which was supposed to bring the matter to a close. “The Labour Party is not interested in the fact that the new prime minister inherited a fourteenth Earldom—he cannot help his antecedents any more than the rest of us.” Wilson had expected an easy oratorical win; it is not clear that he learned any lasting lesson.
Nevertheless, it was indisputable that Alec, at first glance, embodied a lot of what was becoming unpopular with the exhausted Conservative government. He was a tweedy aristocrat who fulfilled perfectly the “grouse moor” stereotype beloved of satirists, and although he was nine years younger than Macmillan, his predecessor, still he did not seem young or dynamic. It didn’t help that his selection had been deeply controversial. He was the last Conservative leader simply to “emerge” and be recommended to the Queen, a process savaged in The Spectator in January 1964 as “the magic circle” by Iain Macleod, who had refused to serve under Alec.
Moreover, Macmillan had played too active a part in the selection. At first he had talked up the chances of Viscount Hailsham, the Leader of the House of Lords, a brilliant but mercurial man who had made his willingness to serve too obvious, while at the same time being clear that his successor should under no account be Rab Butler, First Secretary of State and his quasi-deputy but the perennial Tory bridesmaid. The twists and turns of the succession could fill a book (and has filled many), and there were many improprieties, but it is fair to say that none of them was Alec’s: he was asked by the Queen to form a government, and he did so, at the same time disclaiming his peerage (under the provisions of the recently passed Peerage Act 1963) and becoming the parliamentary candidate for the Scottish constituency of Kinross and West Perthshire. The safest Conservative seat in Scotland, largely consisting of small towns and prosperous farmland, it had fallen vacant that summer when the Scottish Office minister, Gilmour Leburn, had died of a heart attack while on holiday in northern Scotland.
October 1963 was a bad month for the government, with a controversial succession and feelings in parts of the Conservative Party that the outgoing prime minister had not been wholly candid with the Queen about opinion among ministers, MPs and party members. But it could have been worse. Everything hinged on Rab Butler. He was enormously experienced: a Member of Parliament since 1929, a ministerial bag-carrier by 1931 and a junior minister in 1932, he had become under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office when Anthony Eden and Lord Cranborne has resigned over Neville Chamberlain’s policy of rapprochement with Fascist Italy. In 1941 he had become president of the Board of Education and had been midwife to the Education Act 1944 which had transformed school provision.
After the war he had been instrumental in rebuilding the Conservative Party, and might well have succeeded Churchill in 1955 had Eden not been long anointed as the crown prince: as Macmillan remarked, Eden “was trained to win the Derby in 1938; unfortunately, he was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955”. When Eden resigned after the Suez crisis in 1957, it was the sly showman Macmillan, not the enigmatic, elliptical Butler, whom the cabinet had backed when Lord Salisbury (as Cranborne had become in 1947) posed the famous question to each in turn: “Well, which is it to be? Wab or Hawold?” Yet Butler had not retreated to his tent like an aged Achilles, but had ploughed on, taking whatever posts Macmillan gave him, carrying them out capably, and keeping the ship steady.
To understand the relationship between Macmillan and Butler, you have to understand two things: firstly, Butler never wore a uniform—born at the end of 1902, he was too young for the Great War in which Macmillan had served so bravely and paid so high a price, and by the time of the Second World War, he was a minister, at 36 rather too old, and anyway had a semi-disabled right hand as the result of a riding accident when he was six. Even if it was in no way his fault, Macmillan could never quite forgive Butler for not having served in the armed forces. To look around the cabinet table in 1951 was to see not only Churchill, the great warlord, but Eden, awarded the Military Cross with the King’s Royal Rifle Corps at Ploegsteert in 1916; Harry Crookshank, late of the Grenadier Guards, castrated by shrapnel in 1916; James Stuart, who won an MC and Bar within seven months in 1917; Bobbety Salisbury, another Grenadier Guardsman who had been awarded the Croix de Guerre; Oliver Lyttelton, yet another Grenadier and holder of the DSO and MC; and Lord Ismay, who had retired a full general.
The second critical factor was Munich. Macmillan had become a rebel on appeasement by 1938, supporting the independent candidate, A.D. Lindsay, in the Oxford by-election that October (it was won by the official Conservative candidate, Quintin Hogg, who would become Lord Hailsham) and condemning the Munich agreement vigorously. It would remain a mental dividing line for Macmillan, and Butler could not have been more firmly on the other side: as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, he was the number two at the Foreign Office and its chief spokesman in the House of Commons. It was another strike against him.
For all of this, when Alec Home was invited to form a government in 1963, Butler being passed over again, the deal was not quite done. Two cabinet ministers, Iain Macleod, Leader of the House of Commons, and Enoch Powell, Minister of Health, were implacably opposed to Alec becoming prime minister. This was categorically not on personal grounds—if there was anyone who disliked Alec they have yet to be recorded in the history books—but because, on the one hand, they thought Butler would be a good prime minister, and, on the other, they objected to the way that Macmillan had manipulated the shadowy mechanisms which had chosen his replacement. Powell in particular had a hatred for Macmillan, whom he thought shifty, underhand and manipulative. Later he would say:
One of the most horrible things that I remember in politics was… seeing the way in which Harold Macmillan, with all the skill of the old actor manager, succeeded in false-footing Rab. The sheer devilry of it verged upon the disgusting.
Macmillan was not enamoured of Powell. Although he had reappointed him to government in 1960 after he had resigned with the rest of the Treasury team in 1958, and advanced him to cabinet rank in 1962, he quickly had Powell moved from his initial position opposite him at the cabinet table. Macmillan couldn’t bear Powell staring at him “like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes”.
Amid all the manoeuvring, there was one fundamental truth. Given that Alec had promised the Queen he would try to form an administration, rather than accepting the premiership outright, he could still be thwarted. If Butler had refused to serve under him, it seems overwhelmingly likely that Alec would have declined the Queen’s invitation; further, it seems likely she would have turned to Rab next, and there is no reason to think Alec would not have served under him. The prize was, therefore, still to be snatched. All Butler had to do was to remain firm. But that did not play to his strengths. Powell described the scene vividly.
We said, “You see, Rab—look at this. This is a revolver, we’ve loaded it for you, you don’t have to worry about loading it. Now you see this part here, it’s the trigger. If you put your finger round that, then all you have to do—you just squeeze that and he’s dead, see?’ And Rab said, “Oh yes, well thank you for telling me—but will it hurt him? Will he bleed?” And we said, “Well, yes—I’m afraid, you know, when you shoot a man, he does tend to bleed.” “Oh,” said Rab, “I don’t know whether I like that. But tell me something else—will it go off with a bang?” And we said, “Well, Rab, I’m afraid we must admit, you know, a gun does make rather a bang when it goes off.” “Ah… then,” he said, “well thank you very much, I don’t think I will. Do you mind?”
Decisiveness had never been Butler’s forte. He submitted by instinct to events, “the natural servant of the state”, as Roy Jenkins described him. Perhaps this trait would have made him a bad prime minister; indeed, his old friend Geoffrey Lloyd, MP for Sutton Coldfield and former cabinet minister, told him “if you're not prepared to put everything to the touch, you don't deserve to be Prime Minister”. Certainly it stopped him achieving the office now. The surrender was sealed by Alec’s offer to Butler of the Foreign Office, the job he had always wanted (and where he had served 25 years before). Reggie Maudling, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and another waverer, also agreed to stay on. Alec was home and dry: he could govern without Macleod and Powell, though he regretted their absences, brought them back on to the opposition front bench after the election and had plans for both of them if the government had been reelected, but he could not have done so without Butler and Maudling.
So again I find myself not having addressed the point I intended to. A diptych will need to become a triptych, but that is not the end of the world. The next (final!) essay will examine Alec Home’s short premiership and ask, in essence, was he fated to lose? Or could there somehow have been another Conservative victory?