Alec Douglas-Home, the son of the 13th Earl of Home, was born in London
on 2nd July, 1903. Educated at Eton and Christ
Church, Oxford, he joined the Conservative
Party and was elected to the House of Commons
in the 1931 General Election.
Douglas-Home
served as parliamentary private secretary to Neville
Chamberlain
and
was involved in the negotiations with Adolf
Hitler and
Benito
Mussolini
between
1937 and 1939.
During
the Second World War Douglas-Home spent time
in hospital as a result of a spinal operation. He lost his seat in
the 1945 General Election but returned to
the House of Commons in 1950. The following
year, on the death of his father, he became the 14th Earl of Home.
In
1951 Winston
Churchill
appointed
him as Minister of State at the Scottish Office. He held the post
for six years before Anthony
Eden
made
him Commonwealth Relations Secretary (1955-1960), Lord President of
the Council (1957-1960) and Foreign Secretary (1960-63). During this
period he also served as leader of the House
of Lords.
When
Harold
Macmillan
resigned
in October, 1963, the Earl of Home became prime minister. He immediately
resigned his peerage and won a by-election at Kinross. A year later
the Conservative Party was defeated
at the 1964 General Election and Harold
Wilson became
the new prime minister.
Edward
Heath
replaced Douglas Home as leader of the Conservative Party in July
1965. After the 1974 General Election Douglas-Home
served as Foreign Secretary in Heath's government.
In
1974 he was granted the title Baron Home of the Hirsel of Coldstream.
His autobiography, The Way the Wind Blows,
was published in 1976. Other books included Border
Reflections (1979) and Letters
to a Grandson (1983).
Alec
Douglas Home, Baron Home of the Hirsel of Coldstream, died in Berwickshire,
Scotland, on 9th October, 1995.
(1) Margaret
Thatcher, The Faith To Power
(1995)
Douglas-Home was a manifestly good man - and goodness is not to be
underrated as a qualification for those considered for powerful positions.
He was also in the best possible way 'classless'. You always felt
that he treated you not as a category but as a person. And he actually
listened - as I found when I took up with him the vexed question of
the widowed mothers' allowance.
But the press were cruelly,
ruthlessly and almost unanimously against him. He was easy to caricature
as an out-of-touch aristocrat, a throwback to the worst sort of reactionary
Toryism. Inverted snobbery was always to my mind even more distasteful
than the straightforward self-important kind. By 1964 British society
had entered a sick phase of liberal conformism passing as individual
self-expression. Only progressive ideas and people were worthy of
respect by an increasingly self-conscious and self-confident media
class. And how they laughed when Alec said self-deprecatingly that
he used matchsticks to work out economic concepts. What a contrast
with the economic models with which the technically brilliant mind
of Harold Wilson was familiar.
(2)
Harold
Wilson,
Memoirs: 1916-1964 (1986)
The Tories should have elected Rab Butler to succeed him. I expected
them to do so and I would have enjoyed renewing the contest of the
1950s. But Rab did not have enough of the killer instinct to take
over and his colleagues knew it. Instead, they chose the Earl of Home,
who demoted himself to the House of Commons for the purpose. Politically
I was pleased. Instead of the formidable Macmillan, with his deep
knowledge of politics and administration, I was getting an opponent
with very little experience of Parliament and much ignorance of economics.
He was to prove much more
formidable than I expected. When the election came we only just scraped
in and I am often asked whether we might have lost if Macmillan had
been restored to power. It is very hard to say, but I doubt it. Macmillan
had provided us with so much ammunition that I consider that we would
have made mincemeat of him, whereas with Alec Douglas-Home our barrage
was perhaps more subdued.
(3)
Edward
Heath, The Course
of My Life (1988)
It is sometimes suggested
that I helped to engineer Alec Douglas-Home's path to No. 10 for entirely
selfish reasons, because I knew that he would lose the election and
prove to be only a stop-gap, enabling me to become leader. In fact,
I sincerely believed in 1963 that Alec was the only candidate capable
of uniting the party. After the fuss caused by Macleod had died down,
that is exactly what he succeeded in doing. Of course it is true that,
had a younger candidate from my own generation, such as Ergo Madding,
succeeded Macmillan in 1963, it would obviously have been impossible
for me to become leader when I did. But politics is an unpredictable
business, and it would have been madness for me to assume anything
about the longer-term at that stage. Moreover, Alec was a highly perceptive
and shrewd politician and, had I really been playing such a game,
he would have seen straight through me and would never have given
me the responsibilities that he did between November 1963 and July
1965, nor would he have agreed to be my shadow Foreign Secretary after
I replaced him as leader.
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