Theakston K. After Number 10. Former Prime Ministers in British Politics

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Only occasionally would he be recognised. There was a modesty and absence

of self-importance about ex-prime minister Attlee, as Francis Beckett notes:

after an event at the LSE, he was asked when his car was coming to pick

him up and admitted he had travelled there by bus!

Attlee followed domestic politics closely but was not a major presence on

the stage or a nuisance for his successors. He was critical of Eden over Suez,

warning the government in July 1956 against anything that might look like

colonialism, aggression or adventurism, but then thought that Eden was

wrong to halt prematurely the military action – ‘if you’ve broken the eggs

you should make the omelette’. At Macmillan’s invitation he chaired a con-

ﬁdential Whitehall inquiry into the ‘burden on ministers’ in 1957. Attlee

admired Macmillan’s ‘wind of change’ colonial and African policy, and

remembered with respect his concern for the unemployed in the 1930s, but

was shocked by his cynical sacking of a third of the Cabinet in the 1962

‘night of the long knives’. Although loyal in public, he was cool about

Gaitskell. Asked about Gaitskell’s leadership and party management he

replied: ‘Not ideal. Man of character, but lacked experience of the move-

ment and inclined to be doctrinaire.’ The battle to remove Clause IV from

the party’s constitution was a great mistake, Attlee thought. Labour’s ‘passion

for over-deﬁnition’ should always be resisted; Gaitskell should have ‘sedated’

the party, not ‘excited’ it. In the elections of 1959 and 1964 he did his bit

for the party, campaigning and undertaking speaking engagements. When

Labour returned to power the Wilson government disappointed him. ‘I had

a much better government than the present one’, he grumbled in 1967.

‘They seem to adopt Tory policy in everything.’ He predicted ‘an almighty

smash’ for Labour at the next election, even though the Tories were ‘not

much good’. Speaking to Labour MPs in 1964, he vaingloriously ‘couldn’t

think of any mistake that his government had made’. But a couple of years

later he dismissed Wilson’s Labour government as just ‘very weak’.

Attlee lived modestly on his £2,000 a year prime ministers’ pension, the

three guineas a day House of Lords attendance allowance, and whatever he

could make from lecture tours and journalism. ‘Payment is in inverse ratio

to the character of the paper’, he once noted. He had virtually no savings

from his years in ofﬁce. He left only £6,700 in his will – the smallest sum

left by any recent former prime minister. Notoriously taciturn, ‘in his years

of retirement he was anything but uncommunicative with his typewriter’,

was Heasman’s apt comment. He did much book reviewing and could be

waspish in his judgements: Morrison’s memoirs were ‘a ﬁne work of ﬁction’,

Churchill’s History of the English Speaking People should have been called

‘Things in history which have interested me’. In an article about parlia-

ment he decried the trend for MPs to become full-time parliamentarians

without outside interests and briskly argued that MPs should not become

the ‘servants’ of their constituents, ‘at the beck and call of all and sundry

every weekend’.

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His autobiography, As It Happened, had been published in 1954. It has

been described as ‘one of the least interesting political autobiographies

ever written’ and as ‘so unrevealing as to be almost comic’. Attlee himself

once admitted it was ‘not very good’. He was pretty guarded in the taped

interviews with Francis Williams, his former press secretary in Number 10,

which were the basis for the (1961) book, A Prime Minister Remembers and

in the interviews ﬁlmed in 1965 for the Granada Historical Records Series.

His 1960 Chichele lectures at Oxford were turned into a slim book, Empire

into Commonwealth, described by a critical reviewer as ‘commonplace and

pedestrian’.

Lecture tours took him to the USA, Canada, Australia and

elsewhere. He gathered good audiences, speaking on topics like ‘World

Government or World Chaos’, ‘The Future of Europe’, and ‘The Future of

Democratic Government’.

The vital necessity of world government became a key political theme of

his retirement years – it was ‘a long-term interest of his’, as Robert Pearce

notes, ‘though one he had done little to foster while in ofﬁce’. He called for

reform and strengthening of the United Nations, world disarmament and

the abolition of the right to make war, and an international police force.

Nations had to give up part of their sovereignty and accede to a world fed-

eration. He went with a delegation to Moscow in 1961 to discuss the issues

with the Kremlin, with little effect. He was still pressing his case and

writing letters to the press about the issue in the last year of his life.

opposed British entry to the EEC, believing it would damage the Common-

wealth link and detract from Britain’s outward-looking international role.

We should not ‘go cap in hand’ to a narrow group of European countries

with ‘unstable records’, he protested in 1962. ‘I SAY HALT – Britain must

not become merely a part of Europe’, he wrote in the Sunday Express. In

1967, with Wilson renewing negotiations for British entry, Attlee’s ‘objec-

tion to our being hustled into the Common Market’ attracted widespread

publicity.

Attlee was hospitalised with prostate trouble in 1959 and had a heart

attack in 1961, needing a major operation in 1962 for a duodenal ulcer. In

June 1964 his wife suddenly died. Attlee, now in his early eighties and

becoming frail and weak, moved to a ﬂat in the Temple, in London. ‘I’ve

been to a number of funerals lately of my old colleagues’, he remarked in

1965, ‘do you think I will be the next?’

He lasted until 8 October 1967,

dying aged 84, after developing pneumonia. After a funeral service in

Temple Church, his ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey.

Winston Churchill (resigned 5 April 1955)

Churchill had to wait a long time for the premiership and ﬁrst became

prime minister in 1940 at age 65. In all 32 British prime ministers had

already left the ofﬁce (and in 11 cases died) at or before that age. He was

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just a month or so short of his 77th birthday when he started his second

term in 1951; only Gladstone in 1892 was older (82) at the start of a pre-

miership. When he ﬁnally retired, on 5 April 1955, he was 80 years and

four months old – the oldest prime minister of the 20th century and only

the third octogenarian ever to hold the ofﬁce. He then lived for another

nine years and ten months. At the time of his death on 24 January 1965

aged 90 he was the longest-lived former British prime minister, though

three of his successors lived to be 92.

Retirement after his election defeat in 1945 (when Churchill was 70)

would have been welcomed by Churchill’s wife and by his political heir

apparent, Anthony Eden, whose reassurance that the great man’s place in

history was secure and could have gained nothing by anything he might

do in the post-war years was double-edged. As Roy Jenkins put it, after 1945

Churchill ‘had nowhere to go but down’. He was initially stunned, bitter

and depressed at losing power. But in June 1946 he admitted, while ‘a short

time ago I was ready to retire and die gracefully’, now he was ‘going to stay

and have them out. I’ll tear their bleeding entrails out of them’.

However,

he neither enjoyed opposition nor distinguished himself as Leader of the

Opposition 1945–51. He left as much as possible of the work involved to

others, while concentrating on writing his war memoirs and playing the

role of world statesman.

Churchill said he always believed in staying in the pub until closing time.

He clung on tenaciously far longer than anyone expected, until he left reluc-

tantly and under massive pressure from his political colleagues in April 1955.

‘I don’t want to go’, he confessed a few days before the fateful day, ‘but

Anthony wants it so much.’ In 1951 he had given the impression he would

stay in Number 10 for only a year or so. But, despite unmistakeable signs of

old age and ﬂagging energies, and a serious stroke that almost killed him in

1953, he refused to be prised out of ofﬁce and kept coming up with excuses to

postpone retirement. Increasingly-frustrated ministers complained he was

‘gaga’, but it would be better to say that his performance as prime minister

after 1951 was uneven: sometimes he could rouse himself for a big occasion

and the old zest and ﬁre would be seen, at other times (and increasingly) he

was lethargic and ineffective. If Eden had shown more steel and ruthlessness

he would have grasped the crown earlier; and if Eden not been seriously

ill and hospitalised in 1953, Churchill would almost certainly have been

forced to resign at the time of his stroke. After that blow, Churchill’s ‘advanc-

ing decrepitude’ and the fact he was no longer up to the job became more

obvious. In a conversation with his doctor Lord Moran in August 1954,

Churchill hinted he would prefer to die in ofﬁce, something conﬁrmed by his

daughter Mary Soames in March 1955, who said that from his own point of

view ‘it would have been better if he had gone on till he dropped in his

tracks’. Churchill dreaded the emptiness and boredom of retirement: ‘there

would be no purpose in living’, he said, ‘when there is nothing to do.’

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He tried to put a brave face on it. ‘It is a strange and formidable experi-

ence laying down responsibility and letting the trappings of power fall in a

heap to the ground,’ Churchill wrote to US President Eisenhower three

months after resigning. ‘A sense not only of psychological but of physical

relaxation steals over one to leave a feeling both of relief and denudation. I

did not know how tired I was until I stopped working.’ He told a friend he

was ‘enjoying the period of comparative leisure and it is a real relief for me

to be freed from the burdens of Prime Minister. The worst thing about it is

that when you let all these responsibilities drop you feel your power falls

with the thing it held.’ Those close to him were not fooled. His secretaries

realised, as one of them put it, ‘how shattering it was for him to retire’. One

of them told Moran: ‘He comes into the ofﬁce and asks if anything has

happened, just as he used to do. You know that for years he has been inun-

dated with “paper” and with ofﬁcial business. And then, all at once, as if a

tap has been turned off, it has ceased. All the bustle and stir has gone out

of his life. Yesterday Sir Norman Brook [the Cabinet Secretary] sent him

a message by a despatch rider. Sir Winston was delighted. Not with the

message, but with the messenger. It was an echo from the past.’ When

Churchill saw Moran soon after retiring he admitted he had been ‘going

through considerable psychological changes. I have had to let things drop

from my mind. I have had to shed responsibility and become a spectator.’

‘I have no desire now for anything that means effort,’ he continued. ‘I have

got to kill time till time kills me.’

Churchill was proud to be the ‘Great Commoner’ and had no desire to sit

in the House of Lords. He had declined the Order of the Garter in 1945

but accepted it in 1953. He would have liked to have had it both ways, in

the sense of remaining plain ‘Mr Churchill’ rather than becoming known as

‘Sir Winston’. As for the House of Lords, it ‘means nothing to him’, Moran

once noted. A plot to kick him upstairs as prime minister in the Lords in 1952

never got off the ground when it was realised Churchill would never agree.

‘I am afraid that he regards us in the Lords as a rather disreputable collection

of old gentleman’, sighed Lord Salisbury. When he retired, the Queen offered

him a dukedom but only after discreet enquiries conﬁrmed he would refuse

it. There was a last-minute ‘wobble’ when it seemed – to the Queen’s alarm

– that he might, after all, accept it, but he did decline the honour. He said

that were he unable to stay in the Commons he would be proud if the offer

could be reconsidered, but he never asked for it to be renewed. He had long

supported the idea that peers should be able to renounce their peerages and

stand for election to the Commons, and he backed the Labour MP Anthony

Wedgwood Benn’s campaign to change the law to allow him to stay in the

Commons when he inherited his peerage in 1960. Churchill made a donation

(of ten pounds) to Benn’s campaign fund when he fought the by-election

ordered in his constituency, and 10,000 copies of a letter of support Churchill

wrote him were distributed to voters.

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Although he remained an MP, and became Father of the House in 1959

– by then the only MP ﬁrst elected in the reign of Queen Victoria – Churchill

took little part in parliamentary life after retiring as prime minister. From

time to time he attended sessions, sitting prominently on the corner seat

on the front bench below the gangway, and he occasionally voted. But he

did not speak in parliament again, except for brief thanks, literally a sen-

tence each time, acknowledging congratulations on his birthday in 1959

and 1961. He was angry early in 1956, when the Commons voted against the

death penalty, and fumed about going to parliament to warn ‘the country

is going soft’, but realised he was not up to speaking: ‘there is no longer

the necessary clarity of thought’. Later, in July 1958, he told Macmillan he

was going to make a speech about the Middle East, and even drafted some

notes, but then changed his mind and decided he had ‘nothing worth

saying’.

He visited his constituency only rarely but resisted attempts to talk him

out of standing for election again in 1959, by which time he had declined

so much it would have been better if he had called it a day and not stood.

The local Conservative association were ‘acquiescent rather than enthusias-

tic’ by that stage and there was soon discreet pressure for it to be able to go

ahead and select someone to succeed him in good time for the next elec-

tion. Much family pressure was brought to bear, but Churchill was obsti-

nate – he said he hoped he would die in the House – and only in April

1963, to everyone’s relief, he ﬁnally announced he would retire at the next

election. Some of Churchill’s entourage suggested that, uniquely, he be

made an honorary Life Member of Parliament, to give him a last link with

political life, but the Conservative government turned down the idea. In

his last year or two he attended the Commons only a few times, in a wheel-

chair. His last appearance there was on 27 July 1964; the next day the three

party leaders called on him at home to present a Vote of Thanks from the

Commons for his services to parliament and the nation.

By the time he retired from the premiership Churchill was a rich man.

For much of his life, his ﬁnances had been rackety and he had churned out

journalism to fund his extravagant lifestyle. His fortunes began to change

during the war when Alexander Korda bought the ﬁlm rights for two of the

prime minister’s books (Marlborough and History of the English-Speaking

Peoples) for a total of £100,000. Then in 1946 a group of wealthy bene-

factors purchased Chartwell, his house in Kent, and presented it to the

National Trust, on condition he and Clementine Churchill would have the

right to live there for the rest of their lives (Churchill made £43,000 from

the sale). To avoid penal rates of taxation, maximise earnings from his war

memoirs, and provide for his family after his death, a special trust was set

up and given ownership of his papers, which then sold the literary rights.

Churchill was paid £20,000 a year by the trust – double the prime minis-

ter’s salary at that time. The book deal for his Second World War memoirs

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(six volumes published between 1948 and 1954), negotiated in 1947, was

worth £555,000 or over $2.2 million – the value in today’s money estimated

by David Reynolds as anything between $18 and $50 million. New deals

were still being arranged after he ﬁnally retired, including £20,000 for a

10,000-word epilogue for a one-volume abridgement of the war memoirs in

1957, the sale of the ﬁlm and TV rights to The Second World War for $75,000

in 1959, and £100,000 for the ﬁlm rights (in 1960) for My Early Life. At death

Churchill left £304,000 (equivalent to over £3 million today).

The government thought it was important to keep Churchill informed

and supported. Uniquely a Foreign Ofﬁce ofﬁcial, Anthony Montague

Browne, was seconded to be his private secretary (he became a close com-

panion, staying with Churchill until the end of his life), though Churchill

reimbursed the government for the cost of his salary. Foreign Ofﬁce tele-

grams were sent to the former prime minister, though Montague Browne

says he only ‘skimmed through them like a newspaper holiday-reader on

the beach’. He was regularly briefed and updated on developments during

the Suez crisis. The government wanted to keep him on board and, as

Jenkins says, while he still had for a while ‘a semi-diplomatic world role’,

meeting foreign leaders and world statesmen, such as Adenauer, de Gaulle

and Eisenhower, ‘help to steer him through such delicate waters’.

Although he had a massive domestic and international reputation and an

iconic and legendary status, it is difﬁcult to point to much direct political

impact after he left Number 10. Eden wanted to be his own man and, while

he was friendly and kept in touch with his old chief, made sure he did not

play a part in the national campaign or make a party political broadcast in

the 1955 general election, though Churchill would have been happy to

have had a role. Six months later, at Eden’s request, he had a long talk with

a wavering R.A. Butler, to try to persuade him to move from the Treasury to

become Leader of the Commons and a non-departmental minister. He had

had doubts about Eden as his successor – ‘I don’t believe Anthony can do

it’ – and shared the growing anxieties about Eden’s moods and weaknesses

even before the new prime minister was tested to destruction by the Suez

crisis.

As prime minister Churchill had fought all the way against British with-

drawal from the Suez Canal zone and it was to be expected he would

support strong action against Nasser when he nationalised the canal – ‘we

can’t have that malicious swine sitting across our communications’. When

Macmillan saw him and talked about the need to bring in Israel, destroy

the Egyptian forces and bring down Nasser, he noted in his diary ‘Churchill

got out some maps and got quite excited’. The next day, in ‘Action This

Day’ mode, Churchill spent August Bank Holiday Monday driving from

Chartwell to Chequers, dictating in the car a note setting out his views on

the military issues and options, which was typed up by his secretary in a

lay-by, and then discussed the military planning with Eden. At the height

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of the crisis, in October 1956, Eden summoned Montague Browne to ask

whether Churchill would accept a seat in the Cabinet without portfolio.

The astounded Montague Browne replied he would not like ‘the opposite of

the harlot’s prerogative’ (responsibility without power). It was a strange

episode, suggestive perhaps of Eden’s increasing stress and insecurity, and

it is not clear how much Churchill – then recovering from another minor

stroke – would have been able to contribute. In November he issued a public

statement spelling out his support for government policy. But in private he

was critical. In early August he insisted ‘We don’t need the Americans for

this’, but his later verdict on the Suez ﬁasco was: ‘I would never have done

it without squaring the Americans, and once I’d started I would never have

dared stop.’ He was dismayed that the operation was halted almost as soon

as it started, as he told Moran: ‘To go so far and not go on was madness.’

Moran claims that by late-November 1956 Churchill was sensing Eden’s

days were numbered and saying he would like to see Macmillan as prime

minister. In January 1957, when Eden resigned, Churchill was among those

who gave advice to the Queen to appoint Macmillan. However, the support of

the overwhelming majority of the Cabinet for Macmillan over Butler, rather

than the backing of Churchill, was the decisive factor. Later, Churchill was

disappointed by Macmillan; in 1960 he thought he ‘ought not to have gone

to Africa, encouraging the black men’ with his famous ‘wind of change’

speech.

After Suez Churchill did ‘everything he could’, says Jenkins, ‘through

letters to Eisenhower and on his visit to the White House two years later, to

repair the damage to Anglo-American relations.’ The US visit, in May 1959,

was his last effort for the ‘special relationship’, and while Churchill liked

feeling he was ‘on the map again’, as Moran put it, his health was not good

and it is claimed he needed ‘massive doses of stimulants’ prescribed by his

doctor to get him through. He stayed three days in the White House and

spent a good deal of time with his old wartime friend, President Eisen-

hower. ‘Ike’ was extremely affable but their talks and conversations, it was

noted, were of ‘a very general nature [and] ranged much over personalities’.

When Churchill raised, as the Foreign Ofﬁce wanted him to, the issue of

discrimination against British contractors and US protectionist tendencies,

he got sympathetic noises but little else. Did he, asks Montague Browne,

inﬂuence US policy towards Britain? ‘Not one jot’, was the conclusion. ‘We

had long since been ﬁled as “past business”.’

Lord Moran had always doubted whether his patient would be happy

in retirement. ‘I must have something to look forward to’, Churchill had

said to him. ‘I can’t do nothing for the rest of my days.’ Inﬂuenced by his

scientist friend, Lord Cherwell, he led a ﬁnancial appeal to create a British

version of MIT. The outcome was the establishment of a new Cambridge

college, named after him, initially devoted to science and technology. He

turned to the task of completing work on his four-volume History of the

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English-Speaking Peoples, originally begun before the Second World War. A

team of historians and other aides provided material and worked on drafts,

while Churchill tinkered and polished. His role, he admitted, ‘was simple,

just rearrangement and picking out an unnecessary passage here and there.

It’s thinking and composing I ﬁnd difﬁcult.’ One of his team, the historian

Bill Deakin, judged that Churchill no longer had ‘the energy to handle

great masses of material’ and that his contributions ‘were frankly not of

much value’. Published between 1956 and 1958, it sold well chieﬂy because

of the fame of its author, but had a decidedly old-fashioned feel to it, with

its narrative of kings, battles and constitutional struggles. The book stopped

in Victoria’s reign. ‘I could not write about the woe and ruin of the terrible

twentieth century’, Churchill admitted. ‘We answered all the tests. But it

was useless.’ This bleak comment testiﬁed to the sense of political failure

and disappointment that took hold of Churchill in retirement. ‘I am afraid

we are going downhill’, he said to Moran in September 1956. ‘The fallen

state of Britain troubles him more than his own parlous condition’, Moran

noted in his diary. ‘I have worked very hard all my life’, Churchill said to

Montague Browne one day, ‘and I have achieved a great deal – in the end

to achieve NOTHING.’ All that Churchill had stood for and fought for he

saw had been lost or was passing away, and he felt ‘profound melancholy’

at the decline of the Empire and of British power.

In February 1957 Macmillan had lunch with Churchill (now 82) and

noted, ‘He has aged, but he is still very well informed and misses little that

goes on.’ Meeting him again six months later, he found Churchill ‘in pretty

good form and remarkably quick either on very old questions (where his

memory is most attentive) or on very new ones (which he has not had time

to forget)’. Churchill had predicted ‘I shall die quickly once I retire’, but he

was wrong. Instead there was a tragic process of physical and mental decay.

As his friend Brendan Bracken said, he had ‘disregarded all the normal life-

lengthening rules’. But he became very deaf, and a succession of strokes

in 1956, 1959, 1960 and 1963, pneumonia in 1958, and a broken hip after

a fall in 1962 meant he became an invalid in his last years. His memory

started to go, and deep boredom and depression clouded his days. ‘I’m

waiting for death … But it won’t come’, he complained. ‘My life is over, but

not yet ended.’ A visitor in 1958 likened him to ‘the embers of a great ﬁre,

all the force gone’. Moran describes him sinking into a state of ‘apathy and

indifference’, becoming eventually just a shell of a man, waiting blankly for

the end.

He spent much time abroad, chieﬂy in the south of France, staying in the

luxurious Riviera villas of wealthy friends such as Lord Beaverbrook and

Emery Reeves (his literary adviser) or cruising in the Mediterranean or the

West Indies in the large yacht of the Greek shipowner Aristotle Onassis.

Clementine Churchill did not approve of her husband’s friends and did not

usually accompany him on these long trips. He did a few last paintings and

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read a lot, including, apparently, Trollope and Wuthering Heights for the

ﬁrst time, spending many hours whiling away the time by playing cards

and bezique. The deaths of old friends like Brendan Bracken and Lord

Cherwell (‘The Prof’) deepened his gloom and isolation. Family problems

crowded in: Clementine Churchill was often in poor health herself; rela-

tions with his son Randolph had long been difﬁcult, even tempestuous,

though he approved his appointment as ofﬁcial biographer; one daughter,

Sarah, had serious drink problems, while another, Diana, committed suicide

in 1963.

Churchill turned 90 in November 1964. On 10 January 1965 he suffered

another massive stroke and after lingering for two weeks died in his house

at Hyde Park Gate in London on 24 January (exactly 70 years to the day

after the death of his father, Lord Randolph Churchill). The normal prac-

tice is for parliament to adjourn for the day on the death being announced

of a former prime minister, but for Churchill it was adjourned for a week,

until after the laying-in-state in Westminster Hall and the magniﬁcent, long-

planned and carefully stage-managed state funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral. Of

prime-ministerial funerals only Wellington’s could compare, and Churchill’s

passing was more of an international event.

Churchill was buried next

to the graves of his father, mother and brother in Bladon Churchyard near

to his birthplace at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire.

Anthony Eden (resigned 9 January 1957)

Eden resigned as prime minister after just 21 months in Number 10, his

premiership and reputation wrecked by the Suez crisis. Although he enjoyed

high personal poll ratings and had increased the Conservative government’s

majority at the general election, called soon after he took over from Churchill

in 1955, there had been growing doubts about his character, temperament

and ability to do the job of prime minister even before Suez. Eden had been

seriously ill and had almost died in 1953 when a gallstones operation went

wrong and his bile duct was accidentally cut. He had needed emergency sur-

gery and a long convalescence but, although experiencing occasional fevers

and chills in the interim, believed he was in good enough health to become

PM in 1955. However, the strains of the Suez crisis, compounded by a recur-

rence of illness, and the effects of drugs used to treat him, made a crack-up

almost inevitable, and in late-November 1956 he needed to be whisked off to

Jamaica for three weeks to recuperate. David Owen, a former Foreign Secretary

and himself a medic, believes that a ﬁt and well Eden would not have made

the mistakes of judgement and decision-making he did in 1956.

Whatever

the case, Eden’s political position had been fatally undermined in his party

and the Cabinet, and power was draining away from him, even before his

doctors insisted in the New Year that if he did not immediately resign he

would soon collapse again and endanger and shorten his life.

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Eden resigned as an MP, and was the ﬁrst to quit simultaneously both the

premiership and the Commons without going immediately to the House

of Lords, for he declined the Queen’s offer of an Earldom. The Queen did

not ask him formally for advice as to his successor, nor did he volunteer a

recommendation. He assumed it would be Macmillan, who was decisively

backed by an overwhelming majority of the Cabinet. The evidence of Eden’s

praise for Butler in his audience with the Queen and a private letter sent

from his wife to Butler combine to leave the impression that he was himself

perhaps more sympathetic to ‘RAB’.

If not literally sailing off into the sunset at the end of his political career,

the former prime minister and his wife left within a few days on a long

voyage to New Zealand, through the Panama Canal, because the Suez Canal

was closed. He received a VIP, red carpet, band-playing welcome from

cheering crowds and the New Zealand prime minister when he docked in

Auckland. He was as his wife records ‘very unhappy’. Aged just 59 he had

no plans and the future was uncertain. He had never been well-off and had

no income beyond his prime-ministerial pension, nowhere to live apart

from Clarissa Eden’s cottage in Wiltshire, and was in poor health. David

Carlton describes him as ‘sick and … dispirited’. He fell ill again in New

Zealand and had to be ﬂown to the US for another operation. With a

serious health problem that was going to recur, requiring future operations,

the doctors’ verdict was that Eden would be capable only of ‘leading a very

quiet life’ and would have to ‘remain out of things’. It was a sentence of

political death, but Eden only slowly and reluctantly came to terms with it.

Violet Bonham-Carter had noted when he resigned: ‘Now he faces a com-

plete vacuum. Politics have always been his be-all and his end-all. He cares

for nothing else.’ For several years, however unrealistically, he seems to

have dreamed of some sort of political comeback. He continued to follow

politics and international affairs avidly and regretted having resigned his

parliamentary seat. He found, according to Robert Rhodes James, that ‘he

missed politics more than he had anticipated and until late 1960 did not

give up the idea of standing again for the House of Commons’.

Only when he ﬁnally went to the House of Lords in 1961 (as the Earl of

Avon) did Eden accept his political career was over for good. ‘He feels it will

be the irrevocable step’, Clarissa Eden told Beaverbrook, ‘because he always

thinks in the back of his mind that the miracle will happen and he will be

well enough to go back to politics – which, of course, he won’t.’ ‘It provides

a platform with less trouble’, was Eden’s own explanation, saying he did

not propose to attend ‘with any regularity’ but might make a speech or two

there a year and do the same in the country.’ Further ill health – a chest

operation in 1962 and a heart attack in 1963 – underlined that it was the

only course open to him. ‘There is no chance of my returning to political

life’, he told journalists in September 1963. ‘I am all right as long as I am

not working hard.’

Attlee to Douglas-Home 161

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10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston