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

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Much of Eden’s time between 1958 and 1964 was devoted to writing

his memoirs. At one point the press baron Lord Beaverbrook offered one

million pounds for his papers, memoirs and articles, but Eden did not like

the proposed deal. Eventually a contract was signed with The Times (for

£160,000) that brought Eden ﬁnancial security, and with unexpectedly

successful sales a sum equivalent to nearly £3 million today was made.

Like Churchill Eden was helped with his memoirs by a team of talented

historians and researchers. They came out in three volumes totalling nearly

1800 pages: Full Circle, covering the period 1951–57, in 1960; Facing the

Dictators, on the 1930s, in 1962; and The Reckoning, covering the Second

World War, in 1965. They have been neatly described as ‘hard work to

write, and hard work to read’ and as tending to be more of a ‘diplomatic

record rather than a true autobiography’. They were ‘immensely long and

dry’, but the heavy documentary content made volumes two and three in

particular important contributions to historical knowledge at a time when

the ofﬁcial ﬁles were still closed under the Fifty Year Rule. Eden wanted to

justify and vindicate himself over Suez, and demonstrate the unity of his

career. As David Dutton puts it, the premise was that ‘Far from being an

aberration, Suez only made sense in the light of the lessons learnt from the

earlier phases of his political life.’ In Full Circle the theme was the ‘lessons’

of the 1930s applied to the 1950s. He wrote about the most recent and con-

troversial period of his political career ﬁrst at the insistence of The Times,

and to get his version out quickly because it was not then certain how

long he would live. It meant that, as Dutton says, by ‘giving a detailed

account of the inner workings of government so soon after the events

described, Eden broke new ground in the conventions surrounding polit-

ical memoirs’. It also meant a complete lack of frankness about the key

issue of ‘collusion’, with no reference to the secret Sèvres pact with France

and Israel. If Eden had written later – after the publication of books like

Anthony Nutting’s No End of a Lesson (1967) and Hugh Thomas’s The Suez

Affair (1967) – he would have had to address it in some way. He even

agreed with Selwyn Lloyd, who had been his Foreign Secretary, to coor-

dinate their responses to historians and journalists working on the story of

Suez – ‘collusion about collusion’, as Richard Thorpe calls it.

Eden wrote the occasional newspaper or journal article and gave a

few lectures. In a 1966 essay for Chatham House, Towards Peace in Indo-

China, drawing on his experience of the 1954 Geneva conference, he put

forward ideas for new settlement involving great-power guarantees of the

territory and neutrality of North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

He did not give many press or TV interviews, but appeared in a CBS pro-

gramme ‘The Twentieth Century’ in 1964, and in 1974 was interviewed on

the BBC about his wartime recollections, reminiscing about Hitler, Stalin

and Mussolini. In 1976 he enjoyed an unexpected critical and commercial

success with the publication of his ﬁnal and best book, Another World, a

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minor classic of autobiographical writing, and a short but deeply personal

and moving account of his childhood, family background and First World

War experiences.

Thin-skinned, volatile and sensitive to criticism in ofﬁce, Eden was in

retirement exceptionally touchy about his reputation and image, and the

way his career was presented by others, whether other politicians writing

their memoirs or historians. He could ‘react with anger and ﬁerceness when

he considered [his reputation] was being impugned’, says Rhodes James.

Both on Suez (where the book by Nutting, a former protégé who had resigned

from his government over the crisis, angered him) and on the 1930s (where

he was concerned about the trend of revisionist writing in the 1960s and

about books by ‘lamentably, appeasement-minded’ history professors), he

was quick to take offence. Calmer heads might think that threats of legal

action for libel or defamation of character against a former Cabinet col-

league and old friend, Lord Kilmuir, over comments about an Eden press

conference in Rome in his account of the Conservative government and

Europe in the early 1950s, or against an LSE historian (F.S. Northedge)

writing a book about interwar British foreign policy (‘I would gladly sue

him if I could’, fumed Eden), were an over-reaction. Eden would arrange for

friends to write to the press about or pen critical reviews of offending books

and authors. He was preoccupied – obsessed – with the verdict of history, as

Peter Beck shows, and with sustaining ‘the Eden legend’. Towards the end

of his life, when Lord Bethell published a book in 1974 about the forced

repatriation of Russians captured in the German army, containing strong

criticisms of Eden, he was deeply hurt by the ensuing controversy but kept

his silence.

Suez and Nasser haunted Eden in his retirement. He felt the events of

1967 and the Six Day War vindicated him and showed his actions in 1956

had been justiﬁed. But someone who saw him shortly before his death felt

he was ‘consumed deep down by the sorrowful knowledge that history

would not treat him with kindness’. When the journalist Henry Brandon

met him in the autumn of 1976, he found Eden still ‘presenting his case as

he saw it … The ghost of Suez was still stalking Eden as he was getting

ready for the end and wondering about the verdict of history.’

The Edens would make annual visits to Paris, staying at the British

embassy, visiting the galleries, buying pictures and books, and lunching

privately with the De Gaulles at the Elysée. Remembering his crucial

support during the war, the General always treated Eden, who was a life-

long Francophile, as ‘a major political ﬁgure as well as a valued friend’,

would discuss the world scene with him (they shared a distrust of US

policies), and always urged him to return to political life.

It was rather different back in Britain where Eden’s political role after

1957 was minimal and the Conservative high command relieved he was

out of it. As Carlton puts it: ‘During the two decades of his retirement Avon

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clearly had little inﬂuence on the course of events. His successors in Downing

Street did not see him as an elder statesman to be constantly consulted and

the managers of the Conservative Party made little attempt to associate

him with their proceedings and campaigns.’ His views on the Conservative

governments of Macmillan and Home, says Carlton, were not particularly

favourable, and having been a Tory progressive in the past, he was, if any-

thing, now somewhat to the right of them in his private views and outlook.

Macmillan he plainly mistrusted, harbouring resentments about his con-

duct during the Suez crisis and his ruthless manoeuvring to seize the crown.

‘He should have been a cardinal in the Middle Ages’, he said, ‘under a strong

Pope.’ In 1959 Eden refused to issue a statement endorsing Macmillan per-

sonally as prime minister and – despite being pressed hard by his successor

– would issue a statement of support only for the Conservative Party. In 1962

his criticism of Macmillan’s sacking of Selwyn Lloyd, his Chancellor of the

Exchequer, who he felt was being made the scapegoat for wider government

failings, received widespread coverage in the press. Lloyd was ‘a useful stick to

beat Harold [Macmillan] with’, Clarissa Eden told a friend. In the 1963 Tory

leadership contest he preferred (in order) Hailsham, Douglas-Home, and

Maudling. He now had no time for Butler, saying he could not respect him

and disliked his lack of ‘faith’ and consistency.

In 1961 there had been – to put it kindly – crossed wires, or – seen in

another light – the sort of calculated insult only possible with the British

honours system, when Eden contacted Macmillan saying he had decided to

go to the Lords after all, and the prime minister said he would be happy to

recommend him for a Viscountcy. It was soon sorted out and Eden got the

then-customary Earldom. He did not in fact attend the Lords all that fre-

quently and never felt at home or made a mark there. Between October

1961 and March 1974 he made ten speeches there on foreign policy and

international questions, including major speeches on NATO, the Middle

East, the 1968 Czech crisis, and South-East Asia. In 1962 he set out at length

his views on the Common Market application, stressing the need to safe-

guard Commonwealth interests, highlighting implications for the agri-

cultural support system, and raising a concern about the long-term issues of

federalism and political integration. Contrary to his views in ofﬁce, he now

accepted Britain should join the EEC but was never a Euro-enthusiast.

Outside the political sphere Eden’s retirement was, says Richard Thorpe,

‘fulﬁlling and varied’.

He enjoyed living as a country gentleman in Wilt-

shire, where he had some success breeding pedigree Hereford cattle. For the

sake of his health he would go to the West Indies each winter, owning

homes ﬁrst on the island of Bequia and then on Barbados. He was an active

president of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre 1958–66 (he compares with

Neville Chamberlain in his knowledge of and love for Shakespeare), and

was Chancellor of Birmingham University until 1973. His health was variable

and he needed nine major internal operations. But he achieved a real con-

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tentment in retirement that he had found elusive when he was an active

politician. Not the least reason was his happy marriage to Clarissa Eden, his

second wife, who was Churchill’s niece, whom he had married in 1952.

Eden spent the last three winters of his life in Florida, the guest of his

friends Averell and Pamela Harriman. When he fell seriously ill there at the

end of 1976 and cancer of the liver was diagnosed, the prime minister,

James Callaghan, made available an RAF plane to ﬂy the dying former

prime minister home. Eden died aged 79 on 14 January 1977 at his home

Alvediston Manor in Wiltshire and was buried in the local churchyard.

Harold Macmillan (resigned 18 October 1963)

‘Life after death’ was what Harold Macmillan used to call his post-

premiership, referring back to his resignation from ofﬁce as ‘my death’ or

‘when I died’. He had been prime minister for six years and nine months

when he left ofﬁce on 18 October 1963. He was 69 years old and lived

another 23 years, towards the end of which there was, as one biographer

says, a sort of extraordinary ‘political rebirth’ or ‘resurrection’. It is arguable

that the long years of retirement were required fully to develop and polish

Macmillan’s reputation as a statesman and sage, a reputation that stood

higher in 1986, when he died, than in 1963.

Macmillan had joked to his press secretary in March 1960 about going on

until he was 80. However, he was always conscious Churchill had stayed

too long and of the danger of becoming what he called ‘the old limpet’.

Feeling the burdens of ofﬁce and troubled by old war wounds, he had told

the Queen in October 1960 he might have to resign and, after being ill in

June 1961 with a virus and starting to feel his age, he ended the year

depressed and seriously contemplating resignation.

He recovered and kept

going until 1963 but – battered by events and with his reputation starting

to crumble – he seems to have edged towards a decision over that sum-

mer that it was time to go. He told the Queen on 20 September he would

announce there would not be a general election that year and he would not

lead the Conservative Party at the election, thinking he might step down

in January 1964. Then, he changed his mind and on 7 October told the

Cabinet he had decided to stay on. But the very next day, on the eve of the

party conference, he fell ill and, in severe pain, had to be taken to hospital

for a prostate operation. He then decided to quit. It has sometimes been

suggested he thought (wrongly) he had cancer and might die, but his doctors

had reassured him and did not advise him to resign. It was probably more

the case that, indecisive and wavering about resignation, he seized on a

medical bolt from the blue to provide and rationalise the exit he had been

looking for.

Having told the Queen on 9 October 1963 of his intention to

resign, Macmillan – from hospital – spent the period until he left ofﬁce

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on 18 October ordering soundings of party opinion and unscrupulously

manipulating procedures to manage the succession. He was determined

to block R.A. Butler and seems to have ‘switched horses’ at an early

stage, abandoning his early support for Lord Hailsham and seizing on Lord

Home as the best person to unite the party. In an unprecedented fashion

monarch went to prime minister rather than the other way round, and he

formally resigned from his hospital bed before reading out a memorandum

he had prepared, advising her to send for Home. Macmillan’s role in

the choice of his successor was subsequently criticised, and the controversy

his Machiavellian wire-pulling triggered drove the Conservative Party in

1965 to adopt rules by which MPs would elect its leaders. Macmillan had

moreover ‘bounced’ the Queen into accepting his choice of successor – she

took advice from no one else and from someone who was, when he gave

it, no longer prime minister. He always insisted he wanted to preserve

the royal prerogative power over the choice of a premier, but in practice

undermined it.

Macmillan soon recovered from his illness and operation and, ﬁnding

retirement boring and frustrating, regretted he had resigned. He respected

and liked Alec Home but after the Conservatives’ defeat in 1964 came to

realise he had opted for the wrong man and that Butler might have been a

better choice as an election-winner. He spoke only three more times in the

House of Commons, joining in tributes after the assassination of President

Kennedy and on Churchill’s retirement, and speaking in the debate on the

Denning Report on the Profumo affair in December 1963. His decision

to leave the Commons at the general election was announced in February

1964. He came in for some press criticism when it was reported he had

been offered but declined both an earldom and the Order of the Garter. His

own resignation honours list had raised eyebrows with – shades of Disraeli

and Monty Corry – its peerage for John Wyndham, his private secretary in

Number 10, and an unprecedented number of baronetcies and knighthoods

for other close aides. Partly he did not, it seems, want to damage the longer-

term political prospects of his son, Maurice, an MP since 1955 and now start-

ing his ministerial career in Home’s government, though he could have

disclaimed any title under the Peerage Act. Partly he did not hold the House

of Lords in high esteem – it was ‘a place for politicians put out to grass’, it was

‘not worth belonging to’, as he once said. And partly he wanted to keep open

the option of a political come-back and a return to ofﬁce – perhaps as prime

minister, perhaps as an elder statesman like Balfour, in some sort of coalition

or ‘National’ government. He stayed plain Mr Macmillan. In 1976 he accepted

the Order of Merit, which he is held to have prized above all other honours,

though there are suggestions the Queen, irritated by his refusal of honours,

kept him waiting for this distinction.

Lady Dorothy Macmillan died suddenly in May 1966. Her long affair

with Bob Boothby, starting in the later-1920s but unknown to the wider

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public until after Harold Macmillan’s death, had virtually wrecked their

marriage, but she had played the dutiful political wife, had been supportive

of him in ofﬁce, and while they lived somewhat separate lives there had

been benign warmth in their later years together. Macmillan was left des-

pondent and lonelier than ever after her death, prone to bouts of depres-

sion, and living a rather solitary life at Birch Grove (his house in Sussex),

with forays into London clubland and to Oxford. He seems to have devel-

oped a close and affectionate relationship with Eileen O’Casey, widow of

the Irish playwright Sean O’Casey (a Macmillan author), but rumours they

might marry came to nothing. There were other family bereavements: the

Macmillan’s youngest daughter (Boothby was probably her father), Sarah,

was an alcoholic who died aged 40 in 1970; and Maurice Macmillan fought

alcoholism and ill-health before pre-deceasing his father in 1984. The death

in 1972 of John Wyndham (Lord Egremont) was a grievous blow.

He was able to go back into the family publishing business, in which he

had worked earlier in his career, playing an active role as chairman of the

company (1964–67 and 1970–74) and later as its ﬁrst president. He oversaw

changes in management and organisation, a move to new premises, and

a major international expansion – Macmillan himself travelled a great deal

to promote sales – and growth of the business. In his ofﬁcial biography

Alistair Horne describes Macmillan as ‘a millionaire publisher, author and

landowner’. But his fortune and his tax affairs were so carefully arranged

within the family that when he died his will for probate totalled only

£37,000.

He had been elected Chancellor of Oxford University in 1960

and, in retirement was active in that role and took it seriously, with fre-

quent visits to the university and its colleges, dinners, speeches and award

ceremonies. He mesmerised dons and students alike and was an effective

fund-raiser.

The writing of his memoirs also kept Macmillan occupied. Originally

planned as three volumes they eventually appeared in six, totalling nearly

4,000 pages and two million words, between 1966 and 1973. He admitted

to making some mistakes, saying the 1962 ‘night of the long knives’ mass

Cabinet sackings were ‘a serious error’ and that he could have handled

some aspects of the Profumo affair better. Drawing extensively on his pri-

vate diaries and on documents from his time in ofﬁce, they are a massively

detailed and rather ponderous account, in which he revealed little of him-

self. Had he not been his own publisher they would probably have been

scaled down. They sold well but critics often found them uneven and dull;

Enoch Powell memorably described reading them as ‘akin to … chewing

cardboard’.

Later, he published Past Masters (1975), a short and readable

set of political portraits and reﬂections covering the 1906–39 period and his

illuminating Mediterranean War Diaries (1984).

In a survey in 1975, more than ten years after he had left power, 26 per

cent of respondents thought Macmillan was dead. He was in fact in his old

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age developing into something of a ‘national treasure’, as Colin Matthew

noted, regarded with growing respect and affection. Some of his reputation

was down to his clever showmanship, to the witty, learned, urbane and

nostalgic speeches and conversation, and to the skilfully deceptive and

show stealing ‘old-man act’ he developed. Successful television appearances

and interviews, timed to coincide with the appearance of each volume of

his memoirs, were important in the rediscovery of Macmillan. There was a

sense, as time passed and perspectives lengthened on his years in power,

and as his successors struggled with and were defeated by the problems

facing the country, of the ‘old pro’, the ‘old master’ or the ‘old entertainer’

being seen in a new light.

‘Without membership of either house of parliament, Macmillan’s political

presence after 1964 was at best marginal’, argues Colin Matthew. ‘He assisted

behind the scenes, but effectively ceased to be a force in national politics.’ His

ﬁrst plunge back into public political controversy came in 1975, when he

denounced Labour’s calling of the Common Market referendum and spoke

out for the pro-European cause. But the idea of a return to the political stage

one day in an all-party coalition seems to have been in his mind almost as

soon as he left Number 10. In October 1964 in Liverpool he quipped he was

making his last speech from a political platform, ‘unless I have to come out

again to put it right’. In 1965 he was speculating with a group of his former

aides that a coalition government might be the best way of tackling the

country’s economic problems, and he might then come back: ‘he could take a

life peerage which could be arranged in a matter of hours’. The defeat of the

Heath government (Macmillan thought its confrontations with the miners

union were ‘bungling’ – ‘he had fought with miners in the trenches’, he said,

‘and they never gave in’) and the election of a weak Labour government in

1974 gave added force to his conviction a coalition national government was

needed to save the country from collapse or extremism. He considered stand-

ing for parliament as a national candidate in the October 1974 general elec-

tion, and visited Eden to ask him to back his return to politics in a coalition.

He used a TV interview in October 1976 to call for a government of national

unity. Asked who could lead it, he replied: ‘Mr Gladstone formed his last

Government when he was eighty-three. I’m only eighty-two. You mustn’t put

temptation in my way.’ Mrs Thatcher was dismayed and immediately made

known her view that the answer to Britain’s problems was the election of a

Conservative government.

Macmillan was initially delighted when Thatcher replaced Heath as Tory

leader in 1975. Heath, he liked to say, had been ‘a very good No. 2’ but was

not an effective leader and his decade in charge of the party had been dis-

astrous. He admired Thatcher’s courage, resolution and drive. She sought

his advice before and after she became prime minister, consulting him

during the Falklands campaign about how to organise a War Cabinet and

run a war. He campaigned for the party during the 1979 election, appearing in

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a party-political broadcast. But from the start he had his doubts and there

were clear political differences between them. In a February 1979 TV interview

he continued to drop hints about a government of national unity, harked

back to the period of Keynesian consensus politics and expressed doubts

about monetarism and Conservative economic policy. He let it be known that

he was deeply worried by Keith Joseph’s doctrinaire ideas and the ‘extremism’

of the Left being matched by that of the Right, arguing Conservatives should

occupy the middle ground. He described Thatcher as ‘a brilliant tyrant sur-

rounded by mediocrities’, deploring the zeal and narrowness of her ‘con-

viction’ leadership and loftily advising her not to try to do too much and

to read as much Jane Austen as possible. He rocked the boat with his com-

ments that inﬂation was ‘the mark of a rising civilisation’, his criticisms of

deﬂationary policies and high unemployment, and his calls for cooperation

between industry and unions, calling for a sort of ‘industrial parliament’ – all

showed his growing dissatisfaction and opposition to the direction in which

Thatcher was taking her party and the country.

With his great eye for the dramatic gesture he then decided to accept

an Earldom in February 1984 on his ninetieth birthday. The Queen and

Mrs Thatcher had been pressing him to accept a peerage and, bored, unable

to read because of failing eyesight, and no longer worried about his son’s

political career, he seized a last chance to strut the political stage. ‘In the

House of Lords it really doesn’t matter if you’re blind … or deaf or dumb’,

he remarked. He joked to Ted Heath he did not know on which side of the

chamber he was going to sit and, once installed as the Earl of Stockton, he

attended regularly and proceeded to make a number of witty, theatrical,

memorable and politically mischievous speeches attacking the ‘barren’

economic and social policies and philosophy of the Thatcher government.

In a speech to the Tory Reform Group in November 1985 he likened

privatisation to ‘selling the family silver’. While Opposition Labour peers

cheered his performances in the Lords, Thatcher and her supporters did not

hide their irritation and scorn. The right-wing press now labelled him as out-

of-date, quasi-socialist and someone who had been a bad prime minister,

sharing responsibility for creating the problems Thatcher was sorting out.

There were no more political curtain calls. Although his mind and his

stiletto were as sharp as ever, he was getting very frail. He was virtually

blind, suffering from pleurisy, shingles and gout, and in July 1986 was

ill with pneumonia. He died at Birch Grove after a short illness on

29 December 1986, six weeks short of his 93rd birthday, and was buried in

the parish churchyard of Horsted Keynes, nearby in West Sussex.

Alec Douglas-Home (left ofﬁce 16 0ctober 1964)

Alec Douglas-Home had been prime minister for just 362 days when, after

the Conservatives’ narrow defeat in the 1964 general election, he left ofﬁce

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on 16 October 1964, slipping quietly out of the garden gate at the back of

Number 10 with his suitcases as crowds cheered the victorious Harold

Wilson arriving at the front door. Somewhat like Balfour, Douglas-Home’s

time as prime minister was a short and unsuccessful interlude in a longer

ministerial and political career, which in his case continued with front-

bench posts for another decade until he ﬁnally retired from full-time active

politics in 1974. Home was modest, decent and amiable, often caricatured

as a tweedy aristocratic amateur, but his political career spanned over

40 years and he should not be underestimated as one of the ‘great sur-

vivors’ of British politics. Although he had a ‘hinterland’, a happy family

life, a love of county pursuits, great estates and wealth (inheriting 100,000

acres when he became the 14th Earl of Home and estimated to be a mil-

lionaire when he became PM), he was for all his charm a shrewd and tough

political operator – ‘iron painted to look like wood’, as Macmillan said of

him.

A ‘Jak’ cartoon in the Evening Standard of 17 October 1964 showed

Douglas-Home and Nikita Khrushchev, overthrown as Soviet leader on

15 October, shotguns under their arms, heading off side-by-side to the

grouse moors. But whereas Khrushchev had no choice but to live quietly in

retirement, watched over by the KGB, Douglas-Home, then aged 61, had

no intention of quitting politics. A ‘Vicky’ cartoon a week later – ‘Don’t

shoot the pianist, he’s doing his best’ – showed grim-faced leading Tories

looking on as a hapless Douglas-Home hammered away discordantly at his

ﬁve-ﬁnger exercises. He was not the man to ﬁnd a new tune for a party

unhappily returned to the uncertainties of opposition after 13 years in

power. No match for the quick-witted and tactically-adroit new prime min-

ister, who completely outclassed him as a House of Commons and tele-

vision performer, Douglas-Home was soon being described by Labour Cabinet

minister Richard Crossman as ‘totally ineffective as Leader of the Opposition’

and as ‘our asset’. His wife, many of his friends, and a majority of Tory

voters wanted him to continue as leader but his heart was not in it and

he was not willing to ﬁght to keep the position. ‘Factious opposition does

not come easily to me’, he privately admitted. He was reluctant to go

immediately and wanted to leave at a time of his own choosing.

Addressing the problems of democracy and legitimacy that had sur-

rounded his own emergence as party leader, Douglas-Home oversaw the

introduction of new procedures in February 1965 by which future leaders

would be elected by Tory MPs. Had he immediately put himself up for elec-

tion he would have probably won the ballot, in the absence at that stage of

a clear successor, and bought more time for his leadership. In policy terms

there were two important steps in his time at the helm: the commitment

to seek EEC entry was repeated, and a wide-ranging policy review process

was set up, directed by Edward Heath, the powerful Shadow Chancellor.

However, discontent built up within the party with calls for more robust

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leadership and suggestions of a covert campaign to force him out, involv-

ing Heathites, if not Heath himself. As rumours, plotting and press specula-

tion continued, Douglas-Home declared in June 1965 he would be carrying

on, but then Wilson’s announcement there would be no general election

that year made him more vulnerable still by giving time for any new leader

to settle in before facing the voters. Douglas-Home’s position collapsed

quickly. Criticism in the Tory press increased and the Conservatives, and

Douglas-Home personally compared with Wilson, fell further behind in the

opinion polls. An attempt by disgruntled backbenchers to move against

him, in the guise of a call for a ‘debate’ on the leadership, at the 1922 Com-

mittee was headed-off, but the writing was on the wall and, tired and

depressed, he decided to stand down while he could do so with dignity

rather than be forced out in a putsch. He announced his resignation as

party leader on 22 July 1965. His playwright brother, William, later insisted

‘the Tories sacked my brother’, saying ‘suicide’ might have been written

on his political death certiﬁcate but it was ‘murder none the less’. The bio-

graphers of Willie Whitelaw, then the Tory Chief Whip, termed it a ‘mercy-

killing’.

He had been Leader of the Opposition for only nine months.

Douglas-Home was reluctant to go but the way in which he accepted the

inevitable without a fuss and without public bitterness or rancour greatly

enhanced his reputation and was a key factor in allowing him to carve out

a constructive post-leadership role.

After 1965 Douglas-Home went on to provide a model of digniﬁed, loyal

and supportive behaviour towards all his successors as Conservative leader.

When their turn to quit the leadership came, not all of them were willing

or able to be so magnanimous and follow his example. He backed Heath for

the leadership and then served in his shadow Cabinet, ﬁrst as External

Affairs spokesman and from April 1966 as Foreign Affairs spokesman, his

responsibilities overlapping with those of Reginald Maudling, the Deputy

Leader, who also took charge of Commonwealth and Colonial affairs and

overseas development.

He travelled widely in this role but found time to

serve as president of the MCC 1966–67 and was caught up in the D’Oliveira

affair and the controversies over cricket, South Africa and apartheid.

Douglas-Home and Heath worked well together, ﬁrst in opposition

(1965–70) and then in government (1970–74), though Douglas-Home was

from a different wing of the party and never part of the Heathite inner

circle. Where Heath was a modernising technocrat, Douglas-Home had

more right-wing instincts. He sympathised with Enoch Powell’s views

on cutting immigration and believed ‘the best government was the least

government’. An often under-ﬁre Heath found Douglas-Home’s loyalty

invaluable, as he ‘placed his own authority and party inﬂuence between

Mr Heath and any critics there might be’. When Heath shocked Scottish

Tories by backing devolution in 1968, Home was given the job of chairing

a commission that produced a plan for an elected Scottish convention,

Attlee to Douglas-Home 171

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10.1057/9780230281387 - After Number 10, Kevin Theakston