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Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Baron Home of the Hirsel, KT,1 PC (July 2, 1903 – October 9, 1995), 14th Earl of Home from 1951 to 1963, was a British Conservative politician, and served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for a year from October 1963 to October, 1964. He is widely regarded as the last aristocratic Prime Minister. As such, he held a series of records: he was the last member of the House of Lords to be appointed Prime Minister, the first Prime Minister born in the 20th Century, the only Prime Minister to resign from the Lords and contest a by-election to enter the House of Commons and, to date, the last Prime Minister to be chosen personally by a British monarch.

Early life

Douglas-Home was born in Mayfair, London, the eldest son of Lord Dunglass, the eldest son of the 12th Earl of Home. After his father's succession to the Earldom in 1918 he held the courtesy title Lord Dunglass. His brother was the dramatist, William Douglas-Home. He was educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford.

He was married to Elizabeth Alington, the daughter of Cyril Alington, who had been Douglas-Home's headmaster while a boy at Eton College.

Cricket career

He was a keen cricketer at school, club and county level, and is the only British prime minister to have played first-class cricket. He represented the MCC, Middlesex CCC, Oxford University Cricket Club, HDG Leveson-Gower's XI, Free Foresters and Harlequins at first-class level, playing under the name "Lord Dunglass", his title at the time. Between 1924 and 1927 Dunglass played 10 first-class matches, scoring 147 runs at an average of 16.33 and a best score of 37 not out. As a right-arm fast-medium bowler he took 12 wickets at an average of 30.25 with a best of 3 for 43. Three of his first-class games were against Argentina on the MCC tour of South America in 1926-27. After Home had retired as prime minister, he became president of the MCC in 1966. Between 1977 and 1989 Lord Home was Governor of I Zingari, the well-known nomadic cricket team.

Political life

He became the Scottish Unionist Party MP for Lanark in 1931. His high birth gave him a head start in parliament, and he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary (1937-9) to Neville Chamberlain, witnessing at first hand the latter's attempts to stave off World War II through negotiation with Adolf Hitler. Douglas-Home fell gravely ill with spinal tuberculosis in 1938, which kept him immobile on his back for two years and prevented him from fighting in World War II.

He lost his parliamentary seat in the 1945 general election, but regained it in 1950. However he was automatically disqualified from the Commons in 1951, when he inherited his father's seat in the House of Lords, becoming 14th Earl of Home.

This did not blunt his political aspirations. Lord Home, as he then was, served not only as Commonwealth Secretary from 1955 during the time of the Suez Crisis but, from 1957, also as Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council (the latter twice; briefly in 1957 and subsequently from 1959). Home traded all three for the Foreign Office in 1960. In 1962, he was created a knight of the Order of the Thistle — the highest honour outside the nobility available to a Scot and in the personal gift of the Monarch — which entitled him to be styled "Sir" after later renouncing his earldom.

Appointment as Prime Minister

In 1963, Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan suddenly resigned when diagnosed with prostate cancer from which he was (wrongly) not expected to recover. At the time, the Conservative Party had no formal procedure for selecting a leader, merely a series of confused precedents and the Queen expected to choose on the basis of advice given by the party's elder statesmen. Though Rab Butler, nominally the "Deputy Prime Minister" (officially no such constitutional office then existed, with the title on its rare usages being an honorific one), was the favourite among Conservative MPs, Home was preferred by the elder statesmen, some of whom indicated that they would refuse to serve in cabinet under Butler or the other potential candidate, Quintin Hogg, then Lord Hailsham. Macmillan's resignation took place at the time of the 1963 Conservative Party Conference, which rapidly became something akin to an American political convention as various candidates and their supporters jostled publicly for the position. Following a series of consultations to determine who could command support from across the party and prove the best compromise candidate, Macmillan advised Queen Elizabeth II. Though it was argued that he had no right to advise the Queen as to whom to invite to Kiss Hands as Prime Minister, and the Queen was under no obligation to accept his advice, the Queen duly invited the Earl of Home to become Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury.

Home, the first UK Prime Minister born in the 20th century, believed it would be impractical to serve as PM from the Lords (it was widely believed that Lord Curzon had not been invited to become prime minister in 1923 because of his seat in the Lords). Using the Peerage Act 1963 passed earlier in the same year after Tony Benn's campaign to renounce his peerage, Home disclaimed his Earldom and, as "Sir Alec Douglas-Home", contested a by-election in the safe seat of Kinross & West Perthshire. Home duly won, entering the history books as the last peer ever to become Prime Minister and the only Prime Minister to resign the Lords to enter the Commons.

Defeat and opposition

Linked as it was to the damaged former government and the Profumo Affair of 1963, Douglas-Home's tenure as prime minister lasted only one year. The October 1964 general election was won by the Labour Party under the new leadership of Harold Wilson. However, the margin of victory proved narrow and the election thus provided a much sterner test for Harold Wilson than predicted. Indeed it was in this campaign that Home made his most famous remark. Wilson kept gibing Home that he was not a man of a people, as he was the 14th Earl of Home. Home responded, "as far as the 14th Earl is concerned I suppose that Mr. Wilson, when you come to think of it, is the 14th Mr. Wilson".

He remained leader of the party until his resignation in July of the following year. At this time, Douglas-Home himself revised the rules of the Conservative Party to allow the party leader to be henceforth selected by a series of ballots of all Conservative MPs. The resulting leadership election was won by Edward Heath, who defeated Reginald Maudling and Enoch Powell. Over the following six years, Home was notably loyal to Heath, comparing those who questioned his position with impatient gardeners who would keep digging up a tree to gauge its progress by examining its roots. When, in 1970, Heath became prime minister, Home returned to the post of Foreign Secretary which was deemed to suit him so well.

In 1973 Home intimated his intention to retire from Parliament and government at the next general election, but was overtaken by the calling of a snap general election in February 1974. Following the defeat of the Heath government by that of Harold Wilson in 1974, Home retired from front-line politics, standing down from the Commons at the October 1974 election. In the 1979 Devolution referendum he made a high profile statement arguing that an incoming Conservative Government would introduce a better Scottish Assembly. Margaret Thatcher's government did not do so.

Home was restored to the House of Lords when he accepted a life peerage, becoming known as Baron Home of the Hirsel (The Hirsel being his family seat in Berwickshire), and continued to appear in the House of Lords into his nineties. To date, Home ranks as the third-longest-lived British Prime Minister, behind James Callaghan and Harold MacMillan. His autobiography, The Way The Wind Blows, was published in 1976.

On his death at Coldstream in 1995, aged 92, he was succeeded as Earl of Home by his son, David Douglas-Home.

Titles from birth to death

  • The Hon. Alec Douglas-Home (1903 – 1918)
  • Lord Dunglass (1918 – 1931)
  • Lord Dunglass, MP (1931 – 1945)
  • Lord Dunglass (1945 – 1950)
  • Lord Dunglass, MP (1950 – 1951)
  • The Rt Hon. Lord Dunglass, MP (1951)
  • The Rt Hon. The Earl of Home, PC (1951 – 1962)
  • The Rt Hon. The Earl of Home, KT, PC (1962 – 1963)
  • The Rt Hon. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, KT (1963)
  • The Rt Hon. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, KT, MP (1963 – 1974)
  • The Rt Hon. The Lord Home of the Hirsel, KT, PC (1974 – 1995)

Nicknames

Home was referred to as 'Baillie Vass' by the magazine Private Eye. This running joke began in 1964 when a provincial newspaper, the Aberdeen Evening Express accidentally used a picture of Home over a caption referring to a baillie called Vass. Private Eye then affected to believe that Home was an imposter whom the newspaper had unmasked, and the magazine maintained this conceit until Home's death.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home's Government, October 1963 – October 1964

Changes

  • April 1964: Quintin McGarel Hogg becomes Secretary of State for Education and Science. Sir Edward Boyle leaves the Cabinet.

Notes

1 The family name and title of Home are both pronounced Hume.

References

1903 births | 1995 deaths | British Secretaries of State | Earls in the Peerage of Scotland | English cricketers | Leaders of the British Conservative Party | Life peers | Londoners | Lord Presidents of the Council | Members of the United Kingdom Parliament from Scottish constituencies | Middlesex cricketers | Old Etonians | Oxford University cricketers | Presidents of the MCC | Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom | Prostate cancer survivors | Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs | Secretaries of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs | Cricketer-politicians

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