Alec Douglas-Home

About the Alec Douglas-Home

Sir Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Baron Home of the Hirsel, became a parliamentary aide to Neville Chamberlain, witnessing first-hand Chamberlain’s efforts as prime minister to preserve peace through appeasement in the two years before the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1940 Douglas-Home was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis and was immobilised for two years. By the later stages of the war he had recovered enough to resume his political career, but he lost his seat in the general election of 1945. He regained it in 1950, but the following year he left the Commons when, on the death of his father, he inherited the earldom of Home and thereby became a member of the House of Lords. Under the premierships of Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan he was appointed to a series of increasingly senior posts, including Leader of the House of Lords and Foreign Secretary. In the latter post, which he held from 1960 to 1963, he supported United States resolve in the Cuban Missile Crisis and in August 1963 was the United Kingdom’s signatory to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

In October 1963 Macmillan was taken ill and resigned as prime minister. Home was chosen to succeed him. By the 1960s it had become generally considered unacceptable for a prime minister to sit in the House of Lords; Home renounced his earldom and successfully stood for election to the House of Commons. The manner of his appointment was controversial, and two of Macmillan’s cabinet ministers refused to take office under him. He was criticised by the Labour Party as an aristocrat, out of touch with the problems of ordinary families, and he came over stiffly in television interviews, by contrast with the Labour leader, Harold Wilson. The Conservative Party, in power since 1951, had lost standing as a result of the Profumo affair, a 1963 sex scandal involving a defence minister, and at the time of Home’s appointment as prime minister it seemed headed for heavy electoral defeat. Home’s premiership was the second briefest of the twentieth century, lasting two days short of a year. Among the legislation passed under his government was the abolition of resale price maintenance, bringing costs down for the consumer against the interests of producers of food and other commodities.

After a narrow defeat in the general election of 1964, Douglas-Home resigned the leadership of his party, after having instituted a new and less secretive method of electing the party leader. From 1970 to 1974 he was in the cabinet of Edward Heath as Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; this was an expanded version of the post of Foreign Secretary, which he had held earlier. After the defeat of the Heath government in 1974, he returned to the House of Lords as a life peer, and retired from front-line politics.