Does anyone remember the 14th Earl of Home?

You have to be getting on a bit to recall the 14th Earl of Home. His late-life description of himself as “an uncontroversial man who was involved in controversial events” is characteristically modest, though not so wide of the mark.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home was a remarkable politician even if he was only Prime Minister for 362 days, between October 1963 and October 1964. He was much tougher than he looked and not always quite as nice as he seemed.Home was a countryman in an increasingly urban world. He was an aristocrat in the age of the commoner, a chip off a very old and distinguished block. He was also a Unionist who did not anticipate the rise of the Scottish National Party and would indeed have lamented the prospect of an independent Scotland.

Home’s long life stretched across the 20th century from a little before the Great War until shortly after the Cold War. A public figure almost all his adult life, he first tried for a seat in Parliament in 1922 and went on to win South Lanark in 1931. Sprung from a family steeped in Scotland’s history, his aristocratic lineage reached back to the 11th century. The first Lord Home was created in 1473 and the first Earl of Home in 1605, both in the Peerage of Scotland.

The 14th Earl was no political Johnny-come-lately therefore and had been born not just with one silver spoon in his mouth but with a brace of them. A less modest man might have felt a sense of overwhelming entitlement. Land and comparative wealth came his way without effort on his part, and his lifelong home and favourite habitat was in the Borders, where his family had their houses and estates. The portrait of Home in the National Portrait Gallery captures the essence of the man, not clothed in the pomp of office but fishing on the River Tweed, a Labrador at his side.  

Having taken his seat in the House of Commons (using the courtesy title of Lord Douglas), he quickly made his mark and, in 1937, became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain. Then he hit choppy waters. He accompanied his boss to Munich in 1938 and met Hitler and other Nazi notables. He didn’t fall for the falsehood that Munich offered a route to “peace with honour”, but he didn’t disavow Chamberlain either.  

Home learnt an abiding lesson from Munich: talking is not enough, and diplomacy has to be backed by military strength. It was a lesson that stayed with him and informed his policies when he was Foreign Secretary in the early 1960s and again in the 1970s. He had no illusions about Hitler and by 1938/39 saw war as unavoidable.

Home was one of those who – by accident of birth –  was too young to have fought in the Great War and too old to do so in the Second World War. But in a more personal way, he suffered and showed great fortitude and courage for two of those war years. He contracted spinal tuberculosis and was confined to bed and held rigidly still in what he described as a “plaster sarcophagus”. He endured painful surgery involving the burrowing out of the diseased section of his spine and its replacement with bone taken from his shin. As he later drily remarked, he was the only politician who had had backbone inserted into him. By the end of the war, he had recovered amazingly well and was even more intent than before to contribute to public life.

By 1951, when the Conservatives were back in office under Churchill, Home had inherited his father’s title and – without any choice in the matter – had to surrender his seat in the House of Commons and move to the House of Lords. For four years, he was a Minister in the Scottish Office before starting his long association with overseas affairs, first as Commonwealth Secretary and then as Foreign Secretary from 1960 until he entered Downing Street. He oversaw the beginnings of decolonisation, played an underrated role in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, and grew in political stature. He was an improbable candidate for the office of Prime Minister, but circumstances and personal determination delivered the unexpected prize.

However, everything was against him. He was not a member of the House of Commons when that was effectively a precondition for Prime Minister. He had limited domestic affairs experience, and he was a poor performer on TV when it was becoming a core skill.

His self-deprecation had offered hostages to cartoonist and satirists alike, not least an over-modest reference on-screen to his knowledge of economics being of the counting matchsticks variety. Most significantly perhaps, he had more politically adept and better-regarded rivals. Home didn’t seek the job and didn’t think it attainable until very late in the day.

It was Macmillan, confined to hospital with prostate problems and determined on resigning from the Prime Ministership, who pushed him to consider it. The men who thought they should get the job were Rab Butler and Lord Hailsham (also hampered, however, by being in the Lords).

Neither enjoyed Macmillan’s support; Macmillan would advise the Queen on whom she should invite to form a new government. Home emerged as a viable possibility in the course of the Conservative Party Conference then being held in Blackpool. As the leading runners showed signs of stumbling, the party elders looked for a unifying candidate and settled on Home. He could have held back, but it was his backbone and that streak of ruthlessness that won him the day.

There was still the problem of the House of Lords. But on this, he was helped by Viscount Stansgate – later and better known as Anthony Wedgwood Benn – who sponsored a change in the law to allow Peers to renounce their titles and thereby sit in the House of Commons. The Peerage Act, which passed in 1963, came over the parliamentary hill just in time for Home. Though he took office as Prime Minister whilst still the 14th Earl, he was soon translated via a by-election in the Borders back to the Commons as Sir Alec Douglas-Home.

Though he later claimed in a conversation with the historian Peter Hennessy that being Prime Minister was a “terrible intrusion in one’s private life”, he entered Downing Street knowing an election would have to be called in a little over a year. Home was not the feeble aristocrat cartoonists sought to portray him. Despite his limited TV skills, he readied himself for the fight and managed to resonate more with the general public than his opponents cared to admit.

In government, he proved himself an efficient administrator. He streamlined and reformed the Cabinet Committee structure and held a tight hold on the operations of the Cabinet itself. Hume also established a defensible voting system for the selection of future leaders of the Conservative Party.  When an election could no longer be postponed, Home showed his mettle once more. Having entered office with his party 11% behind Labour in the opinion polls, he managed to turn things around in twelve months, very nearly winning the election. He and the Conservatives lost by only 0.7% of the vote. Not bad for a too-easily-underestimated politician.

Home was, of course, deeply disappointed by the outcome but accepted defeat with good grace. He did not, unlike his successor Ted Heath, slink away muttering and resentful. He took office once more as Foreign Secretary from 1970-73 for three crucial years of the Cold War and as Britain applied successfully for entry to the European Common Market. His modesty and preference for the country-life in Scotland took him away thereafter from the public eye.

Some people forgot him rather quickly, and one anecdote reflects well on the man. Travelling once by train back to the Borders, an elderly couple drew him into a conversation, and the lady remarked: “My husband and I think it was a great tragedy that you were never Prime Minister.” This provoked the quietly polite reply from Home: “As a matter of fact I was, but only for a very short time”.