Sir Alec Frederick Douglas-Home has been Prime Minister for only a week and he is already beginning to look the part. The shrill outcries of indignation, protest and ridicule that greeted his appointment last weekend have not died down but they are beginning to stop. The opposition leader, Mr Harold Wilson, whose first reaction led him to describe the new Prime Minister as an “elegant anachronism,” is showing signs of having second thoughts. He has shifted the grounds of criticism from that of noble birth to that of school ties. Like Mr Macmillan and Sir Anthony Eden before him, Sir Alexander is an Etonian.
There were three principal causes for the first hostile reaction to the appointment of Lord Home, as he was then, as Prime Minister. First, there was genuine sympathy with Mr Butler, who was passed over for the second time. Mr Butler is the acknowledged father of modern conservatism. He gave the Conservative party its progressive ideas and social conscience and attracted to it young intellectuals who are its life-blood today. His services in the cause of education, vide the Education Act of 1954, his reforms of prisons as Home Secretary, his silent opposition to the Suez outrage, and his role in the liquidation of the monstrous contraption known as the Central African Federation showed he was a man of principle and considerable ability. Sympathy for him cut through party divisions.
Natural Leader
The second reason for the widespread hostility to the new Prime Minister was the devious manner in which Mr Macmillan secured his appointment. It was known from the start that he was opposed to Mr Butler. Apparently he was no more favourably disposed to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Reginald Maudling, one of the young men Mr Butler had promoted in the Conservative hierarchy. If Mr Butler had to be stopped from becoming Prime Minister, Lord Hailsham was the man to do it.
His ebullience, revivalism and jingoism combined with a penchant for burying a grain of borrowed ideas under a ton of words made him a natural leader of the backwoodsmen in the Conservative party. These dispirited colonels and brigadiers who were once the storm-troopers of Lord Salisbury in his assault on Mr Macmillan himself had to be given heart if they were to blackball Mr Butler. This is exactly what happened once the word was spread by Mr Macmillan’s son and son-in-law that he favoured Lord Hailsham. The scene was now set for the emergence of a compromise candidate in Lord Home.
Finally Lord Home’s personality and political record were far from reassuring to the progressive section of his own party and the community. He was Parliamentary Secretary to the late unlamented Neville Chamberlain and accompanied him to Munich. As the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations under Sir Anthony Eden he was a firm supporter of Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the Central African Federation, itself an expression of a desperate attempt to perpetuate white man’s domination in the heart of the Dark Continent. As Foreign Secretary he distinguished himself not so much by his firmness towards Moscow as by the cold contempt he poured on newly independent countries of Asia and Africa and his obstinate opposition to the United Nations attempt to end the secession of Katanga and to pacify the Congo. There was nothing on record which would show that he was capable of the smallest degree of understanding and sympathy for the policy of neutrality.
Formidable
On the face of it, these objections are formidable. Their one serious weakness, however, is that they ignore the basic problem of the evolution of the Conservative party and by the same logic, of an influential section of the British elite. Lord Attlee once said that the Labour party could be led only from the left of centre. The contrast between a turbulent Labour party under the late Mr Gaitskell and a united one under Mr Wilson on the same programme is an eloquent vindication of Lord Attlee’s observation. If similarly the Conservative party can be led only from the right of centre, Mr Butler was not the man for the job. The choice was between Sir Alec and Lord Hailsham. The latter was also barred because he would have been too far out on the right. The terms left, right and centre are used here in the different contexts of the two parties.
Though for an Indian it is tempting to be pro-Butler (he was born in our country and his political outlook would dispose him to be understanding of our approach to World affairs) I am inclined to the view that Mr Macmillan showed a profound understanding of the correlation of forces within the Conservative party in securing the appointment of Sir Alec as his successor. Mr Butler may be in step with a majority of his countrymen but remains out of step with the traditionalists – those who emphasise the “great” part of Great Britain and live in the shattered dreamland of the empire that once was – in his own party. This hard core of about one hundred members of Parliament would never have accepted him. It was on this ground that he was passed over in 1957 and it remained valid six years later in spite of the blows Mr Macmillan had delivered at this extreme right-wing group. Old soldiers never die; they fade away which takes time.
It is one of the interesting aspects of British public life that in both the Conservative and Labour parties the traditionalists need to be appeased as far as the selection in one case and election in the other of the leader is concerned. In all these years Mr Gaitskell was the only exception and it was not a happy experience either for him or for his party. But once a Wilson or a Home becomes the leader, the wider compulsion of presenting an acceptable image to the electorate, to be more specific the uncommitted section of the electorate popularly known as the floating vote, is so strong that they are compelled virtually to turn on their erstwhile supporters. This is the key to the British political scene.
Mr Wilson’s is a recent case. Most of the members of the Labour parliamentary party’s shadow cabinet were opposed to him and so were Mr Gaitskell’s young men. Their fears were the hopes of the left-wingers. The former feared, and the latter believed, that Mr Wilson stood for unilateralism and all that it meant in terms of weakening the alliance with America abroad and Clause Four – extension of public ownership – at home. He would not have been elected if his opponents were not divided and if the principal contender against him was intellectually better equipped. But for the left-wingers it has proved a phyrric victory. Mr Wilson in search of respectability is a different person.
Mr Macmillan performed a similar feat in a different way. In the ’thirties he was a Conservative rebel. But he could not have become Prime Minister if he had stayed a rebel. He spent the post-war years diligently burying his record of radicalism. His marriage into the Devonshire family with its wide links into other similarly ancient, famous and influential houses – Lord Salisbury who played an important role in Mr Macmillan’s promotion was related to him through his wife – helped him. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Suez policy. It was only after he became Prime Minister and had won an election that he felt strong enough to turn on his right-wing supporters including Lord Salisbury.
A Chairman
On this view of British politics no one need be disturbed by the rise of the fourteenth Earl of Home, nineteenth Baron Home and fourteenth Baron Dunglass to the highest elective office in the land. It is not without reason that in the very first interview he described himself as a man left of centre in terms of the Conservative party politics. Also since he has been able to form a government only because of the willingness of Mr Butler and Mr Maudling to serve in it, he is more in the nature of a chairman than that of a strong Prime Minister who can lay down the line for other members of the Cabinet to follow. So strong is the corrective of public opinion that Britain can afford to have a Prime Minister whose political instinct has more often been wrong than right.
The Times of India, 26 October 1963