The reasons that prompted or provoked Mr Macmillan to announce his decision to resign in the midst of the Conservative party’s conference at Blackpool last week remain a subject of speculation. There can be little doubt however that he could easily have avoided adding to the existing tension and confusion at Blackpool if he so desired. In fact, in view of the constitutional practice that the Prime Minister must communicate his decision to resign first to the Crown, no one expected him to make the announcement before he had undergone the operation and recovered sufficiently to have an audience with the Queen. It is, therefore, reasonable to infer that he chose the course deliberately.
As the dramatic announcement was read out by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Home, political pundits assembled at Blackpool concluded that this was a move to block Mr RA Butler from at least grasping the coveted prize which had eluded him in 1957. The conclusion was well founded, which is not to say that it was legitimate. The relations between Mr Macmillan and Mr Butler were known to have been cool. Within hours of the announcement, the Prime Minister’s son, Mr Maurice Macmillan, and son-in-law, Mr Julian Amery who is Minister for Aviation, were canvassing support for Lord Hailsham. Mr Butler was characterised as one who could not be entrusted with supreme power. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Munich and was lukewarm towards the Suez expedition.
Munich Men
This line of reasoning ran into one difficulty. If Mr Butler was unacceptable to Mr Macmillan because of Munich, so should have been Lord Hailsham and Lord Home. They were both Munich men. In Lord Hailsham’s case there was the additional personal factor that Mr Macmillan had worked against him when he was seeking election to Parliament from Oxford constituency before the war. Mr Macmillan was then a vigorous opponent of the policy of appeasement. The dislike between the two men had apparently survived the next two decades because Mr Macmillan got rid of Lord Hailsham as chairman of the Conservative party soon after the 1959 general election in spite of the latter’s known contribution to the electoral victory. During Mr Macmillan’s tenure of office, Lord Hailsham became the Minister for odd jobs.
After the announcement, Mr Maurice Macmillan said in a television interview that the Prime Minister had been greatly hurt by the criticism against him from within the Conservative party. This had been all too obvious and was only the natural reaction of a man who had served the party for 40 long years. Did he then want to teach the critics a lesson by exposing their inability to agree on a successor? Mr Macmillan is a highly complex person and it could well be that he was acting under a sense of grievance which had been building up since last June when the former War Minister, Mr Profumo, made his famous confession about illicit relations with Miss Christine Keeler. In spite of his reputation for unflappability, Mr Macmillan is a sensitive man. Unflappability is as much a pose with him as his Edwardian suits and aristocratic nasal drawl.
Whatever might have been his motive or motives, he fully exposed the weaknesses of the Conservative party. It needs a machinery for finding the successor to an outgoing Prime Minister because it has ceased to be a tribe whose head can be chosen by a small group of chiefs who have known each other from cradle onwards through public schools, Oxbridge and the Guards regiments. Equally important, Mr Macmillan showed that the lack of definition of the relationship between the parliamentary party and the constituency parties was not without hazards. At Blackpool, it appeared as if the howling mob of 4,000 delegates was about to appropriate to itself the powers to choose the successor to Mr Macmillan.
Unprecedented
It is incontestible that Lord Hailsham announced at Blackpool his decision to give up peerage and seek election to the House of Commons because he wanted to exploit his known influence with the party activists in the constituency parties. This attempt to associate the constituency parties with the selection of the Prime Minister was unprecedented in the life of the Conservative party. By that logic and that of the constitutional theory that the Prime Minister owes his office to Parliament and is primarily responsible to it, the attempt was illegitimate. The more important point is that none of the other aspirants had the courage to refuse to use this forum to advance his cause. Mr Butler did speak of the prerogative of the Crown in a newspaper interview only to denude it of all meaning by seeking to be a rabble-rouser himself at the concluding rally. He failed but that is another matter.
Of the two problems of establishing a machinery for finding a successor to an outgoing Conservative Prime Minister and of defining the relationship between the parliamentary party and the constituency parties, the first is the more fundamental. It will require the disposal of two myths: that the Crown has absolute prerogative to select the Prime Minister and that a Conservative leader is evolved and not elected. It is going to be a tough job but not an impossible one.
On this question of the Crown’s prerogative, well-known constitutional experts have been expressing divergent views. Mr Roger Fulford insists that the Crown has this privilege and has exercised it effectively three times in this century and adds that “it has emerged as the fairest and most sensible way of maintaining an existing government when an unseen personal misfortune assails its head.” Professor Max Beloff has on the other hand opined that the “Crown should never have to make a choice which would imply either a preference as between parties, or a preference between persons … it is not consonant with the spirit of the Constitution that the monarch should be forced to seek advice in private from unnamed persons.”
There is the third view of Mr Anthony Wedgewood Benn, the first peer to renounce his title and return to the House of Commons. He has stated that the myth of the Royal prerogative is a convenient screen for men like Lord Home and Lord Poole who, though not elected to the House of Commons nor accountable to it for what they do, still wish a controlling voice in the choice of Prime Minister. In 1957 Lord Salisbury played a leading role in securing Mr Macmillan’s succession to Sir Anthony Eden. Undoubtedly the same role would have been played by Lord Home this time if, like Sir Anthony, Mr Macmillan was too ill to hold consultations with his colleagues and give advice to the Queen.
Whatever the constitutional lawyers may say, it is plainly absurd to contend in this day and age that the Crown can send for anyone it chooses to be the first minister. If that was so, what was all the fuss that was made about King Charles I for? If like the Labour party the Conservative parliamentary party elected its leader this myth would not have survived so long. The Labour parliamentary party renews its confidence in the leader every year. If during his term in office Lord Attlee either lost the confidence of the party or was incapacitated, it is inconceivable that the Labour party would have left the choice of the successor to the Crown. It would have elected a new leader through its normal procedure.
Procedure
The Conservative party elected Mr Bonar Law as its leader in 1922 at a meeting of Tory peers, MPs and parliamentary candidates. This happened a few days after 274 Conservatives had decided by 187 against 87 to dissolve the coalition government. Mr Bonar Law was reluctant to take office and insisted he should first be elected by the party. Immediately on his election, he went to Buckingham Palace where he was appointed Prime Minister. Precisely the same procedure is being urged now by commentators and Conservative back-benchers for the future.
Unlike the Conservatives, the Labour party has a well-defined and accepted machinery for electing its leader. But the relationship between the parliamentary wing and the annual conference which represents the constituency parties and the trade unions is tenuous and can be difficult and even disruptive, as was shown at the time of the late Mr Gaitskell’s clash with the majority conference opinion on the question of unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1960. In the case of the Conservatives a difficulty of this kind has not arisen so far.
The Times of India, 19 October 1963