Alec Douglas Home

Sir Alec Douglas-Home, around 1963

Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Baron Home of the Hirsel , KT (born July 2, 1903 in Mayfair , London , England , † October 9, 1995 in Berwickshire , Scotland , from 1951 to 1963 14th Earl of Home ) was a British politician and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1963 to 1964 . Douglas Home was a member of the Conservative Party . In 1951 he inherited the title of 14th Earl of Home , which he renounced in 1963.

Douglas-Home was the last member of the House of Lords to be appointed Prime Minister to date , the only Prime Minister to step down from the House of Lords to stand for a by-election to the House of Commons , and the last Prime Minister chosen directly by the monarch . In addition, Douglas Home was the last Prime Minister to this day who, after the end of his own term in office, belonged to the cabinet of one of his successors; he served as Secretary of State in the government of Edward Heath between 1970 and 1974 .

Life

Political rise

Douglas-Home was born in Mayfair , London , as the eldest son of the Scottish peer Charles Douglas-Home, 13th Earl of Home , and since 1918 he has apparently carried the courtesy title of Lord Dunglass as his marriage . His brother was the playwright William Douglas-Home . After his education at Eton College and at Christ Church , College of Oxford University , he became a Member of Parliament in 1931 as a member of the Conservatives. His aristocratic background made his political ascent within the conservative party easier. In 1937 he was appointed parliamentary state secretary by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and thus in 1938 in Munich at close range to witness the late attempts to avoid a major war by negotiating with Adolf Hitler . During the Second World War , Douglas-Home was unsuitable for military service due to a sudden tuberculosis in the spine, which for several years made him live almost entirely in a lying position with a support bandage. After his recovery, he took part in meetings of the House of Commons again from 1943 and, among other things, was critical of the negotiations at the Yalta Conference . In 1945 he became the private parliamentary secretary in the British Foreign Office. In the general election on July 5, 1945 , he lost his seat in parliament; In 1950 he recaptured it. When he inherited his father's seat in the House of Lords and became the 14th Earl of Home , he was forced to give up his seat in the House of Commons in 1951. From 1957 to 1960 Douglas-Home was head of the House of Lords. In 1960 he was appointed Foreign Minister . In 1962 he was made Knight of the Thistle Order.

The main events of his time as Foreign Minister were the building of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis , in which he emphatically supported the US position. A key achievement of Douglas-Home's diplomatic activity was the 1963 Treaty on the Ban on Nuclear Weapons Tests.

prime minister

In 1963, the Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan unexpectedly resigned after the Profumo affair when a medical diagnosis wrongly gave him no hope of recovery due to prostate cancer. At that time, the rules of the Conservative Party provided that its party leader should be determined by the decision of the party's elder statesmen . Although Deputy Prime Minister Rab Butler was the favorite of the majority of Conservative MPs, the elder statesmen preferred Douglas-Home. Some said they did not want to join a Butler cabinet or the other potential candidate, Quintin Hogg . In addition, there was the public image of the possible successor: Butler was assessed by Macmillan himself as unsuitable and was considered colorless and weak to make decisions, while Hogg was seen as erratic and vain and applied too obviously for the office of party chairman, which was undignified in public at the time or was vulgar. Douglas Home, on the other hand, was known to have integrity and seriousness and had few opponents in the party. This made him appear as an ideal compromise candidate.

Outgoing Prime Minister Harold Macmillan briefed Queen Elizabeth II on the views of the party's notables. Although it was argued that he did not have the right to advise the Queen in forming a government and the Queen had no obligation to accept his advice, the Queen appointed the Earl of Home Prime Minister. Douglas-Home, the first British Prime Minister born in the 20th century, saw it as inappropriate to serve in the House of Lords as Prime Minister (it is widely believed that Lord Curzon was not appointed Prime Minister in the 1920s because of his position in the House of Lords ). He used the recently passed Peerage Act 1963 to renounce his earliest status (along with subordinate peer titles) on October 23, 1963. Instead of his peer title, from then on he carried the nobility title "Sir", which was due to him as a knight of the thistle order. By resigning he lost his seat in the House of Lords and was able to stand for a by-election in the safe Scottish constituency of Kinross & West Perthshire. He clearly won the vote.

The government was too damaged to survive after thirteen years of uninterrupted Conservative government, and the October 15, 1964 general election was won by the Labor Party and the new leadership of Harold Wilson . During this election campaign, Douglas-Home made its most famous saying: Wilson kept teasing that Douglas-Home, as the 14th Earl of Home, was not a man of the people. His answer: " As far as the fourteenth earl is concerned, I suppose Mr Wilson, when you come to think, Mr Wilson, if you think about it." of it, is the fourteenth Mr Wilson.) In view of the poor condition of the conservative ruling party, the election result (Labor only won a narrow majority of four seats) was considered to be quite respectable, so that Douglas Home, who enjoyed a high reputation in the party, initially Party and opposition leader remained.

After his tenure

As party chairman, Douglas-Home ensured a change in the procedure for the election of the party leader in 1965, who from then on was elected by members of the parliamentary group. When he resigned in July 1965, Edward Heath was elected to succeed him. During the following years, Douglas-Home was loyal to Heath, who was put under pressure within the party, especially from the right (including from Enoch Powell ). When Heath became Prime Minister in 1970, Douglas-Home returned to the State Department . The successful accession negotiations with the European Community were his greatest success.

In 1974 he returned from the House of Commons to the House of Lords when he was promoted to Life Peer with the title Baron Home of the Hirsel, of Coldstream in the County of Berwick (named after his family home The Hirsel in southern Scotland) . After the Heath government was defeated by Harold Wilson in the two 1974 elections (February 28 and October 10, 1974), Douglas-Home withdrew from the front line of politics, but continued to intervene from the House of Lords into his nineties . Douglas Home was the third longest living British Prime Minister after Harold Macmillan and James Callaghan .

Memberships

In 1953 he was elected a member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh .

Marriage and offspring

Since 1936 he was married to Elizabeth Hester Alington (1909–1990). With her he had three daughters and a son, David , who inherited him in 1995 as the 15th Earl of Home .

Autobiography

• The way the wind blows. An autobiography. Collins, London 1976, ISBN 0-00-211997-8 .

literature

• Douglas Hurd: Home, Alexander Frederick Douglas-, fourteenth earl of Home and Baron Home of the Hirsel (1903-1995). In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . Oxford University Press, 2004.
• DR Thorpe: Alec Douglas-Home . Sinclair-Stevenson, London 1996, ISBN 978-1-84275-191-6 .

Web links

Commons : Alec Douglas-Home  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• SPIEGEL conversation with British Foreign Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home (1971)
• Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Baron Home of the Hirsel on thepeerage.com

Individual evidence

1. ^ Keith Laybourn: Fifty Key Figures in Twentieth-Century British Politics. Routledge, London 2002, ISBN 0-415-22676-7 , p. 134
2. ^ The London Gazette : 42815, 8275 , October 23, 1962.
3. ↑ Peter Henessy: Winds of Change. Britain in the Early Sixties . Alan Lane, London 2019 ISBN 978-1-8461-4110-2 pp. 234ff.
4. ↑ Ben Pimlott : Harold Wilson . HarperCollins, London 1992, ISBN 0-00-215189-8 , p. 3.
5. ↑ The London Gazette: No. 46441, pp. 13203 f. , December 24, 1974.
6. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. (PDF file) Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed December 21, 2019 . 

predecessor	Office	successor
Charles Douglas Home	Earl of Home 1951–1963 (title waiver)	David Douglas-Home (from 1995)