World: The Winner

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Lord Home’s crest shows a salamander standing in fire. To his friends, it symbolizes his patient, outwardly phlegmatic disposition, not easily touched by the heat of emotion, danger or disaster. As the grim-faced stream of ministers came and went through the black door of No. 10 Downing Street, the watching crowds got no hint of crisis from Lord Home’s broad, boyish grin and jaunty stride. The Prime Minister-designate seemed serenely untouched by the jealousies and conspiracies of his riven party. As one Tory said not long ago: “He’s never scared. He just looks at you with that damn-your-eyes look and goes right on with what he’s doing.”

Home’s victory may prove to be Pyrrhic. As a millionaire, one of Britain’s biggest landowners, an Old Etonian, head of a family whose pedigree predates Magna Carta, he has inevitably caused the revival of an old argument: that the Tories’ progressive, democratic goals are mere window dressing for the party of wealth and privilege.

The Labor Party is already in full cry. Describing the Tory selection process as viciously undemocratic, the Laborite Daily Mirror wrote: “Butler has been betrayed, Maudling insulted, Macleod ignored, Heath treated with contempt and Hailsham giggled out of court by the jester in hospital.” Deriding the Tories’ “aristocratic cabal,” Harold Wilson last week took aim and declared scornfully: “In this ruthlessly competitive, scientific, technical, industrial age, a week of intrigues has produced a result based on family and hereditary connections. The leader has emerged—an elegant anachronism.”

Many Tories agreed. On the other hand, the ordeal undeniably produced a leader of courage and principle who believes, in Home’s own words, that the government should never be content just to do “what people will stand for,” but instead should unflinchingly “tell them what they ought to stand for.” Says Tory Backbencher Nigel Birch: “His clarity and integrity shine out, and that’s what you require in a leader. With his dignity and restraint, Home will show up Harold Wilson for a cheap crackerjack.”

Denobilization. The grey-haired, blue-eyed earl has none of the hauteur of many English noblemen, and he has a pugnacious streak that his fragile air belies. In the Cabinet and the country at large, Home’s blunt, hardheaded performance as Foreign Secretary has won him a degree of respect accorded to only one of his postwar predecessors, Labor’s late Ernie Bevin. Remembering Churchill’s innocence of economics and social problems, many politicians believed that Home-Sweet-Home, as Winston called him, could easily fill the same gaps in his experience.

To some extent, the fears about Home reflect Britain’s long and jealous struggle to establish political democracy and protect it from the monarchy and nobility. The last peer to form a government in Britain was Lord Salisbury in 1895. Since then, in deference to the unwritten rule that the Prime Minister cannot sit in the “Other Place,” as M.P.s call the House of Lords, party leaders twice have reluctantly passed over titled favorites for second-running commoners. In 1923 Stanley Baldwin wrested the job from Lord Curzon; in 1940 Winston Churchill edged out Lord Halifax. Today the old rule need no longer keep talented men out of the Commons, thanks to a bill passed last summer that enables any “reluctant peer” to renounce his titles for life if he wishes.* The 14th Earl of Home will soon be legally and for the rest of his life Sir Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home. His next move will be to run for Parliament from a safe Tory seat. However, he is eager to represent a Scottish constituency, and since no suitable seat will be vacant in the immediate future, he may have to hold on to his title temporarily and sit in the Other Place until the right Scottish by-election comes along. To avoid this impractical arrangement, Tories hoped to postpone Parliament’s recall next week. How ever, Harold Wilson brusquely rejected the idea as “impertinence.”

What many Tories overlooked in the scramble to “denobilize” their leader is that Home’s virtues are incurably those of the aristocrat: honor, charm, utter self-confidence, the dedication—and none of the condescension—of no blesse oblige.

Show Me. Home is almost devoid of personal ambition. Asked last year if he had ever thought of becoming Prime Minister, he shook his head and explained: “After I had dipped fairly freely into my first bottle of port, my father said to me: ‘You know, the most important thing in life is to know when to stop.’ ” At the height of the leadership auction at the Tory conference in Blackpool this month, a reporter goaded Home: “Aren’t you catching the fever?” Replied the Foreign Secretary: “Put your hand on my forehead, and feel my pulse. You will find that both are quite normal.”

Home’s rise to the premiership has no parallel in modern times. He has been in politics for 27 of his 60 years, but he had held no Cabinet post before he became Commonwealth Relations Secretary. Though he worked diligently in the Commonwealth job and was also an able leader of the House of Lords before he took over the Foreign Office from Selwyn Lloyd in 1960, few Britons knew his name, and even fewer could pronounce it correctly. Most critics were angered by the fact that the Foreign Secretary would sit in the Lords, sheltered from the heavy fire of Commons debate. His decision was called “the most reckless appointment since the Emperor Caligula made his favorite horse a consul.”

It was taken for granted that Macmillan, who had been his own Foreign Secretary when Selwyn Lloyd officially held the job, had picked a colorless yes man. “The Foreign Secretary,” pronounced the late Hugh Gaitskell, “is now a puppet.”

Home showed soon enough who was running the Foreign Office. He impressed its clannish professionals with his industry and quick grasp of issues, delighted many others with his laconic wit. When an aide sent him a bale of documents with the note, “The Secretary of State will be interested in reading this,” Home sent back the bundle with the reply: “A kind thought, but entirely erroneous. Please abstract.” From the outset he adopted a show-me attitude to the Russians that was notably tougher than Macmillan’s conciliatory approach. When Soviet fighters threatened Allied traffic in the Berlin air corridors not long after he took over, Home fired off an angry note to Moscow, and only then notified the Prime Minister.

Compleat Angler. Nonetheless, Gromyko trusts “Milord” Home enough to converse with him in English when they are alone, and Soviet admirers dubbed him respectfully the “Western Mo’otov.” Laborites accused him of being rigidly antiCommunist, but Home was always ready to negotiate problems when he thought that there was any hope. When dealing with the Russians, said Compleat Angler Home, “I go trying for a fish. If nothing bites, I go back the next day. If a small fish bites, I go after a bigger one.”

He has been a firm supporter of U.S. policies, though not always without reservations. When the Cuban crisis broke, he muttered: “I hope the Americans know what they are up to.” Later, however, he rebuked British anti-Americanism: “The British people must recognize who are their friends and who are not. 1 am all for being fairminded, but 1 do wish this country had a little less of the intellectual fringe and more horse sense.” On his first visit to India as Commonwealth Relations Secretary, Home questioned the value of neutrality in talks with government leaders. “Weakness invites aggression,” he said. He is an informal, unself-conscious diplomat who sometimes shows up for conferences in old worn carpet slippers, but his blunt talk often infuriates people. A cherished tribute to his forensic skill is a cable he received after one outspoken verdict. “To hell with you,” it said. “Offensive letter follows.”

Cast’e for Coal. In all Britain last week, there was probably only one community where Macmillan’s choice of a successor was hailed with unmixed joy. To the 2,000-odd people of Coldstream, a Berwickshire border village flanked by 5,000 acres of Home’s ancestral lands, the news of the laird’s new job stirred the greatest celebration since the 6th Lord became the 1st Earl in 1605. The clan once foregathered also at Douglas Castle, or “Castle Dangerous,” as Sir Walter Scott called it, on their Lanarkshire estate, but in 1937, when the 13th Earl discovered a coalmine beneath his living room, he tore down the 176-year-old castle to get at it. Their family seat today is The Hirsel, a 70-room, Queen Anne mansion at Coldstream, one of the few Scottish homes that are both stately and central-heated.

Home’s wife, who was the daughter of his old headmaster but cannot remember the Earl as an Etonian, shuttles with her husband between London, The Hirsel and Dorneywood, their country home in Buckinghamshire. She knits his socks, often cooks his breakfast. She is also an accomplished hostess, and confesses: “I love politics, because we are not the worrying kind. My husband is even more of an unworrier than I am.” The Homes have three grown daughters and a son, 19-year-old Lord Dunglass, who will eventually inherit his father’s suspended titles—unless he too wants to be Prime Minister.

The Coldstream villagers confessed last week that they were a little upset over Home’s decision to drop his titles, but as Provost Joseph Carrick said sturdily, “To us, he’ll always be the Earl.”

Scot of Scots. Coldstream has been home to the Homes for at least eight centuries, and they have always been powers in the land. Their rolling farm lands were bestowed on the family by Scotland’s King William the Lion in the 13th century. Later, the Homes merged with the powerful Douglas clan and inherited their vast, 50,000-acre estates in the Douglas Valley, 80 miles west of Coldstream. For several centuries, the bold, battling lairds of Douglas and Home fought the English and rustled their cattle. The 4th Earl of Douglas was acclaimed by Falstaff in Henry IV as “that sprightly Scot of Scots that runs o’horseback up a hill perpendicular.”

At the battle of Flodden Field, which was fought within sight of the Homes’ front lawn at Coldstream, Archibald, 5th Earl of Douglas, otherwise known as Bell-the-Cat, and the 3rd Lord Home both fought the Sassenach. Home tried to rally his followers against the English longbowmen. “A Home! A Home!” he cried. But his men—or so legend has it—misunderstood his order and trotted off home. It was then that the family decided to avert future disasters by pronouncing the name “Hume.”

Two earls of Home were imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle for political crimes. Three others were beheaded. One mer ry laird of Home, says the 14th Earl, used to invite his neighbors to dinner and, “having wined them and dined them until they were under the table, would then proceed to acquire their property. Then he would hang them by the neck to a tree outside the bedroom window to remind himself of, as he used to say, ‘the danger of overindulgence.’ ” Home adds: “The English always say that we Scots retarded the advance of civilization. If we had known what civilization was going to be like, we would have retarded it a great deal longer.”

Honorably Ineligible. Home’s father was a cheerful, absent-minded nobleman of the Wodehouse breed—the sort that would take potshots at hares from the drawing-room window. At first young Alec seemed to take after him. Eton contemporaries still remember Alec Home’s finest hour, in the big cricket match of 1922, when he scored 66 runs on a sticky wicket against Harrow. In those days, Author and Fellow Etonian Cyril Connolly wrote, Britain’s new Prime Minister “was the kind of graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy who is showered with favors and crowned with all the laurels, who is liked by the masters and admired by the boys without any apparent exertion on his part. In the 18th century he would have become Prime Minister before he was 30; as it was, he appeared honorably ineligible for the struggle of life.”

But Alec’s younger brother, Playwright William Douglas-Home, warns that his “apparent mildness, his good-natured absent-mindedness,” even his grin, are deceptive. William also vows that under Home, unlike Macmillan, “there won’t be any nepotism.” Says he: “Sister Bridget won’t be chairing the Tory conference at Blackpool, my bird-watching brother Henry won’t be next Secretary of State for Scotland, I will not be sent to the U.N., and Edward, my youngest brother, who spent four years on the Burma railway as a prisoner of war, will not be Minister without Portfolio in the Far East.”

Political Blood. To his father’s regret, young Alec Home lost interest in fox hunting after falling off a walking horse the first time he rode to hounds. Home still follows his other boyhood pursuits: bird watching, butterfly collecting, flower arranging, piano playing. Macmillan occasionally visits the Homes for the grouse shooting, and, friends say, was about to tip the gillie £2 one day, when the thrifty Earl advised him sharply: “Half as much will do.”

After Eton, where his headmaster described him as the most unambitious boy he had ever encountered, Home went to Oxford’s aristocratic Christ Church,* where he scraped by with a third in history. He was interested in the family’s “political blood”—Britain’s great reforming Prime Minister Earl Grey was his paternal great-grandfather —and was elected to Parliament in 1931 from the depressed mining district of South Lanark. “It seemed rather stodgy just to stay at home and live on your money and look after your estates,” he explains. “It would have been a lot better for the estates if I had, and you might think it would have been better for foreign policy.”

In fact, Home was a conscientious M.P., and says that the miseries of the depression in Lanarkshire helped swing his political views left of center. Despite the criticism that he knows nothing of domestic issues, he was concerned with a wide range of economic and social problems as Lanarkshire’s M.P. and later as Secretary of State for Scotland.

Backbone Added. In 1937 Home became Neville Chamberlain’s parliamentary private secretary. It was he who handed the Prime Minister Hitler’s message setting up the Munich meeting in 1938, and Home accompanied his boss to the ill-fated conference. The Home family motto is True to the End, and Home still defends Chamberlain’s at tempt to make a deal with Hitler. “Chamberlain,” he says, “hated Hitler and Fascism, but he felt that Europe in general and Britain in particular were in even greater danger from Communism.” In wartime, Major Lord Home was invalided out of the Lanarkshire Yeo manry after only a few months’ service, when he contracted spinal tuberculosis. The next two years were to be the crucial period of his life. In bed, encased in a plaster cast, the happy-go-lucky Etonian read deeply and widely, pored over Marx and Lenin in an attempt to understand Russia’s long-range goals. (Harold Wilson admits that he never got farther than page 2 of Marx’s Das Kapital.) When he was able to return to the House, his spine mended by the doctors, Home cracked: “This is the first time that anyone has ever performed the impossible task of putting backbone in a politician.”

Home’s profound skepticism of Soviet policy led him to challenge Winston Churchill when the Prime Minister praised as an “act of justice” Stalin’s promise to respect Poland’s borders after the war. “On the contrary,” said Home, it was “an act of power,” and he was soon proved right. Home constantly reiterated that unless the government grasped the fact that “this country and Russia operate under two different setsof standards, there will stretch before us a long vista of political difficulties, misunderstandings and disillusions.”

Home can be equally pointed on domestic issues, of which his foes say he knows nothing. Every step to make Britain more competitive and prosperous, said Home not long ago, has “an instant effect on our ability to guide events. Once more I make a plea for wealth —which is one of the foundations of influence.”

Us & Them. Theoretically, such talk should appeal to newly prosperous Britons at a time when economic boom and expanding education have eroded the ancient class barriers between “Us” and “Them,” between the Privileged and the People of Disraeli’s Two Nations. Instead of denouncing their superiors in privilege, Britons now aspire to join them—and do. Two-thirds of Britain’s workers vote Labor, but sociologists report that 40% of them actually think of themselves as middleclass.

And yet, class feeling remains stronger in Britain than anywhere else in Western Europe. The very fact that a new “aristocracy of achievement” has risen up, through scholarships and redbrick universities, to breach the Establishment has made many Tories more class-conscious than before. This in turn produces resentment among newcomers, who feel that they are not really welcomed by the old crowd. The game of “class spotting,” a charade around the infinite variety of right or wrong in speech or dress, is being played in Britain more cruelly than ever. It is against this background of class distinction, paradoxically both keener and less meaningful, that Britain’s aristocratic Prime Minister will have to make policy—and fight an election.

One question that Britons will answer at the polls is whether the Earl who has forsworn his titles will in fact not seem less of an anachronism than Harold Wilson, who brags that he is “classless” but harps on class consciousness. Home may well seem to many Britons a symbol of the bad old days, when privilege meant power without responsibility. On the other hand, Labor’s new order would create its own privileged class, one that has had little or no experience of power and would owe its primary responsibility to the state.

Sink or Swim. Home has considered the issue more carefully than he is often given credit for, is on record with a remarkable statement of Britain’s domestic challenges. “For the trade unions,” he has said, “the choice is whether to remain sunk in the stick-in-the-mud attitudes of the twenties and thirties, a prey to Depression fixations, meeting today’s prosperity with yesterday’s attitudes of mind, or whether to operate an up-to-date organization in modern conditions of affluence, where the object would be to produce as much wealth as possible and get a fair and increasing reward for an honest day’s work. For the industrialist, the choice is whether to play safe, to divide up the market, to insist on restrictive practices, or whether to get out and take those risks which created British industrial supremacy in the first place and are the very basis of a free mercantile economy.”

As for government, said Home, its choice “is whether to treat the country as a chronic invalid, taking its temperature and feeling its pulse every five minutes to see if it is strong enough to be told the facts of life, or whether to assume that the body politic of the country is robust and its mind mature and its heart sound and to tell the people what the hour demands, confident they will rise to the occasion. The country has a right to assume that men’s minds will be as modern as the machinery they tend, that private enterprise will be enterprising—that the government will govern.”

* For this, ironically, the new Tory Prime Minister can thank Labor M.P. Anthony Wedgwood Benn, whose gallant campaign to shed his father’s viscountcy won the nation’s support for the law. *Home is the 20th Old Etonian Prime Minister (of 45), and the 13th to have attended Christ Church.