This article is taken from the May 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
On 18 October 1963, Buckingham Palace announced that the Queen had received the Earl of Home in audience and invited him to form an administration. The formula might have been lifted from the journals of Horace Walpole; the age, emphatically, could not. After rivals of greater reputation and more obvious ambition had faltered, a fourteenth earl, born to two great Border families and educated in the old manner, found himself prime minister in the era of the Beatles and the Profumo scandal.
Home occupied a life on the border — politically, intellectually and literally. He was a scion of the Homes and the Douglases, two ancient families of the Scottish marches whose fortunes were bound up with the contested ground between kingdoms. Those who knew him spoke of a Douglas side and a Home side to the man. As he himself put it with characteristic brevity: “The Douglases had a habit of taking what they wanted, the Homes conserving what they had got.”
Harold Macmillan, who understood the type, caught the paradox precisely: “an urbane but resolute character, iron painted to look like wood”. Home inherited great wealth and an assured place in society but was never merely the ornament of a landowning tradition. It was not the vague sense of noblesse oblige that drew him to public life but ambition of a quieter, more persistent kind.
Anthony Eden’s departure from Downing Street in 1957 and Macmillan’s arrival opened a new phase in his political career. Home served at the Commonwealth Relations Office, where he managed decolonisation after Suez with patience and self-effacement, before Macmillan made him foreign secretary in 1960.
The Daily Mirror reached for the most wounding comparison it could find, describing it as “the most reckless political appointment since Caligula made his favourite horse a consul”. The paper’s judgement was not borne out. Over the following two decades, Home would prove himself a consummate foreign secretary.
Even his detractors concurred. Dean Rusk, who as America’s secretary of state dealt with many foreign ministers, reckoned him one of the ablest he had encountered. What had been mistaken for aristocratic languor turned out to be something rarer: a temperamental steadiness, a capacity for balance that Macmillan himself did not always possess.
Those who served under him spoke of an intuitive sense for what mattered and what did not. He belonged to that school of conservatism in which absolutes must sometimes yield to expediency; he believed that politics was not the art of the possible, as the old formula had it, but a choice between the unpalatable and the disastrous.
On the question of Europe, Home sought to hold together what others wished to pull apart. He was never a paid-up member of the European tendency, yet nor was he a doctrinaire sceptic. “We might hope eventually to achieve leadership of it,” he wrote of the EEC, with the more prescient expectation that “we could use our influence in it to keep Western Germany independent of the Soviet bloc”.
The same equilibrium governed his view of the Atlantic relationship. Home did not accept that Britain must choose between Europe and the United States, thinking it might, with care, maintain a footing in both. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, he served as a discreet channel between Macmillan and Rusk, and worked behind the scenes to influence the Soviet diplomatic corps in London. Kennedy acknowledged the contribution with a signed photograph: “with appreciation for his most useful efforts to bridge the Atlantic”.
Home’s seat in the Lords proved an advantage in dealing with the complexities of the Foreign Office. He could give himself to the work almost entirely — save for those Saturdays at the family seat, The Hirsel, for fly fishing or on a friend’s shoot, which he regarded as no less essential to the conduct of public life. He distrusted summits, regarding them as better suited to spectacle than to serious negotiation. He had little patience, either, for the razzmatazz of press conferences and airstrip interviews.
When he at last left King Charles Street for Downing Street, his permanent under-secretary wrote to mark the occasion: “I must tell you of the inspiration which you have been to the whole Foreign Service. Believe me, this isn’t just diplomatic wordage.”
The early 1960s was a period of national transition and Macmillan’s administration, with its Edwardian cadences and grandee ministers, appeared the most conspicuous relic of an order under siege. Then the Conservative Party’s so-called “magic circle” contrived to place an aristocrat in Downing Street.
Yet Home’s appointment was not the act of political suicide it appeared to be because he possessed a rare capacity to unite the disparate elements of his party.
He did, however, have the misfortune to arrive in Downing Street just as the tide was turning after 13 unbroken years of Conservative government. Jim Callaghan once quipped that there come moments in politics when a sea-change occurs, and then it scarcely matters what any politician says or does.
But Home was not without a reforming instinct. He permitted the opposition front bench to hold informal talks with permanent secretaries before a change of government. The “Douglas-Home Rules” were accepted on both sides of the House as conducive to better government and endure to this day.
The death of Kennedy brought a chapter in Anglo-American relations to its close. The easy intimacy of “Mac and Jack” — half genuine, half performed — was over; what followed would be more transactional and considerably less warm.
President Lyndon B. Johnson and Home were temperamentally ill-matched. When Home met Johnson in Washington in February 1964, the agenda was formidable, yet Johnson raised at once a narrower grievance: British trade with Cuba and, specifically, the parochial issue of a contract for Leyland buses to be supplied to Castro’s regime.
Home told Johnson plainly that to return to the Commons and announce restrictions on Cuban trade would provoke a sharp anti-American reaction.
“There is no question,” he said, “of dictation by the United States government to this country over commercial relations with Cuba. This is a subject which is decided solely by the British government.”
The result of the 1964 election was extraordinarily close. After an eleven-point Labour poll lead had been reduced to less than one, Tony Benn had to revise his earlier estimate of Home: “He campaigned very powerfully. I think he’s a much-underestimated figure — very competent, very hard-working.”
Home brought to politics a sense of proportion that was not easily learned and could not be feigned. His administration, in retrospect, was the last of a certain style of government — and he, perhaps, the last of a certain kind of man.
Lord Rosebery, that most self-regarding of late Victorian statesmen, once observed that to have a former prime minister in a Cabinet was “a fleeting and dangerous luxury”. When Edward Heath entered No. 10 in June 1970, he permitted himself that luxury, bringing Home back to King Charles Street.
Heath’s absorption in the European project left Home free to attend to what he knew best: East-West relations, Africa, the Middle and Far East. Yet he played his part in the central achievement of the Heath government: Britain’s accession to the European Community on 1 January 1973.
Home’s long commitment to membership had given Heath a foundation on which to build. From the outset, however, he was critical of much in the Community’s institutional arrangements: the bureaucratic overgrowth and the cumbersome Council of Ministers. His support for entry was real and pragmatic, but it was never uncritical and never federalist.
By 1970, Home had become an elder statesman in the fullest sense of that overworked term. He was courteous, calm and brought a quiet wit to the daily conduct of business. He gave, too, an assurance of interests beyond the despatch boxes — Ruff’s Guide to the Turf was reliably to be found within reach of his right hand.
The parliamentary atmosphere he had found uncongenial in 1963 had grown coarser and more confrontational; he regretted the decline in courtesy and the decay of old restraints, a process he could observe but do nothing to arrest.
On the old question of balancing Europe and the United States, Home saw his task clearly: to temper the European emphasis of the Heath government with close attention to Washington. The relationship between Heath and Nixon was distant, even cool; Home, who had known Nixon from his visits to London over the years, became an important intermediary.
He also became the principal contact for Henry Kissinger. (He was also amongst the first to deduce that conversations in the Oval Office were being recorded: during substantive talks on Laos with Nixon and Kissinger on 30 September 1972, he noticed that no notes were being taken.) Kissinger later admitted that he and Nixon “often found ourselves in the habit of calling the Foreign Secretary on a whole series of issues.”
To some critics, Home’s second tenure at King Charles Street appeared reactionary. There was justice in the charge to an extent. Home belonged to a tradition, perhaps he was the last representative, of reactive rather than creative foreign secretaries. He did not remake policy, but managed it. But if a minister’s tenure is to be measured by the absence of serious error, Home deserves high marks.
Throughout this period, what Home presided over was the conduct of a successful retreat. From his arrival at the Commonwealth Ministry in April 1955 until his departure from the Foreign Office in March 1974, he stood at or near the centre of Britain’s imperial withdrawal, managing decline with patience, dignity and a minimum of disaster.
Alec Home was the last prime minister to belong wholly to another world. From his beloved Borders — the country of the Homes and the Douglases, where he would die in 1995 — he had stood between Scotland and England, between the Atlantic archipelago and Europe, between the Lords and the Commons, between aristocratic duty and the new technocratic politics.
Once mocked as a relic, he embodied much of what we now wish we had more of in public life. He was modest in tone, clear in purpose and untouched by the politics of self-advertisement.
Jock Colville, writing at the time of Home’s resignation from the party leadership in 1965, feared he might be the last of a breed — politicians prepared to endure the indignities, disappointments and ingratitude of public life merely because they wished to serve their country. That fear was well-founded. What followed was a severely professional age, in which such driving forces came to seem quaint, even suspect.
Alec Home’s career offers no programme for imitation; the circumstances that formed him will not recur. But it provides something different, a lesson that the modern age is not always willing to learn: that politics and honour are by no means incompatible and that something may be lost when we forget it.
