Alec Douglas-Home
Alec Douglas-Home was prime minister of the United Kingdom for twelve months, from October 1963 to October 1964, the fourteenth Earl of Home who emerged from the Conservative Party's soundings as Macmillan's successor over Butler, Hailsham and Maudling, to the fury of Macleod and Powell, who refused to serve. He disclaimed his peerage under the act passed that year for Tony Benn, fought a by-election at Kinross and West Perthshire as Sir Alec, and was for three weeks a prime minister in neither house. Wilson called him the fourteenth earl, and he answered that Wilson was presumably the fourteenth Mr Wilson. The year was the resale price maintenance bill that Heath forced through against the party's shopkeepers. There were the Robbins report on the universities accepted, the Beeching cuts begun, and the Denning report on Profumo. There were the confrontation with Indonesia over Malaysia, the Cyprus emergency, and the election of October 1964 that he lost to Wilson by four seats, closer than anyone had expected of the old-fashioned man who did his sums with matchsticks, as he said, and who had not been given a chance. He was born in London in 1903, the eldest son of the thirteenth earl, went to Eton and Christ Church, and played first-class cricket for Middlesex. He sat for Lanark from 1931 as Lord Dunglass, and was Chamberlain's parliamentary private secretary at Munich, which he never disowned. He spent two years of the war on his back in a plaster cast with spinal tuberculosis, and succeeded to the earldom in 1951. He was Commonwealth secretary under Macmillan from 1955 and foreign secretary from 1960, the first peer in the office since 1940, who signed the test ban treaty in Moscow. He was leader of the opposition until July 1965, when he introduced the party's first leadership election and stood aside for Heath. He was Heath's foreign secretary from 1970 to 1974. In that office he expelled a hundred and five Soviet spies from London in September 1971, the largest such expulsion ever, recognised China, and managed the entry into Europe's foreign side. He went back to the Lords in 1974 as a life peer, wrote a memoir called The Way the Wind Blows, fished and shot. He died at the Hirsel in October 1995 at ninety-two, the last prime minister born before the Great War and the one the party had chosen because he wanted it least.
- Lived: 1903 CE – 1995 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: prime minister, politician
