As a result of all these factors, the Conservatives’ standing in the polls fell alarmingly as the dismal course of 1963 unfolded. In July Labour were some 20 per cent ahead. In early October at the Labour Party Conference Harold Wilson’s brilliant but shallow speech about the ‘white heat’ of scientific revolution caught the imagination of the country, or at least of the commentators. And then just a few days later — a bombshell — a resignation statement from Harold Macmillan’s hospital bed was read out by Alec Douglas-Home to the Party Conference at Blackpool, which was immediately transformed into a kind of gladiatorial combat by the leadership candidates.
This made Blackpool the most exciting Tory Conference anyone has ever witnessed. There was an atmosphere of ‘buzz, buzz, buzz’ as the contenders — at first Rab Butler and Quintin Hogg — and their supporters manoeuvred for advantage. As a junior minister, I was very much on the outside of even the outer ring of the magic circle. But I felt that the victory was Rab’s for the taking. He was a statesman of vast experience and some vision who had missed the leadership by a whisker six years before. Quintin Hogg, or as he still was and later became Lord Hailsham, had more flair and great powers of oratory, but also a reputation at that time for erratic judgement. In brief, Rab failed to grasp the opportunity which was there, making a pedestrian speech at the final rally; while Quintin grabbed and ran off with an opportunity that had never existed in the first place. So when the politicians entrained for London that Saturday, the contest was still undecided.
But the real battle for the Conservative leadership — if a military metaphor can be applied to the subtle processes by which Tory leaders at that time ‘emerged’ — was taking place elsewhere. The subtlest process of all was the way in which Harold Macmillan let it be known that he favoured Hogg over Butler, thus stopping any bandwagon for the latter and preparing the ground for the ‘emergence’ of Alec Douglas-Home. Iain Macleod was to write devastatingly in the Spectator about the way in which the magic circle of the Party ignored Butler and at Macmillan’s behest engineered this. I admired Iain Macleod, as I did Enoch Powell, both of whom subsequently refused to serve in the new Prime Minister’s Cabinet. But I did not agree with their criticisms either of the process or of the choice. I thought at the time there was something to be said for avoiding the public divisions in the Party which open elections would necessitate. I am not in general a believer in changing customs and conventions simply because rationalizing critics demand it. The way in which a Party Leader is chosen seemed to me of much less importance than whether the right person came out on top — and I thought that the right person had come out on top.
The Monday following the Conference I received a phone call from the Whips’ Office to gauge my views on the leadership. I first told them that I would support Rab over Quintin, because he was simply the more qualified of the two. I was then asked my view of Alec. This opened up a possibility I had not envisaged. ‘Is it constitutionally possible?’ I asked. Assured that it was, I did not hesitate. I replied: ‘Then I am strongly in favour of Alec.’
My only reservation, which I expressed at the time, was that there was something dubious about assuming the result of an election — Alec would have to disclaim his peerage and fight a by-election — when asking the monarch to choose a Prime Minister. But I also said that I left that question for others better qualified to consider. In retrospect, though, I would have to add one other qualification. Events in fact showed that the magic circle no longer provided the legitimacy for the men who emerged. It was a handicap to Alec as Prime Minister. By the time a new system was announced I too had come to see the need for it.
My admiration for Alec Douglas-Home was not the result of a recent conversion. When he became Foreign Secretary in June i960 I had expressed doubts to Bettie Harvie-Anderson (MP for Renfrewshire East). I thought that there surely ought to be a suitable candidate for the post among the ministers in the Commons. Moreover, Anthony Eden had, I recalled, ostensibly refused to give the Foreign Secretaryship to Lord Salisbury on these grounds. But Betty told me that Alec was quite outstanding and deserved the job. So I decided to read the new Foreign Secretary’s first speech in Hansard. It was a masterly survey of East-West relations, which emphasized the need for deterrence as well as negotiation with the Soviets and stressed the importance of our relationship with the United States. Alec now and later managed, most unusually, to combine skill in diplomacy with clarity of vision. He exhibited none of those tendencies, so characteristic of those who aspire to be Foreign Secretary, towards regarding the processes of negotiation as an end in themselves. Yet he had the charm, polish and eye for detail of the perfect negotiator.
Moreover, Alec Douglas-Home was a manifestly good man — and goodness is not to be underrated as a qualification for those considered for powerful positions. He was also in the best possible way ‘classless’. You always felt that he treated you not as a category but as a person. And he actually listened — as I found when I took up with him the vexed question of the widowed mothers’ allowance.
But the press were cruelly, ruthlessly and almost unanimously against him. He was easy to caricature as an out-of-touch aristocrat, a throwback to the worst sort of reactionary Toryism. Inverted snobbery was always to my mind even more distasteful than the straightforward self-important kind. By 1964 British society had entered a sick phase of liberal conformism passing as individual self-expression. Only progressive ideas and people were worthy of respect by an increasingly self-conscious and self-confident media class. And how they laughed when Alec said self-deprecatingly that he used matchsticks to work out economic concepts. What a contrast with the economic models with which the technically brilliant mind of Harold Wilson was familiar. No one stopped to question whether the weaknesses of the British economy were fundamentally simple and only superficially complex. In fact, if politicians had been compelled to use more honest language and simple illustrations to ensure that people understood their policies, we might well have avoided Britain’s slither into relative decline.
For all that — in spite of the media criticism, in spite of the chaotic end of the Macmillan Government, in spite of the correct but appallingly timed abolition of Retail Price Maintenance which so offended small-business support for the Conservatives — we very nearly won the 1964 general election. This recovery was not because of any economic improvement, for inflation worsened and the balance of payments deficit yawned. Nor was it because of our 1964 manifesto, with its heavy emphasis on corporatism as the way out of the country’s economic problems — territory on which the socialists were bound to be more convincing. In part it was because the closer one looked at the Labour Party’s programme and its Leader, the less substantial they seemed. But mainly the credit for our political recovery should go to Alec. It is ironic that he had already been cast in the role of scapegoat for the defeat many thought inevitable.
There had been some press speculation that I might not hold Finchley. The Liberals, never reticent in talking up their chances, began predicting another Orpington. They had secured a tight grip on the old Finchley council, though in May 1964 they had done rather less well in the elections for the new Barnet borough council. The Golf Club scandal kept rumbling on. The Liberals’ new, energetic candidate, John Pardoe, campaigned principally on local issues while I mainly stuck to national ones — above all, how to secure prosperity without inflation. The Party asked me to speak in a number of constituencies in and around London. I answered attacks on the Government’s record on pensions and benefits at a noisy, hostile meeting of women at Bethnal Green. I wrote in an article in the Evening Standard on ‘good housekeeping’ as the test for sound policies.