Alec Douglas-Home (2 July 1903 – 9 October 1995) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 19 October 1963 to 16 October 1964, succeeding Harold Macmillan and preceding Harold Wilson. He was a member of the UK Conservative Party.
Biography[]
Alec Douglas-Home was born in London, England in 1903, and he was educated at Eton and Oxford. He was elected as Conservative Party MP for South Lanark in 1931 and, in 1937, became Neville Chamberlain's Parliamentary Private Secretary. He accompanied Chamberlain on the visit to Adolf Hitler which led to the Munich Agreement, and he would lose his seat in 1945 before regaining it in 1950. In 1951, he left the House of Commons for the House of Lords, succeeding his father as Earl of Home. In 1951-1955, he was Secretary of State for Scotland, presenting the Conservative case for union against the growing strength of nationalism there. In 1955, under Anthony Eden, he became Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, holding the post until he was made Foreign Secretary by Harold Macmillan in 1960.
In 1963, Douglas-Home was a surprise choice to succeed Macmillan as Prime Minister, partly because the latter wanted to prevent Rab Butler from succeeding him. It was considered inappropriate for the Prime Minister to be in the House of Lords, so he renounced his peerage and was elected to the Commons again, an act that had only recently become possible following a campaign by Tony Benn. His short government was remembered for its policy of monetary expansion under Reginald Maudling as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and for accepting the Robbins Report on the expansion of higher education. He took over the leadership of the Conservative Party when it was tired from twelve years in office and suffered from bad opinion-poll ratings. He managed to increase the party's prospects considerably, yet ultimately his old-fashioned, aristocratic appearance stood little chance against the appeal of the young and innovative profile of the Labor Party leader Harold Wilson. He served again in the Cabinet as Edward Heath's Foreign Secretary from 1970 to 1974, and he then returned to the House of Lords.