by Robert Lacey
On 20 September 1963, in their weekly audience, Macmillan told the Queen he had come to feel – and was informing his colleagues – that he should leave Downing Street within a few months, and Elizabeth duly voiced her sadness and thanks.307 But Supermac was canny enough to realise that whatever polite regrets the Queen might express about the news, her deeper worry was the personal role that she would now have to play in choosing his successor, since the Conservatives still had no set mechanism for selecting a new leader. As the confusion following Eden’s departure six years earlier had made clear, the ill-defined Tory process of ‘emergence’ could verge on chaos, and Elizabeth was desperate to avoid the same mess again. For her part, she preferred not to get involved at all, if she could help it.
‘She feels the great importance of maintaining the prerogative intact,’ noted Macmillan. ‘After all, if she invited someone to form a government and he failed, what harm was done?’308
As we saw in Chapter Three, it had been the Tory grandee Lord Salisbury, with his semi-comical speech impediment, who had quizzed the cabinet and other grandees in 1957 as to whether they preferred ‘Wab’ (R. A. Butler) or ‘Hawold’ for the leadership of the party, and hence the premiership.309 Six years later Macmillan wanted to play the grandee himself – with the principal aim of keeping his deputy and long-time rival ‘Rab’ Butler out of Downing Street. ‘From the first day of his premiership to the last,’ wrote Iain Macleod, a rising star on the liberal wing of the party, ‘Macmillan was determined that Butler, although incomparably the best qualified of the contenders, should not succeed him’.310
Macleod was correct – and also correct in his inference that Macmillan was personally jealous of his deputy. Butler’s visionary 1944 Education Act that had extended free secondary education to all gave Butler a far better claim than Macmillan to being seen as the post-war father of modernising Conservatism. But in 1963 the so-called ‘Butler Act’ was nearly 20 years in the past, and despite recent good work as a reforming Home Secretary, Rab lacked the panache to lead the Tories into the election they would have to fight by the October of the following year – he was ‘a slab of cold fish’ in the acerbic opinion of the former Defence Minister, Walter Monckton.311 Labour’s recently elected leader Harold Wilson was licking his lips in anticipation.
Macmillan changed his mind about resigning – the whiff of the hustings quite revived the old bruiser’s battle spirits. He decided that he would fight the next year’s election, after all. But on 7 October, the night before he was due to inform the cabinet of his new resolve, he was laid low with a prostate attack – ‘I found it impossible to pass water and an excruciating pain when I attempted to do so,’ he noted in his diary. ‘I was seized by terrible spasms.’312 The PM was in agony throughout the cabinet meeting, having to leave the room twice, and that evening his doctors ordered him straight into hospital for surgery. Macmillan now finally accepted that the moment had presented itself for his resignation, but he was still determined that he should oversee the choice of his successor – a process complicated by the fact that the entire Tory Party was just moving up to Blackpool for its annual conference.
There, in the Winter Gardens’ Empress Ballroom, the ebullient Lord Hailsham, campaign manager of the Tories’ sweeping election victory of 1959, was already campaigning on his own behalf, planning to take advantage of the recent legislation that allowed peers to renounce their titles.313 Other candidates included Iain Macleod, then Secretary of State for the Colonies; the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Reginald Maudling; and another up-and-comer, Edward Heath, who would have been a stronger candidate if his negotiations to join the Common Market had not been recently rebuffed by General de Gaulle.
None of these candidacies, however, were really thriving. Hailsham’s blustering style – at one point he brandished his nappy-clad daughter in front of the Blackpool delegates and fed her with a baby bottle – was falling flat, while the consensus was developing that Heath, Macleod and Maudling were just a bit too young. There was no one to match the sober – and rather depressing – gravitas of Butler.
A few weeks earlier, Macmillan would happily have gone with Hailsham, to whom he had recently entrusted a number of special assignments for unemployment and higher education. But with Lord Hailsham sabotaged by his over-flamboyant campaigning, and Macmillan sharing the view that Heath, Maudling and Macleod should wait their moment, the Prime Minister turned to another aristocrat, the fourteenth Earl of Home who had, like Hailsham, just acquired the legal option of resigning his title through the Peerage Act of July 1963.
It was Macmillan himself who had plucked Home from comparative obscurity to take over the Foreign Office only three years earlier, and the peer had proved a loyal and solid colleague. ‘Alec’ Home was no genius, but he was steady and straightforward, coming across as a friendly doctor as he peered over the top of his trademark half-moon spectacles. As Foreign Secretary, Home had played a constructive part in the negotiations for the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of August 1963 – whose success had earned the government some respite from the ramifications of the Profumo Scandal. But insiders wondered whether the Prime Minister had not really picked out Home as the best available opponent to thwart the ambitions of his own long-term rival and adversary R. A. Butler – and so it now proved.
On 9 October 1963 the ailing Macmillan was admitted to King Edward VII Hospital for Officers in Marylebone, near Harley Street, ready for surgery next day. There he wrote to the Queen to tell her that his resignation now seemed inevitable, and he summoned Alec Home to his bedside, giving him a letter to be read out to the party conference publicly announcing the news. He had wanted and had intended to stay in office to fight next year’s election, Macmillan explained, but his imminent surgery now made that impossible. He also urged Home strongly to throw his own hat into the leadership ring. Having this letter to read out to the 4,000 delegates in Blackpool would be a very good start to his campaign.314
The missive had the intended effect. Although Butler, as deputy premier, was technically in charge of the conference, Home’s shock announcement and his reading out of the Prime Minister’s personal letter of wishes to the awe-struck delegates quite took the wind out of Butler’s sails – and, indeed, of his other rivals. Home’s fatherly manner played well in the crisis, and by the end of the conference he was being rated as strongly as anyone – with the added impetus of the horse that makes its bid on the final bend.
Back in London on 14 and 15 October, all the leadership contenders and other Tories – the Chief Whips and senior party officials – commenced their pilgrimages to Macmillan’s bedside at King Edward VII’s. The Prime Minister was ‘still woozy from the anaesthetic …’ according to his biographer, Alistair Horne. But ‘it was now clear that, sick as he was, Macmillan was still going to hold all the strings in his hand until the very last minute, controlling events from his bed’.315
While putting on a tantalising show over the days that followed for the reporters and photographers gathered outside the hospital, Macmillan’s ostensible purpose was to take ‘soundings’ from all these comings and goings in order to prepare the advice that he could give to the Queen – and at 11.15 on the morning of Friday the 18th, Elizabeth duly arrived.
‘She came in alone,’ wrote Macmillan later, ‘with a firm step, and those brightly shining eyes which are her chief beauty. She seemed deeply moved; so was I.’ According to Sir John Richardson, Macmillan’s doctor, the young Queen had tears in her eyes. (According also to Richardson’s later account, Macmillan’s prostate complication was ‘benign’ and he could easily have resumed his official duties two weeks later if he had not decided to step down for political reasons.)316
Once Prime Minister and Sovereign were alone, Macmillan asked if he could read out the memorandum he had put together over the past few days, apologising that he did not feel strong enough to speak without a text. ‘She expressed her gratitude, and said that she did not need and did not intend to seek any other a
dvice but mine. I then read the memorandum. She agreed that Lord Home was the most likely choice to get general support, as well as really the best and strongest character … I said that I thought speed was important and hoped she would send for Lord Home immediately – as soon as she got back to the Palace. He could then begin to work. She agreed.’317
Macmillan added, both verbally and in the second part of his memorandum, that the Queen should not appoint Home as Prime Minister at this first audience, but should use the old-fashioned formula of ‘inviting him to form an administration’, so he could consult his colleagues before giving a final answer. Could Home, in other words, get Butler and his other competitors on board, since without their support he could not command a majority in his party or in the Commons?
To round off the proceedings, Macmillan handed over his memorandum to be kept in the royal archives as justification for whatever action Elizabeth might now take on his advice. Unfolded, the document filled a large white envelope which the Queen took from her ex-Prime Minister and passed on to her private secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, who was standing by the now-open door. As Adeane received the envelope, its huge size ‘made him look,’ thought Macmillan, ‘like the Frog Footman’.318
Alice in Wonderland? Alice Through the Looking Glass? Many were the unflattering analogies made in the days that followed about Macmillan’s hospital bed theatrics – and they have intensified as historians have analysed these events over the years. The crucial detail is that the Prime Minister had formally resigned at 9.30 that morning.319 So, the ‘advice’ handed over two hours later by Harold Macmillan, ex-Prime Minister, had no constitutional status whatsoever. Elizabeth was not compelled to accept it, as she was normally bound to accept and follow the advice of an elected Prime Minister. Indeed, her responsibility was actually to step back and take a hard look at what this ex-official with no government status was proposing.
The truth was, however, that Macmillan’s personal preference was the Queen’s as well. Elizabeth had established no closeness at all with the damp and complex deputy premier. ‘Rab wasn’t her cup of tea,’ explained one royal aide to the historian Ben Pimlott. ‘When she got the advice to call Alec she thought “Thank God”. She loved Alec – he was an old friend. They talked about dogs and shooting together. They were both Scottish landowners, the same sort of people, like old school friends.’ While the Queen knew very well that she would have been ‘constitutionally justified in sending for Rab’, she felt no temptation whatsoever to do so.320
In the opinion of Ben Pimlott, Elizabeth II’s unquestioning acceptance of Harold Macmillan’s advice to pick Douglas-Home was ‘the biggest political misjudgement of her reign’.321 But as events turned out, the retiring Prime Minister’s advice proved quite shrewd – in hard political terms, at least. As 1963 moved into 1964, the Conservatives made a remarkable recovery under Douglas-Home’s leadership, losing the 15 October election by the merest whisker – 0.7 per cent of the vote. As we shall see in the next chapter (covering Episode 301, the start of Season 3), Harold Wilson’s Labour Party enjoyed an overall majority of just four seats. If only 900 voters in eight constituencies had switched their votes, Supermac’s aristocratic and apparently eccentric hospital choice would have remained Prime Minister.322
Episode 210 concludes with the unresolved dramatic strand left over from Episode 201 – Elizabeth’s 1956 discovery in her husband’s briefcase of the photograph of the Russian ballerina Ulanova. The couple’s reconciliation over this imagined incident must, by definition, be fictitious, but it does provide a dramatic device to reflect the refreshed closeness that the Queen and her husband enjoyed in the early 1960s with the birth of their ‘new family’ – the princes Andrew (b. 19 February 1960) and Edward (b. 10 March 1964).
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘OLDING’
OCTOBER 1964–FEBRUARY 1975
Season 3, Episode 301, opens with the Queen inspecting a new issue of postage stamps, giving her the chance to comment on how the passing years have changed her appearance ‘from young woman,’ as she puts it, ‘… to old bat’. ‘Age is rarely kind,’ she reflects ‘… to anyone.’323 Meanwhile, we, the viewers, can reflect on this new season’s change in casting, from Claire Foy to Olivia Colman, as she inspects her new postal profile. The timing of this new issue, based on the famous Arnold Machin silhouette of Elizabeth that features on British stamps to this day, has been brought forward to coincide with the 1964 opening of Season 3, and the Postmaster General’s name has been changed accordingly. There would not normally have been so many officials present for the inspection, and they almost certainly would not have included the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, Sir Anthony Blunt. But Anthony Blunt, as we shall see, will play a crucial role in the drama of this episode…
1967 – Profile of Elizabeth II, 41, on UK stamps to this day
Much of The Crown is set in Buckingham Palace – you could hardly fail to have noticed that – but a fair proportion of the drama also unrolls in the Palace of Westminster (the Houses of Parliament) and inside No. 10 Downing Street, the residence of the Prime Minister, since much of the ongoing narrative revolves around Politics with a capital ‘P’. Season 1 was built around Winston Churchill, Elizabeth II’s first Prime Minister, with all the grumblings and grandeur of the great man’s final spell in office. Season 2 has recounted the adventures and misadventures of Churchill’s less imposing Conservative successors – Sir Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and the fourteenth Earl of Home, who renounced his peerage to serve as Sir Alec Douglas-Home. Now Season 3 introduces us to Britain’s version of socialism and the ‘14th Mr Wilson’, as Alec Douglas-Home derisively called his opponent in the 1964 general election, when Britain voted out the Tories and entrusted its destiny for the next five years to Harold Wilson and the Labour Party.324
The contest was a cliffhanger, as we have already seen at the end of Chapter Ten – but Mr Wilson was ready for his encounter with history. At 2.47 on the afternoon of Friday 16 October 1964, Labour gained the 316th seat it needed to secure a majority in the 630-seat House of Commons,325 and the Downing Street civil servants promptly instructed Wilson to don the striped trousers and long morning tailcoat that tradition required a prime minister to wear for his audience at the Palace. Wilson’s Tory predecessors Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Home had all dressed themselves in that gear whenever they went to see the Queen – sometimes with a top hat as well.326
But Mr Wilson politely declined. Striped trousers, perhaps – long coat, certainly not. Not for the leader of the triumphant People’s Party. The new Prime Minister had a short black jacket brought down from his wardrobe in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and that was how Wilson dressed when he went to kiss hands with the Queen.327 The brilliant first-class, alphaplus Bachelor of Arts (Philosophy, Politics & Economics) – Oxford’s youngest don since Cardinal Wolsey, and a lecturer in Economic History at the age of 21 – jealously guarded his image as a plain and everyday man: tinned salmon, please, not smoked; holidays in a bungalow on the Isles of Scilly; khaki shorts in August to recall his Boy Scout days; then an hour or so with the Meccano set, enlivened by some Gilbert & Sullivan on the gramophone. Most famously of all, Harold Wilson insisted on being photographed puffing on his battered old pipe – though, as we see in this Episode 301, the premier smoked Havana cigars in private and greatly preferred cognac to beer.328
When Wilson arrived at the Palace that Friday afternoon, he discovered that, in fact, Elizabeth II could be quite as relaxed about etiquette as he was. In view of the clear Westminster majority that the Labour Party now commanded, she simply asked its leader to form a government, without ceremony. The hand-kissing, he later recalled, was taken ‘as read’.329 Nor was the Queen disconcerted by her new Prime Minister’s request that he might bring along his wife for the occasion – another innovation – with his father and his sister turning up in another car.330
But the Queen did have some surprises in store for him. With his anti-elitist disdain for the
rituals of monarchy, the new Prime Minister had not bothered to research precisely what was involved in his audience at the Palace every Tuesday. He arrived for his first encounter anticipating some cosy round-up of the political situation in general terms – with a cup of tea as well, perhaps.
Elizabeth II had other ideas, for she had been reading the contents of her red leather ‘boxes’ more carefully than ever. The arrival of a socialist government had prompted fierce speculation against sterling, and Wilson had generated additional gloom by harping on about the £800 million balance of payments deficit which was the legacy of ‘thirteen years of Tory mis-rule’.331 This might not be Wilson’s fault, but Her Majesty wished to know precisely what her First Lord of the Treasury now intended to do about the problem. She was the Queen, not some television interviewer to be fobbed off with platitudes. She expected her Prime Minister to take her into his confidence – and to know his facts, as Wilson discovered in another audience a week or so later.
‘Very interesting,’ said the Queen, ‘this idea of a new town in the Bletchley area.’ The Prime Minister looked blank. It was the first he had heard of the proposal to build the new town in Buckinghamshire that became known as Milton Keynes. The plan was set out in a Cabinet Committee paper which the Queen had studied, but which Wilson had set aside to read at the weekend.332
‘I shall certainly advise my successor to do his homework before his audience,’ he said a dozen years later in his retirement speech, ‘and to read all his telegrams and Cabinet Committee papers in time, and not leave them to the weekend, or he will feel like an unprepared schoolboy.’333
From this uncomfortable start, Elizabeth II’s relationship with her first Labour Prime Minister could only improve. Alec Douglas-Home compared the Queen’s handling of her audiences to a friendly headmaster receiving the head prefect in his study, listening hard and asking shrewd direct questions, but always being supportive – while being especially understanding of the difficulties that politicians can get themselves into for politics’ sake.334 Now Harold Wilson found the same. It was a sustaining element of his working week that he had not anticipated. The Queen, he discovered, was on his side in a fundamental fashion. She was the one working colleague, he confided once to the Prime Minister of Eire, to whom he could take his problems without feeling that he might be sharpening a knife for his own back. The most trustworthy of fellow ministers had their own axes to grind, personal or political, but the Queen’s preoccupation quite simply started and ended with the welfare of her nation.335