by A. N. Wilson
It was an aristocratic coup d’état. True, the aristocracy, in such forms as Bobbety Cecil (Lord Salisbury), hovered in the wings of the Conservative Party, but it was an age since they had so blatantly shown their hand. ‘The Tory Party is run by about five people,’ said one leading member, ‘and they all treat their followers with disdain: they’re mostly Etonians, and Eton is good for disdain.’5 But Sir Alec Douglas-Home did not treat people with disdain. He was a palpably decent person. He was vague: ‘Moscow, Alec, Moscow’, his wife had to keep reminding him on a visit to Russia as they came down the steps of an aeroplane, lest he ‘should assume that he had just arrived in Washington or Peking or Rome’.6 But he was also sharp-witted, and, given the attack which was unleashed upon him immediately by a hostile media, remarkably popular. He himself blamed the shortness of his tenure of office (barely a year) upon the influence of a new satirical TV show called That Was The Week That Was, compèred by a Cambridge-educated son of the Methodist manse named David Frost and directed by a sharp-tongued homosexual called Ned Sherrin (educated at Sexey’s School, Bruton, Somerset). For them, as for most of the team of satirists they assembled–Bernard Levin, Roy Kinnear, Millicent Martin, and the rest–as for the Private Eye boys, who also wrote material for That Was The Week, there was something self-evidently risible in having an aristocrat as Prime Minister. The fact that he was diplomatically experienced counted for nothing. Nor did the fact that, because of a long period as a young man when he suffered from tuberculosis of the spine, he had spent over a year reading Marxist texts. He was thought to be the only member of the House of Commons who had read Das Kapital, and he was the author of an impressive, well-researched letter to Churchill in 1945, protesting at the disgraceful terms of the Yalta Agreement with Stalin, and protesting at the fate of the Eastern European countries at the end of the Second World War. Had a man with the same qualifications as Home been educated at a grammar school and spoken with a regional accent, the media would probably have been hailing him as supremely well equipped for office.
One of the paradoxical features of our times is not that the aristocracy has especially declined, either in wealth or in influence, but that it has been thought improper for this wealth and influence to be reflected in the political sphere.
As so often in his Polonius-like machinations, Macmillan had given out confusing signals. It was he who had anointed the 14th Earl of Home as his successor, and yet it was he who, with the 1958 Life Peerages Act, had undermined the hereditary principle itself. The great majority of those who accepted peerages for life were former members of the House of Commons.7 For the remainder of the twentieth century, they sat in the Second Chamber together with the hereditary peers. It was not until 1999 with its House of Lords Reform Bill that the Blair government limited the numbers of hereditary peers permitted to be legislators to ninety-two.8 Finally, their right to sit there was abolished altogether. Given the climate of the times, the wonder is that it took so long. Since Victorian times, radicals had been calling for the divorce between membership of the Upper House and membership of peerage of the realm. It took the government of New Labour fully to bring this to pass, though Macmillan had taken the first step. Between 1965 and 1983 no hereditary titles were created. Margaret Thatcher made three creations–an earldom (of Stockton) was given to Macmillan; a viscountcy apiece was given to George Thomas (Viscount Tonypandy) and William Whitelaw, neither of whom had male heirs. The paradox is, that in the fifty years since the Life Peerages Act, and the steady diminution of direct political power of the aristocracy, the old peerage has grown stronger in terms of wealth and private influence.
In 1989, the meritocratic Sunday Times published the first of its List of the Richest People in Britain. The political agenda of its proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, and its editor, Andrew Neil, was that Britain should become more like America, a place, supposedly, where birth counted for less than enterprise, and where it was possible for enterprising people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. In fact, this is an illusory economic concept, a piece of myth. As an experienced historian of wealth, W. D. Rubinstein, has pointed out, the statistics all suggest one thing. The surest way to become rich is to inherit money. In the period 1809–1939, Rubinstein found only fifteen truly self-made millionaires; the rest had all started out with the help of inherited money.9 In 1989, Andrew Neil, who had hoped to print a list of the new Thatcherite meritocracy, was able, it is true, to field some who had made their money out of motor racing or multi-storey car parks, but a quarter of the hundred listed were hereditary landowners. When Gladstone raised the richest man in Victorian England from a Marquessate in 1874, he made him the Duke of Westminster. In Thatcher’s Britain of 1989, the richest man was still the Duke of Westminster. Many of the landed classes, who in real terms were prodigiously wealthy, did not appear on Andrew Neil’s list because, in order to avoid confiscatory levels of taxation, they had formed their estates into trusts and limited companies which they did not, technically, own. So the list of the rich aristocrats in the Sunday Times tended to be those who lived chiefly off urban rents–figures such as the Duke of Westminster and Earl Cadogan. Even so, after the first ten years of the Rich List’s history, well over a hundred members of the peerage and the landed gentry appeared in the list, none worth less than £20 million.10
At the time when Alec Douglas-Home was Prime Minister this was a state of things which the Labour Party and many others in Britain were actively determined to reverse. Harold Wilson had a stock of replies to hecklers. When he was in full flight, promising new and better schools, hospitals, roads, laboratories and all the blessings of modern life, some recalcitrant member of the audience called out, ‘Where are you going to find the money to pay for it?’ he would shout back, ‘Out of Lord Carrington’s pocket!’11 It pleased the fans, but it was economic nonsense. Lord Carrington’s pocket remained as full at the end of our times as it had been when Harold Wilson made the boast. There were many landed families who, in the mid-twentieth century, were obliged through poverty to abandon their ancient country houses, and sell their land, or donate it all to the National Trust. Those who survived, however, did so not necessarily because they had more grit or enterprise or other meritocratic virtues. They were simply much richer, and were determined to remain so. In the past in Britain it was deemed axiomatic that those who had the largest share of the nation’s wealth should have the biggest say in determining the course of its affairs. This is still, broadly, the point of view in America, where presidential candidates either have to possess, or to find the support of, colossal fortunes merely to stand for election. In Britain in 1963, however, attitudes had so changed that the mere fact of belonging to the aristocracy was considered a disqualification for office. After Alec Home went, there would follow over forty years in which the ‘toffs’ in the Conservative Party either retreated from politics altogether or played backroom roles. It led to a situation where, for example, in the 1990s, so obviously brilliant a man and ruthlessly good a politician as Viscount Cranborne, who succeeded as 7th Marquess of Salisbury in 2003, was confined to fighting losing battles for the rights of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords, rather than use his talents for the wider good of the country. His is an extreme case, but there are many others where toffs were excluded from public life simply for being toffs. The growth of their wealth, and the diminishment of their political power, was one of the many symptoms of the dissolution of late twentieth-century society. Socialists of the Harold Wilson generation would have liked the government of Britain to be shared between intellectuals and trades unionists. Meritocrats of the Thatcher generation would have wanted it to be governed by businessmen. But the political structures of Britain, and its institutions, remained largely unchanged, and they were determined by the ownership of wealth and land, by the position of the older universities and the more prestigious private schools, and by Parliament itself. Since 1689, the system, the institutions, had been posited upon an aristocratic form of government. Un
der the Victorians, this system had evolved, to widen the franchise, but it had not become in any continental sense democratic. Nor would it, throughout our times. Proportional representation, the only truly democratic voting system, was not introduced in all the years 1953–2008, and the representatives sent to Parliament might have represented all the people but they only represented some 20 percent of their actual opinions and political colouring.
What Britain was left with, by the end of the period, was the rump of an aristocratic system, with no aristocracy allowed to govern within it. Alec Home’s short tenure of office was the end of an era when those trained through generations to belong to the ‘governing classes’ were actually allowed to govern.
In any event, 1963 was a brave moment for a 14th Earl to become Prime Minister, and from the very first the media were out not merely to mock, but to destroy him. When the Aberdeen Evening Express accidentally used a photograph of Home to illustrate a story about one Baillie Vass, one of Private Eye’s more baffling soubriquets was instantly born. Home became, in the eyes of that magazine, ‘Baillie Vass, the notorious Scottish entrepreneur and confidence trickster’.12 They printed more than one picture of him enthroned on the lavatory with his striped parliamentary trousers crumpled around his ankles. In September, his mere appearance in a photograph in the Guardian unleashed this comment: ‘In a desperate attempt to win over the female voters Baillie Vass last week exposed himself in Downing Street in the presence of Mr Butler, and a photographer from the Grauniad. It is well known that the impudent Baillie pins his hopes of winning the election on women (our Political Correspondent writes) but it was not expected that he would stoop to such primitive stunts in order to gain their allegiance.’13 The ‘Election Issue’ had a floppy gramophone record (‘His Master’s Vass’) stuck to the cover. When removed, it revealed a photograph of Baillie Vass on the lavatory. He is surrounded by putti drawn by Gerald Scarfe, with the faces of R.A. Butler, Quintin Hogg, Edward Heath and another unrecognisable. The bubble coming from the Baillie’s mouth is ‘Put that record back AT ONCE’.14
What did they find so odious about him? Nine years after Home had stopped being Prime Minister, the magazine’s diarist, Auberon Waugh, angered at being sacked from The Times by Baillie Vass’s nephew Charles Douglas-Home, was still pursuing the campaign–in 1973–reminding readers, ‘Vass it was who stood up to be counted at Munich; who patiently got on with his needlework throughout the resulting World War when a bad back laid him low; who refused to be cowed by the tyrant Nasser at Suez; whose unswerving support for Michael Stewart emboldened that timid little man to see his peculiar Nigerian policy through; who keeps trying to sell black Rhodesians down the river, despite repeated discouragement. Sir Baillie Vass, at 89, is widely regarded as the most honourable man in British politics.’15 One of the reasons Waugh’s invectives in his Private Eye Diaries packed such a punch was that you did not know how much of it was meant. Probably, at the time of writing, drunk or half-drunk, he meant every word, as when he added, in the same Diary entry, ‘I have always maintained that Churchill should have been hanged at the end of the last war–whether for specific war crimes, like the introduction of civilian bombing, or for Yalta, or merely to herald a return to the civilised standards of peace.’
Sir Alec Douglas-Home was actually an embodiment of such ‘civilised standards’. He worried about ‘whether democracy (one man, one vote) will last. Certainly it will relapse into some more authoritarian form of government unless the great majority are really well-educated in the basic facts of community and international living’…‘We’ve got a long way to go before we can say democracy is secure and stands on its feet.’16
He wanted to bring in legislation, such as Margaret Thatcher was to do, to democratise the trades unions. His short premiership was dominated by foreign affairs. In Cyprus, the Turks threatened to invade. Harold Wilson made a fool of himself in the Commons, demanding that Britain should send her ‘heaviest tanks’ to Cyprus, vehicles totally unsuited to the terrain, as to security operations, as Home was able gently to point out.
Wilson would follow Home’s foreign policy almost to the letter–support for democratic governments in Africa, support for an independent Malaysia, continued negotiations with Rhodesia to try to persuade the white minority government to agree a programme of devolving power to the black majority, maintaining the transatlantic alliance, and yet not being totally subsumed by the US. This was the argument in favour of Britain possessing its own nuclear deterrent and being a member of NATO. ‘It is not to man’s credit,’ Home said, ‘that the peace is held by a balance of nuclear power but it is the fact of life and paradoxically the hope of life too.’17
Scarcely a month after Douglas-Home became Prime Minister, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated–on 22 November in Dallas, Texas. He had been in office thirty-four months and he was forty-six years old. His assassin was Lee Harvey Oswald, a twenty-four-year-old former US Marine who was apprehended on the day of the murder and himself assassinated on 24 November, while being taken from Dallas gaol to a county prison. (His murderer was a nightclub owner called Jack Ruby.)
Kennedy died from a gunshot wound in the brain at 1.00 p.m. local time (7.00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time). (On the same day died also Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis.) In the aircraft flying the body back to Washington, and with Kennedy’s widow Jackie at his side, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson, aged fifty-five, took the oath of office as 36th President before Federal Judge Sarah Hughes, who was in tears. A stranger in a New York street, one of the innumerable vox pop interviews for television stations around the world, said he was younger than Kennedy, for whom he had not voted. He said he suddenly felt very old. He turned aside to weep.
The assassination of John F. Kennedy was an overwhelming shock, not only to the people of America, but to the world. The unknown young New Yorker who felt suddenly old and weepy encapsulated the mood of the quarter of a million people who filed past Kennedy’s body in the rotunda of the Capitol, and of the mourners who came to the funeral–the Duke of Edinburgh, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, President de Gaulle, Dr Ludwig Erhard and the rest.
That Was The Week That Was had been unsparing, to date, in its attempts at bad-taste mockery of those set in authority. When they heard the news of Kennedy’s death, on a Friday night, Ned Sherrin and David Frost decided immediately that the next day’s show should be a serious tribute. They devoted twenty minutes to saying that Kennedy was ‘miraculous…an amazing man who seemed so utterly right for the job’. Millicent Martin sang ‘His soul goes riding on’, and they trundled out Dame Sybil Thorndike to recite a poem by Caryl Brahms–‘Yesterday the sun was shot out of your sky, Jackie’. The whole programme was, according to Private Eye Trotskyist Paul Foot, ‘sickeningly sycophantic’.18
Kennedy was connected to Britain with much closer bonds than most American Presidents had been. His father had been Ambassador at the Court of St James before the war and though his gut-Irish anti-British view of the European situation had enraged those who saw him as a pro-Hitler isolationist, his clever, handsome children were part of society. Much to the horror of the Catholic Kennedys, Joe’s daughter Kathleen (Kick) had married Billy Hartington, heir to the Duke of Devonshire; because the Devonshires would not countenance a Catholic wedding, the marriage took place at the Chelsea Register Office. Joe came to the wedding to give away his daughter, who was excommunicated, but most of the Kennedys stayed away. Hartington was killed in the war in September 1944. Kick was killed in a plane crash in the Rhône Valley on 13 May 1948. She was with her (married) lover Peter FitzWilliam, whom she had hoped to marry, but, since she died as the Marchioness of Hartington, she was buried in the family plot at Edensor, the model village adjoining Chatsworth. JOY SHE GAVE/JOY SHE HAS FOUND is her epitaph.19 It was chosen by her mother-in-law, the Duchess. Her own mother refused to attend the funeral. An observer noted, ‘the stricken face of old Joe Kennedy as he stood alone, unloved and despised, behind the coffin of his el
dest daughter, and the hundreds of British friends who had adored her and now mourned her.’20
It was a scene which demonstrated how deeply the Kennedys had become a part of the very British class which the British themselves–among the satirists and opinion-forming intelligentsia–had decided was obsolete. Lady Dorothy Macmillan was Kick Kennedy’s aunt by marriage. Jack Kennedy was not only an in-law but also the devoted friend of his sister’s sister-in-law Debo. Nancy Mitford, Debo’s eldest sister, wrote to another sister, Jessica, ‘Our fast young sister went over that ocean & had long loving tête à têtes with your ruler. Andrew [11th Duke of Devonshire] says Kennedy is doing for sex what Eisenhower did for golf.’21
During the Kennedy years, the special relationship between Britain and the United States was a familial one.
This did not stop Jack Kennedy absorbing the information that the Profumo affair had finished not merely his ‘Uncle Harold’ but the Conservative government. Ambassador David Bruce in London had told Kennedy by telegram, ‘Macmillan’s admission that he did not know what was going on at critical times was in circumstances pitiable and extremely damaging. He did not try to shirk responsibility, but on his own account did not give impression that he knew how to exercise it in unfolding developments of case on which nearly everyone in Parliament appeared to be better informed than the Prime Minister.’22