The Foreign Policy of the Douglas-Home Government

Britain, the United States and the End of Empire

A. Holt

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137284402
• eBook ISBN: 9781137284419
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book provides an important study of a short-lived government making foreign policy in the shadow of an impending general election. It considers Britain's relations with the United States, Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

1

Introduction

At 11.00 a.m. on 18 October 1963, Queen Elizabeth II went to see a 69-year-old man at the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers. This was no ordinary royal visit. The patient was Harold Macmillan, Conservative prime minister from 1957 until earlier that morning, when he had tendered his resignation. Shortly afterwards, the Queen controversially invited the Foreign Secretary, a member of the House of Lords, to try to form a new government. After consultations with colleagues, the Earl of Home officially succeeded to the premiership the next day. There remained one more obstacle to overcome, however, and on 23 October the ‘14th Earl’ disclaimed his title under the Peerage Act. As Sir Alec Douglas-Home, he became the ‘unremembered Prime Minister’.¹

Douglas-Home entered 10 Downing Street at a moment when Britain was in an increasingly precarious position in world affairs. In December 1962, former US Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously remarked that ‘Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role’.² This touched a raw nerve. It was clear that Winston Churchill’s concept of Britain as the only nation able to link the United States, Europe and the Commonwealth was losing relevance. While the British viewed interdependence more as a partnership in which the US depended on Britain in certain areas, the US, envisaged a greater degree of control.³ If the American alliance seemed increasingly one-sided, the success of the European Economic Community (EEC) threatened to leave Britain behind. For Macmillan, ‘the problems involved in the future of our relations with Europe are among the most difficult and the most important that the nation has ever had to face’.⁴ When French President Charles de Gaulle vetoed Britain’s application for membership of the EEC in January 1963, partly because of suspicion of Britain’s close relations with Washington, he closed off another avenue for rebuilding British political and economic power. Meanwhile, the Commonwealth was bitterly divided over racial discrimination in Southern Rhodesia, raising questions as to whether some states would leave the organisation. Worse still, Cold War ideological divisions were being played out in Africa and Asia, where one-party rule and central planning seemed an acceptable way forward and communism was viewed as an ally of racial equality.

Despite these challenges, the government remained reluctant to surrender Britain’s privileged position in international matters, won over centuries. She held one of five permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and retained considerable commitments as far afield as Africa and the Caribbean; Aden, Hong Kong, and Malaysia. The ‘Macmillan directive’ of 1961 thus outlined Britain’s three priorities as nuclear deterrence, the defence of Western Europe and the role East of Suez, all of which the Cabinet reaffirmed in 1963.⁵ The Foreign Office (FO) maintained that ‘It must be our intention to maintain our position as a great Power … If we accepted a lesser role, it would be so modest as to be intolerable’.⁶

The problem lay in reconciling this with her diminishing resources. The economic situation was not encouraging. On the one hand, living standards had risen and consumer goods were more widely available, as Douglas-Home avoided the severe economic problems faced later in the decade that ‘saw the [Wilson] government lurch from crisis to crisis’.⁷ On the other hand, the British economy remained sluggish. Growth was slower than in much of Western Europe and attempts to boost spending tended to lead to higher imports, which were met in turn by budgetary restraints—the so-called ‘stop-go’ economy. Sterling was still weakening as a global trading currency and the growing size and diversity of the Commonwealth meant that 60 per cent of investment came from without the organisation, mostly from the US.

Economics continued to influence defence changes. Half of Britain’s oil came from the Persian Gulf and 25 per cent of exports still went to countries bordering the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific. Given the instability of those regions, a British presence there still seemed desirable. With the Royal Navy seeking a role in the nuclear era, jockeying for position between branches of the defence community was intense. The First Sea Lord, Louis Mountbatten, established the doctrine that the aircraft carrier could be useful as a ‘mobile air station’ for colonial policing of counter-insurgency and all three services envisaged a significant role East of Suez.⁸ Indeed, a January 1962 paper by the Chiefs of Staff concluded that intervention in Asia (and Africa) would be Britain’s predominant military role for the next decade.⁹ Yet this role was already being seriously questioned. The British-sponsored Federation of South Arabia in 1963 faced a violent internal insurrection and an external threat from Yemen, backed by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Cabinet Secretary Sir Burke Trend minuted Douglas-Home soon after he took office to warn that the issue was not ‘whether we ought to continue to keep forces in Aden but whether we can’.¹⁰

In the strategic field Britain was increasingly reliant on the United States. The concept of an ‘independent’ nuclear deterrent was ‘nonsense’, giving merely an ‘appearance’ of independence and some influence on American targeting policy.¹¹ Meanwhile, the success of the more genuinely independent French nuclear programme had damaging knock-on effects when the US placed nuclear weapons in West Germany. Although no German attack could be launched without American assent, the possibility that West Germany might seek to revise this greatly alarmed Britain. This, combined with German attempts to increase their input in NATO decision-making, contributed to the clamour for a multilateral nuclear force (MLF), in which the US hoped Britain’s Polaris missiles would be pooled. Macmillan had actually signed up for this scheme when he agreed the Polaris deal with President John F. Kennedy at Nassau in December 1962, but it called into question the whole idea of an ‘independent’ deterrent and was unpopular with both the armed forces and the public.

Where the Cold War was concerned, the failure of Macmillan’s 1960 Paris Summit and increased Soviet belligerency, especially over Berlin, had seemed to vindicate the US policy of firmness and fed American doubts about the value of Britain as an ally. Although the signing of the Test Ban Treaty on 5 August 1963, followed by cultural and trade exchanges with Moscow, ensured that Douglas-Home entered office at what has been called ‘the peak of British-Soviet relations’, the new prime minister was a firm anti-communist and not best placed to exploit an atmosphere of détente.¹² Worse was to come for Douglas-Home shortly after he became prime minister. Given the recent successes in East–West relations, built in part on the understanding between President Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the assassination of the President in November 1963 ‘was a severe setback to improved international relations’.¹³ Coming soon after Macmillan’s resignation, Kennedy’s death also ended a friendly personal period at the highest level of the ‘Special Relationship’ between Britain and the US. The new US president, Lyndon B. Johnson, was temperamentally and politically far-removed from Douglas-Home and would prove less well predisposed towards Britain. It is therefore unsurprising that some historians even view the Special Relationship as ending with Macmillan.¹⁴

Although he had led a recovery of Conservative fortunes after the 1956 Suez Crisis, winning the 1959 election by a clear margin, Harold Macmillan had become increasingly beleaguered in the early 1960s. He had been damaged by a series of scandals, the worst of which involved the revelation in 1963 of Secretary of State for War John Profumo’s notorious affair with Christine Keeler. The prime minister’s attempt to restore authority in July 1962, when he sacked a number of key ministers, seemed to the public to be evidence of his increasing desperation. ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life’, quipped Liberal Leader Jeremy Thorpe,¹⁵ and the event became mockingly known as the Night of the Long Knives.¹⁶ While Macmillan’s decision to resign at the time of the Conservative Party Conference in October 1963 was ostensibly attributed to illness, there was a growing sense that he had lost touch with social and political developments. In contrast, the Labour Party, which had been bitterly divided around 1960 with the future of the nuclear deterrent a particular sore, seemed far more electable under Harold Wilson. Young, dynamic and grammar school educated, Wilson had become leader the previous January and exploited the feeling that it was ‘time for change’. Faced by this challenge, the Conservatives’ choice of the 14th Earl of Home as Macmillan’s successor seemed in many ways bizarre.

Sir Alec Douglas-Home

According to an anonymous Cabinet colleague, ‘there isn’t an enigma’ about Sir Alec Douglas-Home.¹⁷ He was a thoroughly decent man and the most down-to-earth post-war Premier; ‘the unfancied tortoise who pipped many political hares to the Prime Minister’s office’.¹⁸ Initially motivated by an old-fashioned aristocratic sense of duty—and possibly by the opportunity to combine politics with country pursuits—Lord Dunglass, as he was then known, entered Parliament in 1931.¹⁹ He became parliamentary private secretary to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain, in 1936. Chamberlain succeeded Stanley Baldwin as prime minister the following year and Dunglass served him loyally throughout the ‘appeasement’ period. Having minimal involvement in policy-making, Dunglass’s main role ‘was to be an acceptable transmitter-receiver in the Lobbies of Westminster’.²⁰ Yet his potential shone through. A long-serving secretary in the prime minister’s office predicted in 1939 that Home would one day rise to be prime minister.²¹

After Chamberlain resigned in May 1940, tragedy soon struck both men. By the end of the year cancer had claimed Chamberlain’s life, while Dunglass was encased in plaster after electing to undergo an operation for spinal tuberculosis. He remained imprisoned in this shell for almost two years, but put his time to good use. He read widely and developed an interest in Russia, studying the country via her novelists and dramatists, and through political theorists such as Karl Marx who had influenced her development. In May 1944, Dunglass finally rose to address the Commons once more, delivering for the first time a speech on foreign policy.²² He would return to this theme, repeatedly challenging the government on the issue of the independence of post-war Poland until Churchill appointed him an under-secretary at the Foreign Office in the 1945 caretaker administration. However, the Labour landslide in the subsequent election checked Dunglass’s rise and he lost his seat. Although he avenged the defeat in 1950, his return to the Commons was to be short-lived. Dunglass’s father died the following July, thus elevating Alec to the centuries-old Earldom of Home and seemingly banishing him from the lower house forever.

When the Conservatives returned to power in October 1951, Churchill appointed Home to the newly created post of Minister of State for Scotland. Promoted by Anthony Eden to be Commonwealth Secretary in 1955, Home’s extended tour of the Commonwealth that year increased his prestige in cabinet and led to his views being sought on wider foreign policy and defence issues.²³ During the Suez Crisis, Eden chose Home to serve with the Marquess of Salisbury, Harold Macmillan and himself on the Suez cabinet sub-committee as initially constituted. Home also had the unenviable role during the crisis of acting as an intermediary for Commonwealth prime ministers and Eden, a task made considerably harder by the positions taken by Canada, Pakistan and especially India.²⁴ The addition of the roles of Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council to Home’s portfolio under Macmillan empowered him to play a greater role in policy-making.²⁵ He handled these extra responsibilities well, and was regarded as ‘the best of the lot’ in comparison with other post-war incumbents of the Commonwealth Office.²⁶ This success did not go unnoticed and in 1960 Macmillan shocked the nation by appointing Home as Foreign Secretary. The storm soon dissipated however. The Daily Mail summed up the changing mood by admitting ‘How wrong we were about Home’.²⁷ Indeed, John Dickie describes him as ‘one of the most successful Foreign Secretaries of his time’, and he returned to the Foreign Office under Edward Heath in 1970.²⁸

Home’s initial period at the Foreign Office thus gave him a wealth of experience in foreign affairs and made many of his attitudes to international issues appear abundantly clear. His interest in Eu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Anglo-American Relations and the Caribbean
• 3 NATO and the Multilateral Nuclear Force
• 4 Africa, Race and the Commonwealth
• 5 Aden, Yemen and the Middle East
• 6 Confrontation in South-East Asia
• 7 The Cyprus Crisis
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index