Alec Douglas-Home

Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Baron Home of the Hirsel (; 2 July 1903 – 9 October 1995), known as Lord Dunglass from 1918 to 1951 and the Earl of Home from 1951 to 1963, was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1963 to 1964 and Leader of the Conservative Party until 1965. He was the last prime minister to hold office while being a member of the House of Lords, before renouncing his peerage and taking up a seat in the House of Commons for the remainder of his premiership. His reputation, however, rests more on his seven years over two stints as Foreign Secretary than on his brief premiership.

Born to nobility in the Peerage of Scotland, Douglas-Home was educated at Eton and Oxford and entered the House of Commons in 1931. Within six years, he became a parliamentary aide to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, witnessing the government's efforts to maintain peace through appeasement before the Second World War. In 1940, he was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis, which forced him to suspend his political activities for nearly two years. After recovering, he returned to politics, although he lost his parliamentary seat in the 1945 general election before regaining it in 1950. The following year, he succeeded to the earldom of Home upon the death of his father and consequently moved to the House of Lords. During the premierships of Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, and Harold Macmillan, he held a number of senior offices, including Leader of the House of Lords and Foreign Secretary. As Foreign Secretary from 1960 to 1963, he supported the United States during the Cuban Missile Crisis and signed the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty on behalf of the United Kingdom.

In October 1963, Macmillan took ill and resigned as prime minister. Unexpectedly, Home was chosen to succeed him. By then it was generally considered unacceptable for a prime minister to sit in the House of Lords; Home renounced his earldom and successfully stood for election to the House of Commons. Home's appointment was controversial, and two of Macmillan's cabinet ministers refused to take office under him. He was criticised by the Labour Party as an aristocrat, out of touch with the problems of ordinary families, and he came over stiffly in television interviews, by contrast with the young, media-savvy Labour leader, Harold Wilson. Home's premiership was the second briefest of the twentieth century, lasting two days short of a year. Among the legislation his government passed was the Resale Prices Act 1964, an anti-trust provision targeting mandatory price conditions manufacturers imposed on retailers.

Despite polls predicting when Home took power that the Conservative Party — in power since 1951, and damaged by a 1963 sex scandal involving Macmillan's war secretary John Profumo — was headed for landslide defeat, Labour won only a slender majority in the 1964 election. Nevertheless, Douglas-Home resigned the party leadership after instituting a new and less secretive method of choosing his successor, Edward Heath, who defeated Wilson at the next election. From 1970 to 1974 Douglas-Home served in Heath's cabinet as Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, an expanded version of the post of Foreign Secretary which he had held a decade prior. Following the government's defeat in 1974, he returned to the House of Lords as a life peer, and retired from front-line politics. He died in 1995, aged 92.

Awards: Order of the Thistle, Doctor of Law (honorary) Education: Christ Church, Eton College

Source: Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec_Douglas-Home