House & Home

"Home! Home! Home!" cried the third Lord Home, trying to rally his Scots against the English soldiery by shouting the family name at Flodden Field in 1513. In the heat of battle, the clansmen misunderstood and--so the story goes--took off for home. Ever since, lest another such disaster befall, the family has pronounced the name "Hume."

Last week the noble and ancient name of Home resounded once more over a British battle. Press and politicians of all parties were up in arms because Prime Minister Macmillan appointed the 14th Earl of Home to the key post of Foreign Secretary. The earl was Macmillan's replacement for Selwyn Lloyd, faithful veteran of Suez and scores of disarmament sessions, who after five years at the foreign office moved on to the treasury as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Mac's Mount. What chiefly outraged the M.P.s was the fact that the new For eign Secretary was a peer, and therefore could not be cross-examined in the House of Commons. "Utterly retrograde," cried Tory Backbencher Gerald Nabarro. "Effrontery," shouted members of the Conservative M.P.s Foreign Policy Committee. Though there is no written law requiring a Foreign Secretary (or a Prime Minister for that matter) to sit in Commons, M.P.s have taken it pretty much for granted that nowadays such ministers are answerable only to them. Not since before World War II, when the late Lord Halifax served briefly, had a member of the upper house held the high office of Foreign Secretary. Worse, said the Liberal News Chronicle, Macmillan's man was a peer whose career had progressed only from "the negligible to the mediocre." The Laborite Daily Mirror called it "the most reckless political appointment since the Roman Emperor Caligula made his favorite horse a consul," and the independent-conservative Spectator, far from disagreeing, called the comparison "apt" and added: "The Earl of Home at his best has shown signs of equine intelligence." The object of all this objurgation is one of unflappable Mac's most steadfast supporters and closest confidants. Called "Gentle Alec" by his friends, tall, tweedy Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, 57, belongs to that diminishing number of landed Britons who go into politics as an inherited duty. His ancestors were border lairds who fought alternately for the English and the Scots. His nephew, Robin Douglas-Home, used to play the piano in nightclubs for a living, was recently in the news as a dashing contender for the hand of Sweden's Princess Margaretha. His younger brother William is a successful West End playwright who once wrote a hit comedy (Chiltern Hundreds) spoofing Gentle Alec's unexpected loss of the family's "safe" Lanarkshire seat in the 1945 Labor landslide election. In his 31 years in politics, Home served as Neville Chamberlain's parliamentary private secretary (accompanying Chamberlain to Munich in 1938 and riding with him behind Hitler and Mussolini through cheering Nazi crowds). After succeeding to the earldom in 1951 and taking his seat in the House of Lords he served as Scottish Secretary and later as Commonwealth Secretary and leader of the House of Lords.

Mild, diligent, diffident, Lord Home makes speeches as unexceptionable as they are unmemorable. A dogged cricketer, he was once characterized by his captain as "a useful man provided he is not put too high up in the batting order." At home in Scotland, he shoots grouse and catches butterflies, and lives in a wing of his 70 room mansion with his wife, three daughters (his only son is at Eton) and one elderly servant. The countess often serves his supper at the end of the kitchen table. "A gent'eman with no put-on," says one of his Coldstream villagers.

"My Scottish blood rises in me," said the earl gamely at the height of last week's attack, "to tell me that publicity costs nothing." Demanding censure of the government, Labor Leader Hugh Gaitskell refused to be content with the appointment of able Edward Heath as Lord Privy Seal and spokesman on foreign affairs in the House. A Macmillan protege and recognized as one of the most brilliant of the new generation of Tories, Heath, 44, has served briefly as Minister of Labor, but admittedly knows little about foreign affairs, is expected to serve chiefly as Macmillan's watchdog. Gibing at Macmillan's notorious insistence on conducting foreign policy himself, Gaitskell quoted the late Nye Sevan's sardonic wisecrack: "Why bother with the monkey when the organ grinder is here?" Yet if the government was to run a puppet show, said Gaitskell, he would prefer that it take place in the Commons, not the Lords. Retorted Macmillan with dignity: "I did not think that a mere accident of birth should debar me from the right to choose the man I wanted at my side."

Mac's Shadow. Not all of the week's political darts hit Home. Noting that Lloyd had had no training for the treasury, Beaverbrook's Daily Express said: "Mr. Lloyd has been Mr. Macmillan's Foreign Secretary shadow for so long that he's an unknown quantity." "At last Selwyn will have a department of his own," sniffed Laborite Harold Wilson.

With Lloyd as Chancellor of the Exchequer, would Macmillan, who had always made his own foreign policy, now dominate financial affairs as well? The one figure to emerge with more authority from the shuffle seemed to be Old Mac Wonder himself.

In all, Macmillan shifted ten Cabinet jobs. As his Minister of Aviation, he named able, independent-minded Peter Thorneycroft, 51, who quit as Chancellor of the Exchequer two years ago in a hassle with the Prime Minister over his "austerity" policy of curbing credit and budget expenditures. Enoch Powell, 48, who. as Financial Secretary, resigned along with Thorneycroft, also returned to the government as the new Minister of Health. Their return to office takes a little of the curse off Macmillan's Cabinet reshuffle, in which, as one irreverent wag put it. Macmillan was playing with a deck with no face cards in it.

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