The first occasion was when Macmillan precipitately resigned in October 1963. This was announced on Thursday 10 October. By Saturday 19 October Alec Home had emerged as Prime Minister and had got all the members of the outgoing Cabinet, save only Macleod and Enoch Powell, to serve under him. It was a disastrous ten days, not only for Butler, the obvious although passed-over candidate, but also for Macleod. Macleod was more anti-Home than he was pro-Butler, who was in some sense his mentor but for whom his support in the last leadership contest in 1957 had been to say the least equivocal, and who he regarded, with some justification, as behaving with hopeless softness at the 1963 crunch. But Macleod also seems to have been activated by some inner sourness. His friendly 1973 biographer, Nigel Fisher, then an MP and a supporter as well as a friend, hints strongly at this. He partly attributes Macleod’s temporary lack, not merely of higher judgement, but of basic political common sense to the severe illness of his daughter at the time, but he did not feel that this was the whole explanation.
Hailsham began as the front runner, or at least the most noisy one. When he began to fade Macleod believed that he himself might emerge between the fainéant Butler and the too rumbustious Hailsham. His only excuse was that his Blackpool conference speech (on n October) had been as great a success as usual, in contrast with the dank efforts of Butler and Maudling. But he ought to have noticed that Home got as good a reception as he did for a much less powerful speech. A politician who is applauded without deploying rhetoric is like a comedian who provokes laughter without saying anything funny. Neither can fail to succeed. But Macleod refused to take Home’s candidature seriously for nearly another week. As a result he was late and ineffective (despite inherent strength) in organizing his junta against him, and was left gesticulating rather than conducting. Macmillan, who over-reacted to his prostate condition but did not allow it to detract from his anti-Butler dedication, took not the slightest notice of Macleod throughout.
Fisher does not doubt that these days finished off Macleod’s chances of becoming leader of the Conservative Party, which had already been gravely weakened by his liberal courage as Colonial Secretary. If, however, the coffin required the knocking in of any nails Macleod abundantly provided the hammer during the next few months. Out of office, he became editor of the Spectator and a director of Lombard Banking, not one of the great names in the City but a finance house which at least had enough resources, even in those relatively austere days, to provide him with an enormous motor car and a chauffeur. I remember his assuring me that the most important thing for an office-less politician was to secure this facility (he may well have been right). I also remember seeing him frequently step out of it in New Palace Yard looking like a discontented gnome in spite of his golden coach.
His Spectator editorship, at which he was rather a success, led him much more astray than did the motor car. In January 1964, at the beginning of what was certain to be an election year, he wrote and published a long denunciation of ‘the magic circle’ of privilege, prejudice and complacency which had put Home in and kept Butler out. Macleod wanted to provoke a row, but he got more than he bargained for. Even the Enfield Conservative executive censured him for the article, although only by fifteen votes to fourteen, and with seven abstentions. A rare foray of his into the House of Commons smoking room met with a proportionately still less friendly Tory response.
He contemplated withdrawal from politics, but instead set about the slow process of working his passage back. That did not start well. His old luck seemed: to have deserted him. Home welcomed his return to the Shadow Cabinet after the 1964 election, but probably unintentionally gave him a dud portfolio. It was thought that the new Wilson Government was about to nationalize steel and that if Macleod were made steel spokesman he could redeem his reputation in the most bloody part of the battlefield without at first being given too senior a command. But the government wisely procrastinated and Macleod languished. There was even a debate in which he allowed himself to be badly worsted by as normally grey a ministerial spokesman as Fred Lee. The humiliation was made greater by the fact that the newspapers had been briefed for several days previously to trumpet Macleod’s coming triumph. Fisher, always loyal but never blind, says it was the one really bad speech that Macleod made in the House of Commons.
In the summer of 1965 Home resigned the leadership, and Macleod had to stand on the sidelines and watch a battle between Maudling and Heath (with Enoch Powell as a semi-irrelevant third candidate), both of whom were his juniors in age and had been substantially so in rank as recently as 1961. He broke an old compact with Maudling (that they would both support whichever of themselves looked stronger at the time of any future leadership contest) and voted for Heath. If he carried even two handfuls of votes with him this would have been decisive, for the margin was narrow. He was rewarded with the shadow Chancellorship, although I do not think this consideration had affected his vote. The promotion did, however, mark the completion of his penance and his return to the central councils, but only when his last likely chance of leadership had gone by. He was no more than fifty-one but he was in poor health and Heath was four years younger.