38656356325923

summoned to Windsor to see the Queen and was talking to her in her sitting-room when
the door opened and Princess Margaret, wearing a dressing-gown, came in, saw him,
said crossly to her sister, ‘No one would talk to you if you weren’t the Queen’, and went
out again slamming the door, leaving the Prime Minister greatly embarrassed.
He was always sensitive to her feelings and careful not to infringe on her prerogative
as when the idea of giving Rab Butler the title of Deputy Prime Minister was raised in
September 1961. Elizabeth’s father, George VI, had been quick to pounce on this when it
had been raised by Churchill in the context of giving it to Anthony Eden in 1951. The
King had pointed out that the title implied succession and, as such, was an infringement
of the royal prerogative of choosing the Prime Minister. Elizabeth, very much her
father’s daughter, had, according to Macmillan, objected once before. ‘The Queen has in
the past rightly pointed out that there is no such official post, for which queen’s
approval is required…’ 13 None the less, in the wake of the Night of the Long Knives,
according to Butler’s biographer, Macmillan gave Butler an ‘unofficial intimation’,
conveyed to the parliamentary correspondents and published in their respective
newspapers on 14 July 1962, ‘that he would from now on in effect be Deputy Prime
Minister’. 14 According to a recent constitutional authority, Vernon Bogdanor, Elizabeth
again refused to grant the title to Butler and Macmillan therefore told the Commons that
it was ‘not an appointment submitted to the sovereign but is a statement of the
organization of Government’. 15 The Palace position remains that the office of Deputy
Prime Minister ‘has no constitutional significance’.
Curiously, for all Macmillan’s reverence for Elizabeth and her office, the final act of
his premiership was to link her even more closely and damagingly with the
‘establishment’ and to lead to a curtailment of her prerogative in choosing her Prime
Minister. At his weekly audience on 20 September 1963, he told her of his decision not
to lead the party into the next general election and that this would involve a change in
the leadership in January or February. He noted in his diary that:
The Queen expressed her full understanding. But I thought she was very distressed, partly (perhaps) at the
thought of losing a PM to whom she has become accustomed, but chiefly (no doubt) because of all the
difficulties about a successor in which the Crown will be much involved. We discussed at some length the
various possibilities. She feels the great importance of maintaining the prerogative intact. After all, if she
asked someone to form a government and he failed, what harm was done? It often, indeed at one time almost
invariably, happened in the first half of the 19th century. Of course, it would be much better for everything
to go smoothly, as in my case… 16
According to his biographer, ‘Macmillan declared himself determined at all costs to
preserve this prerogative, the Queen’s right to select her Prime Minister’, but as it turned
out, his handling of the question of his successor was to have the opposite effect.
Later, he vacillated, discussing the leadership possibilities with colleagues, ultimately
concluding that he would fight the general election after all. On 7 October he was struck
by acute prostate trouble; in great pain and always tending towards the