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fashioned baggage for the current climate. Elizabeth had appeared to have allowed
herself to be led into accepting an outgoing Prime Minister’s advice on his successor,
which was against constitutional practice, however much Macmillan had dressed it up
with documentation of soundings taken by Tory grandees. Michael Adeane, as the
Queen’s Private Secretary, it is argued, should have advised the Queen to exercise her
independent right of consultation but he was anxious above all to keep her from any
involvement in choosing the leader of the Conservative Party. Moreover, despite the
popular impression that Butler was the obvious candidate, in fact Home was the choice
of a majority within the party and succeeded in forming a government including his
rivals for the leadership. In public relations terms, however, the outcome was
unfortunate for Elizabeth. The choice of the fourteenth Earl of Home as Prime Minister
against the background of the changes in social attitudes which were taking place in the
early 1960s showed the Palace and the ‘magic circle’ as belonging to another era.
Moreover, the change which then took place in the method of choosing the leader of the
Conservative Party from private consultation to direct election was further to limit the
Queen’s choice and, therefore, her prerogative.
A year later the fourteenth Earl lost his job to ‘the fourteenth Mr Wilson’ (as he once
retorted to the Labour leader) in the general election of October 1964. Elizabeth’s four
previous Prime Ministers – Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Douglas-Home – all had a
more or less similar background with shared interests which she understood. Wilson
provided a new experience, coming as he did from an entirely different social planet, a
northern, provincial lower middle-class background. Despite a brilliant academic record
at Oxford, he had remained endearingly, some thought deliberately, close to his roots.
He still spoke with a Yorkshire accent and followed the fortunes of his local football
club, Huddersfield Town. He was rarely seen without a pipe in his mouth, which, as
their relationship became cosier, he would smoke during their weekly meetings. He was,
however, the first of her Prime Ministers to be almost of her own generation; born in
1916 he was only ten years older, and he was a man who liked the company of women
and respected their intelligence.
In a breaking with tradition, Wilson arrived for his first formal meeting with Elizabeth
– to ‘kiss hands’ and receive his seals of office as her First Minister – with two carloads
of family and supporters, his father, wife and two sons, and his confidential secretary,
Marcia Williams. Normally, a Prime Minister arrives alone. The Wilson party sat on a
sofa in the Equerries’ Room and were given sherry by Patrick Plunket. Marcia Williams’s
recollection of the occasion was not very flattering:
A number of anonymous Palace individuals were there. To me they all looked exactly alike. As I recall it, the
conversation centred on horses. Perhaps it was assumed that everybody was interested in horses, though my
knowledge of them was minimal and the Wilson family’s less. It struck me at the time as an ironic beginning
to the white-hot technological revolution and the Government that was to mastermind it… 18
At his very first Tuesday audience with Elizabeth, Wilson had got off to a
spectacularly bad start when she asked him about something in the Cabinet Minutes and