Page "Alec Douglas-Home" Paragraph 62

Heath invited Douglas-Home to join the cabinet, taking charge of Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs.

In earlier centuries it had not been exceptional for a former Prime Minister to serve in the cabinet of a successor, and even in the past fifty years Arthur Balfour, Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain had done so.

Douglas-Home, as at 2012, is the last former premier to have served under a successor.

Of Balfour's appointment to Asquith's cabinet in 1916, Lord Rosebery, who had been Prime Minister in 1894 – 95, said that having an ex-premier in the cabinet was " a fleeting and dangerous luxury ".

Thorpe writes that Heath's appointment of Douglas-Home " was not a luxury but an essential buttress to his administration.