In his memoirs, Macmillan claimed that Butler "chose" the Home Office, an assertion of which Butler drily observed in his own memoirs that Macmillan's memory "played him false". Heath corroborates Butler's claim that he had wanted the Foreign Office and suggested that with his "quiet charm", he could have won over the Americans. Butler also remained Leader of the House of Commons. In early 1958, he was left "holding the baby", as he put it, after Macmillan had departed on a Commonwealth tour after the resignation of Chancellor Thorneycroft and the Treasury team. Butler held the Home Office for five years, but his liberal views on hanging and flogging did little to endear him to rank-and-file Conservative members. He later wrote of "Colonel Blimps of both sexes – and the female of the species was more deadly, politically, than the male". Butler later wrote that Macmillan, who kept a tight grip on foreign and economic policies, had given him "a completely free hand" in Home Office matters, which may well have been, in Gilmour's view, because reform was likely to blacken Butler in the eyes of Conservative activists. Macmillan's official biographer believes that Butler simply had no interest in Home Affairs. Butler later said, "I couldn't deal with Eden, but I could deal with Mac". Butler inherited a Homicide Bill, which introduced different degrees of murder. He had privately come to favour abolition of hanging but signed off on the execution of James Hanratty, which was thought at the time to be a miscarriage of justice. He declined to reintroduce corporal punishment, according to the recommendation of the prewar Cadogan Report. Butler gave a very successful speech at the Conservative Conference in 1959. Despite the recommendations of the Wolfenden Report, he could not decriminalise homosexual acts between consenting adults (that would not happen until 1967), but the Conservatives were more willing to implement Wolfenden's recommended crackdown on street prostitution. He passed the Licensing Act 1961 and reformed the law on obscene publications. The Betting and Gaming Act legalised betting. Annual immigration from the Indian subcontinent had risen from 21,000 in 1959 to 136,000 in 1961. Butler introduced the first curbs on immigration although the Eden Cabinet had contemplated measures in 1955. It was initially opposed by Labour, but the party brought in stricter curbs when it returned to office. Enoch Powell praised Butler's performance as a great reforming Home Secretary.