Edward Heath
The Authorised Biography
Philip Ziegler

Copyright

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First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2010

Copyright © 2010 Philip Ziegler

FIRST EDITION

Philip Ziegler asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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To Clare

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

FOREWORD

ABBREVIATIONS USED IN TEXT

ONE The Child and the Boy

TWO Balliol

THREE War

FOUR In Waiting for Westminster

FIVE The Young Member

SIX Chief Whip

SEVEN Europe: The First Round

EIGHT Minister

NINE Leader of the Opposition

TEN Problems with the Party

ELEVEN Victory

TWELVE Making a Ministry

THIRTEEN The Pains of Office

FOURTEEN Europe: The Second Round

FIFTEEN Ulster

SIXTEEN Choppy Water

SEVENTEEN The Approaching Storm

EIGHTEEN Foreign Affairs

NINETEEN Hurricane

TWENTY Defeat on Points

TWENTY-ONE The Uneasy Truce

TWENTY-TWO Defeat by Knockout

TWENTY-THREE Adjusting to a New Life

TWENTY-FOUR The Long Sulk

TWENTY-FIVE Phased Retreat

TWENTY-SIX Filling in Time

TWENTY-SEVEN Declining Years

NOTES

SOURCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

Edward Heath changed the lives of the British people more fundamentally than any prime minister since Winston Churchill. By forcing through the abolition of Resale Price Maintenance he cleared the way for the all-conquering march of the supermarket and transformed every high street in the country. By securing Britain’s entry into Europe he reversed almost a thousand years of history and embarked on a course that would inevitably lead to the legal, political, economic and social transformation of his country. Both these reforms he forced through by a combination of determination, patience and persuasive powers, against the inertia or active hostility of a large part of the British population, including many of his own party. There may have been others who could have done as much, there may have been others who desired to do so, but it is hard to conceive of any other individual in the second half of the twentieth century who would both have been able and have wished to achieve this transformation.

Yet Heath today is largely forgotten: a meaner beauty of the night eclipsed by the refulgent moon of Margaret Thatcher. This is because, in spite of all he did, he was seen by others, indeed portrayed himself, as a disgruntled loser. Lady Thatcher, though she too was shipwrecked in the end, is remembered as a winner. It is the winners who remain prominent in people’s minds. Heath brought it on himself, but the importance of his contribution to British history deserves greater attention. Opinions may differ as to whether what he did was right; the immensity of his achievement in doing it is open to no question.

ONE The Child and the Boy

Two future British prime ministers were born in 1916. Both belonged to what may loosely be called the lower-middle class and found their way by scholarships to grammar school and Oxford, where both were strikingly successful. Both served at one time in the civil service and took a precocious interest in politics. Both prided themselves on their knowledge of economics and were endowed by nature with prodigious memories. One was prime minister from October 1964 to June 1970 and from February 1974 to March 1976; the other occupied 10 Downing Street for the intervening years. In all other ways, few men can have been less similar than Harold Wilson and Edward Richard George Heath.

In fact, for those who take an interest in such arcane distinctions, the Wilsons were in origin slightly grander – or at least less humble – than the Heaths. They had been lower-middle class for several generations; the Heaths had only recently taken their first steps from the working classes. Ted Heath’s first identifiable ancestor, his four times great-grandfather, Richard, had been a fisherman living in Cockington in Devonshire at the end of the eighteenth century. His son William followed the same calling but with scant success. By 1819, when William was 56 and presumably too old for an active seafaring life, he found himself with fourteen children and no job and was forced to lodge a petition with Trinity House as having ‘no property or income whatever’. Undiscomfited, his son, Richard, also took to the sea, joined the Coastguard Service and, in 1831, was transferred to the new coastguard station in Ramsgate, Kent. Before migrating he had married a Somerset girl. Their son, George, Ted’s great-grandfather, was the last of the seafaring Heaths; he served with the merchant navy and ended his working days in charge of Ramsgate pier.¹

George married a local girl. Their son, Stephen, the first terrestrial Heath, did not notably improve the family’s prosperity. He went into the dairy business and at first did well, but then, according to his son William, ‘lost all his money and went on the railway’,² with the unglamorous task of moving passengers’ luggage between the station and the hotels. He survived this setback with equanimity and lived to the age of seventy-seven, invariably genial, frequently inebriated and loved by his grandson, Ted. He too married a Kentish girl, as did William, Ted’s father. Ted, therefore, was of solidly Devonshire and Kentish stock, with no tincture of more exotic blood in the five generations before his birth. In 1962 Iain Macleod, seeking Heath’s endorsement when a candidate for the Rectorship of Glasgow University, asked hopefully whether he could not scrape up some Scottish connection, however tenuous. His only claim, Heath replied, was that he had been educated at Balliol, a college which owed its existence to John de Balliol and Dervorguilla of Galway: ‘I do not know whether on this somewhat flimsy basis you will be able to build up a case which will secure the Nationalist vote.’³

William Heath was far more like his exuberant and outgoing father than his more unapproachable son. He was a ‘quiet and unassuming’ man, said Heath in his memoirs,⁴ but this does not correspond with the testimony of many of those who knew him well. He was ‘a dear man’, said Nancy-Joan Seligman; ‘heaven’, said Mary Lou de Zulueta; ‘a great hugger and kisser, even a bottom-pincher, to the occasional embarrassment of his son’, recalled Margaret Chadd.⁵ He loved parties: other people’s would do but it was best of all to be at the centre of his own. His jollity was not allowed to interfere with his work, however: he was enterprising, energetic and conscientious. By training he was a carpenter; he ended up as a builder with his own firm, small but still employing several workmen. Ted Heath took considerable pride in his father’s advance into the middle classes. In his biography, John Campbell mentioned that Heath had had to be dissuaded from suing Isis for describing his father as ‘a jobbing builder’. Heath scrawled angry denials against several of Campbell’s assertions but here he merely noted that it was the Sunday Express and not Isis which had used the phrase.⁶ William had all the fierce conservatism so often to be found in the small and struggling businessman. During the First World War he had been assigned to the Vickers armaments factory at Croydon and forced to join a union. ‘It was terrible,’ he remembered. ‘The union was all right, it was the way it was run. There was a clique of people in control and unless you were in the clique you couldn’t get anything past.’⁷ In his own life as a builder he resolved to have as little to do with unions as could be contrived, and he inculcated in his son a conviction that, whilst unions as an institution were acceptable, even desirable, they should never be allowed to run riot or to consider themselves above the law.

William Heath was a man of intelligence, common sense and limited education. The few letters to his son which survive in the archive at Arundells, Heath’s house in Salisbury, are sound in content but wayward in grammar and spelling; in one short letter we have ‘emportant people’, ‘busness’, ‘we planed our week’, ‘untill’, ‘they have wrote to him’ and a dearth of question marks and apostrophes. Possibly he suffered from what would now be diagnosed as dyslexia; certainly he left school at the age of twelve and never had time to continue his formal education. He never doubted its value, however, and was resolved that his children should have a better start than he did. In this ambition his wife wholeheartedly supported him.

Without Edith Heath, indeed, it is unlikely that Ted would have been launched so successfully on his vertiginous career. She was a Pantony, another Kentish family, and her father had been gardener in a big house a few miles from Broadstairs. She became lady’s maid to a rich, exacting but benevolent mistress and absorbed uncritically the values of propriety, decorum and unostentatious good-living which she found in the home of her employer. In his description of Edith Heath, John Campbell used the phrase ‘strait-laced’;⁸ Heath underlined it, usually an indication of disagreement. It seems apt enough. Certainly she tolerated, if perhaps silently deplored, her husband’s conviviality, but she kept a house that was resolutely clean and well ordered and dedicated herself, to an extent for which William had neither the time nor the inclination, to instilling in her elder son the habit of hard work and a burning hunger to succeed. ‘She was the driving spirit,’ a childhood friend of Heath’s remarked. ‘His father was a nice guy but without the drive his mother had. She was the one who encouraged…the ambitions.’ Heath felt her to be beyond reproach. ‘My mother was a wonderful woman,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘My lasting memory is of her beauty and calmness…At home we adored her for these traits and also because she was so supportive of us.’ Some felt her resolution verged on the implacable and detected in her not so much tolerance as contempt for the looser standards of her husband. Certainly she was strong-minded and convinced that her values could not be questioned, but she was sensitive and generous, ready to endure the shortcomings of anyone except herself and her beloved son. She missed no opportunity to inculcate her most cherished values in her children. As a Christmas present when he was eight Ted was given a leather commonplace book in which various improving thoughts had already been inscribed. The first was: ‘To get you must give, but never give to get.’ Some time later she added: ‘Make new friends but keep the old. One is silver, the other is gold.’ Ted made little effort to improve on these but the book was still in his possession when he died.⁹

Different though they were, both physically and psychologically, William and Edith Heath were happy in their marriage. Edith may have been the stronger character and certainly it was her standards that prevailed at home, but she was wise enough to ensure that her husband never felt himself excluded or ignored. ‘In a marriage, nobody’s boss – I don’t believe in that,’ he told one of Heath’s biographers, and everything suggests he approved heartily of the way his wife was bringing up his children. They started life in St Peter’s-in-Thanet, a village now absorbed into the Kentish holiday resort of Broadstairs. Teddy – the use of ‘Ted’ seems to have become habitual during the Second World War, he was never known as ‘Edward’ – was born on Sunday, 9 July 1916. His middle names were Richard and George. Almost immediately the family abandoned St Peter’s to move inland to Crayford, where William Heath had been assigned to war work at the Vickers aircraft factory. Only a few months old, Teddy was spared the worst rigours of what must have been a miserable winter. Wartime privations were at their worst. ‘We had a ramshackle house,’ William Heath remembered, ‘and the wind used to whistle round it like a pack of wolves. I remember begging in the street for coal and potatoes…It was a terrible time.’ ‘Begging’, presumably, involved asking for an additional ration from under-supplied shopkeepers rather than soliciting from passers-by. William Heath was never unemployed and quite well paid – but the last two years of the war were exceptionally difficult. It may have been these problems which deterred the Heaths from adding to their family; at all events it was four years before Teddy acquired a brother, John.¹⁰

The difference between the two boys was quickly apparent. By the time he was eight or nine Teddy was conspicuously diligent and hardworking, with formidable powers of concentration and a distaste for anything bordering on frivolity. John, on the other hand, was amiable, messy, easygoing and almost entirely without ambition. He viewed his elder brother with a mixture of awe, incredulity and derision. Many years later the journalist John Junor had a conversation with John at a party and found him ‘a very dull chap indeed. Pleasant but commonplace.’ This was the general verdict. Ted Heath always denied hotly that he had been his mother’s favourite or had been given any special treatment. The evidence of those who knew the family well – Nancy-Joan Seligman, Araminta Aldington – is that, on the contrary, Edith Heath, without ever being consciously unkind to her younger son, lavished most of her loving attention on Teddy. She always put his needs first, said John’s widow, Muriel; it was taken for granted in the household that the normal rules of conduct were suspended for his benefit. ‘She spoiled Teddy rotten,’ recalled Margaret Chadd; whenever he came to stay with the Chadds he left his pyjamas all over the floor and assumed that somebody else would pick them up. The inevitable result was that John, finding that nothing was expected of him, responded by achieving nothing. At school one day he overheard two masters extolling Teddy’s virtues: ‘Of course his brother is nothing like…’ one of them added. John accepted without undue dismay the fact that he was ‘nothing like…’; Teddy took it for granted that he too was ‘nothing like…’; nothing like John nor like the generality of his schoolfellows. He grew in confidence while John resigned himself to rubbing along in contented obscurity.¹¹

Teddy began his schooling at a dingy little church school in Crayford. He learned enough to be well able to cope with the next stage of his education but his life did not really take off until the family returned to Broadstairs in 1923. Broadstairs then as now was an amiable little seaside resort, busy in summer, under-occupied in winter, with few buildings of distinction but many of quiet attractiveness. It prided itself on its connections with Charles Dickens: a suitably bleak Bleak House still looms over the seafront; plaques abound asserting that the author wrote this or that book while in residence; Heath’s favourite was a discreet notice proclaiming ‘Charles Dickens did not live here’. Though neighbouring Margate and Ramsgate were better equipped to handle yachts of any size, Broadstairs was rich in boats. In spite of their maritime antecedents, however, the Heaths were neither rich nor enthusiastic enough to own a boat themselves.

Once back in Broadstairs Teddy began to attend St Peter’s Church of England School. James Bird, the assistant headmaster, described how he presented himself ‘neatly dressed and completely self-possessed’ and handed over a transfer form from his school in Crayford which lauded his attainments in reading and arithmetic. John’s first wife, Marian, who wrote a mildly malicious account of her brother-in-law after her marriage broke up, quotes Mr Bird as saying that Teddy ‘was not a good mixer. He was inclined to be aloof.’ It was not her intention to paint a sympathetic portrait of her former husband’s family but in this case she seems to have been recording faithfully. To another biographer Bird spoke of Teddy’s ‘general cleanliness and wholesomeness and a certain aloofness – even as a small boy he was self-contained and purposeful’. It is not an entirely attractive picture. The headmaster’s report that he was ‘a good boy…earnest, painstaking and thoroughly well-behaved’ is almost equally daunting. That Teddy was a good influence at St Peter’s can be taken for granted; whether he got much fun out of it or gave much fun to others is more doubtful. Once his mother went up to his room and suggested that he was working too hard and should come down to join the family. ‘Mother,’ Teddy replied severely, ‘sometimes I think you don’t want me to get on.’ Self-discipline and a conscious distrust of emotional display were as evident at the age of ten as sixty or seventy years later. On a radio programme his interviewer Mavis Nicholson once asked him whether the Heaths had been demonstrative as a family. ‘As we were by nature a close-knit family it wasn’t necessary to demonstrate great emotion towards each other,’ he replied. ‘If people are demonstrating their emotions, there must be something lacking in the background.’¹²

Emotional austerity did not preclude an early and intense love of music. A cousin of his mother’s first introduced him to the piano, he began to take lessons, and his parents, at what must have been considerable financial sacrifice, invested in an instrument for him to play on. He was not the most amenable of pupils. ‘I was always in too much of a hurry,’ he confessed, and he was irritated by his teacher’s insistence that he should master one piece before moving on to another. ‘What I was after was the musical experience, the opportunity to express feeling and emotion in pieces of different kinds, according to my moods.’ It would be an over-simplification to say that in music Heath found expression for the emotion of which he had deprived himself in his everyday life, but even at the age often or eleven he was indulging on the piano a freedom which he would not have allowed himself in personal relationships. It was his father who encouraged him most vigorously. If Teddy got bored of practising, William would urge him to fresh efforts: ‘Stick to it! Once you’ve mastered it, nobody can ever take it away from you. Your music will be a joy for life.’ His brother at one point also began to play the piano but, according to his first wife at least, was switched to the violin on the grounds that it would be nice for Teddy to have somebody to play duets with. John got no pleasure out of either instrument and renounced them at the first opportunity.¹³

The local church of St Peter’s-in-Thanet had a large choir of twenty-four boys and twelve men, and Teddy, who had a good if not outstanding treble voice, joined it and was soon singing solos. After a few years he began to take an interest in the organ and before long was assisting the regular organist and understudying Miss Price, the lady who habitually played at the children’s services. ‘He is a great worker, very quick to learn, conscientious, and for his years a very capable musician,’ wrote the vicar, Alfred Tatham. Teddy was ‘thoroughly dependable; I have always found him a very present help in trouble’. Much later, Tatham’s widow remembered Teddy sitting beside Miss Price: she ‘was a very poor performer on the organ and I always thought you kept her straight’. For those oppressed by the vision of Heath’s unwavering rectitude it is only fair to say that he seems to have been a genuinely kind and helpful child. Mrs Matthews, the widow of a former vicar, remembered him as being ‘one of the nicest boys I have known’. When Mrs Matthews, by then aged 86 and wavering in her mind, invited him to a party to celebrate the return of her son, who in fact had been killed in action thirty years before, Heath scrapped the run-of-the-mill letter submitted by a secretary, wrote a long and friendly letter in his own hand and also wrote to Mrs Matthews’ surviving son to express his sympathy.¹⁴

It was Mr Tatham who prepared Teddy for confirmation. His schoolfriend Ronald Whittall, who underwent the same ordeal, said that Tatham was the first man to have had a serious influence on either of the boys: ‘He opened our eyes to religion, to Christianity, and from that point on Teddy took his religion very seriously. I believe that it’s a deep-seated sense of religion which may – rightly or wrongly – make him think he’s a man of destiny.’ Extravagant though it may seem, the evidence suggests that Heath saw himself as a man of destiny several years before his confirmation; certainly, from the age of nine or ten he was hoarding every scrap of paper with the zeal of someone who is well aware that one day a momentous tale would need to be told. His religion did mean a great deal to him, however: partly because the Church and music were in his experience so closely related, more because the Christian faith and Christian values had been deeply inculcated in him when he was a child and he rarely saw cause to question them. The same interviewer who had asked him whether the Heaths were demonstrative as a family asked him whether he prayed. ‘Yes.’ ‘Is it very helpful to you?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because it is a spiritual communion.’ To an unbeliever such an answer might not seem to take matters much further but to Heath it was wholly satisfactory. He never doubted that, through prayer, he was in direct communication with God, and though religious problems did not preoccupy him, his faith provided a bedrock on which he believed he could construct his life. His mother at one time hoped he might enter the Church, then discovered how badly clergymen were paid and changed her mind. Even if she had not done so he would never have taken holy orders: he ‘did not feel a true calling’, he wrote in his memoirs and – a somewhat vainglorious reflection for a young man on the brink of life – such work would not have given him an opportunity ‘to shape the affairs of my country’.¹⁵

By the time Teddy was confirmed he had already moved on to Chatham House Grammar School, a Local Education Authority school in the heart of Ramsgate. Chatham House was built of an aggressively red brick and from outside was entirely charmless. Its interior was little, if at all, more prepossessing. It was, however, an excellent school. It was geared to equip its pupils to make a living in a competitive world: accountancy was an optional subject and the emphasis in economics was on the practical rather than the theoretic. At the same time, however, it encouraged an interest in literature, regularly put on plays in which a high proportion of the boys performed some part, and organised vigorous debates, both within the school and against other schools in the vicinity. The fees were twelve guineas a year but about half the boys were on scholarships. Teddy sat for one of these and was successful. At the final interview the headmaster, H. C. Norman, asked him what he wished to be in later life. ‘An architect,’ said Teddy; an ambition which he had never admitted to his parents and which seems to have passed rapidly from his mind. The Kent Education Committee provided a further grant to cover travel and the cost of lunch, so the only expense left for the family was a guinea a year for music. William Heath was happy to provide for this, though making it a condition that Teddy would not take up music as a career.¹⁶

Teddy went to Chatham House in the autumn of 1926. A combination of precocity and the date on which his birthday fell meant that he was far younger than the average age of his class: ten years five months, against thirteen years one month. In spite of this he managed to come eighth out of twenty-eight – ‘most promising’, said the headmaster.¹⁷ At no point in his time at Chatham House did he excel academically, though the occasional complaints – geography: ‘He must work very much harder’; French: ‘Much lacking in accuracy’ – were outweighed by enthusiastic comments or references to his comparative youth. His performance in general seems to have been creditable but somewhat graceless; in 1931 the English master remarked gloomily: ‘He must remember that he writes to be read and that the Examiner is, after all, only a human being.’ Being too young for his class proved a problem when most of his fellow pupils were about to take School Certificate. The headmaster noted that, though his work had been ‘most promising’ (a formula which he invoked seven or eight times during Teddy’s career at Chatham House), it would still be ‘tempting providence to let him sit this year. He is too immature for an exam of this standard.’ This evoked a protest from William Heath – inspired, one suspects, and possibly even written, by Teddy’s mother. Teddy, wrote William, was ‘most depressed at the thought of not being allowed to sit…He is young, I agree, but even the young sometimes exceed our expectations.’ He would undertake to have Teddy coached in French – his weakest subject – during the holidays. The headmaster gave way and Teddy did exceed expectations though not extravagantly so; he gained his School Certificate but had to wait another year for the Matriculation which opened the way to university.

Throughout these years it is clear that Teddy was considered by his parents, and up to a point by the boys and masters as well, as being outside the common run. Only rarely were these pretensions slapped down. Shortly after he arrived at Chatham House his father – once again, no doubt, put up to it by Mrs Heath – wrote to say that the school food did not agree with him. Could he please take his dinner at a nearby café? Only if he had a doctor’s certificate saying he needed a special diet, ruled the headmaster: ‘There is nothing in the school dinners which should be unsuitable for a boy in ordinary health.’ He was, however, excused football and cricket, on the grounds that such games might damage his hands and thus impair his music. He got on perfectly well with the other boys and was never bullied or ostracised, but he does not seem to have made close friends or to have spent much time visiting their houses. He led a ‘one-dimensional life’, recalled his contemporary, Keith Hunt. ‘He took no interest in games and played as rarely as possible. He often had special classes just for himself.’¹⁸ His behaviour was almost always immaculate. Only once in his first three years did he suffer a detention, for some unspecified but, no doubt, innocuous crime. He was invariably punctual. Almost his only recorded offence was ‘running along a passage in which running is forbidden’. His penalty was self-inflicted; he banged his head so hard against a projecting pipe that he had to have several stitches in the resultant wound. ‘I cannot discover that anyone was to blame but the boy himself,’ wrote the headmaster severely, presumably fearing that, even in 1929, an indignant parent might sue the school for negligence. Why Teddy was running is not explained: it is depressingly likely that it was merely to ensure that he was in good time for the next class.

In part this remoteness from the preoccupations of his contemporaries must have been fostered by the fact that music was his favoured pastime, and that the instrument he chose inevitably took him away from his fellow schoolboys. But he did not exclusively practise on the organ, and music also brought him further into the life of Chatham House. He won the Belasco Prize for the piano and increasingly began to experiment with conducting. By the time he left he had established a unique position as a leader among the school’s musicians. ‘I cannot speak too highly of the tremendous amount of work he has done,’ recorded an awe-struck music master. ‘He has been a help to me and an inspiration to the boys. As a conductor of choirs he has been outstanding…I am grateful to him for all he has done for me.’ This note, giving the impression that the master viewed Teddy more as a collaborator than a pupil, marked all his reports during his triumphant last year at Chatham House. In their eyes – and not only in their eyes; in the last year he won a prize for character awarded by the votes of all the boys of the fifth and sixth forms – he was a remarkable force for good in the school. ‘It will be long before his ability, character, personality and leadership have failed to leave their mark on Coleman’s,’ testified a grateful housemaster. The headmaster was still more lavish in his panegyric: ‘The purity of his ideals, his loyalty to them, and his sense of duty have made him outstanding among boys who have helped build the School. That his mental and moral worth may have the reward they deserve is my wish for him.’

It would be easy to assume from all this that Teddy Heath was a ghastly little prig, who should have been shunned by any boy of spirit. He was not: on the contrary, the recollections of contemporaries make it clear that he was on the whole well-liked as well as respected. Inevitably he was prominent among the school prefects: he was ‘a bit of a stickler’, one master remembered. ‘He was very down on kids who had their hands in their trouser pockets, or weren’t behaving well in the street in their school cap and blazer. He thought that breaking a school rule amounted to disloyalty to the school.’¹⁹ But though he was allowed to use a gym-shoe to beat recalcitrant schoolboys, he rarely availed himself of the opportunity. ‘Discipline and organisation,’ he told a television interviewer in 1998, were of paramount importance, but need not involve harsh rule. ‘I carried out my responsibilities, of course,’ he replied loftily, when asked if he had often resorted to physical punishment. His popularity was established when the school held a mock election in January 1935 to choose one of the boys as prime minister. Teddy stood as the national government candidate and fought an enterprising campaign: persuading the local MP to write a letter in his support and taking advantage of a sudden snow storm to arrive early at school and tramp out a gigantic ‘VOTE FOR HEATH’ on the lawn in front of the main entrance. He won a landslide victory.²⁰

The energy he spent on enterprises of this kind slightly alarmed the headmaster. ‘He must not jeopardise his own interests by giving too much time to sidelines – either in or out of school,’ warned Mr Norman. As well as music, Teddy in his last two or three years proved an enthusiastic actor, playing important roles in most of the school’s productions and featuring as the Archangel Gabriel in the annual nativity play. He also took eagerly to debating, proposing successfully, at various times, that sweepstakes, Sunday cinemas and capital punishment should be abolished and that the House would, in defiance of the recent vote in the Oxford Union, be prepared to fight for King and Country. ‘Its present flourishing condition is largely due to his efforts,’ the master in charge of the Debating Society appreciatively recorded.

Another extramural activity which profoundly influenced his thinking was a school trip to Paris in the spring of 1931. ‘It was the most exciting event of my life so far,’ wrote Heath some forty years later. ‘It was this which embedded in me a lifelong curiosity about every other part of the world and a determination to see for myself before I formed judgments about other people’s customs, traditions and way of life.’²¹ This somewhat portentous declaration perhaps overrates the significance for a fifteen-year-old schoolboy of a brief shuffle round the more obvious sights of Paris leavened by a furtive escapade to the Folies Bergère. In fact the expedition was more memorable for Teddy because it included his first visit to an opera, Carmen at the Opéra Comique. This experience heralded an addiction to opera-going which persisted throughout his life. The Parisian trip, however, failed to herald any similar addiction to the French language; Heath’s French remained appalling, in accent, syntax and vocabulary, and some of the most important conversations of his life had to be conducted through an interpreter.

The trip to Paris was organised by a Dr Woolf, who included Teddy in the party even though all the other boys were from another school. Teddy – keen, cheerful, friendly, intelligent, deferential without being obsequious – had a capacity for gaining the interest of older men in a way which even the most prurient would have agreed was free of any undertone of sexuality. Another such patron was Alec Martin, a future chairman of the auctioneers Christie’s and a considerable authority on painting. Martin owned a large house in the neighbourhood for whose upkeep William Heath was responsible. He met Teddy, decided the boy was worth cultivating and took to asking him over when there were guests. He remained a friend until he died in 1971. From him Teddy learned to look at and enjoy pictures; he was never to be an expert but he had a good eye and a shrewd collector’s instinct. Martin advised him on his purchases and left him two valuable paintings by Sargent. Through Martin, Teddy met several distinguished painters. One of whom he missed out on, though, was Walter Sickert. In 1934 Sickert bought a home in St Peter’s-in-Thanet. Teddy used to bicycle regularly past his house and often saw paintings hanging on the clothes line to dry, including the celebrated if artistically insignificant portrait of King Edward VIII, painted from a photograph. In this case, though, his charms failed to prevail. Once he took a group of carol singers to Sickert’s house and, after the singers had done their bit, rang hopefully at the front door. After a long pause the door opened a crack. ‘Go away!’ said Sickert.²²

Another elderly admirer brought into his life by his father’s building activities was the rich Jewish solicitor, Royalton Kisch. Kisch was an expert on roses and a considerable amateur musicologist. From the start he decided that Teddy had limitless potential and he was accustomed to say from time to time: ‘That boy will one day be prime minister.’ Arnold Goodman was a frequent visitor who well remembered the youthful Heath as a feature of Kisch’s home. ‘Although he was clearly a very intelligent boy and intensely interested in politics,’ wrote Goodman, ‘I never shared Kisch’s view about his future.’ He told one of Heath’s biographers that he thought Teddy ‘an eager, questing person who was looking for founts of experience; founts of sophistication, founts of knowledge…He was not at all a man on the make.’ What most impressed Goodman was that, when Kisch was a very old man and Heath had become a public figure, Heath went on regularly visiting his old benefactor. ‘Seemingly he never forgot a friend,’ wrote Goodman, adding dryly that this was a quality ‘complemented, some critics may say, by too firm a recollection of his adversaries’.²³

Musical, interested in painting and politics, religiously minded, reasonably well read: by most standards Teddy, when the time came to move on from Chatham House, was a formidably well-rounded individual. He had his limitations. ‘You were always a poor judge of a good film,’ wrote a friend in 1935. ‘Mickey Mouse seems to be the only “actor” who interests you.’²⁴ He was intellectually unambitious and of limited imagination. Though his essay on Keats was judged to be ‘fairly well done’ there is no evidence that poetry held any joys for him. He paid little attention to the appearance of the buildings or countryside around him. But he was still better informed and had far wider interests than most of his contemporaries. His masters took it for granted that whatever college at Oxford or Cambridge he favoured would be grateful to receive him and would smooth his way with scholarships. The colleges proved to be less enthusiastic.

First, in 1934 he tried for music scholarships at St Catherine’s, Cambridge and Keble, Oxford. Both were denied him. Next he applied for a Modern Greats scholarship at Balliol. Charles Morris, the Tutor for Admissions, asked him what he wanted to do in life. Architecture was by now long forgotten; his most ardent wish, he replied, was to be a professional politician. ‘I don’t think I ever heard any other schoolboy answer a similar question in these terms,’ admitted the Tutor. He was rejected on other grounds. Though his economics were close to being of Exhibition standard, his general work was not so good and his French was lamentable. ‘You will understand,’ the Tutor wrote consolingly to Norman, ‘that it is not so much a question of a candidate being weak in some subjects as of his being sufficiently better than the other candidates.’ Balliol would be happy to accept him as a Commoner. He was still very young, however. If he were to stay on for another year at Chatham House, he might well get an Exhibition. Norman discussed the matter with Teddy’s parents and established that, though they were prepared to keep him at school for another year, they did not think they could possibly afford to send him to Oxford without some kind of scholarship. May 1935 was pencilled in for the next attempt.²⁵

Teddy, however, grew restive. In January 1935 he wrote directly to the Tutor for Admissions at Balliol. The letter was cautiously phrased but suggested that he was well placed to win a scholarship worth £80 a year to Cambridge. If he was to get an Exhibition or scholarship to Balliol, how much would it be worth? If the purpose of the letter was to enhance his value in the eyes of Balliol, it was unsuccessful. The reply was discouraging. ‘It seems to me that you can hardly afford to take the risk of letting the possibilities at Cambridge go by in favour of an examination in May which (so far at any rate as this College is concerned) has only got one £100 award.’ If an Exhibition worth £40 would give Heath the support he needed, then his chances were obviously better, but even at that level an award was far from being a certainty.²⁶

Teddy concluded that a bird in the hand was worth more than a – probably pretty speculative – bird in the bush, and decided to stick with Balliol. He duly tried again in May 1935. The bird turned out not to be in the hand after all. Perhaps his extracurricular activities had proved too distracting, perhaps he had grown stale. He did no better in economics and decidedly worse in literature: his essay earned a derisory gamma+. ‘On balance he does not appear to have made any marked advance,’ the Tutor for Admissions concluded depressingly.²⁷ Once more his parents were consulted. In the intervening twelve months William Heath had grown slightly more prosperous, the acclaim for Teddy at Chatham House had become still more fervent: the Heaths decided that, whatever the sacrifice involved, their son must accept the place at Balliol which the college was still happy to offer him. The new term began in October 1935. ‘It will be my last letter to you before you go up,’ wrote his former schoolfriend, Ken Evans, on 1 October, ‘so take my warning. Don’t get drunk at the first dinner, it looks bad.’²⁸ He was clearly joking. No one who knew Teddy Heath in 1935 could have believed that the advice was necessary.

TWO Balliol

Balliol in the 1930s was not quite the intellectual powerhouse which it had been before the First World War, but it was still one of Oxford’s leading colleges and as likely as any other to produce the next generation of political leaders. For Heath it had another salient advantage; it was not even slightly smart. Its uncompromisingly ugly architecture and the – by contemporary standards – unusually polyglot or at least polychrome nature of its student body meant that it was derided by the more conventionally snobbish of the undergraduates. The year Heath went up, Korda’s epic Sanders of the River was playing in Oxford cinemas. At one point a canoe-load of ferocious black warriors scudded furiously down the river in pursuit of the fleeing hero. It became a ritual that shouts of ‘Well rowed, Balliol!’ should ring round the auditorium at this point. Such mockery only enhanced the self-esteem of the members of Balliol, whose bland consciousness of their own superiority ensured that they would assume that any hostility was based on jealousy.

As well as being cosmopolitan, Balliol prided itself on being socially inclusive. Half the undergraduates came from public schools, a handful from patrician families. In some colleges this led to the formation of uneasy cliques; no doubt some such social divisions were to be found at Balliol but they were deplored by the great majority of the undergraduates and practised only surreptitiously. ‘What little snobbery there was tended to be intellectual rather than social,’ wrote Heath, ‘and, to my delight as well as my surprise, I soon found myself mixing easily with freshmen from almost every conceivable background.’¹ Any undergraduate who let his snobbishness obtrude would have had to reckon with the formidable Master of Balliol, A. D. Lindsay. Lindsay was a former Professor of Philosophy at Glasgow University whose resolute radicalism was tempered by openness of mind and a tolerance of almost any point of view except the bigoted and the stupid. He liked Heath from the start: ‘v.attractive chap’, he wrote in the ‘handshaking notes’ which he kept to remind himself of the salient points about all the undergraduates.² ‘No background’ was a slightly cryptic additional comment; if it meant that Heath almost unconsciously distanced himself from his roots, it would have been justified. Heath never made a secret of his origins or in any way appeared ashamed of them, but he felt family and university to be two widely distant sectors of his life and saw no reason to mix them. Throughout his life he tended rigidly to compartmentalise his interests, his activities and his personal relationships. During his four years at university his parents visited him only once or twice, his brother John seems never to have come. He was not ashamed of his family; it was just that it had no place in his Oxford life.

‘The College is delightful,’ Heath told his old headmaster. ‘Of course, not an architectural wonder, but it has its own, to me, very pleasing atmosphere. The dons are very nice…Here too everybody mixes very well, unfortunately not always the case.’³ Heath did not strive consciously to adapt to his new surroundings but, in the words of his tutor, the future Lord Fulton, he was not one of those working-class undergraduates who remained ‘conspicuously loyal to their social background’.⁴ It was while he was at Oxford that his accent evolved into the slightly uneasy compound which endured until his death: plummy upper-middle-class varied by disconcerting vowel sounds that betrayed a more plebeian background. When Nigel Nicolson, an Oxford contemporary, referred to his ‘cockney accent’, Heath remarked indignantly that he had not a trace of London blood in his make-up. ‘I think it is a mixture of rural Kent and Wodehousean Oxford,’ suggested his sister-in-law. Whatever its origins, Heath was aware of the fact that his accent was noticeably different from that of most of those with whom he consorted. Either he was unable to change it or, more probably, had no wish to do so. More than most politicians, he genuinely disdained cheap popularity and eschewed anything that might be interpreted as an attempt to win favour by pretending to be something other than what he was. He would not ostentatiously parade his social origins but nor would he excuse them or conceal them. Nicolson said he thought Heath’s accent ‘counted against him a little’. Given the progress that lay ahead, it can not have counted much.⁵

Not that everything was easy. Heath was certainly one of the poorest undergraduates at Balliol. A few came from similarly humble homes but most of those had scholarships or grants to help them. Heath had a small loan from the Kent Education Committee and another from Royalton Kisch, but beyond that every penny that he spent was an extra burden on his hard-pressed parents. He had no car and could not afford the train fare, so he never went home during the term; he bought no books unless they were essential for his work; he did not get a single gramophone record or anything on which to play it until his second year. ‘I like to have things of my own,’ he told a Guardian interviewer in 1970, ‘pictures of my own, even if they are poor pictures.’⁶ The hunger to acquire, which became so marked later in his life, must have been fuelled during that bleak first term at Balliol.

Relief came soon. He had barely installed himself before he learnt that an organ scholarship worth £80 a year would be coming free in December. He was encouraged to apply. ‘I feel you may think it strange that somebody already up here should compete for an award which would allow someone else to come up,’ he wrote apologetically to Mr Norman, ‘but I feel from the financial point of view that I must.’ He duly won the scholarship and was installed as organ scholar by the first term in 1936. The award made all the difference between penury and modest comfort. The duties – playing the organ at evensong on Sundays and at the 8 a.m. morning service on weekdays – might have seemed oppressive to an undergraduate used to late nights and heavy drinking, but neither Heath’s finances nor his inclinations led him into such excesses. According to David Willcocks, the eminent organist and conductor, who heard him play the organ in Salisbury Cathedral shortly after the war, he was ‘an intellectual rather than a musician’ but played ‘reasonably fluently’. The praise is hardly ecstatic, but Heath was quite good enough to get pleasure out of it and to satisfy the dons of Balliol. He enjoyed still more his involvement in the Balliol concerts, which were held in Hall every other Sunday evening, and with the Balliol Players. For the latter, he composed the music for their production of Aristophanes’ The Frogs. The performance was directed by an American Rhodes Scholar called Walt Rostow, who was to attain fame, or perhaps notoriety, as foreign affairs adviser to Lyndon Johnson. Heath was ‘one of the two or three most promising men I met at Oxford’, Rostow remembered: ‘a rare example of purposefulness, amiability and reserve’.⁷

The reserve was a characteristic noted by several of his contemporaries. Another American Rhodes Scholar, the future ambassador, Philip Kaiser, found him ‘agreeable and congenial’ but ‘not a gladhander…there was a little bit of a quality which comes out more prominently in the person presented today [1970] – essentially self-protective, in a certain obliqueness about him which came through in a rather charming way in those days’. He was ‘somebody one noticed’, remembered another contemporary, Julian Amery. ‘One found him in all kinds of groups, but he was in a way rather detached from any of them.’ But his presence in those groups was more generally noticed than his remoteness from them. Denis Healey, who knew him well and was secretary to the Junior Common Room when Heath was president, found him affable and companionable, well-liked by every element of the college. Hugh Fraser, who was one day to stand against Heath for the leadership of the Conservative Party, thought him ‘extremely nice, agreeable, friendly’ though he noted a certain lack of ebullience: ‘There was nothing madcap about him.’ Nicholas Henderson, another future ambassador, denied even the lack of ebullience; Heath was ‘as gregarious, as boisterous, as friendly as anyone at Oxford’. Henderson’s father had a house in Oxford where his son held occasional parties. Heath was their ‘life and soul’, one of the most popular and sought-after of the undergraduate guests.⁸

Oxford was predominantly masculine; it was an inward-looking society in which Sebastian Flyte and Harold Acton flourished extravagantly while the rugger hearties threw stones through their windows or ducked them in Mercury. Heath was neither aesthete nor hearty. Such evidence as exists suggests that he recoiled nervously even from those intense but sexless emotional relationships which were so often to be found among the undergraduates. In August 1939, an unidentified ‘Freddy’ wrote to remonstrate. ‘Now, Teddie, I am going to be very frank,’ he began. ‘Please tell me what it is you don’t like about me. I hate being on anything but really friendly terms with people, especially when as nice as you. Your attitude towards me last term was obvious…It upset me quite a bit…I remember you behaved in the same way last year about Michael…If it is just jealousy, you have no justification for it…we all want to be your friends.’ Without the context it is impossible to say how much or how little such letters mean, but it seems clear that Freddy was demanding a greater and more demonstrative commitment than Heath was willing, or perhaps able, to give.⁹

Nicko Henderson recalled that, brightly though Heath had shone at parties, he could not remember ever seeing him talking to a girl. In Oxford in the 1930s there were not many girls to talk to, but there are enough anecdotes from this period, indeed from every period of his life, to show that he was ill at ease with women. An old acquaintance from Chatham House urged him to venture into the brave new world of feminine society. ‘I think it very doubtful if one can make friends of the old schoolboy type if one has left school,’ he chided his backward friend. ‘I am certain that female friendship is the natural thing to take its place. I think that it’s unnatural for adults to form new friendships of the previous type: it obviously has had for part of its basis an emotional admiration which is transferred to one’s opposite sex.’¹⁰ Heath had never been strong on ‘emotional admiration’; certainly he had no intention of transferring it to the opposite sex.

He did not actually dislike women, indeed he was happy to consort with them if they were attractive and intelligent, but his appreciation of their attractiveness was purely aesthetic and his expectation was that they would not have much to say that was worth listening to. The consorting, if it took place, had to be at arms’ length; he shrank from physical contact with both men and women, but whereas an effusive gesture from a man would have been distasteful, from a woman it was repugnant. Nigel Nicolson remembered walking with Heath along the banks of the Cherwell and arriving at the spot known as Parsons’ Pleasure where undergraduates traditionally bathed in the nude. Heath was shocked. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘anyone might come along. Girls might come along.’ Denis Healey mentioned to Heath that a mutual friend was spending the weekend with his girlfriend in Bibury. ‘You don’t mean to say that they are sleeping together?’ asked a dismayed Heath. Healey replied that he had no idea but thought it probable. ‘Good heavens,’ said Heath. ‘I can’t imagine anyone in the Conservative Association doing that!’ Certainly he felt no inclination to allow women into those sanctums of Oxford life from which they were still excluded. When the admission of women to the Union was debated in 1938 Heath declared: ‘Women have no original contribution to make to our debates and I believe that, if they are admitted to the floor of this House, a large number of members will leave.’¹¹

Most young men, even if little preoccupied by sex, find it desirable to affect more enthusiasm than they actually feel. Heath was not wholly above such posturing. ‘I hope you enjoyed the Carnival,’ wrote a friend, ‘and did not run after young ladies like you did last year, and call to them from windows.’ He was alleged to have taken a fancy to a pretty young blonde, Joan Stuart, though he ‘never got his arm beyond her shoulder – not even around her waist’.¹² The limits which he imposed on his relationships with women were well exemplified by the case of Kay Raven. Kay was the friendly and attractive daughter of a Broadstairs doctor, socially a notch or two above the Heaths but by no means in another world. From Heath’s point of view, indeed, she was alarmingly accessible. He felt at home with her, enjoyed their games of tennis, talked to her about music, but that was that. To his family she seemed the perfect match; Mrs Heath talked confidently of her son’s eventual engagement. Kay would happily have concurred. When Heath went up to Balliol she missed him greatly and began to bombard him with letters; ‘quite honestly, though I don’t mean to be sentimental, it does help to write and makes Oxford seem as though it was not really on another planet’. The response was not what she had hoped for – Heath’s replies seem to have been friendly but distancing. ‘I have a feeling you may be fed up with me and my wretched correspondence,’ she wrote a fortnight later. ‘That is what is on my mind, Teddy. I may just be rather depressed.’ She was rather depressed; her father noticed it and cross-examined her, and Kay evidently admitted that she was in love. She had promised Heath that she would not talk to her parents about their relationship. ‘I am afraid that through this I have broken my word, but I told him that I didn’t want Mummy to know. I am awfully sorry that this has happened, the curse of living at home is that parents are so observant…it does not mean, of course, that we are committed to anything, that would be foolish seeing how young we both are. It is damnable your being so far away.’

Heath probably thought there were certain advantages in distance; he was genuinely fond of Kay, he got as close to loving her as he was ever to come with any woman except his mother, but at least once the war was over he seems never to have contemplated accepting the total commitment which is or should be involved in marriage. Perhaps he felt he had outgrown Kay, perhaps he did not feel financially secure, probably most of all he had a deep-seated preference for living his life on his own, without the responsibilities and distractions of matrimony. Kay continued to hope but the hopes grew increasingly more wistful; eventually she accepted that she would have to settle for friendship and that Heath was going to find it difficult to find time even for this in an increasingly crowded life.¹³

What most conspicuously filled that life was politics. Heath was a Conservative by nature almost from childhood. His father had taught him that the freedom of the individual was the highest goal and that socialism and liberty were incompatible. Heath found much that was appealing about the Liberal Party but, supremely practical in disposition, concluded that it had no real chance of capturing power and should therefore be avoided. That left the Conservatives. But though he never doubted that it was to the Tories that his allegiance was due, he found certain elements in the party snobbish, self-interested and out-of-date. The true Conservatives were ‘compassionate men who believed in opportunity, and a decent standard of living for all’. Baldwin, the then prime minister, he felt had the right instincts but was stuck in the past, slave of a class system which held the country back. Chamberlain was even worse: ‘infinitely boring’, a ‘small-time businessman’. His heroes were Churchill, Macmillan and most of all – if only because he held high office while the other two were in the wilderness – Anthony Eden. He heard of Eden’s resignation in early 1938 when he was in the rooms of Philip Kaiser. ‘I remember that Ted said very little that night,’ recalled Kaiser. ‘It affected him, Eden was important to him…a great thoughtfulness settled on him…He thanked me and then walked out.’ But he never thought of leaving the party. He had nowhere else to go. He would stay with the Conservatives and give his support to those of its leaders who wanted to change it. In the end, he had little doubt, he would contribute to that change himself.¹⁴

Lindsay’s Balliol was on the whole a left-wing college. Though Heath became president of the Junior Common Room, his immediate successor was Denis Healey; Kaiser followed Healey but the president after that was Roy Jenkins. When Heath joined the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA), its membership in Balliol was so sparse that he was immediately appointed secretary of the college branch. He soon found that Balliol was not unusual in its politics; in the mid-1930s most of the more politically conscious undergraduates were to the left and a fair number of them, believing that no other effective force was combating the growth of fascism, were Communist as well. Heath therefore joined an organisation that, if not moribund, was at least unfashionable. His energy and persuasive powers were quickly recognised and in June 1937, against inconsiderable opposition, he was appointed president of the OUCA. His biographer George Hutchinson wrote that he built up its membership from 600 to around 1,500. The previous president, Ian Harvey, a Conservative politician whose career was prematurely ended when he was arrested cavorting with a guardsman in the bushes of St James’s Park, claimed that the achievement was really his, Heath was only moving further down a path that had already been prepared for him. There may be some truth in this, but Heath was rightly considered a president of outstanding ability, under whose leadership the OUCA prospered at a time when it might well have suffered an almost terminal decline. He canvassed vigorously when Professor Lindemann, the future Lord Cherwell, stood as Conservative candidate in a by-election in 1936 and, as a reward, was asked back to the Professor’s rooms when Churchill came down to support his friend and scientific adviser. It would have been surprising if Heath had not been impressed by the grand old warrior. ‘I was struck not only by the force and clarity of his arguments but by his sheer presence,’ wrote Heath in his memoirs. He ‘reinforced my determination to help articulate and later implement a new brand of Conservatism’.¹⁵

It was in the Oxford Union, not the Conservative Association, that Heath first attained real prominence. He did not seem a particularly promising candidate for such a role. Physically he was unremarkable. Asked by David Frost how he would describe himself, Heath said that he was 5 feet 10¹/₂ inches tall and ‘fairly lean’. He flattered himself; even as an undergraduate he verged on the portly. ‘Glad to hear you are getting some exercise,’ wrote a friend in 1936. ‘If you keep it up you should get rid of that fat.’ Though he kept the fat within the bounds of respectability for another forty years he habitually ate and drank too much and remained inelegantly solid. His face, recalled Philip Toynbee, was ‘soft and unformed’; his most impressive attributes were his striking blue eyes which in repose could seem detached, even glaucous, but when animated blazed with vehement excitement. His voice was powerful but unmelodious, his oratorical technique more that of the battering ram than the rapier. ‘Teddy Heath was born in the summer of 1916, some two years before the Tank,’ said the Oxford magazine Isis, when it nominated him its ‘Isis Idol’. ‘Lacking the thickness of skin of this early rival, he soon outstripped it in charm of manner, and has since proved its equal in force of utterance and ability to surmount obstacles.’ There was, indeed, something relentless about Heath’s public speaking; his weapons were a powerful memory, a mastery of the facts and a capacity to marshal and deploy them to best advantage. He saw the need to leaven this mass with a little humour but while he could be genuinely witty, particularly when in a small group of people whom he knew well, his more considered efforts to amuse often seemed laborious and were occasionally embarrassing. In 1938 Alan Wood, in another Oxford magazine, Cherwell, said that Heath was ‘the Union’s best speaker’ and that he succeeded ‘by the simple process of knowing more about the subject than his opponents’. He eschewed the flamboyant and rarely made any emotional appeal. Why did he think there was no place for public political passion, he was once asked. ‘I’ve always distrusted rhetoric and I still do,’ Heath replied.¹⁶

For his first few debates Heath wisely kept silent, content to listen and learn. His most important lesson came from the then Home Secretary, John Simon, who spoke for half an hour without a note while successfully dealing with every point of substance that had been raised. Heath, who had hitherto always written out in full every speech that he delivered, resolved that Simon’s was the proper way. For the next sixty years he regularly astonished his listeners by his ability to deliver long and carefully crafted speeches with apparent spontaneity. He had still not mastered the art, however, by the time he delivered his maiden speech in the Union, defending Britain against the charge that it was a declining power. His speech was praised by Isis as ‘extremely forcible and able’, but there was no feeling that a new star had been born. Solid worth rather than fireworks marked his contributions, though the tank to which he had been likened by Isis often figured in his performances. Ian Harvey, then President of the Union, praised his confidence but warned that ‘he must be careful not to appear too aggressive’.¹⁷

He first established himself as a major player in October 1937, when he led the opposition to a motion approving the Labour Party’s programme which was introduced by the then chairman of the party and future Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton. To Dalton’s indignation and against the normal temper of the house, the motion was defeated by forty votes; a result for which Heath’s speech was held to be largely responsible and which led to him being elected secretary to the Union at the end of the term. But though on this occasion he defended the National Government and took an impeccably Conservative line, it was becoming increasingly evident that he was not disposed blindly to accept party policy. He abhorred the doctrinaire and looked always for common ground that he could share with his political adversaries. He wrote a long essay for Roy Harrod on the Popular Front. ‘I think this is an excellent paper,’ wrote Harrod. ‘I feel there is a little too much tendency to tell the Socialists that they are really only Liberals or bound to become Liberals.’¹⁸ Throughout his life Heath believed that any Socialist open to reason was really only Liberal, and that any Liberal was close to the Conservative – or at least his own branch of Conservatism. He was constantly disillusioned by the discovery that most Socialists, indeed most Conservatives, were not open to reason and refused to join him on the common ground where he was rationally ensconced. Each time he believed that such obduracy could not be repeated, only to be disappointed once more when the next occasion arose.

Appeasement was the issue on which he found himself most starkly at variance with orthodox Conservative policy. As late as 1937, Heath – assuming the fascist leaders to be as much susceptible to reason as any Socialist or Liberal – considered that war could and should be avoided. ‘I don’t agree with you on pacifism,’ his friend Tickner told him. ‘It fails. The Socialist parties in Germany and Austria adopted it.’¹⁹ Within a few months he had been convinced that Tickner was right. He was appalled by Chamberlain’s abandonment of the Czechs at Munich and in October 1938 proposed the motion ‘that this House deplores the Government’s policy of Peace without Honour’. The motion was carried, with support from many Conservatives as well as Socialists. A fortnight later a by-election became necessary in Oxford. Heath put his name forward as a possible candidate, pointing out as his principal qualification that he was opposed to the Munich agreement and would therefore be a better Foreign Secretary than the present incumbent, Lord Halifax. Unsurprisingly, the Oxford Conservatives preferred the almost equally youthful but more orthodox Quintin Hogg. The Master of Balliol, Sandy Lindsay, then announced that he would stand as an Independent Progressive candidate in the by-election. Although Lindsay was a prominent Socialist, Heath had no hesitation in joining Jenkins and Healey in canvassing for his cause. Heath much later told Basil Liddell Hart, the military historian and strategist, that a speech Liddell Hart had made to the OUCA had been the decisive factor in convincing him that he must canvass against the official Conservative candidate (Liddell Hart responded by saying that Heath was the one man who might induce him to support a Conservative government). He cannot have taken much convincing; even if his performances in the Union had not made his views unambiguously clear, his loyalty to Lindsay both as an individual and as Master of Balliol would surely have proved decisive.²⁰

It was the issue of appeasement which won Heath the appointment he most wanted, President of the Union. He had tried the previous year and had been defeated by another Balliol man; thanks to his music scholarship he was able to stay on for a fourth year and try again. In November 1938 he moved: ‘That this House has no confidence in the National Government as at present constituted.’ He won the debate and, the following day, the presidency. Enough of Britain’s most eminent politicians had in their day been President of the Union to ensure that his appointment was widely noticed. He only had one term in which to make his mark but he used it with energy and imagination: reorganising the structure and workings of the society, enlarging its social role and thus its membership, and holding the first-ever dance in its hallowed headquarters. Even more remarkably, perhaps, he introduced these reforms without annoying those traditional elements which, in Oxford perhaps more than anywhere else, can be relied on to rise in rage at any disturbance of their cherished practices. Leo Amery, who had been persuaded to come to Oxford for a debate on conscription, remembered dining with ‘Heath of Balliol, a very nice youth’. A very nice youth would have been the verdict of most of his contemporaries. Isis paid a remarkable tribute to his performance. ‘No president for many years has provided a more interesting series of debates and visitors; no president has done more to re-establish the prestige of the Union not only as a debating society…but as a club…He will not soon be forgotten.’²¹

One of the more controversial debates while Heath was President was on the motion: ‘That a return to religion is the only solution to our present discontents.’ Heath tried to persuade Bernard Shaw to oppose the motion, failed, and made do with Stephen Spender. He did not speak himself; probably as much because he did not know what he wanted to say as for any other reason. Though the debate was generally deemed a success, he found it thoroughly unsatisfactory. ‘Over sixty people wanted to speak, not six of them were worth hearing,’ he wrote in Isis. The typical undergraduate who spoke in the Union was obsessed by politics: ‘All the superficiality, the shallowness, the sterility of undergraduate thought, were revealed unmercifully as speaker after speaker tried to find something to replace the political clichés with which he can normally get away.’²² The lofty tone of these remarks suggests that Heath thought himself above such trivia, but at that moment in his life he would have found it difficult to express his real views on the subject with any force or clarity. He does seem to have been undergoing something of a spiritual crisis at the time. The following year he indulged himself by writing a diary in what was for him an uncharacteristically introspective vein. ‘The only principles I have ever had firmly implanted have been religious,’ he wrote, ‘but these never had any intellectual backing. I never even realised what the grounds of belief are and how they compare with anything else. The result was that the religious beliefs I had were undermined at Oxford. I felt that they were silly, that I couldn’t defend them against other people. Only now am I beginning to realise their justification. I may be slowly coming through the valley of bewilderment.’²³ He had not descended very far into that valley, nor were the heights to which he was to climb of imposing altitude. Heath never thought much about religion. His time at Oxford was almost the only occasion when he found his implicit faith challenged by clever and articulate contemporaries; that threat removed he reverted to the comfortable and unchallenged convictions of his youth. They underpinned but did not notably affect his political beliefs. ‘In all this time in the House of Commons,’ he wrote in 1996, he had found that there were ‘comparatively few issues on which one has to sit back and say, “Well, now, does this correspond with the values of my own faith?”’²⁴

Faith or not, he asked himself more often than was true of most politicians how far his attitude on any given issue corresponded with the moral principles by which he regulated his behaviour. Many of those principles were formulated while he was at Oxford, although it was the travels that he undertook in the vacations that did most to shape his views. In the summer of 1938, with a small group of fellow undergraduates of whom he was by far the most right wing, he went on the invitation of the republican government to visit Catalonia, the last major Spanish province which Franco had not yet overrun. It was an exciting visit. In Barcelona the party was advised to take shelter in the hotel basement since an air-raid was beginning. They decided that the risk was slight and that it would be more interesting to stay above ground and watch events. According to his memoirs, a bomb hit the hotel, skittled down the lift-shaft and killed all those who had taken shelter. Somewhat perplexingly, his version of the event in a book published some twenty years earlier says that the bomb ‘went straight through our hotel, without, however, causing any great damage’. By the time he came to write his memoirs he was not above occasionally gingering up the narrative with somewhat romanticised anecdotes, but it is curious that he should have published two versions of the same incident, apparently so contradictory.²⁵

There were other moments of danger. On the road from Barcelona to Tarragona their car was machine-gunned by one of Franco’s aircraft and they had to crouch in a ditch until the danger had passed. When they reached the British contingent of the International Brigade, Heath met and talked to a young volunteer called Jack Jones. They were to see much more of each other, on different sides this time but in more peaceful surroundings, nearly forty years later when Heath was prime minister and Jones leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU). Though Heath regretted the powerful influence of the Communist Party and recognised that, in a civil war, atrocities were likely to be committed by both sides, he was as satisfied as any of his party that the republican cause was the better one. It was, as he saw it, a battle between legitimate government and militaristic fascism; the republican government was ‘introducing progressive social reforms and encouraging a bracing democratic atmosphere’; Franco was providing ‘a convenient testing bed for the hardware of the Nazi war machine’. Heath returned to Britain resolved to canvass for the republican cause, even though he accepted that it was probably lost. He was moreover convinced that the Spanish civil war was merely the preamble to a greater European war for which Britain must urgently prepare.²⁶

He had had few illusions about this since the summer of 1937 when he had spent two months in Germany working on his German. In his biography, John Campbell writes that Heath ‘never learned a second language’. In his copy of the book Heath wrote against this remark ‘Wrong!’ He does, indeed, seem to have spoken German with some fluency at this time. He read it too; he claimed that Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks had given him a unique insight into the German character: ‘What a superb book it is,’ he told Professor Winckler, in whose home in Bavaria he spent several weeks as a paying guest.²⁷ But he was not a natural linguist, and by the time he found himself negotiating with German politicians over Britain’s entry into Europe he would have found it impossible to sustain a serious conversation in their language. To his surprise, he was invited to attend a Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg and found himself within a few feet of Hitler and meeting the other Nazi leaders at a cocktail party: Göring, ‘bulky and genial’; Goebbels, ‘small, pale and insignificant’, and Himmler, ‘I shall never forget how drooping and sloppy Himmler’s hand was when he offered it to me’. He was horrified by the ferociously nationalistic zeal which permeated the whole affair: ‘I was utterly convinced now that a conflict was inevitable, and that it was one for which we must prepare immediately if we were to save Europe from the evil domination of National Socialism.’²⁸

He went back to Germany in August 1939. His companion was Madron Seligman, a Balliol contemporary who was, and would remain, his closest friend. Seligman was Jewish, educated at Harrow and from a family of rich aluminium manufacturers. A fine sportsman and a lover of music, Seligman could have made himself at home in any sector of Balliol society. For a time, remembered Roy Jenkins, he had links with the ‘Rugbeian pi group’ which went in for ‘low living, social concern and high moral tone’. Though Heath avoided association with any clique, this was a group with which he too had much in common. He and Seligman became, if not inseparable, then at least intimate to a degree which Heath was never to permit himself with any other friend. The two discussed where they should spend their last months of liberty before embarking on their respective careers. Seligman favoured Spain. Heath acquiesced and filled in a visa application. To the question why he had visited Spain the previous year he wrote: ‘To observe the Civil War’; to ‘What is the purpose of your present visit’, he wrote: ‘To observe the peace.’ Perhaps the Spanish authorities found this unduly flippant; perhaps they disapproved of his republican sympathies; the visa was refused. Instead, the two set out for a tour of Danzig and Poland, travelling by way of Germany. Seligman’s Jewish blood, Heath told Winckler, provided the couple with ‘many amusing moments’. The words were curiously chosen: it was less than a year since the pogroms of Kristallnacht and since then the plight of the German Jews had inexorably worsened. Seligman was protected by his British passport, but if they had got their timing wrong and war had broken out while they were still in Germany he would have been in great danger. Even as it was it must have been always unpleasant and sometimes distressing. The English were not well liked in Germany in 1939 and an Englishman of Jewish appearance was doubly unwelcome.²⁹

They travelled to suit Heath’s budget rather than Seligman’s, which meant that discomfort was added to their other woes. The train from Berlin to Danzig was filled with drunken Austrians and they had to try to sleep in the luggage rack: when they had a meal with the consul next day, according to Seligman, Heath was half asleep and ‘didn’t utter a word the whole way through lunch except to say how bad the food was’. By the time they reached Warsaw it was obvious that war was imminent; they were sped on their way and hitch-hiked towards the frontier with the Polish army as it moved up to defend its country. Once in Germany things were still worse; the – far more formidable – German army was moving the other way and they had to battle against the tide. Suspicion of foreigners, particularly English-speaking foreigners, was even worse than it had been on the way out and several times they thought they were on the point of being arrested or beaten up. Eventually they arrived at Paris and called at the Embassy, to be told: ‘Unless you get out now you will never get out at all!’ The advice was perhaps unduly alarmist but the situation was indeed dire: Heath got back to Dover a week before war broke out.³⁰

His Oxford career was over. He had reason to feel proud of his achievements. He had attained heroic status within the university – ‘That’s Teddy Heath. He’s going to be prime minister one day’, a new arrival among the women undergraduates – the future Mrs Anthony Barber – was excitedly informed. More important, his name was known in Westminster; visiting politicians had noticed him as a potential recruit to their ranks. Only in one way was he disappointed. He had read Modern Greats (PPE) and he would have liked to crown his triumphs with first-class honours. He knew that the time and effort which he had devoted to the Union, the OUCA, the Balliol JCR and his musical duties had made his task doubly difficult. ‘He would have done even better had he not been a man of wide and very active interests,’ wrote Lindsay. ‘I have the greatest admiration for Mr Heath’s energy, initiative and sense of responsibility.’ Such praise from Lindsay was most welcome but Heath had still hoped for more. ‘You seem to have got a very nice Second in the Schools, and I dare say that all things considered you are quite satisfied,’ wrote one of his tutors at Balliol consolingly. Heath did not think his Second was very nice and he was far from satisfied. He believed that, with just a little more application, he could have gained the coveted First.³¹

In this he was probably wrong. The notes which Lindsay made on the undergraduates, based on the reports of the various tutors, show that Heath was not felt to be distinguished academically. One don was ‘not impressed, uninspired work’, others contributed ‘fairly intelligent, decent, slow mind’; ‘No outstanding work; second class’; and even ‘stupid, lacks thought’. This was not the whole picture; some said that he was ‘v. intelligent’ or ‘can do v. good work’; but the overall picture was not that of a student for whom first-class honours could be expected.³² The economist Redvers Opie taught both Harold Wilson and Heath at Oxford and left notes on his pupils. Wilson had ‘exceptional intellectual ability and a remarkably comprehensive mind’; Heath, on the other hand, ‘was usually given a beta mark and criticised for trundling out run-of-the-mill views’.³³ When he was writing his memoirs Heath got hold of Harold Wilson’s marks in Finals so that he could compare them with his own. He found that he had one beta+ while the rest were betas or beta–. Wilson got one beta+ and the rest alphas. The figures were not quoted in Heath’s memoirs.

If Heath had achieved all he did at Oxford and nevertheless gained first-class honours it would indeed have been a triumph. If, though, he had failed to become President of the Union and, in spite of the extra effort put into his work, had still gained only a Second, it would have been a sad waste. No one can doubt that he made the right decision and put his energies where they counted most.

THREE War

New graduates leaving Oxford at the end of the summer term of 1939 must have been aware that whatever career they planned was likely to be interrupted. It was still possible, however, that war would not come. If it did, it might last only a few months. The only sensible thing to do was to prepare for a peacetime future with a tacit awareness that all such plans would probably come to nothing.

For Heath the first and most important decision was whether he should pursue music as a career. As organ scholar at Balliol he had put in a more than adequate performance in college chapel; as a pianist too he was competent beyond the standards of the talented amateur. He had no illusions, however, that he would ever achieve greatness as an instrumentalist. To choose as his life work something – however enjoyable – in which he knew he would never progress beyond the second-rate would have been unacceptable to Heath. If music was to be his career it would have to be as a conductor. Heath already had more experience in this field than most musicians of his age. He had been largely responsible for conducting the Balliol Choral Society, one of the oldest and most distinguished of Oxford choirs. Since childhood, too, he had been involved with the Broadstairs carol singers and, even though less than twenty years old, he had taken over the running of their annual carol concert in the mid-1930s. The Mayor of Oxford’s Christmas Carol concert, conducted by Dr Armstrong, seemed to him a model of its kind and, despite the far smaller resources available, he decided that Broadstairs could do something similar. He conducted his first carol concert there in 1936; it was judged a great success and the tradition was established of an annual concert under Heath’s baton, which continued for some forty years. But did such modest achievements provide a base from which a professional career could be mounted? Heath consulted Sir Hugh Allen, Heather Professor of Music at Oxford and a man of vast influence in musical circles. If Heath made some money and went into politics, the possibilities were limitless, judged Allen. Probably he would end up as prime minister. If instead he became a conductor he would have to dedicate himself totally to it, and even then it would be a fierce struggle to get to the top. ‘I believe you can do it, but if so you must be prepared to be just as big a shit as Malcolm Sargent.’¹

Heath might not have been put off by the thought of having to emulate Malcolm Sargent’s shittishness but the need to dedicate himself exclusively to the task was a serious deterrent. He knew that his heart was in politics. If a career in music would rule out politics for ever, it could not be right for him. It would have taken more encouragement than Allen was prepared to offer to make him reach a different conclusion. Thomas Armstrong, himself an organist of great repute and one-time Principal of the Royal Academy of Music, many years later heard Heath’s recording of the Beethoven Triple Concerto. ‘I sometimes wonder’, he wrote, ‘whether HPA[llen] was right, after all, and in spite of all you’ve done, to steer you away from a professional career in music.’² Heath may sometimes have wondered the same thing, but he can never seriously have doubted that he had reached the best, the only possible conclusion.

A life in politics, therefore, was his firm objective. But the concept of the professional politician, without private means, who lived on his salary as an MP or worked his way up through the party organisation, was almost unknown in 1939. Heath would have to make his name, and with luck his fortune, in some other walk of life before he could begin to look for a seat in the House of Commons. The two safest professions for people of a musical bent, one friend told him, were ‘the BBC and school teaching’. The BBC would require ‘submission to an intolerable bureaucracy’, teaching was ill-paid and probably involved severing one’s ties with London.³ Neither appealed to Heath. A more attractive possibility, which offered a better chance of making money quickly, was the Bar. Heath had an excellent memory, a clear mind well adjusted to grasping the essential points in any problem, a well-honed capacity for debate and argument: all qualities required of a successful barrister. If he went to the Bar and prospered he could reasonably expect to have established himself within ten or, at the most, fifteen years; the route from the Bar to the House of Commons was a well-trodden one. Before he had left Oxford he had begun on the essential preliminary of eating his dinners at Gray’s Inn.

Even that course, however, posed financial problems. To spend another two years in study, unless supported by a scholarship, would have placed an unfair additional burden on the parents who had sacrificed so much for him. He had already been summoned to Gray’s Inn for an interview and had been led to believe that, if he turned up and made a good impression, a scholarship would probably be his for the asking. Before anything could be clinched, however, an opportunity arose to go to the United States on a debating tour. The chance was too good to miss, but it meant that he had to forgo the all-important interview. At the end of 1939, he heard that the scholarship had been awarded to someone else. ‘I had been relying on this to enable me to finish being called to the bar,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Of course, it would have been wonderful to think that after the war this money would have been waiting for me…Now this is impossible. I may have to give up the whole idea of law and go into something else…The temptation to get into politics in an era of reconstruction will be enormous.’ At least one of his friends thought that his loss of the scholarship was a blessing in disguise. ‘You have done very well for a C[hatham] H[ouse] S[chool] boy, something out of the usual,’ wrote A. C. Tickner. ‘The bar seems rather too conventional a finish for you. Hence my disappointment.’ If Heath had envisaged a spell at the Bar as anything more than a stepping stone on the way to a life in politics, Tickner’s disappointment might have been justified; as it was, the main cause for Heath’s chagrin at the loss of the scholarship was that it seemed to make more remote the time when he could hope to make his move into the House of Commons.⁴

The trip to the United States which cost him his scholarship had been arranged under a scheme by which two debaters from English universities crossed the Atlantic each year to go on a tour of American universities. Heath was to have been accompanied by his Balliol contemporary Hugh Fraser. When war broke out both young men volunteered for military service. Fraser, who had been training as a territorial, was at once called up. Heath was told that he would not be wanted for several months. The way was open, therefore, for him to go as planned to America. Instead of Fraser he was to share the platform with Peter Street, a former treasurer of the Oxford Union.

One Balliol contemporary doubted whether this was a good idea:

Were I you I would go to the war rather than to the USA, because, while the propaganda in America might be a more valuable contribution to Britain, there might be a number of people who would place an uncharitable construction on your absence from this country. After all, it is more important to do what the public think right than what you might think right! That sounds cynical, but it is true in politics. A good war record is of great assistance to a politician…

If ‘going to war’ had been a possible alternative Heath would certainly have taken it but there seemed little point in hanging around awaiting call-up when a far more interesting and potentially valuable way of using the time presented itself. If people chose to suggest that he was in some way running away or shirking his duty then they were welcome to do so. He and Street consulted the Foreign Office, were encouraged to go ahead with the tour and did so with alacrity.⁵

The Foreign Office did, however, issue one caveat. Public opinion in the United States was in a delicate state and there were many people who would be quick to resent what they might see as an attempt to push them into the war. Two brash students, holding forth about the duty of the Americans to join the British and the French in defence of Poland, might do considerable harm. Any such debate was to be avoided: like Basil in Fawlty Towers, they were not to mention the war. The difficulty about this was that the American students with whom they were to debate thought that the war by far the most interesting topic. The University of Pittsburgh dismissed the twelve possible subjects proposed by the British team and announced that the debate would be on the motion: ‘That the United States should immediately enter the war on the side of the allies.’ When Heath and Street demurred they were told that this was the published motion and that nothing else would be accepted. To refuse to appear would seem both churlish and chicken-hearted, to speak would be to brave the wrath of the Foreign Office and perhaps to provoke an international incident. In dismay, Heath appealed to the British Ambassador, Lord Lothian. Not for nothing was Lothian known as one of the most ingeniously devious of politicians: they should agree to speak, he ruled, but only on condition that one proposed and one opposed the motion. That way nobody could claim that the visitors were trying to manoeuvre America into the war. The fact that the more eloquent and well-briefed of the speakers seemed always to be the one who favoured intervention could in no way be blamed on the British representatives.

Heath did not delude himself that his efforts had any marked impact on American public opinion. The most usual question – not easily answered – was why, if the war was being waged in support of Poland, Britain and France were not also at war with the other aggressor, Russia. They met very little out-and-out pacifism but did not feel that they had done much to shake ‘the final and all-compelling assumption that America must stay out of the war’.⁶ Some universities were content to abide by the choice of subject made by the visitors. At Brooklyn College the debate turned on what should be done after the war to secure a lasting peace. This was a topic on which Heath had already thought deeply and which had preoccupied him during his recent trip to Europe. In the debate he envisaged various possibilities, not mutually exclusive, but inclined to the view that the best hope was a federal Europe, a ‘United States of Europe…in which states will have to give up some of their national rights…There seems to be a better view for the future if we lean towards a federalism that can be secured either by joining with a small national group and/or big group, because this seems to be the most foolproof sort of thing you can get.’⁷ It was the first public airing of a view which, though from time to time modified, was to dominate his thinking for the rest of his life.

On his way back to England he mused on the differences between the New World which he had just visited and tired old Europe. America was a new country and ‘though it lacks dignity is filled with pulsating life’. Britain’s rulers, on the other hand, were ‘out of touch, uninspired, content to deal with new problems in an old way. The opposition is just as lifeless and tied to dogmas and formulae of which everyone is heartily sick.’ What was needed was a new breeze which would sweep away ‘stuffiness, dead convention, stultifying distinctions, all those things which paralyse our national and individual life’. But it would not be enough to produce some prophet who would ‘talk in vague generalisations’; he must be able to conjure up visions in other people’s minds, but also ‘to think things through right to the bitter end, a leader who is practical and strong’. Who that leader might be and where he would spring from, he did not surmise. Given the astonishing self-confidence that was already so apparent it would be surprising if, at the back of his mind, he did not cherish a hope that it might one day be him. At the moment the Tory Party seemed a spent force. Could it be revived? Was he right in thinking that his future lay with its left wing rather than with ‘the Liberals, whose practical policy and mode of thought is much more in keeping with my own than those of many Conservatives; or the Socialists, most of whom are from my own “class” and are perhaps more concerned than many Conservatives with domestic problems?’ It was the issue that he had faced when he joined the Conservative Association at Oxford, and he reached the same conclusion. But the question still was how they were ‘to secure greater equality of opportunity and of wealth and abolish class distinction’. The Socialist recipes – confiscation of wealth, high taxation, nationalisation – repelled him: ‘If one has government control and planning it becomes national socialism and political control too often follows.’ But what was the alternative: spending to make work, deficit spending, the American New Deal? Such a policy would be risky but at least it would be positive and would offer the possibility of fruitful advance.⁸

He knew that such speculation was largely academic. Political activity would be at a low ebb until the end of the war and, anyway, he expected that he would quickly be called up and would have many more immediate preoccupations. His younger brother, John, was already with the infantry in France, yet Heath was kept hanging about. ‘I’m horribly bored,’ he told a Balliol friend some time in the early summer of 1940.

I’ve been waiting now since February…without anything really to do. Each time I’ve heard from them or pressed them I’ve been told I should be wanted in only a couple of weeks, with the result that it was impossible for me to get a temporary job to pass the time. I was called up once actually for the Buffs [John’s regiment] but two days before I had to report I received another notice saying ‘owing to unforeseen circumstances’ my calling-up notice was cancelled…I’m rather anxious to get in and get on with it…There is so much to do and, as ever, so little time to do it. What a struggle it will have to be, but what a magnificent opportunity.⁹

From Balliol, Lindsay had promised to do what he could to get Heath into military Intelligence, but either his attempt aborted or he forgot about it. When Heath finally came before the Board he found that he had been assigned to the Royal Artillery. He had every hope that he would be commissioned as an officer within a few months, but the basic training that had to be undergone by every gunner lay ahead of him. ‘I don’t think I regret what’s coming,’ he told his diary resignedly. ‘It may well be for the best.’ There would be hardships, of course: uncomfortable clothes, lack of privacy, gruelling hard work, difficult hours, ‘bad food served absolutely revoltingly’, but there would be good things too: fitness, discipline, relief from responsibility for a while. Living cheek-by-jowl with ‘people of whom he knew nothing, unintelligent people, uneducated people, unstimulating and unstimulatable’, was the thing that frightened him most. Yet he recognised that ‘if I could feel at the end that I knew them and what they expected from life it would be a good thing’. He prayed that there would be at least a few men ‘reasonably like people I’m accustomed to’; but at the same time he told himself that he should welcome the chance to escape from his background and the class with which he had been assimilated: ‘I have a desire, perhaps when analysed not very rational or even sane, to get “hard” like other men; to take the knocks they can take, to go wining and whoring with them. Yet whenever I meet them I feel repelled by their lack of intelligence and concern only with things like pay, leave and food. Perhaps my nature’s different.’¹⁰

When the call-up did eventually come in August 1940 Heath found that his nature was not so very different after all, or at least that physical exhaustion and a common resentment of the iniquities of the lance-bombardier in charge of his barrack room produced a sense of camaraderie and mutual tolerance among the recruits. By good fortune he found a fellow music-lover, a future director of the New York City Ballet, among the other novice gunners at the training camp near Storrington in Sussex; still more remarkably they found that the composer Sir Arnold Bax was a habitué of the local pub. Even without such resources, however, Heath would have found life at Storrington tolerable, almost enjoyable. It was comforting for him to know where he stood in relation to other people, exactly where his duties began and ended. He could not have endured for long his lowly status, the total absence of responsibility, but for the three months of basic training it suited him very well. Given his record, he would have had to do something badly wrong not to be selected for a commission; he made no such blunder and was duly sent as an officer cadet to Shrivenham in Wiltshire. His training there was as straightforward and as uneventful as at Storrington. In March 1941 he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery and posted to a Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment at Chester. For the next three years and two months he shuttled around the United Kingdom, occasionally helping defend Britain’s cities against air attack, more often sitting around waiting for something to happen.

What quickly became evident was that Heath was a good soldier. Whether he had the qualities necessary for success at the highest level was never to be tested, but as a regimental officer he showed himself impressively calm, clear-headed, resolute and with marked organisational skills. One of his few faults, indeed, was a tendency to over-organise. When his battery was to move from the north prior to embarkation for France, for instance, he worked out every detail, even down to the seats the individual men would occupy, and produced a set of instructions so comprehensive that nobody could be bothered to read, let alone implement them. The results, as he ruefully admitted, were ‘completely catastrophic’.¹¹ On this occasion he recognised his failing and resolved to correct it. But he never altogether conquered his conviction that every eventuality had to be prepared for, every problem foreseen. Time and again he was to be disappointed when things did not turn out as he had expected; each time it came as a disagreeable surprise.

At his level at least it was a fault generally on the right side: better too much organisation than too little or none at all. Successive commanding officers paid tribute to his talents. ‘I consider E. R. G. Heath to be the most capable officer I met in any department during the four years in which I had command,’ wrote Major Tyrell, when recommending Heath for a military MBE. ‘He had personality, drive and ability of the highest order. He was quick to grasp essentials and to formulate plans and his determination, energy and enthusiasm guarantee that they shall not miscarry. I find it difficult to present a fair picture of a man in whom I could detect no weakness of character, whose intellectual scope and integrity I could but admire and for whom I feel nothing but respect and affection.’ Colonel Chadd, who was to become a lifelong friend and make Heath godfather to his son, was equally complimentary. ‘At his interview,’ Chadd wrote, Heath told him that after the war, ‘he hoped to go into politics. Within a very short space of time Ted was held in the highest possible esteem by all of us – officers and other ranks alike – and we were quite sure that one day he could be prime minister.’ (Given that this was written in 1946 the officers and other ranks in question were remarkably perceptive.)¹²

Not everyone was so ecstatic. Tony Race, his site commander when he was posted near Liverpool, found him ‘mature and confident’ and admired his ‘stamina and efficiency’, but felt him to be ‘a little withdrawn. He hadn’t a warm personality.’ But even this accusation – which was to become all too familiar over the years – was denied by his admirers. ‘The men liked him,’ claimed Chadd. ‘He was never impatient with dullards or arrogant to people not so bright as himself.’ When he took over a battery from a major who had commanded it for several years, he was viewed with some suspicion. ‘We were none too happy,’ remembered the orderly room sergeant, James Hyde:

Up to then he had been an administrator. He hadn’t done any fighting worth speaking of…But I think it’s right to say that within a fortnight or three weeks he exercised such a persuading influence…that one found Heath was first class. So far as administration was concerned, he was perfect. The other reason he was first class – and this was to my surprise – was that he rapidly understood the men and their reactions…Within a month or two it was Heath’s battery. The men liked him because they thought he was a fair man.¹³

He became adjutant of his regiment in March 1942. ‘I imagine life as an Adjutant must suit you down to the ground,’ wrote Kay Raven. She wrote to him regularly throughout the war; letters beginning ‘Darling Teddy’ but rarely venturing beyond the chatty or the gossipy. She was now an officer in the WAAF and in 1944 Heath sent her a photograph. ‘My batwoman asked me if “that was my steady – he looks just like a film star”! Knowing her tastes, you must be a cross between Charles Boyer and Bob Hope. So now you reside on my mantelpiece and greet me in my waking and sleeping.’¹⁴ Whether he was her steady was a question which even he would have found it hard to answer. In a letter to Tim Bligh, a Balliol friend who was later to become principal private secretary to Harold Macmillan, he had evidently envisaged the possibility of marriage. ‘I would like to point out,’ replied Bligh, ‘that there are more convenient methods of experiencing the grand passion, and as you should know we can justly claim the title of lady-killers par excellence.’¹⁵ The reputation of lady-killer was not one to which Heath aspired, but even if he had considered marrying Kay it would have been a long-term project, not to be contemplated until the war was over. They met rarely, and when they did the meetings, for Kay, generally ended in frustration. ‘I’m awfully sorry about spoiling it the other night,’ she wrote after their leaves had for once coincided. ‘It was the horror of months of going by and hearing nothing of you…Perhaps it won’t be so long before you are back again.’¹⁶

By that time Heath had already spent nearly a year in Europe. His last months in England had been marred by a gangrenous appendix, which should have been operated on months before and nearly cost him his life. By the time it was removed he was convinced he was going to die. He wrote, in high emotion, to his parents, ‘It is not possible to thank you for all you have done, for your love, for my schooling, my career, and for the sacrifices which you have all the time made. Everything I have done I have owed largely to my early training and the standards you taught me.’ The tribute was most sincerely meant. Fortunately it never needed to be dispatched. The appendix was successfully removed, though its condition was so revolting that the hospital had it pickled and put on exhibition as a reminder of what should never happen.¹⁷

Heath and his regiment crossed the Channel a month after D-Day and fought their way towards Belgium, taking part, on the way, in the bombardment of Caen and the battle of the Falaise Gap. For a time they lingered in Antwerp, then in September 1944 moved on to support the allied forces trying to relieve the airborne troops at Arnhem. Their most serious action, wrote John Campbell in his biography, was keeping open the vital bridge at Nijmegen. ‘Nonsense!’ Heath scrawled in the margin; it is hard to understand why he took exception to the comment, because the action was indeed both bloody and of critical importance.¹⁸ The level of casualties among the gunners is usually lower than that in the infantry, but in the advance into Germany Heath frequently saw men die within a few yards of him and was constantly in danger. He never wavered. This officer, said his citation, ‘showed outstanding initiative and devotion to duty…His work was of a very high order and contributed largely to the success achieved.’

His last year as a soldier was spent in Germany. For three months he was in charge of a prisoner-of-war camp near Hanover. ‘I hope my experience and knowledge of the German people helped me to run the show with understanding and fairness,’ he told Professor Winckler.¹⁹ He was put in charge of the reconstruction of the city and gave the rebuilding of the opera house top priority. Whether the German population was entirely in accord with his scale of values is uncertain. Since the Brigade Commander was equally insistent that the racecourse should be reopened rapidly it is possible that they felt their housing needs were being unreasonably overlooked.

In his memoirs Heath records in moving detail the execution by firing squad of a Pole found guilty by court martial of aggravated rape and murder. He was in charge and had to give the order to fire. ‘I believe’, he wrote, ‘this made a mark on my mind which later crystallised the view to which I have adhered for nearly four decades of my political career, as to the justification for abolishing the death penalty in peace time.’ He is never known to have referred to this incident until work on the memoirs was almost completed. Rupert Allason in his as yet unpublished biography of Heath casts doubt on the story. He points out that no record of such an execution exists in the files kept by the Court Martial Centre. Since the war was four months over when the incident is alleged to have taken place, the guilty man would have been hanged rather than shot. A major would not normally have commanded a firing squad. The situation is not as clear-cut as Allason suggests. A few executions by firing squad did in fact take place after the end of the war. There are no records of executions of soldiers of Polish origin serving in the British Army at the time in question but, given the situation in Germany at the time, the Ministry of Defence believes that the victim could have been a member of the Polish land forces serving under allied command. Another possibility is that the executed Pole was incorrectly described as a soldier. One Polish national, Piotr Kuczerawy, was executed in Hanover at a time when Heath’s regiment was based in the city and it is possible that he found himself charged with this grisly task. Heath was in general a scrupulously truthful man and he had nothing to gain by inventing such a story. On the whole it seems likely that his story is substantially correct. Certainly the result was as he indicated; in the course of his political career he was consistent in his opposition to the death penalty.²⁰

He might have been in a position to vote on the issue even before the supposed incident took place. Early in 1945 an Army Council Instruction invited anyone interested in fighting the anticipated general election to fill in a form requesting the necessary three weeks’ leave. Heath applied for a copy of the form. Andrew Roth, one of Heath’s biographers, suggests that he hoped to be adopted as Conservative candidate for the Isle of Thanet. He does not seem to have made any serious effort to press his candidature. In his memoirs he writes that he decided not to stand in the 1945 general election ‘because I did not feel that I could abandon my colleagues in the regiment at such a time’. This is certainly part of the story: Heath was conspicuously loyal to those with whom he served and in the post-war years did much to help any former fellow servicemen who had got into trouble or needed a leg-up in their career. But there may have been another contributory factor; that in the circumstances of 1945, he was not sure he wanted the Conservatives to win.²¹

He never seriously contemplated joining any other party. The nearest he came to it – and that was not very near – had arisen from a chance encounter early in 1945 when he was on leave in England. Late at night, while waiting for a train at a provincial station, he went into the tea room. There he found Arthur Jenkins, father of Roy and a pps to Clement Attlee, whom he had met several times at Oxford before the war. Jenkins, it turned out, was waiting for Attlee and when the Deputy Prime Minister arrived Heath joined them. Jenkins explained who he was. ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. ‘He’s now commanding a battery in Germany,’ said Jenkins. ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. ‘From what he’s been saying he’s obviously still interested in politics.’ ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. ‘I think he’ll make a damn good politician.’ ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. ‘I think we ought to try to grab him as one of our candidates.’ ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. At this point Heath’s train was announced. ‘This’, he concluded, ‘was the nearest I ever came to becoming a Labour candidate.’²²

Though he is said to have told his old acquaintance and future opponent, Ashley Bramall, that he was still uncertain whether he wanted to take up politics,²³ he never doubted that if he did so it would be as a Tory. But in 1945 the disillusionment which he had expressed on the journey back from the United States still lingered. He believed that the old Conservative Party survived unregenerate, governed, as it had been before the war, by ‘stuffiness, dead convention, stultifying distinctions’. If, as almost everyone assumed would be the case, they were returned to power on the coat-tails of Churchill’s popularity, then these attitudes would survive unchanged. A period of opposition would give the modernisers a chance to take control of the party and reshape its thinking and its principles. He did not expect, still less hope for, the landslide Labour victory of 1945, but there was some comfort to be drawn from it. Certainly he rejoiced that he had not personally been involved in the debacle.

He had one last searing experience before he returned to England and civilian life. In February 1946 he drove across a shattered Germany to Nuremberg, where the trial of the Nazi war criminals was in progress. In the dock were those leaders whom he had seen or even shaken hands with eight years before. Then they had been rulers of Germany, soon to be rulers of the continent; now they were reviled and tragic figures. In the meantime, Europe had been almost destroyed. Somehow it must be made impossible for this to happen again. ‘My generation did not have the option of living in the past: we had to work for the future…Only by working together right across our continent had we any hope of creating a society which would uphold the true values of European civilisation.’ Heath’s vision of a united Europe had been formed before the war but it was in Germany in 1945 that it found its full realisation.²⁴

FOUR In Waiting for Westminster

‘I now so often have the feeling’, Heath had written on the way back from the United States at the beginning of 1940, ‘that I’ve a lot of energy, power, ambition, and so on, and yet nothing to which to harness it. Is this, I wonder, because I’ve got so many things I haven’t thought out and that, when I’ve done that, I shall see the way to go? Or am I just blasé?’¹ Blasé was certainly not something which Heath could have been accused of being at any point in his life. To most people in 1940 he had appeared impressively clear-headed and decisive. His inner uncertainty, his doubt as to where he should go and how he should get there, were largely kept to himself: unconfiding by nature, he was least of all inclined to expose his weaknesses, even to those few whom he trusted fully. By 1946, to a large extent, those doubts had been resolved. He knew that he wished his long-term future to lie in politics; that the Conservative Party, for all its imperfections, was the only institution that offered him a chance to realise this ambition; that within that party his loyalties would lie with the left, reforming wing. The war had confirmed his belief in his own powers and helped him decide where those powers were to take him. He was tougher and more effective in 1946 than he had been six years before. It was perhaps symbolic of his evolution that the cosy ‘Teddy’ of pre-war years had now become a starker, sterner ‘Ted’. Not all his old friends made the change, even among new acquaintances some still preferred the earlier form, but by 1946 ‘Ted Heath’ had established itself as the address most usually employed. It was to remain so until his death.

His family never fully recognised the change. It was Teddy Heath who returned to the family home in Broadstairs. Even more than before the war he was the centre of attention. William Heath’s business was prospering in the post-war building boom and it was no longer necessary to take in paying guests. For the first time, Teddy and his brother, John, had separate rooms. But John had slipped still further from centre stage. To his father’s disappointment he had refused to join the family firm and had instead taken a job in a local radio shop. Within a year he had become engaged and was moving out.

The marriage lasted only a few years. John’s wife, Marian, maintained that Teddy Heath was the be-all and end-all of his mother’s and, to a lesser but still considerable extent, his father’s life. There were only two comfortable chairs in the kitchen/living room: Teddy would commandeer one while his mother sat knitting socks in the other. ‘She was always knitting socks.’ William and John helped with the washing-up; Teddy was never expected to join in. Everyone had to dress for breakfast except Teddy, who was allowed to come down in his dressing gown. His mother waited on him hand and foot: ‘I’ve seen her sitting there cracking nuts for him so that he wouldn’t have to crack them himself.’²

Teddy was ‘very clannish’ and expected the family to do things together, wrote Marian. It was always he who had the final choice as to what was to be done. On one occasion she revolted and, even though Teddy favoured a family picnic, insisted that she and John should go on the river with some cousins. ‘When I say we quarrelled, it was a case of Teddy and I crossing swords while the rest of the family sat around in awe-struck silence.’ He did not share the same circle of friends as John and Marian and was often to be seen striding along the cliffs or seafront immersed in thought. Such friends as he had in the neighbourhood were noticeably more mature – except for an occasional game of tennis he had little to do with the young. ‘My father was once invited to lunch with the Heaths,’ wrote Marian, ‘and was astounded to find Teddy walking in and out of the room without seemingly seeing anyone. He was so wrapped up in his thoughts and plans for the future.’ He was not ungenerous – more often than not he paid if they went to the cinema or on some similar outing – but Marian was told by Mrs Heath to make nothing of it: ‘Teddy hates to be thanked, he gets embarrassed,’ she explained.

When John and Marian were married, Teddy was best man and made what Marian remembered as a ‘most amusing speech’. There were no bridesmaids, so, he said, he felt in no way committed: ‘I might add that he was the only one not to kiss the bride.’ Kay Raven would certainly have been among the family friends at the wedding. ‘She was looked on by all as Teddy’s girlfriend,’ wrote Marian. ‘It was a strange relationship. Teddy never seemed very attentive, yet she didn’t seem to mind.’ She minded more than appeared but she had to put up with what she could get. John Heath never believed that there was any serious romance between his brother and Kay; so far as Teddy, at least, was concerned, it was ‘a bit of a smoke screen’ which provided him with a convincing reason for not forming a relationship with any other woman.

Broadstairs provided a convenient base to which he could retreat, but there was no question of Heath seeking a job in the neighbourhood. Politics were his long-term ambition and he hoped the wait would not be very long. His plan was to have found a seat before the next general election. By that time he would be 35 or thereabouts. But in the meantime he had to earn a living, ideally a living in a career which he could continue part-time when he had become a Member and which would pay enough to enable him to make some savings. Though he says in his memoirs that the scholarship to read law at Gray’s Inn which he had nearly secured before the war was still available, it does not seem that any specific promise had been made. Even if it had been, he had decided that the law was ‘rather dry’ and that it would take him five or six years to earn a modest salary.³ Academic life, even if he had been suited to it, was hardly the ideal jumping-off ground for politics. The Master of Balliol tried to fix him up with a job as personal assistant to the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford; Heath had his doubts about this, the Professor had still more and looked elsewhere. One problem was that Heath made no secret of his political ambitions and this discouraged possible employers who were looking for a longer-term commitment. He could have been Meetings Secretary at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House – a post which would have brought him into close contact with many leading politicians – but when they realised that they might only have the benefit of his services for a few years, they lost interest.

The same was true when he looked to business and industry. ‘At the moment I have six irons in the fire; two of them certainties if I want them and I hope to get them sorted out this month,’ he told a friend in November 1946. One of the certainties was ICI, but when Heath told them that he hoped to be standing for parliament at the next election the certainty became unstuck and he was told he could not be considered. Another certainty or near-certainty was the North Central Wagon and Finance Company. This job would have carried with it alluring prospects of promotion to chairman within three years, but though this would have been lucrative it would have involved a move to Rotherham, unacceptably far from the political power centre. Unilever seemed more promising but here there appears to have been some misunderstanding. Heath thought that they were not disturbed by his wish to enter parliament, but the report on his application said that he had abandoned his political ideas without regret: ‘Provided he really can subordinate his interests in politics as a career, I believe he would be very well suited to business.’ The man who interviewed him could hardly have been more flattering. Heath, he said, was ‘one of those rare men who is extremely competent intellectually yet a normal, pleasant, honest person…I found him very likeable’. Under the heading ‘Quality of Social Relations’ the interviewer said: ‘I rate this man very high. He strikes me as a well-balanced, human sort of person whom others would willingly work for and with.’ He was offered a management traineeship. Possibly the true position about his political ambitions now came to light; certainly he turned the offer down.⁴

There remained the civil service. Heath knew that if he became a parliamentary candidate he would not be able to continue to work in Whitehall but that he would be free to pursue his career until that point was reached. If he never succeeded in finding a winnable seat he would at least have a respectable profession on which to fall back; if he did escape to politics he would have gained valuable experience of the workings of the civil service. He appeared before the Final Selection Board in August 1947. Just over 200 applicants survived to face this ultimate hurdle. Twenty-two passed in, and of these Heath was top. With this glittering success he could reasonably have expected to be able to choose his department. He was told that the Foreign Office was his for the asking (whether the Foreign Office had been consulted over this is unclear; they were a law unto themselves when it came to selecting future diplomats). The idea was appealing in many ways, but Heath realised that the long periods of exile which the career would involve would be incompatible or at least hard to reconcile with a move into politics. His wish was to join the Treasury, which he felt carried the greatest prestige and wielded power over all the Whitehall departments. Peter Masefield, his eventual boss in the civil service, thought that possibly his avowed political ambitions, though no bar to entry into the civil service, counted against him when it came to the choice of a department. Heath openly admitted that his main concern was to gain experience which would be of use to him when an MP; to the Treasury this may have seemed lèse-majesté. Whatever the reason, to his chagrin he was consigned to the fledgling Ministry of Civil Aviation. His first task was to work with the future Dame Alison Munro, deciding which of the 700 mainly grass airfields dotted around the country should be retained for future development. Heath was responsible for the airfields near London, Alison Munro for the rest of the United Kingdom.⁵

Soon he found himself working almost exclusively to the head of the Long-Range Planning Department, Peter Masefield. Masefield was a man of enterprise and imagination, a temporary civil servant who, in a couple of years, was to move on to take charge of British European Airways. Masefield took to Heath, pronouncing him ‘pleasant, sound and highly intelligent…And, with all, when you get to know him (which isn’t easy) he is a sensitive and warm-hearted chap who has a direct approach and an endearing sense of the ridiculous.’ Heath quickly found himself with a finger in a wide range of pies, from the development of the Comet to the planning of Heathrow (a name for which he accepted no responsibility). This last task was particularly stressful. ‘Every time I arrive at Heathrow,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I shudder to think that I was in any way involved in the creation of that monstrosity.’ But for his efforts, it might have been more monstrous still. The first plans provided for no parking areas and no aircraft piers to avoid the need for buses. Heath championed both causes and won the day. ‘He used to go and fight on the committee,’ Masefield remembered, ‘and come back and cry on my shoulder about all the spokes put in the wheel by bumbledom.’⁶ Another achievement with which Masefield credited him was persuading de Havillands, when the Comet was in the final stages of development, to substitute four-wheel undercarriage legs for the two-wheel version which they had been proposing to use. The ‘Heath modification’, as Masefield called it, made it possible for the Comet to land on many runways which would otherwise have been too weak to support the impact. ‘That change’, Masefield told Heath many years later, ‘enabled 77 Comets to be produced and used throughout the world.’⁷

Masefield quickly recognised that Heath was an invaluable member of his team. ‘But I fear I shall not have him here for long’, he wrote regretfully, ‘because, outside the office, he lives and dreams politics.’⁸ He was right. Heath’s first move was to try for a job in the Conservative Research Department, a body which, under Rab Butler, was busily rebuilding a new and more progressive Tory Party from the ruins left by the 1945 election. He knew that several of the cleverest and most ambitious of the young Conservatives – Iain Macleod, Enoch Powell, Reginald Maudling – were already at work there; he longed to be doing the same thing himself and was uneasily conscious of the fact that they were snatching a lead over him in the race up the greasy pole of political advancement. Michael Fraser, a wartime friend, was another rising star in the department; Heath appealed to him but was told there was no vacancy or any prospect of one in the near future. By then he was already embarked on the road which he knew he would one day have to travel: the quest for a constituency. Early in 1947 he added his name to the approved list of prospective candidates held by Central Office. He had high hopes that, with his talents and qualifications, he would quickly be selected. By the standards of some would-be candidates he did indeed have a relatively easy passage, but he still suffered some disconcerting setbacks along the way.

The first constituency to summon him for an interview was Ashford, in Kent. It went well, but when it came to the final selection the chairman said that they wanted a member who would apply himself wholeheartedly to the needs of the constituency. Would Heath promise that, if he was offered a job in any forthcoming Conservative government, he would turn it down? Heath would give no such undertaking; for him the main point of being in the House of Commons was the prospect it offered of serving in the government. Ashford rejected him, in favour of the Daily Telegraph journalist Bill Deedes. Deedes later said that he had been selected for the seat because he wore a tweed jacket for his interview while Heath wore a city suit. To this Heath retorted that, at the time, he didn’t even own a city suit.⁹ There may nevertheless have been something in what Deedes said. Though the reformers might be busily at work in London, in the shires the Tory Party was still a highly traditional if not reactionary body. The selectors in a largely rural constituency like Ashford would have wished their member, if not actually drawn from the landed gentry, at least to look and sound as if he were. Heath, with his suspect accent and unabashed lower-middle-class origins, was far from this ideal. The fact that he got through to the final round shows that any such prejudice was not held too seriously, but there could well have been an element of snobbishness in the final selection.

When Rochester and Sevenoaks followed Ashford in preferring another man, Heath began to feel discouragement, but in September 1947 the constituency of Bexley, in north-west Kent on the fringes of London, was looking for a candidate. It was a Labour seat, which meant that competition for it would not be so intense as it had been for Ashford or Sevenoaks; on the other hand the sitting member, Ashley Bramall, had a majority of only 1,851, so it would not need too significant a swing to restore the seat to its traditionally Tory incumbent. Geographically it was ideally placed, being on Heath’s route from central London to Broadstairs. Best of all, the local party chairman, Edward Dines, was said to be looking for a candidate who was ‘not rich or grand but from an ordinary family’. His other criteria for an ideal candidate – that he should be young, well educated, versed in political science and a ‘local boy made good’ – seemed equally applicable to Heath; Broadstairs was not actually Bexley but it was in the same county and, as the crow flies, not much more than fifty miles away. Best of all, Dines thought that the fact Heath was a bachelor told in his favour; marriage and family could have distracted him from his constituency work. Heath sailed through the preliminary stages and, with two other possibles, faced the selection committee for a second time on 18 September. Gladys Whittaker was one of the selectors. ‘That half-smile of his is what I will always remember,’ she said many years later. ‘Of course, he was good on policy, but it is the smile that sticks in my mind. It was not the broad grin which we are used to from him now, but a shy kind of half-smile.’ The shy smile proved decisive. Heath was selected. The approval of the choice of candidate by the Association was a formality. Heath was asked whether he proposed to live in Bexley. He replied that, given the shortage of housing in the constituency and the easy access to it from both Westminster and Broadstairs, he did not think that this was necessary or even desirable. His argument was accepted without demur and on 7 November he was adopted as candidate without a dissenting vote.¹⁰

This was only a start. The next general election might be more than two years away. Heath was confident that the tide was turning towards the Conservatives but far from sure that by then it would have moved far enough to gain him victory. ‘The landslide was so great that it is bound to be some time before there can be a complete changeover,’ he told Professor Winckler. ‘People don’t change their minds so quickly. It may take place before the next election; that will depend a good deal on the crisis and the economic situation, and how constructive the Tories can be. They have to win back a great deal of confidence before they can be certain of the result of an election.’¹¹ For him, the worst possible result would be if the Tories won the election but he failed to carry Bexley. Even if the constituency remained loyal he would be left fuming on the sidelines while his contemporaries established themselves in government. A swing great enough to return the Tories to power should also carry him into the House of Commons, but confident though Heath was in his own abilities he knew enough about the vagaries of politics to realise that the worst could happen.

That, however, was a problem for the future. Earning his living until the next election was his most immediate preoccupation. Though he was never entirely fulfilled by his work in the Ministry of Civil Aviation – ‘I couldn’t get anything done,’ he said much later. ‘I was so impatient. You mustn’t go there hoping to change the world.’¹² – he had enjoyed his time there and would happily have stayed on for another couple of years. Masefield tried to persuade the establishment that this should be allowed but got nowhere: as an adopted candidate for parliament Heath must resign and resign at once. ‘I am exceedingly sorry to lose Mr Heath,’ Masefield concluded. ‘His work during the past year has been of the utmost value and on several occasions has been favourably commented on by the Minister.’¹³ For Heath it was back to the Oxford University Appointments Board. The first job vacant turned out to be that of sub-editor on the Church Times. He knew nothing of theology and had no experience as a journalist, promotion would be unpredictable because of the small size of the staff, the work seemed likely to be easy to learn but pretty dull: on the other hand the pay – £650 a year – was good, they were ‘very pleasant people’, and they did not seem to mind about the political connection provided his name was not publicly linked with the newspaper. ‘I am still waiting to see your name emblazoned over the Church Times,’ wrote a friend. He was to wait in vain. Heath’s main task was editing other people’s copy; when he did write pieces himself they were anonymous. The last thing he wanted, indeed, was to be too conspicuous. He had belatedly discovered that the Bexley selection committee had a rooted aversion to journalists. The Church Times, he protested, was too respectable to count as a real paper; the argument was accepted but he did not want to test the committee’s tolerance too severely.¹⁴

John Trevisick, a reporter on the staff, felt that Heath had no real flair for journalism and tried to steer clear of serious writing. But he was quick to grasp the essentials of any problem and, when called on to do so, wrote with clarity and precision: ‘I have vivid memories of Heath being roped in to cover the Anglo-Catholic Congress – a really tough job…But he turned in a workmanlike précis of what he had heard, thus reflecting his ability.’¹⁵ His inexperience sometimes led him into blunders: he caused some consternation when, never having heard of the UMCA (the Universities Mission to Central Africa), he assumed it was a typing error and corrected it throughout to YMCA. But his real talent was for administration. Though his position in the hierarchy gave him no particular authority, another of his colleagues, Nicholas Bagnall, remembers that ‘after a couple of months he had us eating out of his hands. He did it by force of personality, mainly by making it obvious how hard he worked himself.’ The editor’s secretary was so impressed by his prowess that she told Bagnall: ‘Mark my words, Nicholas, that man will be prime minister one day.’ Bagnall was not prepared to go as far as that: ‘To the rest of us he simply didn’t look like Downing Street material: not nearly devious enough, we thought.’ Besides, the secretary in question, according to Bagnall, was in love with Heath. Heath, alarmed by her adoring looks, took Bagnall to a pub for a consultation. ‘What on earth shall I do about this woman?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think I was much help,’ Bagnall recorded. (When, many years later, he told this story to Mrs Thatcher, she expostulated: ‘Impossible! No one could love Ted Heath.’)¹⁶

Whatever his secretary might have felt about Heath, the editor, Humphrey Beevor, looked on him with a jaundiced eye. ‘Politically they were poles apart,’ said another member of the staff, ‘Heath to the right, Beevor to the left. Heath was an army man of steady disposition; Beevor was a navy type, a brilliant man but a man of moods.’ He would fly into a passion over some trivial slip, and delighted in trying to catch Heath out on abstruse theological points – not a difficult task, since, though Heath soon mastered the technical jargon which beset religious reporting, his bent for philosophy remained obstinately under-developed. But though Beevor had little enthusiasm for his thrusting young sub-editor he was quite content to let him pursue his political interests in his spare time. When eventually the Board considered the matter, it was minuted that, though they too had no objection, they were concerned lest his activities as a would-be member of parliament took up an undue amount of his energies. They had some grounds for disquiet: one friend complained that, whenever he rang up the Church Times and asked to speak to Heath, he was told that he was out and that ‘Mr Heath’s private movements are unknown to us’. ‘From the frequency of that remark,’ the friend commented, ‘I have gained the notion that the majority of your movements fall into this category!’ Heath was constitutionally incapable of not giving value for money but it was clear to anyone that his heart was not wholly in his work. The Board agreed that he could stay on until he actually became involved in an election, but as early as August 1948 Heath told a friend on the Oxford Appointments Board that he had decided to leave as soon as another possibility offered itself. The trouble was, he said, that he was ‘liable to be sent anywhere at any time. This means that I can never make an engagement and be absolutely certain of keeping it.’¹⁷

He wanted an employer who would offer regular hours, who would not be concerned by the fact that he would shortly be fighting an election, who might provide work on a part-time basis even after Heath became an MP and who would offer him new experiences that would be useful in his life as a politician. ‘I must say that I think it will be hard to get what you want,’ wrote his father apprehensively; then, with a return to his habitual cheerfulness: ‘Keep trying. Mummy has a feeling that something is going to turn up for you.’ Heath looked to the City of London and found the solution in Brown Shipley, a small but well-established merchant bank which specialised in financing deals in timber and wool. It was not ideal. The work would involve frequent visits to the north of England, which would provide useful knowledge for the future but would also make more difficult the nursing of his constituency. Worse still, Brown Shipley were only prepared to take him on as a management trainee at a miserable £200 a year and lunch in the staff canteen. This would involve a serious sacrifice. Heath felt it was worth it. The training would last only a few months, after which he could hope for employment as a full-time banker. Brown Shipley seemed delighted to have a potential Tory MP on their staff and were sure that they would be able to accommodate him in some way even if he did win his seat. He took the job, broke the news to a not particularly disappointed Beevor, and began work in the City in October 1949. Far more than at the Church Times, he seemed to fit in right away. ‘All the partners knew him,’ wrote the chairman, Ian Garnett-Orme, in 1970. ‘He was obviously highly intelligent and very interesting…He left a most awfully good impression here. Large numbers of people here went to help him in his election campaign. People don’t do that unless they like a man.’¹⁸

That election campaign was now imminent. Heath had been nursing the constituency assiduously and with great success. The Bexley Conservative Association had a membership of only 600 when Heath took over, within a year it had grown to 3,500, by the election it was over 6,000. Every weekend was spent in the constituency. For the work of wooing the voter and making himself a well-known local figure, Heath renounced all the social pleasures that a young man of his age could have expected to enjoy. Even more painful, he sacrificed the raffish sports car in which he had been accustomed to cover the distance between central London and Broadstairs. He loved his glamorous dark-green MG two-seater but reluctantly accepted that it did not create the right impression in a period of stark austerity and traded it in for a more mundane Vauxhall saloon.

The local party agent who insisted on such a change was right in this case, but wrong about much else. Worst of all, he suffered from folie de grandeur, and plotted to replace the chairman and other senior officers of the association by nominees of his own. Heath’s own position was not threatened in the short term but he would never have worked satisfactorily with the agent and would certainly have stood less chance of winning Bexley if no change had been made. He allied himself with the chairman, organised a counter-coup, and was triumphant. The agent resigned a few months later and it became clear that the finances of the local party were in disarray and that the fighting fund, which Heath had largely built up by his own efforts in preparation for the election, had been dissipated. With a general election probably only a year away, Heath found himself with an organisation in tatters and without the money essential to wage a successful campaign.

Things quickly improved. Central Office found an excellent replacement as an agent: Reginald Pye, a former rubber-planter in Sumatra, was hard-working, conscientious and level-headed. Quite as important, he liked Heath, appreciated his qualities and served him with total loyalty through twenty-five years and seven electoral campaigns. A good agent, especially if the MP concerned takes on responsibilities which make it hard to devote as much time as is desirable to the affairs of his constituency, is one of the most necessary elements of political life. From the moment Pye was appointed, Heath never had cause for serious concern about the running of his constituency. He was to prove as assiduous a member as he had been a candidate, but without the safety net of an efficient local organisation no MP can guard against the sort of lapse which leaves a sense of grievance among the constituents and can cost vital votes on election day. It was largely thanks to Pye that Heath was accepted, even by his political opponents, to be a model constituency member. It did not come easily. Though he genuinely enjoyed talking to the young about their ambitions and preoccupations, he lacked social graces and already showed some of the unease in company which was increasingly to mar his public life. ‘The road to Westminster’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘was not so much a long march as an interminable dinner-dance…I made more speeches, presented more prizes and danced more waltzes than I had ever done in my life.’¹⁹ Even for somebody more naturally sociable than Heath it must be a strain to be endlessly jolly while doing things that bore one with people whom one does not find particularly congenial. For Heath it must sometimes have been agonising. The prize was worth the price, but the price was a high one. It did not become smaller with the years. He developed a technique for coasting through social gatherings in overdrive, with fixed smile and a battery of bland banalities, but it never came easily and the self-discipline which kept the carapace in place became progressively more tattered as he grew in consequence and found the demands made on his time and energies ever less tolerable.

His colleagues in Brown Shipley were not the only people from outside the constituency who were ready to come to his help at election time. Among the many responsibilities which he crowded into an already amazingly cluttered life was the Territorial Army. Early in 1947 he was asked to re-form the 2nd Regiment of the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC) – a heavy anti-aircraft regiment. The HAC was the oldest surviving regiment in the British army and the second most senior territorial unit. Heath felt that the Territorial Army was a critically important element of Britain’s defences at a time when the Cold War was setting in and a hot war seemed a serious possibility. He was eager to serve in it and took immense pride in his association with a unit as ancient and distinguished as the HAC. He flung himself into the recruiting of members with all the energy and conviction he had shown in building up the Bexley Conservative Association. It was a time-consuming task: almost every day he had to devote some part of his energies to the affairs of the HAC; every Tuesday night was given up to drill at the HAC’s headquarters in Finsbury; once a year two weeks of his allotted holidays were spent at the annual training camp. For months before camp he would spend much of his exiguous spare time in preparation, while the months after would be devoted to consideration of what had gone right and what wrong. ‘Believe me,’ wrote a colleague in 1948, ‘the success at camp was due to your leadership, inspiration and enthusiasm, and in saying this I am confident that I speak for the whole Regiment.’ That he did speak for the whole regiment was shown by the number of volunteers who flocked to Bexley to help their commanding officer when the electoral campaign began.²⁰

Such military preoccupations, particularly when linked to a body as traditional as the Honourable Artillery Company, might suggest that Heath was as conservative in instincts as the political label that he bore. He did indeed cherish a nostalgic affection for some of the more picturesque and time-hallowed practices of the past but by the time of the 1950 election he had acquired the reputation of being a reformist, even, in the eyes of some, a dangerous radical. ‘Without sharing your desire for a larger opposition, I hope at least to see you here soon,’ wrote Roy Jenkins from the House of Commons. Whatever his father may have thought when he recommended Heath to Attlee as a potential Labour candidate, Roy Jenkins knew that Heath was a committed Tory, but he knew too that his Balliol friend was well to the left and that the two young men probably had more in common with each other than either did with the extremists of their own parties. At his adoption meeting Heath had told his future constituents that ‘there is still a suspicion of our party in the minds of the people’. That suspicion, he privately believed, had more than a little justification. The country was growing tired of Labour, he told Professor Winckler at the end of 1947, ‘but there is not yet, I regret to say, a very great revival of trust in the Conservatives. The Conservatives have still a lot of hard thinking to do about our present problems.’²¹

He regretted greatly that he was not himself in a position to contribute much to that process. He joined the Coningsby Club, a dining society where some of the more liberal Tories foregathered, but though this put him in touch with current thinking it was no substitute for joining in the policy making. Though he felt that the Labour Party was trying to do too much too fast, and was particularly sceptical about its belief that nationalisation was a panacea for all Britain’s social and economic woes, he accepted that much of what it was doing was necessary and desirable. He openly supported the nationalisation of the Bank of England and privately felt that it was inevitable that the coal industry too should come under public ownership. The Tory Party’s efforts to bring its policies up to date seemed to him belated but eminently desirable. He wholeheartedly backed Butler’s Industrial Charter, which for the first time in Tory circles accepted that the trade unions were a vital and desirable part of society and should be worked with rather than treated as enemies. He was a one-nation Conservative before the term had gained – or regained – popular acceptance, and he made it plain to the voters of Bexley that these were his views.

The voters of Bexley liked what he said and seemed prepared to believe him when he rejected Ashley Bramall’s claim that the Tories were bent on restoring a high level of unemployment as a means of curbing the just demands of Labour. But when the general election was called for 23 February 1950, it was anyone’s guess who would win at Bexley. Everyone accepted that the Tories had gained ground since their disaster of 1945, but would Bexley necessarily follow the national trend and, even if it did, would the swing be sufficient to wipe out Bramall’s majority? Heath had come in for his fair share of heckling and abuse at the innumerable meetings he addressed. ‘Your candidate was born in Kent,’ one local chairman had announced. No particular enthusiasm was evoked by this revelation. ‘He was educated in Kent!’ the chairman went on. Still the response was muted. ‘And he lives in Kent!’ the chairman concluded. ‘And for all I bloody well care, he can die in Kent!’ shouted a Labour supporter from the back. On the whole most of the meetings had gone well, but so too had Bramall’s. There was a Liberal candidate in the field who nobody thought would win but who was expected to poll a few thousand votes. At whose expense would those votes be cast? More satisfactorily from the point of view of the Tories, there was also a Communist standing: any votes he garnered could only come at the expense of Labour. By the early afternoon of polling day Heath was reasonably hopeful, but the flow of Labour voters on their way back from work disquieted him and by the time the count began neither Heath nor Bramall would have put money on their prospects. As the count went on it became obvious that it was going to be a desperately close-run thing. Finally the result was announced: both the leading candidates had secured between 25,000 and 26,000 votes; Heath led by a mere 166. The Communist had polled 481 votes, thus losing the election for Labour. ‘In the next election if you have any trouble finding money for your deposit I’ll look after that,’ a grateful Heath told him. ‘You must stand again. It’s your right to stand.’²²

Bramall demanded a recount. It took place and Heath’s majority shrank still further to a mere 133. A request for a further recount was lodged but refused unless the Labour candidate was prepared to meet the cost himself. This Bramall refused to do and the result was confirmed. Edward Heath at the age of 33 was Member of Parliament for Bexley. He would be joining a party still in opposition, for though the Conservative Party had made substantial gains, reducing Labour’s lead from 142 seats to a mere five, Labour could still cling on to power. From Heath’s point of view this was almost better than an overall victory. He could not have hoped to have been offered any sort of job if the Conservatives had won, it seemed likely that they would be in power after the next election, in the meantime a short period in opposition would give him a chance to make his maiden speech and establish his parliamentary identity.

Margaret Roberts, a young research chemist who was later to marry a prosperous businessman called Denis Thatcher, was standing in the neighbouring constituency of Dartford. She and Heath spoke at each other’s meetings during the campaign. ‘I hope you gallup to the top of the poll,’ read the telegram which Miss Roberts sent him on polling day. ‘Among my fellow Conservative candidates in neighbouring seats, only Margaret Roberts failed to be elected,’ Heath wrote in his memoirs. Whatever his feelings may have been when he wrote those words, at the time her failure caused him mild regret. For the rest, it was exultation.²³

FIVE The Young Member

Heath was no Pitt the Younger, entering parliament like a young lord taking possession of his ancestral home, but he found his first appearances in the House of Commons less stressful than did most of his newly elected colleagues. His political activities at Oxford, the year he had spent nursing his constituency, the assiduity with which he had cultivated useful connections at Westminster, all ensured that to some extent his reputation went before him; he was known to the leadership as a sound and useful man, potentially a suitable candidate for preferment. The first meetings of the House which he attended, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘reminded me more than anything of the debating chamber of the Oxford Union. Nothing could be more natural. I was coming home.’¹

The House had undergone a dramatic transformation since it had last met. A huge Labour majority had melted away; in spite of the fact that they had won 1¹/₂ million more votes than the Conservatives they had only 33 more seats and their majority over all other parties was five. Their front bench still contained the giants of the 1945 administration – Attlee, Bevin, Cripps, Morrison – but they had been in office since the formation of the coalition government in 1940; they were older, tired, in some cases seriously sick. Even that splendid firebrand, Aneurin Bevan, seemed to burn less fiercely; as for the backbenchers, they were demoralised and diminished, conscious that they were in for some gruelling sessions and probably defeat at the end of them.

The Tories had achieved electoral success which, if not as great as they had dreamed of, at least was vastly better than had appeared possible a few years before. One more push, it seemed, and victory would be theirs. Over the previous years, under the guidance of R. A. Butler, they had planned new Tory policies for a return to power, but it had seemed at times a dispiritingly academic exercise. Now there was a real chance that soon they would be able to put those policies into practice. This lent a new urgency to their deliberations and ensured that the members who had won their seats for the first time in February 1950 would have a chance to make their mark as representatives of a new Conservatism. The new entrants were, indeed, an outstandingly able and forward-looking group. Even the scions of the traditional Tory grandee families – Julian Amery, Christopher Soames – seemed to have a slight flavour of radicalism about them; most of the others came from minor public or grammar schools and offered some promise of a serious shift both in the social composition and in the thinking of the party. Heath was one of these, but not considered to be among those most obviously destined for stardom. Ian Trethowan, then a young parliamentary lobby correspondent, reckoned that Iain Macleod, Reginald Maudling and Enoch Powell were the three most exceptional of the new members, the men among whom a future leader of the party must be looked for. Heath, he considered, ‘in those early years seemed a conscientious but rather plodding man’.² But, along with Angus Maude, Robert Carr, Harold Watkinson, it was clear from the start that, whether or not he attained the stratosphere, he had to be reckoned with as potentially a formidable figure within the Tory hierarchy.

He made no attempt to thrust himself into the limelight with a premature display of fireworks. As in the Oxford Union, he was content at first to watch and listen. He ‘took the quiet but persistent way’, remembered Anthony Eden. ‘He attended the House regularly and modestly, but missed nothing. Pains and patience are needed to learn the way at Westminster. Heath had both.’³ In his first five years in the Commons Heath only missed ten divisions, and he had been paired in six of those. He put a parliamentary question in May 1950 – on an issue relating to civil aviation on which he could reasonably be held to have some expert knowledge – but did not make a speech in the House of Commons until 26 June. When he finally spoke, however, it was to considerable effect and on the subject with which his parliamentary career was above all to be identified: that of Europe.

It can be argued that Heath would never have become so irrevocably committed to the cause of Britain in Europe if he had not been entrusted by Harold Macmillan with the negotiations for British entry in the early 1960s. He was by nature strikingly single-minded and, if he had been given some other task, would have pursued it with similar dedication. But from the time that he had fought his way across Germany in 1945 he had felt passionately that war in Western Europe must never be allowed to happen again. The only way by which he felt this could be achieved with certainty was by tying Britain, France and Germany into a union so inextricable that war would become not merely inconceivable but impossible. Britain had to be part of such a group, not just to cement it but to lead it; as the Empire disintegrated British influence in the world would inevitably be diminished; only by entering Europe would the British be able to retain that position in the world, economic as well as political, to which they were accustomed. When colleagues suggested that any European Union, if it were truly to be a force in the world, would have to involve a possibly unacceptable sacrifice of national sovereignty on the part of its members, he brushed the arguments aside. The word ‘federalism’ held no terrors for him and he envisaged a Europe where, in the long term, all important decisions, whether on foreign policy, economics, defence or social policies, would be made in common, without any individual member state being able to frustrate the ambitions of the others. ‘The nation state is dead,’ he would say. ‘What has sovereignty to do with anything in the twentieth century?’⁴ But though these were his private views, he was still cautious about pressing them openly unless he was certain that he was addressing a sympathetic audience. One can feel pretty sure that he did not express himself very forcibly on the subject when, in the summer of 1950, he was taken by another Conservative MP, John Rodgers, to lunch in the South of France with that arch-imperialist and enemy of British association with Europe, Lord Beaverbrook. ‘I liked your young friend,’ Beaverbrook told Rodgers after the meeting. ‘I think he should go far.’ (Beaverbrook’s favourable view of Heath did not survive the discovery of his true views on Europe. By August 1962 he was telling Alec Martin: ‘If you meet that young man Heath, of whom I once formed a good opinion, please tell him to look westward.’)⁵

In 1950, his dream of a united Europe with Britain at its heart seemed infinitely remote. The Labour Government had refused to take part in the conference that drafted the treaty setting up the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Heath was dismayed. ‘A very short-sighted and, for the United Kingdom, an immensely damaging decision,’ he judged it. ‘It was quite simply an abrogation of leadership.’⁶ The Conservatives, if only to be seen to oppose, were formally critical of the Labour policy, but Heath knew well that many of his colleagues were sceptical about the merits of European union and that the heir-apparent to the visibly crumbling Churchill, Anthony Eden, was quite as anxious to preserve full British sovereignty as any Labour minister. But though he knew that he was swimming against the tide, Heath never ceased to press the European cause when any opportunity arose. In his constituency he was as likely to talk of Germany and the need to bring it back into the comity of nations as to offer more orthodox fare about cripplingly high taxes or stultifying controls. When he visited Germany in the Whitsun recess of 1950 he was both exhilarated and alarmed by the pace of recovery; what was already a high priority in his mind took on fresh urgency. And when in June 1950 the House debated the Schuman Plan, the blueprint for European unity conceived by Jean Monnet and accepted in principle by both Germany and France, Heath saw the opportunity to make his maiden speech on a subject about which he was an authority and which he had passionately at heart.

Heath was exceptionally good at expounding complex issues with clarity and objectivity; he could produce apparently impromptu after-dinner speeches or memorial addresses which were as amusing or as moving as the occasion could demand; but he rarely excelled with the parliamentary set-piece. His maiden speech was one of the exceptions. For fourteen minutes he pleaded with the Government to take the Schuman Plan seriously and to join in its formulation before it became set in a rigid structure which might not suit our national interests. This was an opportunity which might never recur; to bind Germany into a peaceful Europe and to ensure that the voice of Britain was heard loudly in the creation of this new union. ‘It was said long ago in the House’, he concluded, ‘that magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom. I appeal tonight to the Government to follow that dictum and to go into the Schuman Plan to develop Europe and to co-ordinate it in the way suggested.’⁷

The Government, of course, did not follow that dictum, nor did Heath expect them to. Even the most sceptical of Labour members, however, were impressed by his authority and obvious sincerity. His own colleagues were still more enthusiastic. The content of Heath’s message was not really to Eden’s taste but he still wrote appreciatively: ‘Warm congratulations on a very capable and debating maiden speech. The House enjoyed it very much; so did I.’ Heath wrote in his memoirs that this note gave him ‘immense pleasure’.⁸ His own career as leader of the party might have run more smoothly if he had himself written rather more such messages to backbenchers hungry for a little encouragement from on high.

It was, however, not as a pro-European but as a committed member of the liberal wing of the party that Heath made an early mark. More than most of his colleagues he was possessed by a strong social conscience. He had been brought up in an era of mass unemployment and he felt that any government which condoned it was committing a crime against the country which it ruled. Many years later, when Heath was prime minister, the then Minister of Housing and Local Government, Peter Walker, wanted him to appoint a 26-year-old as chairman of one of the New Towns in the north of England. Heath was sceptical but asked Walker to bring his protégé along to Number 10. ‘Do you really know the north-east?’ he asked the young man. He took him up to his flat and pointed out a painting by John Cornish of a miner slumped semi-conscious at the bar of a grim Durham pub. ‘That’s the north-east!’ said Heath. ‘If I appoint you, do you think you can see that man and his children have a rather better quality of life in the future than he and his family had in the past?’⁹

The instincts of youth were reinforced by his experiences during the war. The men beside whom he had fought in France and Germany were now the dockers and the miners who would confront him when he was prime minister. The sense of common purpose and national unity which had existed during the Second World War could and must be revived. There was such a thing as society. The issues which were in time to separate him so starkly from Margaret Thatcher were partly personal, but it should never be forgotten that they were also separated by a very real and deep ideological divide. Throughout his life Heath was repelled by the standards of unbridled capitalism and the defeatist philosophy of laissez-faire, with which, unfairly or not, he identified Margaret Thatcher. ‘I fear that to place one’s faith in some invisible hand, rather than to grapple with problems with determination, is a failure of the human spirit,’ he told a young Conservative who questioned his political philosophy. ‘What distinguishes man from animals is his desire and his ability to control and to shape his environment.’¹⁰

The ardently left-wing trade-union leader, Jack Jones, once described Heath as being ‘very much a one-nation Tory’. It was Disraeli who had written that in England ‘the Privileged and the People formed Two Nations’, and ever since then liberal Conservatives had from time to time claimed that it was their role to fuse the two nations into one. Heath did as much as anyone to revitalise the concept. When a group of left-wing Tory members with whom he was associated were preparing a pamphlet summarising their beliefs, there was much debate about what to call it. All were agreed that ‘A Tory Approach to Social Problems’ summarised the contents of the paper but, as a title, lacked punch. Some advocated ‘The Strongest and the Weak’, but, Heath recorded, ‘the irreverent feared that this might deteriorate into “Mild and Bitter”’. I do believe, he went on, ‘that what I might call the “One Nation” approach is the only right approach to social and economic problems in this country today’.¹¹ ‘One Nation’ was the title adopted, and the ‘One Nation Group’ was the banner under which assembled a band of young or youngish Tory members, who were disturbed by the reactionary policies of some of their leaders and were resolved to push the party into the modern age. Heath claimed in his memoirs that the group had its genesis in a late-night talk between him, Angus Maude and Gilbert Longden after Duncan Sandys had made a particularly disastrous contribution to a debate on housing. Certainly he was recruited at an early stage but Maude, Longden and Cuthbert ‘Cub’ Alport seem to have been the originators of the movement. Robert Carr, Richard Fort, Enoch Powell, John Rodgers and Heath himself were soon added; Iain Macleod, according to Heath, was something of an afterthought: ‘We were suspicious that he might remain under the influence of the party machine, with which he was closely involved, as part of the Conservative Research Department.’¹²

In fact Macleod played a highly important part in the group’s deliberations and, though there was never anyone who could formally have been described as the leader, was both the most conspicuous and the most creative among its members. So much so that one member suggested that they should be called not the One Nation but the ‘One Notion’ Group, the notion being that Macleod should be drawn as vigorously as possible to the attention of the leaders of the party. They met, at first, at dinner in the guests’ dining room in the House of Commons; then, when they had begun work on their policy papers, assembled two afternoons a week to discuss progress and inspect each other’s contributions. Heath was charged with producing a paper on the financing and future of the social services, a subject which was bound to create dissent within the party when it returned to power. According to John Rodgers he was not considered one of the more significant contributors or potentially an important innovator: ‘I believe that Enoch thought Ted wasn’t an intellectual at all – he tended to brush him aside. It was true that Ted over-simplified, he didn’t see the light and shade of an argument.’ He would listen to the pontifications of Macleod, Maude or Powell and then surface with some such question as: ‘Well, what are we going to do about it?’ ‘However,’ Rogers added, ‘I can’t recall that he ever told us what we could do.’¹³

When One Nation was finally published in October 1950 it met with guarded approval from the party leaders. ‘A healthy piece of constructive work,’ R. A. Butler described it, praising the fact that it advocated not laissez-faire but ‘private enterprise in the public interest’. Maude and Powell did most of the work in preparing the pamphlet, though Iain Macleod, co-editor with Maude, got most of the credit.¹⁴ Heath definitely gained in reputation by his association with what was seen as an influential and distinguished group but he did not form any particularly close ties among its members. He was, indeed, generally taken to be something of a loner. After the easy camaraderie of Oxford and the army, with ready-made friends formed almost automatically by the way of life pursued in the two institutions, he found the shifting world of the House of Commons difficult to encompass and a bit alarming. He was quite clear about himself, his abilities, his position in the hierarchy, but found it hard to fit into any coherent, still less cosy pattern. ‘One should never under-estimate the loneliness of a political career,’ says John Selwyn Gummer.¹⁵ Heath was never ‘part of a gang’; it was not in his nature to be so: and a member who is not part of a gang in the House of Commons is confronted by a host of acquaintances and a paucity of friends. It is doubtful whether, in the House of Commons in 1950 and 1951, Heath could have named a single member whom he could properly have described as a close, still less an intimate, friend.

In January 1951 Iain Macleod wrote to the members of the One Nation Group to report that he had been approached by a Labour backbencher, Reginald Paget (celebrated as being the only Labour MP to have been master of the Pytchley Hunt), to discuss the possibility of a coalition. The suggestion was that Labour should retain the social services and economic ministries, while the Conservatives should take over foreign affairs and defence. ‘It might be an idea if we could know each other’s minds on this subject before the House meets,’ suggested Macleod. ‘It may be, of course, that we cannot reach agreement, but this, above anything else, is precisely the sort of subject on which the voice of a group is of importance, when the individual opinions count for little or nothing.’ There is no reason to think the matter was taken any further. Paget was a lone voice in the Labour Party and he would have commanded little support for his initiative. The enterprise was clearly a hopeless one. If it had become a serious possibility, however, Heath might have been more interested than certain other members of the One Nation Group, Enoch Powell in particular. Heath never felt that the ideological divide between leftwing Tories and right-wing Socialists was insuperably wide and might well have been in favour of at least exploring the possibility of a regrouping which would link the moderates on both sides. The concept would certainly have provoked some lively discussion within the group and might well have put some strains upon its unity. Macleod saw another reason why it might have been difficult for the group to present a united front. ‘It might be again’, he suggested, ‘that the position would be complicated by one of us being offered an important position such as PPS to the Assistant Postmaster General.’¹⁶ Since there was to be no coalition, no such alluring invitation was issued, but within a few weeks of Macleod’s letter Heath received an offer which had similar results. He was invited to become one of the Tory Whips.

He was uncertain whether he should accept. To become even the most junior of the Whips would be to rise above the ruck of back-bench MPs; he would be the first of his generation to do so and thus would have stolen a march on the others. So far, so good, but by many members the Whips’ Office was seen as something of a dead end. Promotion might be gained within it, but it was not often that a former Whip became a senior minister. ‘It had traditionally been the place for the less bright and imaginative of men,’ wrote the political historian Anthony Seldon. The vacancy which Heath was asked to fill had been caused by the resignation of Sir Walter Bromley-Davenport, a hearty squire from Knutsford who was to become a member of the British Boxing Board of Control. On one unfortunate occasion, Sir Walter had been tempted to exercise his pugilistic skills in the House of Commons. Observing a man whom he thought to be one of his flock sneaking out of the House when he should have been waiting to vote, Bromley-Davenport kicked him heartily, bringing him to the ground. Legend has it that the target of his kick was not a Conservative MP but the Belgian Ambassador; in any case the victim, not unreasonably, took exception to this maltreatment. Bromley-Davenport, it was felt, had gone too far and must be replaced.¹⁷ To be appointed successor to such a boor hardly seemed appealing to Heath. The Chief Whip, Patrick Buchan-Hepburn, insisted, however, that a change of style was intended. The new junior Whip was to be sensitive, a good listener, ready to argue with recalcitrant members rather than kick them. Heath seemed unconvinced. ‘I don’t think he was very keen to come into the Whips’ Office to start with,’ wrote Buchan-Hepburn in 1968. ‘It curtailed his speaking in the H of C and in the days of the 18 majority there was not much time to speak outside either.’¹⁸ The fact that a Whip was precluded from speaking in the House was, indeed, one of the most unfortunate aspects of Heath’s promotion. His forced silence lasted for eight years; by the time that he resumed normal service in October 1959 he had largely lost the knack of handling the Commons in a difficult debate. At the best of times, he would never have been an Iain Macleod or a Michael Foot, have displayed the quicksilver ingenuity of Harold Wilson or the eloquence of Aneurin Bevan; as it was he had to struggle to be merely competent. Only when he was relieved of the burdens of office – and indeed of loyalty to his party’s leadership – did he develop a style which was truly suited to his personality and the needs of the occasion.

His life as a Whip, however, gave him unrivalled knowledge of the strengths and weaknesses of his colleagues. ‘He did know about people,’ Buchan-Hepburn remarked perceptively. ‘He took great trouble to know about them, and their backgrounds and what they wanted…He enjoys people, but I don’t know that he needs them – he’s extraordinarily self-sufficient.’¹⁹ His role as a Whip ensured him a wide acquaintanceship with the Tory members and all their vagaries but also denied him any chance of intimacy. This merely reinforced a predilection that was already obvious, but his new role gave him an obligation to behave in such a way. He did not formally sever his ties with the One Nation Group until the Tories were in power and he found himself on the front bench, but already he had begun to distance himself from their proceedings. The day that he accepted the role of Whip saw the extinction of the last chance that he would ever ‘join a gang’.

He was in one way particularly well suited for the job, because he found the endless grind of House of Commons life perfectly acceptable and had no compelling wish to be elsewhere. He had the advantage of being what was termed in the Commons NHTGT – No Home To Go To.²⁰ His poky flatlet in Petty France, little more than a bed-sitting room, offered few attractions. He would have liked to go to operas or concerts but disliked spending money unnecessarily and was saving every penny that he could; what then could be more appealing than the warmth, light and animation of late night sittings at the House? Ned Carson, a young Conservative MP from Kent, once went into the Whips’ Office after an indecently protracted debate and asked indignantly why Heath did not get married, go home and leave people like him free to go to bed. ‘He looked up slowly, with a very blank face, and answered simply: “I don’t want to get married”.’ Nor did he want to go home, or even particularly to go to bed. His dedication, his self-discipline, his mastery of detail, won the respect of his fellow Members. He was not outstandingly well liked but, as Buchan-Hepburn pointed out, that did not matter much in the House of Commons: ‘Respect is the first thing, and confidence. Popularity comes very much second.’²¹

‘He was shy to start with,’ said Buchan-Hepburn, ‘but quickly developed and became invaluable to me, and I am sure that from his own point of view it was very important for him to have those years in the Whips’ Office – breaking down the reserve, getting on with all and sundry.’ Heath would have agreed. He much enjoyed the organisational role involved in being a Whip. ‘I loathe incompetence, inefficiency, bungling and waste,’ he told Michael Cockerell on television in 1988. Even when he was the most junior of the Whips it was noticeable that the Office functioned more smoothly for his presence; once he had become Deputy Chief Whip in April 1952 procedures were revolutionised. The Whips, if only to be alert to incipient scandal, had always felt it necessary to know a lot about the private lives of the individual members; under Heath procedures were regularised, card-indexes established, the psychological strengths and weaknesses of each member analysed and recorded. The Bromley-Davenports of this world had barked commands and expected unquestioning obedience: Heath relied more upon reason and persuasion. ‘Now be a good chap. It’s not really a matter of your conscience this time, is it?’ was the line Ned Carson remembered him taking. If it really was a matter of conscience he did his best to be sympathetic. As a result, when he did find it necessary to be tough, he was listened to with attention. ‘I remember one occasion when he was stern in a tactful way and I was so surprised I went into the lobby at his bidding.’ The deadpan and slightly black style of humour which was more and more to become his trademark matured during his years as a Whip. His object seemed to be more to disconcert than to amuse; its victim was often uncertain whether Heath’s remarks were intended as a joke or were to be taken seriously. Sometimes both were true. John Peyton, a future minister in Heath’s government, once let off steam to him about the failure of certain ministers to consult interested members about problems which affected them or their constituents. Some months later Heath, as Deputy Chief Whip, asked Peyton whether he would like to serve as a parliamentary private secretary. ‘To whom?’ asked Peyton. Heath looked at him in affected surprise: ‘Do you not feel equally warmly towards all our colleagues?’²²

It was not only his social life that was circumscribed by his work as a Whip. In 1951 he gave up command of the 2nd Regiment HAC. The historic rituals, the social consequence, the pomp of the Honourable Artillery Company had all appealed strongly to Heath; as well as the unstrained masculine comradeship of the mess and the training camp and the feeling that, as an effective element in the Territorial Army, his unit was making an important contribution to national defence. He knew that he had to retire but deplored the need. The blow was softened when Lord Alanbrooke, Colonel Commandent of the HAC, offered him the appointment of Master Gunner within the Tower of London. The post was almost entirely honorary but it enabled Heath to entertain dignitaries in the grand manner and at small expense and to dress up and preside over the firing of salutes on occasions such as the royal birthday. He relished such opportunities and even endured with equanimity the debacle when on one occasion the ammunition was damp and all four guns failed to fire. At one point the desperate troop commander was reduced to extracting a faulty shell and, for want of a more suitable repository, flinging it into the Thames. It was a singularly courageous action but not one recommended by the drill manuals. The officer concerned could well have earned a stiff rebuke, even dismissal, but Heath and Alanbrooke between them saw to it that the War Office was not troubled by any report of the incident.

More importantly from the point of view of his finances, once he became Deputy Chief Whip Heath felt he could no longer work part-time for Brown Shipley. As a tyro backbencher he had managed to spend most mornings in the City and even as a junior Whip he had kept up more-or-less regular attendance. The arrangement had suited Brown Shipley well: to have a promising young MP on their staff both lent the bank a certain prestige and gave them a potentially useful foothold in Westminster. In the summer of 1951 they had sent him on a visit to the United States and Canada; not to transact any particular business but so that he could get to know how Brown Brothers Harriman, Brown Shipley’s associate in New York, transacted its affairs and to make contact with people who might be useful to him both as a banker and as a politician. One of those he hoped to meet was the influential Senator Paul Douglas from Illinois. A mutual acquaintance wrote enthusiastically to urge the Senator to set up a meeting. Heath, he said, was ‘very able and exceedingly well informed and a very fine guy indeed…He’s much more “liberal” that most of our best Democrats, but withal a genuine and convinced Tory…Recently he’s been made an Assistant Whip which, I’ve just learned, makes him a Front Bencher and, should the Conservatives get in power, very likely a cabinet minister.’ Heath’s rise was not to be quite so meteoric but the judgment is of interest as showing how seriously he was already taken in political circles in the United States. A date was fixed for a meeting with the Senator but before it could take place Heath visited Ottawa, staying at the same hotel as Labour’s foreign secretary, Herbert Morrison, and his parliamentary private secretary, Eddie Shackleton. On 19 September he met the pair of them heading hurriedly towards the exit. ‘Have you heard?’ asked Shackleton. ‘Attlee has just called a general election!’ ‘And the bloody fool didn’t ask me first,’ added a disgruntled Morrison.²³

‘Nobody knows whether we can expect an election in the near future,’ Heath had told a friend in August 1951. ‘Personally, I don’t think there will be one for the very simple reason that the Government has nothing to gain but a lot to lose. However, only time will tell.’²⁴ Time had told, and had showed that Attlee disagreed with Heath. Though Morrison turned out to have had good reason for his doubts, Attlee was not acting irrationally. His ministry was in tatters. Cripps and Bevin had retired through ill-health; Bevin’s successor, Morrison, had made a disastrous mess of foreign policy in the Middle East; Heath’s Oxford contemporary, Harold Wilson, together with Aneurin Bevan, had resigned in protest at the increased spending on defence. Attlee could have struggled on but he concluded that the best chance for Labour was to go quickly to the country and then to rebuild the government with new blood and a new mandate. The election was called for 25 October.

Heath must have felt reasonably confident as he hurried back across the Atlantic. On the national scene all the indications were that Labour would do worse than at the last election; in his own constituency he had consolidated his position. He had been an exemplary constituency MP; had dealt conscientiously with the problems of the voters; attended endless fetes, garden parties, dances, rotary lunches, meetings with businessmen; had escorted innumerable constituents around the House of Commons. Local elections had strengthened the position of the Conservatives. He had beaten Ashley Bramall once and was sure that he could do so again.

But it was not only the election that preoccupied him. Shortly before he left for the United States his mother had been diagnosed with cancer and had almost immediately been operated on at the Ramsgate General Hospital. Heath thought of cancelling his tour but the operation seemed to have gone well and the prognosis was that she would be home and well on the way to recovery by the time he got back. She was home, but she was in pain and obviously extremely weak. His sister-in-law Marian told Michael Cockerell that she and her husband were with Ted in the kitchen in the Broadstairs house when William Heath broke it to them that his wife was dying. ‘Ted was absolutely devastated,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I ever saw him before or after as he was on that day.’²⁵

It took the realisation that he was about to lose his mother to make him fully take in how much she had meant to him. He was not dependent on her, in the sense that he turned to her for advice or for moral support, but the love which she had lavished on him over the years, the knowledge that in her eyes he could do no wrong and should be the beneficiary of any and every sacrifice, had created a bond between them which he enjoyed with no one else. Though he fought the election campaign in Bexley with all the energy and conscientiousness that his supporters expected of him, the thought of her suffering was with him every moment. Each evening he would drive back to the coast to be with her; he would sit at the piano in the room directly below her bedroom playing the old sentimental songs which his father had used to sing and which he knew his mother cherished: ‘In a Monastery Garden’, ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’, ‘When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day’. She died on 15 October, ten days before polling day. Ashley Bramall suggested that there should be a day’s truce in the electioneering on the day of her funeral. Heath gratefully accepted. Margaret Roberts, still battling away in the safe Labour seat of Dartford, wrote to commiserate: ‘I am so glad your mother saw your initial success and the way in which you followed up with a steady ascent to great things.’ The precipitous descent which she was one day to engineer lends a certain irony to this letter but, as Heath acknowledged in his memoirs, it was ‘most generous’ and, without doubt, sincerely meant.²⁶

‘As I think you know, I loved and admired her tremendously,’ wrote the former Kay Raven. His relationship with his mother had not been the only one that had ended about this time. A year or so before, Kay had written to announce her engagement to a regular air force officer and former bomber pilot, Richard Buckwell. ‘I hope you will be glad for me, you know I’m rather a loving kind of girl and must have been a horrid bore for you.’²⁷ For nearly fifteen years she had looked for something in Edward Heath that he was unable to supply; finally she had decided that life was too short and that she must move on. ‘Apparently her family persuaded her to go on holiday with a group of young friends, and that was when she got engaged,’ said William Heath. ‘She was keen on him. He wasn’t, or if he was he never showed it.’ It was Mrs Heath who seems to have been the most upset by the news; she had set her heart on Ted’s marriage with Kay and burst into tears when she heard of the engagement.²⁸

Ted Heath remained impassive. He was more moved than he cared to admit, however. For so many years he had taken it for granted that she was there, permanently available in case he should one day decide that the time had come for him to marry. It is conceivable that the death of his mother and the fact that he was now well launched on his climb up the political ladder might have impelled him to marry Kay; conceivable, but on balance improbable. By 1950 he was set in his bachelor ways; the thought of sexual intercourse or of procreation would have filled him with mild dismay; how could he fit a woman into his crowded life; what sacrifices might he not find imposed on him? But her engagement was still a blow to his pride, and the closing of a door which he had liked to feel was at least a crack ajar. He soon convinced himself that he had been in love and had been robbed of a cherished aspiration. Many years later Michael Cockerell, with that startling temerity which adds such zest to his television interviews, asked Heath whether he had been saddened by Kay Raven’s engagement. ‘Yes,’ he replied. When asked if he had ever been in love, Heath again replied, ‘Yes. Why shouldn’t one love?’ Almost incredibly, given his habitual reluctance to express emotion, he seemed on the point of tears.²⁹ He kept a photograph of Kay by his bedside, though it seems to have disappeared before he died. She became a convenient alibi; designed as much to deceive himself as anyone else, to be adduced whenever it seemed possible that he might become close to some other woman. He had loved and lost, once was enough: or that, at least, was the official story. Though he was to get to know many women over the next forty years and become attached to two or three of them, there was never again to be a suspicion of romance, let alone matrimony.

Perhaps inevitably this absence of female involvements meant that there were rumours that Heath was homosexual. In April 2007 one of the Conservative leaders in the London Assembly, Brian Coleman, alleged in the New Statesman that Heath regularly ‘cottaged’ along the motorways and had only desisted when he became a Privy Councillor and MI5 warned him that he must mend his ways. When asked for evidence of this Coleman was unable or unwilling to provide names but said that it was ‘generally known’ in the House of Commons that Heath was gay. General knowledge seems to have been based on little or no information. No man has ever claimed to have had any sort of sexual relationship with Heath, no hint of such an involvement is to be found among Heath’s papers and everyone who knew him well insists that he was not in the least that way inclined. He had friendly relationships with a number of women over the years, but never, it seems, one in which there was any hint of a romantic, let alone sexual, element. It may be that, after Kay Raven decided to marry someone else, he determined never to allow himself to be in a position in which he could be let down (as he might have seen it) in that way again. He certainly had a weak sex drive and may have been to all intents and purposes asexual: a condition which is by no means rare but which those who are more conventionally endowed find hard to believe exists. He was perhaps the poorer for this deficiency, but at least it left him with more time and energy for the other activities which filled his crowded life.³⁰

For the moment it was back to the political fray. His task in Bexley was made more difficult by the fact that this time there was no helpful Communist standing to whittle away at Bramall’s vote; on the other hand there was no Liberal candidate either – a fact which on the whole seemed to favour Heath. The most controversial weapon which Labour employed in this election was the scare story, launched by the Daily Mirror (‘Whose Finger on the Trigger?’), claiming that Churchill was a war-monger and that Britain would not be safe under his leadership. Bramall had little enthusiasm for this line of argument, Heath had no difficulty in rebutting it, and the voters of Bexley appeared unconcerned by the prospect of imminent annihilation. Heath’s majority went up from 133 to 1,639, a swing slightly greater than the national average. Bexley was still a marginal seat but much less so than had been the case before. With the Conservatives enjoying an overall majority of sixteen, Heath could return to Westminster in the confidence that he left a secure base behind him. He could be confident too that, with the new Government enjoying so small a majority, a government Whip was going to have a great deal to do.

Until this time he had been a junior Whip with plenty of work but no financial reward; now he was appointed a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury, which signified nothing in the way of additional responsibilities but meant that he was paid an extra £500 a year (comparative values mean very little, but the equivalent of £10,000 today would not be far wrong). It was not princely, but it usefully replaced the salary he was no longer receiving from Brown Shipley. He earned his pay rise, for he was given responsibility for pairing – the system by which members could miss a division only if they could ensure that a member of the Opposition would also be away. This called for much negotiation and a certain amount of bullying. It also required tact and discretion. Sometimes Heath found himself telephoning the home of a missing MP in the small hours of the morning only to be told by an unsuspecting wife that her husband was in the House. ‘Naturally we were able to demand a high degree of loyalty from colleagues in return for our concern, interest and discretion,’ wrote Heath blandly in his memoirs:³¹ a euphemism which did not conceal the fact that genteel blackmail was one of the weapons by which the Whips controlled their flock. Heath used such methods less than most: few complaints were made about the way he went about his business.

No one was surprised when, after a year or so, he was appointed joint Deputy Chief Whip and, a few months later, was confirmed as the only Deputy. A Chief Whip, Buchan-Hepburn told one of his successors, had ‘to take the responsibility and be jolly rude at times’. Then the Deputy had to pick up the pieces. Heath ‘became very good at that. He could be very nice to people.’³² In due course Heath was to show that he could be surprisingly nice to people even when he was Chief Whip; for the moment he concentrated on building a network of relationships within the party. His new role meant that he became well-known, not only to the rank-and-file but also to the dignitaries of the party. Of these none was half as eminent or as remote from the hurly-burly of back-bench life as the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

When Heath had first been appointed a Whip Churchill had said to him: ‘It will mean much hard work and it will be unremunerated, but so long as I am your leader it will never remain unthanked.’ That was almost all that Heath saw of the Prime Minister for the next few years. Buchan-Hepburn remembered that, when Heath had gained greater prominence, Churchill used to claim that it was he who had discovered him. This was rubbish, claimed Buchan-Hepburn: ‘He asked me more than once, even when Ted was Deputy Chief Whip, who he was.’ But later ‘he got to know him very well, and thought a lot of him’.³³ The relationship did not grow close until Heath had become Chief Whip and Churchill had ceased to be Prime Minister, but by 1953 at the latest Churchill would have had no doubts who the young Whip was. Several times Heath had to extricate him from dinner parties to come back to the House to vote when the Tory majority seemed dangerously low; once it was the other way round and Heath had to persuade him to honour an invitation to dine with the HAC on St George’s Day on an evening when Churchill decided that his duties in Westminster precluded his attendance. In July 1953 Heath was one of the very few leading Tories who knew about Churchill’s stroke and realised that the country was in effect being governed by a cabal of self-appointed substitutes. He was present when Churchill made his first speech after his illness at the Party Conference at Margate. By mistake the Prime Minister’s private secretary had left in both the original and an amended version of a certain page. Churchill began to repeat himself. ‘The Chief Whip and I looked at each other and shuddered. This must be the end of the road, I thought.’ But then Churchill stopped, rallied, remarked blandly: ‘I seem to have heard this somewhere before…’ and moved on to the next page. Heath was conscientious in presenting new Tory members to the old hero. Nigel Nicolson was already unnerved by the prospect and he was made no calmer when, as they approached the comatose figure in the smoking room, Heath murmured: ‘Remember, Winston simply hates small talk!’³⁴

The relationship was not purely official. The visitors’ book for Chartwell, Churchill’s country home, shows that Heath stayed there nine times between 1957 and 1961, once finding himself expected to play poker for high stakes with Aristotle and Christina Onassis. Churchill liked him well enough to give him two of his paintings. He was an unlikely habitué of Chartwell. The young men whose company Churchill usually enjoyed were more socially accomplished – Jock Colville, Anthony Montague Browne – or more raffish – Brendan Bracken – than Ted Heath. Heath’s musical interests had only limited appeal to Churchill; his dedicated sense of purpose, though no doubt seeming admirable to the veteran statesman, was not calculated to amuse or stimulate. Nevertheless, Churchill clearly enjoyed his company. Mary Soames, Churchill’s daughter, believes that it was probably her mother who was primarily responsible for the repeated invitations. Heath’s social ineptness and his patent inadequacy when it came to handling women inspired in some a protective instinct. Clementine Churchill would not have been the only woman who took pity on him and resolved to make his task a little smoother than it would otherwise have been. He was appropriately appreciative and continued to invite Lady Churchill to lunches or dinners long after Churchill had died, taking pains to assemble small parties of old friends who would give her pleasure and impose no strain.³⁵

As the Prime Minister visibly faded, Heath inevitably saw more of his designated successor, Anthony Eden. He felt for the Foreign Secretary none of the reverence that he held for Churchill but he admired and liked him and believed he would make a worthy incumbent of Number 10. He felt, too, that the sooner Eden got there, the better it would be, both for the country and for the party. Like many others, he wished that Churchill had retired after, or better still before, the defeat of 1945. He was not close enough to Eden to discuss directly with him his views about the succession; but Eden can have been in little doubt that Heath would prove a stalwart supporter. He for his part valued Heath highly and had no doubt that one of his first actions when he did finally become Prime Minister would be to appoint him his Chief Whip.

It was presumably as a reward for faithful service that Heath in August and September 1954 was despatched as deputy Conservative leader of a delegation to a Commonwealth Parliamentary Association Conference in Nairobi. He took advantage of the visit to travel widely throughout Africa, ending up in Cape Town. His reception reflected more his likely future than his actual status; wherever he went he met the leading figures of the country. It is a reflection of the times rather than of his own predilections that, except in Egypt, he did not talk at length with anybody who was not of European origin. Cairo provided the most interesting meeting. At dinner at the British Embassy Heath met Colonel Nasser, the young nationalist firebrand who was shortly to depose the President, Neguib, and take over the leadership himself. The two men sat in the Embassy garden in the small hours of the morning, talking about politics and the future of the Middle East. At that time the United Kingdom still had a substantial garrison in the Canal Zone; Heath was left in little doubt that it could only be maintained, and the Canal kept under British control, if the Egyptians could be persuaded that this was to their benefit. Heath was impressed by Nasser and thought that, though he would certainly champion Egyptian interests, he was in no way anti-British. Nasser talked of his wish to bring democracy to Egypt and of the problems he was encountering. ‘I am sure that his intentions were sincere,’ commented Heath, ‘although perhaps at that stage he underestimated the task ahead.’³⁶ The favourable view that he took of Nasser was to be an additional cause for discomfort when the Suez Crisis split the Tory party and the country two years later.

Before that, however, much was to happen. In April 1955 Churchill finally resigned. His successor, Eden, almost immediately called a general election; he could have held on for another year or more but the economy seemed to be going well, the nation was glowing in the false dawn of the ‘New Elizabethan Age’, the temptation to go to the country, demand a fresh mandate and, with reasonable luck, secure a substantially increased majority proved irresistible. The gamble, in so far as it was one, paid off. The Tories cruised to victory, gaining an overall majority of 59. Heath, faced with a new and not particularly impressive Labour candidate, increased his own majority to 4,499. No longer did Bexley have to be considered a marginal constituency. Eden deferred a major cabinet reshuffle until the end of the year. As a preliminary, Buchan-Hepburn, who was to become Minister of Works, resigned as Chief Whip. He had no doubt who should succeed him. Nor did Eden: ‘Ted Heath took over as Chief Whip; by what seemed a natural process,’ he told Heath’s biographer, George Hutchinson.³⁷ In December 1954 the next stage of Heath’s career began.

SIX Chief Whip

‘Painless flagellation is what we are all looking forward to,’ wrote Fitzroy Maclean – then a junior minister – when Heath’s promotion was announced. Derek Marks of the Daily Express doubted whether this would work: ‘I still think you have far too much sympathy with the chaps who smoke in the rugger team to make a very good head prefect.’ Anthony Wedgwood Benn, as Tony Benn then still styled himself, from the opposition, thought he would bring it off: ‘How you manage to combine such a friendly manner with such an iron discipline is a source of respectful amazement to us all.’¹ Benn caught exactly what was Heath’s aspiration: he did not wish to overemphasise the iron discipline but knew that it was a vital part of a Chief Whip’s role; he believed that he could exercise it with restraint and liberality. Sir Thomas Moore, a veteran Tory MP and perhaps extravagantly uncritical admirer of Heath, told him that he had known six Chief Whips but that Heath was different because he had ‘the capacity of making friends easily. That may make things much easier for you, or it may not…I believe that under that friendly smile you have the strength of character to make an outstanding success of this job.’ Comforting though such assurances might be, Heath had no illusions about the scale of the problems which faced him. He believed he could overcome them. ‘In this post,’ the Archbishop of Canterbury assured him, ‘you will spend your time controlling the uncontrollable and reconciling the irreconcilable! But, after all, that is the best kind of life.’ Throughout his career, even when the facts pointed most vigorously to the contrary, Heath believed that the uncontrollable could always be controlled, the irreconcilable reconciled. This was how he saw his future role.²

The most essential quality in a Chief Whip is loyalty. This Heath had in abundance. He saw himself as the servant of the Prime Minister, appointed by him and there to do his bidding. He could argue, point out the dangers, but in the last resort what the Prime Minister decided was law. Macmillan quoted Asquith as saying that a Chief Whip should have a ‘large capacity for self-assertion and self-effacement’. This was true, he considered, but there was one characteristic even more important: ‘absolute and undivided loyalty’. Heath had given him this ‘without reserve’. Loyalty did not imply supine acquiescence. John Wyndham, Macmillan’s most private private secretary, said that Heath was ‘tremendously loyal’ and also ‘tremendously frank. I think he regarded himself as a conduit for conducting information about what the party was thinking.’ But tremendous frankness must be as far as it went. Unlike a minister, a Chief Whip could not allow himself the luxury of a conscience. ‘The resignation of a government Chief Whip on a major issue of policy would be a mortal blow to confidence in the government,’ wrote Heath in his memoirs. ‘For a Chief Whip to resign…would be an act not only of utter disloyalty, but of wilful destruction.’³

This austere creed meant that Heath sometimes found himself arguing against the causes which he held most at heart. He told Geoffrey Rippon, a future minister in his government, that if he went on supporting motions in favour of Europe he would have to resign as parliamentary private secretary. Many years later Rippon reminded him of this. ‘The jowls flipped. “Did I say that?” said Ted doubtfully. “If I did, it did not fit in with what I was doing behind the scenes!”’⁴ This may have been true, but in front of the scenes he never even hinted at his real feelings. He ‘soundly berated’ a group of Tory backbenchers who had put down a parliamentary motion calling for British membership of the Community, and when John Rodgers remained unconvinced, he told him: ‘For God’s sake don’t rock the boat.’⁵

A Chief Whip could not afford to have intimates; even among his fellow Whips there had to be a certain distance. But he needed friends, many friends, people with whom he could communicate easily and with natural confidence. To those who knew only the withdrawn and often curmudgeonly figure of later years it is hard to conceive Heath as mixing affably with all around him. Yet Gerald Nabarro, a man temperamentally as far removed from Heath as it is possible to imagine, claimed that he had more friends than almost any other politician; Benn, when he called on Heath to discuss the possible renunciation of his peerage, described him as ‘a most amiable and friendly soul’.⁶ But even in those early days he did not always find it easy to establish a quick rapport. He had a ‘heart full of kindness’, wrote Woodrow Wyatt, but there was also ‘an element of reserve and awkwardness’ which held him back: ‘The warmth in him has never got out properly.’ Jim Prior was in time to get to know him better than any other member of the House of Commons. He had quality and vision, wrote Prior, and ‘even if he never dared to show it, he had a softer side which we understood. This enabled us to share things with him.’⁷

In the mid-1950s the softer side was more readily accessible and the ability, vastly important in a Chief Whip, to persuade people ‘to share things’ was immediately apparent. But he was resolved not to commit himself totally to any relationship, not to take sides or adopt partisan attitudes, not to use his influence to help those whom he had befriended. His career is pitted with the complaints of friends who felt that he had failed to reward or even thank them for their loyal support; the tendency grew more marked as his power to help grew greater, but even now a former Balliol friend was disgruntled when Heath refused to back his candidacy for a Sussex seat on the grounds that, as Chief Whip, he never interfered in such matters.⁸ Inevitably he found himself having to suggest names for jobs or jobs for names: Robert Carr wanted a list of members who might ‘like to have small directorships’; Quintin Hailsham dropped into his ‘shell-like ear’ the news that Lord Rothermere was trying to find a job for Neill Cooper and that Louis Spears badly wanted a peerage.⁹ He took whatever action he felt necessary on such requests, but without enthusiasm and with an almost perverse reluctance to further the interests of those whom he liked or to whom he felt obliged.

Throughout his career he made up his mind slowly and with some reluctance. Michael Hughes-Young, one of his Junior Whips, remembered interminable meetings: ‘Ted would chew a subject over and over and over again, not saying much himself.’ But when he had finally come down one way or the other he was hard to shift and would fight his corner with resolution. It was not only the prime minister who got the benefit of his blunt advice. ‘I’ve seen him be very tough with ministers,’ said Hughes-Young, ‘just telling them flatly that they couldn’t do it, it wasn’t on.’ He was, indeed, more likely to be tough with ministers than with backbenchers. ‘When we were lunching together,’ wrote Eden’s press secretary, William Clark, ‘you mentioned the problem you had trying to explain to the public that you did not run the House of Commons on the authoritarian lines of a public school.’¹⁰ He never succeeded in dispelling the illusion. Indeed, it was not wholly illusory. Authority had to be exercised. But it was done with discretion and good grace. When John Rodgers, an old ally of Heath’s and parliamentary private secretary to David Eccles, the Minister of Education, rebelled over a bill about shopclosing hours, Heath came to see him, ‘his Whip’s face firmly on, and saying: “You can’t be a pps and attack the government like this: you must make your choice.”’ Rodgers chose and resigned, but two years later he was offered a ministerial job and was urged by Heath to accept. Another backbencher, David Price, had to be sharply rebuked for straying out of line. ‘I really must express my sincere appreciation of your attitude during our interview this evening,’ wrote Price. ‘You had to carpet me; I realise that, but you couldn’t have been nicer or more gentle about it.’¹¹

Not all members were so ready to take correction. Sir William Anstruther-Gray, a Tory of the old school who probably took exception to Heath’s social origins and relative youth as well as to the fact that he was being rebuked for missing a three-line Whip, retorted haughtily: ‘I am not a member of the government, paid to take orders. I am a private member, returned by my constituents to support the party and prime minister as I think best…I shall continue to work for the party and prime minister as I think best and, while on the subject, I shall not be available to vote on Thursday, 8th.’¹² Since the gravamen of the Chief Whip’s complaint had been that Anstruther-Gray had given no warning of his absence, Heath probably let the matter rest – but a black mark would have been registered against the errant member. Not many others would have been similarly defiant. The notably independent-minded Hugh Fraser arrived at a dinner party announcing that the debate that evening was on a matter of trivial importance and that he had no intention of returning to vote. An hour later the telephone rang and the servant reported that it was the Chief Whip for Mr Fraser. Fraser left without waiting for the pudding. Heath was the last Whip to act as teller during crucial votes; on certain issues he stood by the Opposition entrance so that any rebel would have to file by directly in front of him.¹³

He was particularly hard on any behaviour that he thought might bring discredit to the House. When the Tory MP for Dorset North, Robert Crouch, touted for business on House of Commons writing paper, Heath summoned him and sternly pointed out the impropriety of his behaviour. Crouch promised to mend his ways but shortly afterwards died, leaving many unpaid bills and an indigent widow. Heath was active in raising funds so that Mrs Crouch was not left in too parlous a state.¹⁴ If he felt a member was not and never would be up to the job he would not hesitate to plan for his replacement. He thought badly of the member for Oxford, Lawrence Turner, and did what he could to arrange a change. When Harold Macmillan was asked to drop in at the Cowley Conservative Club after a dinner in Oxford, Heath urged him to take up the invitation: ‘It would be important that the prospective candidate, the Hon Montague Woodhouse, is at the Club in order to receive the benefit of this rather than Mr Turner.’ Sometimes, in the eye of the victim at least, he seems to have behaved with some insensitivity. When Airey Neave, a junior minister, resigned in 1959, he was told bleakly that his political career was over. ‘Airey deeply resented the way he felt he had been discarded and the way it had been done,’ remembered Margaret Thatcher’s future minister, Norman Fowler. Fifteen years later Neave got his revenge. Only somebody who had been present at the original interview could tell how justified his resentment really was. Another version has it that it was alcohol rather than illness that had forced Neave’s retirement and that Heath’s harshness was therefore justified. The story shows, however, that no Chief Whip, however tactful and emollient, could do his job properly without making some enemies along the way.¹⁵

More often, however, Heath was trying to persuade members not to retire at a time when it might prove damaging to the party. When the famous former fighter pilot ‘Laddie’ Lucas reported that he felt his employment as managing director of the White City stadium was stopping him from doing a proper job as an MP, Heath replied that there had been no complaints from his constituents and that ‘as it would be very difficult for anybody else to hold his seat, it was his duty to carry on’. Lucas temporarily agreed but, two months later, wrote from holiday in Italy to say that he had finally decided to resign. ‘Italy seems to have a fatal effect on everyone’s ideas of both love and duty!’ wrote Heath resignedly.¹⁶ Sometimes he was more successful. Derick Heathcoat-Amory, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, told Heath late in 1958 that he wanted to retire and ‘spend his declining years in some useful form of service’ (a curious reflection on his estimation of his actual job). Heath persuaded him that it was his duty to soldier on, at least until the next election.¹⁷

Another desirable quality for a Chief Whip is to be invariably equable. Here Heath was less than perfect. He always suffered from a short temper and was apt to explode if opposed in any way which he felt pig-headed and unreasonable. ‘He was fratchety as Chief Whip,’ said one not particularly rebellious member. ‘He can be very huffy if you don’t agree with him.’ Humphry Berkeley, a left-wing Tory backbencher, was lunching with a friend in the Carlton Club in 1956, discussing the capital punishment bill which was then being debated in the Commons. Heath joined them and tried to persuade them to accept the compromise proposal supported by the Government, which retained the death penalty but only for four categories of murder. He failed, whereupon, according to Berkeley, he ‘became abusive; he called us soft and then relapsed into a sullen silence, refusing to join us for coffee afterwards…We were shocked at this display of anger and rudeness on the part of the Government Chief Whip.’¹⁸ The anecdote is the more striking because Heath’s personal conviction was that the death penalty should be abolished. It was another example of his belief that a Chief Whip could have no views of his own, or at least none that he would own to publicly. It was also uncharacteristic: the explosion of bad temper was not unheard of but, at this stage of his career at least, the sustained sulk was unusual. He must have been in an exceptionally fratchety mood that day.

‘You’ll remember asking last Saturday what I thought about a certain person’s private affairs,’ the veteran Tory politician, Harry Crookshank, wrote mysteriously. He recommended an approach to the Queen’s private secretary.¹⁹ It was but one of many such covert communications. Heath constantly had to enquire into the private affairs of one person or another, and usually found the task distasteful. Peter Baker, the member for South Norfolk, was an alcoholic whose businesses had failed badly. He tried to persuade Heath that he was now a reformed character but the Deputy Chief Whip, as Heath then was, insisted he should resign. Baker refused, though promising not to stand at the next election. ‘What is to be done?’ asked the Prime Minister. Nothing, replied Heath, ‘short of guiding his hand to sign an application for the Chiltern Hundreds,* which would have been particularly dangerous as he is in a Nursing Home under the care of a doctor’. Eventually Baker was charged with forgery and sent to prison.²⁰

Another scandal erupted in 1965, when Alec Home was Prime Minister. Anthony Courtney, a Tory MP, had been photographed in Moscow – presumably by the KGB – in flagrante with an attractive Intourist guide. Courtney went to see Heath and found him ‘wholly unsympathetic’ and showing ‘a complete absence of that human quality of personal involvement which to me at any rate is the mark of true leadership towards a colleague in trouble’. He does, indeed, seem to have been unusually disobliging. If Courtney insisted on making a personal statement in the House, Heath said, he could not expect to get any support from the Government. He should go quietly. Heath always found it hard to understand or condone the sexual misdemeanours of others but in most cases he did his best to be sympathetic. On this occasion it seems probable that Courtney had been given a damning report by MI5 and that Heath had been advised to have nothing to do with him.²¹

‘It was commonly believed’, wrote the future Chairman of the Conservative Party, Edward du Cann, ‘that his four years as Chief Whip had given him a healthy contempt for his fellow members of parliament in the Conservative party.’ Certainly he had little respect for the Crouches and Courtneys of this world but ‘contempt’ is too strong a word to describe his attitude towards the rank and file of the party. His time as Chief Whip did, however, foster a conviction that members were cannon fodder, to be deployed according to the needs of the Government and without much consideration for their personal feelings. When Peter Walker was 22, Heath came to address his constituency party. He told its members that they should not be worried about Walker’s youth: ‘Be assured that when he gets into the House of Commons I shall, as Chief Whip, have no difficulty in guiding him.’ He no doubt meant it as a joke but, like many of his jokes, it misfired: the audience was not particularly amused and Walker was furious. Joke or not, the remark conveyed something of Heath’s true feelings: it was for him to guide, it was the duty of members to be guided. This cast of mind was not to make things easier for him when in due course he became leader of the party.²²

There was a noticeable change of style when Heath took over as Chief Whip. Buchan-Hepburn had devoted what Heath felt to be a disproportionate amount of his time to ensuring that the requisite number of MPs passed through the appropriate lobby. Heath saw the importance of this function but felt that it was still more important to ensure that the Prime Minister and Cabinet were at every point fully aware of the feelings within the party. In his biography John Campbell observed that Heath had delegated less responsibility to his deputy, Martin Redmayne, than Buchan-Hepburn had been willing to grant him. ‘Greater’, wrote Heath in the margin. Up to a point this was true. Redmayne was left in charge of operations on the floor of the House to an extent which Heath had never been. But this says more about Heath’s order of priorities than his opinion of his number two. In his memoirs he praised Redmayne as an ‘excellent deputy’ who did a fine job looking after the daily machinery in the House of Commons, but in an unguarded interview, the text of which survives in his archive, he remarks that, as Chief Whip, he was much more concerned with policy than about ‘chasing people in the House of Commons’. Martin Redmayne, he went on, ‘did all the chasing, which he enjoyed. He was really a military type, he owned a sports shop, and he was really very dim.’²³

The Chief Whip was not formally a member of the Cabinet but Heath was present at almost every meeting and increasingly behaved as if he belonged there as of right. He saw this as being a perquisite of his office, not a tribute to him personally. Against Campbell’s statement that Willie Whitelaw had never sat in a Cabinet before 1970, he scrawled ‘Chief Whip’. Under Eden, and later still more under Macmillan, Heath intervened in Cabinet not just to report on the feeling in the party but to make points of policy. In a discussion of the Tory manifesto in the summer of 1959 R. A. Butler urged the inclusion of a pledge to revise the laws relating to betting and gambling. ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Macmillan. ‘We already have the Toby Belch vote. We must not antagonise the Malvolio vote.’ Everyone chuckled dutifully. ‘Then’, remembered Butler, ‘the Chief Whip, ever business-like and forceful, intervened by pointing out that we had committed ourselves to such reforms.’ That settled the matter. Eden appreciated his abilities and valued his advice: ‘I have never known a better equipped Chief Whip,’ he wrote. ‘A ready smile confirmed a firm mind.’²⁴

A majority of fifty-nine meant that the policing of the lobbies, however much Redmayne might have enjoyed it, could be reasonably relaxed. ‘The party is not vociferous about anything,’ Heath told Eden after a meeting of the 1922 Committee in February 1956, ‘neither does it appear to be particularly enthusiastic about any particular course of action, it is quietly awaiting economic events and the budget.’ In his penetrating study of back-bench opinion, Robert Jackson has shown that there was more unrest within the party ranks than Heath’s comments suggest. The fact that the Government was unlikely to be defeated meant that backbenchers allowed themselves greater latitude in promoting personal or constituency points. Most of the issues related to domestic matters: purchase tax, licensing, the coal industry, rent control and government expenditure were all the subject of sometimes acrimonious debate. Between 1955 and 1958, Jackson reckons, there were thirteen revolts on domestic issues and eight on foreign affairs and defence.²⁵ None of these threatened the position of the Government. Apart from the Suez Crisis, the subject on which passions ran highest was the one that had provoked Heath’s fracas with Humphrey Berkeley in the Carlton Club: capital punishment. The ministers were insistent that their compromise proposals must prevail. Heath warned them that there were enough out-and-out abolitionists among the younger Tory members to mean that the Government would probably be defeated. He could not convince the Cabinet that it should modify its views. Loyally, he worked to persuade the recalcitrant backbenchers to withdraw from a cause which he himself had at heart. Sir Thomas Moore claimed that no Whip had tried to influence his vote on the issue, but as he was himself a defender of the death penalty he did not seem likely to reject the party line. Berkeley was only one of many would-be reformists to be approached. In the case of the young MP, Peter Kirk, it is said that Heath even threatened to use the ultimate sanction available to a Chief Whip: to denounce the erring member to his local constituency association. It made no difference; the Government lost by almost exactly the amount that Heath had predicted.²⁶

The imposition of prescription charges late in 1956 provides an illuminating snapshot of the Whips at work. This was an issue on which people felt strongly but not with the passion provoked by capital punishment. Busily, the Whips canvassed opinions and did their sums. ‘Price thinks we should exclude all OAPs.’ ‘P Forth hoped the Whips had taken note of the party’s strong disapproval. This will be very serious.’ John Vaughan-Morgan wanted a preliminary discussion in the 1922 Committee. Philip Remnant ‘is still determined not to vote for the charges’, but, a day later, ‘I think he is weakening a little’. Julian Ridsdale is ‘very shaky and liable to vote against’. John Eden is ‘all worked up, though I don’t think he will oppose actively’. And so it went on. In the end Heath was able to tell the Cabinet that, at the price of a few conciliatory noises, their majority was secure. Nearly always the Whips were successful. On 28 June 1956 the 1922 Committee was almost unanimous in its opposition to an American takeover of Trinidad. On 4 July no Tory voted against it and only one abstained. ‘This was considered a text-book case of brilliant whipping.’²⁷

These were mere storms in a teacup, however, compared with the hurricane that was about to break. In July 1956 Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. When the issue was first raised in the House of Commons, the Leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, supported the Government, provided that the problem was handled through the United Nations. It seemed that a bipartisan approach might be possible, but Heath saw trouble ahead and warned Eden not to count on Labour support. As preparations went ahead for an attack on Egypt and the reoccupation of the Canal Zone, regardless of the United Nations and world opinion, it became clear that not only would Labour oppose such action but that the Tory Party was divided. Initially, Heath thought that this threat was small. Towards the end of August he told the Egypt Committee – the inner group which handled the crisis and which he regularly attended – that he was ‘pretty sure about the party, though there might be some weaker brethren’. To William Clark he said that nobody would revolt and that ‘it won’t cause much bother in parliament because there are no leaders on the Conservative side to cause trouble’. Two or three weeks later the mood had changed. Heath reported that there were three groups: those who would support any action; those who would accept it, but only after reference to the United Nations; and those who were opposed to the use of force. ‘The Chief Whip cannot estimate the strength of this group. It might be large enough to put us in a minority in a division.’²⁸

Though Heath must have suspected what was going on, it was not until almost the end of October that Eden told him of the plot that was being hatched with Israel to circumvent the tortuous negotiations in the United Nations. Israel was to invade Egypt: Britain and France would then intervene to separate the contestants. ‘This is the highest form of statesmanship,’ Eden declared – ‘rather unnervingly’, in the view of his Chief Whip. If Heath was unnerved he concealed it well. His personal position was singularly difficult. He did not share Eden’s conviction that Nasser could be equated with Hitler and that the nationalisation of the Canal was another Munich crisis over which the West could not afford to fail. He believed that an honourable if imperfect solution could be reached through the United Nations. He felt that military intervention without the endorsement of the United Nations would be at the best extremely dangerous, at the worst disastrous. His doubts were evident to a few insiders. According to the Secretary of the Cabinet, Norman Brook, the sceptics in the Cabinet were Butler, Walter Monckton, Macleod, the Earl of Selkirk, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, possibly the Lord Chancellor, Kilmuir and Derrick Heathcoat-Amory and certainly, though strictly speaking he was not a member, Edward Heath.²⁹ Yet he hugged his true opinions to himself. When, fifteen years later, Willie Whitelaw was asked what he believed were Heath’s views on Suez, he replied: ‘Do you know, I have no idea. He does keep his own counsel very much. I have a suspicion, but such a tiny suspicion that I couldn’t venture it.’ Certainly Heath did not see it as being his role to try to convert the Prime Minister; he was doing his duty if he brought home to Eden the misgivings in the party. An old friend from Oxford, Robert Shackleton, urged him to resign: ‘You must agree Government policy is disastrous. I implore you to put first things first. The resignation of the Chief Whip would do more than any other single thing to rescue the country. I beg you to consider it.’ It was just because his resignation would have been so seismic in its consequences that he would not consider it. And if he could not resign, then it was his duty to try to persuade every member of the parliamentary party to support the government.³⁰

But when it was a case of working on members opposed to military intervention – in particular the eleven MPs, among whom Keith Joseph and Bob Boothby were the most prominent, who signed a letter demanding that British troops should be placed under the command of the United Nations – his approach was notably dulcet. It was also on the whole successful. Just before a crucial vote on 8 November he was seen exhorting two young MPs, Peter Kirk and David Price, who were known to be planning to abstain. He warned them that, if they did so, they might destroy the Government and, incidentally, their own futures. His arguments prevailed. But he was less successful with Nigel Nicolson. ‘I still believe it cannot be a bad thing for the party’, Nicolson told Heath, ‘that there should be at least one Conservative backbencher who is prepared to state he agrees with the very many eminent Conservatives outside this House who have expressed their distress at the Government’s action.’ Eventually Nicolson said that he would support the Government if the Chief Whip would assure him ‘that the purpose of our invasion was “to separate the combatants”, as the Prime Minister claimed and not to regain control of the Canal by a subterfuge. He held my gaze steadily and said nothing. I thanked him for his honesty, told him that I would abstain, and left the room.’³¹ When Anthony Nutting, a junior minister at the Foreign Office, resigned in protest at the Government’s action, a campaign to discredit him was launched, hinting that there were malign influences at work and that he had personal reasons for his behaviour, unconnected with the merits of the case. As often as not this sort of campaign would have had its origins in the Whips’ Office. It is hard to prove a negative but it would have been wholly out of character if Heath had lent his authority to such an operation. Again and again in the course of his career he refused to make use of damaging gossip, even though he believed it to be true. The sort of disinformation used to blacken Nutting’s reputation would have repelled him. If such a campaign was in fact mounted it was more probably the work of somebody in Number 10.³²

But both wings of the party were in revolt. One group objected to intervention; the other, the ‘Suez Group’, was outraged when the government succumbed to overwhelming American pressure and agreed to withdraw from Egypt. The latter were more numerous, more clamorous and, in Heath’s eyes, less worthy of sympathy. He treated them altogether more roughly. When Patrick Maitland said that he could not in conscience support the party, the Chief Whip exploded: ‘I’m fed up with your bloody consciences. I’m going to get on to your constituency.’ According to Maitland, he did so and was rebuffed. Maitland went public on the ‘extraordinary and unexampled pressures – some of them altogether underhand’, to which he and his fellow rebels had been subjected. That Labour hatchet-man, George Wigg, tried to raise the matter as a breach of parliamentary privilege but the Speaker ruled that ‘the work of the Whips had never been thought to be a matter of privilege’. There were very few occasions during his term of office as Chief Whip that Heath could legitimately be accused of going too far, of straying beyond the boundaries of propriety. That it was the Suez Group who provoked such conduct perhaps reflects his uneasy conscience at having pressed the opponents of intervention to vote for a course of action which he himself felt to be morally wrong and politically inexpedient. He could not publicly condone their behaviour if they rejected his pleas but he could express his true feelings by the added vigour with which he denounced rebels from the other wing. He turned to John Biggs-Davidson, a rabid member of the Suez Group, and told him: ‘You were a Communist before the war and now you are nothing but a bloody Fascist.’ Some years later he was asked if he had really used such words. Heath reflected for a movement. ‘I didn’t say “nothing but”,’ he concluded.³³

Whatever his personal views, he could not disguise the fact that a substantial element in the party, both inside and outside parliament, was deeply dissatisfied with the Government’s conduct of the Suez crisis. On the whole he handled such protests with tact and moderation. When Lawrence Turner abstained on a critical vote on the grounds that ‘the present Government has betrayed basic Conservative principles and been disloyal to everything for which the party stands’, Heath replied mildly that he appreciated Turner’s honesty but wished that he had expressed his views a little earlier so as to allow time for ministers to explain their position to him.³⁴ He was disconcerted to find how strongly anti-American even some of the less extreme members had become; there were reports from the smoking room that names were being collected for resolutions calling for the admission of Red China into the United Nations and the nationalisation of the Panama Canal.

Like the after-shocks that follow an earthquake, the Suez crisis continued to plague the Tory Party for the next two or three years. In mid-1957 the Suez Group once more caused trouble when it was proposed to resume paying Canal dues to Egypt. At one point it seemed as if as many as thirty members would abstain, though in the end only eight remained seated ostentatiously in their places. The venom was going out of the campaign, however, and by the end of the year the obdurate hard core who had forfeited the party whip were asking for talks which might lead to their return. Philip de Zulueta, the Prime Minister’s private secretary, consulted Heath. The Chief Whip, de Zulueta reported, ‘thought that you should not be forthcoming about this suggestion. He was anxious that it should still remain cold outside.’ Heath was more forgiving when it came to the tribulations of Nigel Nicolson. Nicolson, a bookish intellectual of markedly liberal views, had never been happy in his constituency of Bournemouth where his stance over Suez had caused great offence. Early in 1957 a mutiny broke out. ‘There is no doubt that the Association has every intention of getting rid of Nigel Nicolson in spite of reasonable pressure from me not to do so,’ Heath told the party chairman. All he would do was discourage those right-wingers who were hungry for a safe seat from taking any action while Nicolson was still the member. Nicolson was duly deselected by his constituency and told the Chief Whip that he felt his situation would be impossible if he did not resign the seat immediately. ‘Don’t believe that for a moment,’ Heath encouraged him. ‘Nobody feels anything but respect for your attitude. You have done well and served the party most creditably.’ Nicolson was moved and delighted: Heath, he told his father, ‘was quite clearly speaking with real conviction, and not as a formal condolence’.³⁵ But a year later came another ‘distressing but amicable interview’. A bill concerning obscene publications was passing through the House of Commons with support from both parties. The publishing house in which Nicolson was a partner, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, chose this moment to publish Nabokov’s Lolita, a brilliantly written yet curiously distasteful masterpiece about the passion felt by a middle-aged man for a pubescent twelve-year-old nymphet. It threatened to cause a scandal, was denounced as corrupting, and, Heath believed, would complicate the passage of the bill. He asked Weidenfeld and Nicolson at least to postpone publication. George Weidenfeld, however, would not hear of it: Lolita duly appeared, caused the anticipated furore and had no noticeable effect on the progress of the bill. When Heath first approached the publishers about the book Nicolson asked him whether he had read it. Yes, said Heath; he had found it ‘rather boring’. Some people have been sickened by Lolita, many were moved, excited or discomposed. Few can have been bored. Heath was genuinely at a loss, unable to see what all the fuss was about. Unlike Lolita and the bill, Nicolson’s parliamentary career perished at the next election.³⁶

Heath was one of the very few people who survived the Suez crisis with their reputation substantially enhanced. It had been a disaster for the Conservative Party, and but for him it would have been a catastrophe. The Lord Chancellor, David Kilmuir, described him as ‘the most brilliant Chief Whip of modern times…the most promising of the new generation of Conservatives’. The quiet skill with which he had handled the party had been exemplary: ‘While never showing any weaknesses or forgetting his responsibility to the Government, Heath calmly and gently shepherded the party through a crisis which might have broken it.’ The Chief Whip was the one man of whom he had not heard a word of criticism, wrote the Secretary of State for Scotland, James Stuart. ‘There has been nothing but praise for the fair and impartial manner in which you have handled a most difficult situation.’ Till the time of Suez Heath had been respected and well liked but something of a back-room boy; from 1957 he was clearly a coming man.³⁷

Apart from the credit he personally had gained, there was for Heath one redeeming feature about the crisis. Until the end of 1956 many Tories had continued to believe that Britain, at the centre of a still worldwide empire, could go on playing the role of a great power while isolated from the continent of Europe. Now he believed even the most sceptical must see that Britain’s future lay ‘in our own continent and not in distant lands which our forefathers had coloured pink on the map’. Even Eden, in one of the last memoranda he circulated as Prime Minister, acknowledged that a consequence of the disaster might be ‘to determine us to work more closely with Europe’. He was not to survive to implement such a policy himself. Heath had felt it essential that Eden should go from the moment when, on 20 December, he heard the Prime Minister deny that he had any foreknowledge of Israel’s invasion of Egypt: ‘I felt like burying my head in my hands at the sight of this man I so much admired maintaining this fiction.’ A few hours later he met Norman Brook leaving the Cabinet Room. ‘He’s told me to destroy all the relevant documents,’ Brook said. ‘I must go and get it done.’³⁸ But no hecatomb of incriminating papers could eliminate the evidence, nor great Neptune’s ocean wash the blood from Eden’s hands. It was only a question of how many days or weeks he could survive. On 8 January 1957 he summoned Heath to the Cabinet Room and told him that he was going to resign.

The two obvious successors were R. A. Butler and Harold Macmillan. Heath liked them both and would willingly have served under either, but he believed that Macmillan was better qualified to rebuild the shattered party. More to the point, he knew that the majority of Tories in the country felt the same. Pat Hornsby was only one of many members who reported meetings of constituents at which the scuttle from Suez had been denounced and who had demanded ‘new leaders who would back Britain’. The Tory voters, she claimed, were convinced that Butler was ‘the villain appeaser’. The fact that Macmillan had been the most insistent in demanding that the British and French must withdraw was either unknown or forgotten: Butler was seen as craven-hearted, Christopher Hollis wrote in Punch:

There was a man called Edward Heath

Who looked a gift horse in the teeth.

Ted Heath who, you must understand

Is not the leader of the band,

But is the chap who has to say

What instruments the others play.

He told a bean, who told a bean,

Who told a bean who told the Queen,

We really must have someone subtler

Than Mr Richard Austen Butler.

A proper man, and what is properer

Than take a fellow out of opera

And build him up as large as life

The character of Mac the Knife?³⁹

So far as Heath was concerned there was only one bean involved and he was Michael Adeane, the Queen’s private secretary. Heath told him that, by a substantial majority, the party would prefer Macmillan and that he personally agreed. His was not the decisive voice, but he spoke for the backbenchers and must have carried a lot of weight. It was to Heath that fell the unpleasant task of telling Butler that he was not to be Prime Minister. ‘Look after him, for he’s a very solitary figure just at present, and he relies on you,’ Butler’s private secretary, Ian Bancroft, wrote to urge him. There was no way by which Heath could make palatable the news that, in spite of the confident predictions in almost all the morning papers that Butler would be the next Prime Minister, the Queen had sent for Macmillan. ‘He looked utterly dumbfounded.’⁴⁰

In his memoirs Heath pays the most fulsome compliments to the new Prime Minister. Macmillan possessed, he says, ‘by far the most constructive mind I have encountered in a lifetime of politics’; he showed ‘a generous spirit and unquenchable desire to help the underdog’; he was ‘more than anyone else, my political mentor and my patron’. This may not have been the whole story. Several people have remarked that Heath was sometimes irritated by Macmillan’s sedulously cultivated insouciance; Kenneth Baker goes so far as to suggest that he disliked him and sometimes made disparaging remarks about him. Nor was Macmillan without reservations in his championship of his Chief Whip. He once told his future biographer Alistair Horne that Heath did not possess the qualities of a prime minister. ‘Hengist and Horsa’, he went on, ‘were very dull people. Now, as you know, they colonised Kent; consequently the people of Kent have ever since been very slightly – well, you know…Ted was an excellent Chief Whip…a first class staff officer, but no army commander.’⁴¹

So far as most people could see, however, the relationship was notably harmonious: certainly each man found the other extremely useful, if not indispensable. It was Heath whom Macmillan took with him to dine at the Turf Club on the night after he had taken over. ‘Had any good shooting lately?’ asked a fellow member when the Prime Minister entered the dining room; then, as he left some time later, ‘Oh, by the way, congratulations’. The dinner took place in the course of discussions about the shape of the new Government. Changes were kept to a minimum but some new blood had to be introduced and many hopes were disappointed. ‘It was a most difficult and exhausting task,’ Macmillan wrote in his diary. ‘Without the help of Edward Heath, who was quite admirable, we couldn’t have done it.’ Heath himself was one of the disappointed. He realised that he was bound to stay where he was – ‘The Government is like a regiment,’ he remarked. ‘You can’t change the CO and the adjutant at the same time’ – but he still felt a pang of jealousy when Reginald Maudling was made Paymaster General with a brief to concentrate on Britain’s relationship with Europe. It was the task which he coveted above all others.⁴²

But he had no reason to complain that he was treated with lack of consideration. Heath, an unidentified minister told Andrew Roth early in 1958, ‘is probably the most influential man around the Prime Minister today. The PM consults him about practically everything.’ Should the Prime Minister accept an invitation to dine with the Progress Trust? He should. How should he reply to a rather cheeky letter from the backbencher Martin Lindsay? ‘I have always found that a snub works and does not lead to increased heat.’ Should he visit Northern Ireland? Yes. If he were able to visit Lord Brookeborough at his country home it would be a most enjoyable and worthwhile experience.⁴³ He was the central figure in the preparation of party political broadcasts, was closely involved in the selection or deselection of MPs, and worked with the party chairman on political honours. When the time came to prepare a manifesto for the next election, the Steering Committee charged with drafting it consisted of Butler, Alec Home, Hailsham, Macleod and the Chief Whip; he was equally included in the inner group of Macmillan’s most intimate advisers – Norman Brook, Philip de Zulueta, John Wyndham – who met informally for half an hour several times a week.⁴⁴

He never hesitated to speak his mind. Early in 1958 the Government found itself inexplicably – in its own mind at least – unpopular. Things came to a head when the Liberal candidate won a by-election in Rochdale and the Tory was pushed into third place. The Steering Committee met to consider this disaster. Macleod identified the Liberals as the most dangerous enemy, who must be destroyed. Heath questioned whether they should be treated as enemy. They had much in common with the Conservatives, more so than with Labour. The Tories in the past had largely maintained themselves by absorbing other parties; if they were now to do a deal with the Liberals this would surely again be the final result. It was a line to which he was to revert several times over the next decades. On this occasion he met with a mixed reception. Home supported him; Hailsham strongly backed Macleod; as is usually the case with such debates it grumbled on until the circumstances which had engendered it no longer pertained and the issue became irrelevant.⁴⁵

It was maintaining the cohesion and loyalty of the party, however, that was his chief preoccupation, and the gauge by which the success of his tenure as Chief Whip would be judged. Many of the stresses within the party related to the disintegration of the empire, which had begun with the granting of independence to India and Pakistan in 1947, had gathered speed after Suez and was now to be accelerated still further by Macmillan. Heath was far from being a dedicated imperialist, but he had to manage a vociferous right wing which bitterly resented the humiliation of Suez and was resolved that no further scuttles should be permitted. The first battlefield was Malta. In this case the proposal was not that Malta should become independent but that it should be wholly integrated with the United Kingdom. Maltese members would sit in the House of Commons; all tariffs or restrictions on movement between the two countries would be abolished. The hard-core Suez Group, supported in this case by many moderates, broke into a clamorous protest. A six-line Whip would be needed to get the proposals through, said John Peyton; William Teeling announced that he and his friends would not merely vote against it in the House but would hold public meetings up and down the country in protest. Heath reported to Alan Lennox-Boyd that the executive of the 1922 Committee foresaw ‘very great trouble in the Party if the proposals for integration were proceeded with’. He calculated that a minimum of forty-eight Tory members would vote against the Government. In the event the Maltese Government declared that it would not take the matter further unless it were offered independence as an alternative to integration. With some relief the Colonial Office dropped this uncomfortably hot potato and the incipient mutiny died away.⁴⁶

Cyprus provided a more typical battleground. Archbishop Makarios had been exiled in March 1956, but it was obvious to most people that sooner or later he must be allowed to return and that the Greek majority on the island was determined to have him as its leader. Negotiations were under way. The Tory right wing passionately rejected any such solution. Busily the Whips reported to Heath on feelings in the party. Wolrige-Gordon ‘feels that God does not agree with our conduct of the Cyprus negotiations. We will have trouble with him when the debate comes.’ Henry Legge-Bourke was ‘more angry over the Cyprus settlement than he was over Suez’. Cyril Black said that Makarios’s return would ‘provoke an explosion in the House and the country among our own supporters’. The figures were remarkably similar to those on Malta; this time Heath had to report that a minimum of forty-seven Tories were probable rebels. It was Makarios’s insistence on enosis – union with Greece – which particularly offended the disaffected Tories; in the end he was cajoled into abandoning this position and the worst of the bitterness went out of the dispute.⁴⁷

The most serious threat to Macmillan, however, came over domestic issues. In the autumn of 1957 the Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, insisted on cuts in public expenditure which departmental ministers were not prepared to accept. Macmillan dallied over intervening in the dispute and, when he did so, found that positions were so entrenched that he must expect resignations from one side or the other. Heath told him that Thorneycroft’s intransigence had largely forfeited the support of the party, even those parts of it that were disposed to accept the logic of the Chancellor’s position. The Government could survive the resignation of Thorneycroft and the other Treasury ministers. Macmillan took his advice and left the country on a six-week overseas tour, referring airily as he prepared to board the plane to the ‘little local difficulty’ which the Government was confronting. Heath was right: there was no revolt, nor even serious misgivings. His handling of the crisis had been ‘superb’, wrote Macmillan in his diary; Dorothy Macmillan doubted whether anyone realised ‘the overwhelming regard and affection my husband has for Mr Heath’.⁴⁸

By now it was evident to most people that Heath would, one day, be a serious contender for the leadership. R. A. Butler, in July 1958, was reporting ‘intense personal rivalries’ between Heath and Macleod. ‘They are the same age and look anxiously to the throne. The Chief Whip’s status has been raised to God Almighty by the PM asking him to every meeting on every subject at every hour of the day and night.’ But divine though his status might have been, Heath was uncomfortably aware that he had enjoyed the role quite long enough for his own good. If his career was to prosper as he hoped it might, it was essential that he should soon be given a department of his own in which he could establish his credentials. The opportunity was not to be long delayed. A debilitating attack of jaundice early in 1959 kept him out of action for a couple of months and led him to take things slowly for a few weeks after that, but by the time Macmillan called a general election for 8 October he was fully recovered. Given the disastrous circumstances in which Macmillan had taken over, and the unpopularity which the party had experienced at the time of the Rochdale by-election, it was remarkable that the Conservatives went into the election as clear favourites. Heath was by no means complacent about his prospects at Bexley. His old adversary, Ashley Bramall, had returned to the fray and the seat, if no longer marginal, was still vulnerable to an adverse swing. Harold Macmillan came to speak for him during the campaign, saying that Heath represented ‘everything that is best in the new progressive, modern Tory party…He stands for the new philosophy and modern thought in the party. You send him back, for he is a good man.’ The Prime Minister undoubtedly meant what he said, and was glad of a chance to say it, but he would hardly have bothered to make the trip to Bexley if it had seemed that the constituency was secure. As it turned out, his efforts were unnecessary. Nationally, the Conservatives increased their popular vote by half a million and gained an overall majority of a hundred. In Bexley Heath’s majority went up to 8,500.⁴⁹

His last job as Chief Whip was to help Macmillan form a new Government. His own future was quickly settled: he was to succeed Iain Macleod in the critically important and taxing role of Minister of Labour. Mrs Thatcher, as Margaret Roberts had now become, who had at last secured herself a safe seat, wrote to congratulate him and thank him for the telegram he had sent her on polling day. ‘As you once said to me,’ she wrote, ‘even I could not lose Finchley. I am very sorry that you will not now be Chief Whip. I trust that Mr Redmayne will be no harder a taskmaster than you would have been.’⁵⁰

SEVEN Europe: The First Round

Heath had wanted the Ministry of Labour, wrote Macmillan, ‘and it was only right, in view of all his services, that he should step into independent ministerial command’. In fact he had wanted the Board of Trade but that had been promised to Maudling. He was well satisfied with the alternative, knowing that his success or failure in the role would be critically important to the economic and social performance of the government. The history of the unions in post-war Britain suggested that this task, though difficult, would not be unmanageable. Walter Monckton in 1951 had set a pattern of conciliation which had been broadly continued by Iain Macleod; the unions for their part had been controlled by moderates who were almost as anxious to avoid confrontation as the ministers with whom they dealt. But there were signs that all might not run so smoothly in the future. On one side the Tory right wing was growing restive: strikes, though still relatively infrequent, were becoming more common. There were calls for the abolition of the closed shop and the political levy, and the introduction of secret balloting. Sir John Laing, a giant of the construction industry, wrote to the Prime Minister demanding a return to the discipline enjoyed during the Second World War and citing examples from the Continent to show that this would be generally acceptable. ‘I can see no prospect of reverting to the wartime policy of combining a prohibition of strikes with a compulsory form of arbitration on industrial disputes,’ commented Heath. ‘The industrial conditions in Switzerland are so different from ours that a comparison is not very fruitful.’ He did not rule out legislation, yet he felt that the TUC must be given a chance to put its own house in order before the Government tried to impose its will on them.¹

But, on the other side, the union leadership was becoming less disposed to take any steps which might satisfy the Tory right. The scene was still relatively tranquil. Though the stalwarts of the wartime years had now departed, the TUC was still largely in the hands of moderates. George Woodcock, the General Secretary, and his deputy, Vic Feather, were eminently reasonable or, as their left wing saw it, feeble. So were the majority of members of the General Council. When Macmillan wrote in dismay to Heath about a rumour that the TUC was proposing a boycott of South African goods – ‘There are terrible dangers, especially for the heavy machinery business. In their present mood the Union of South Africa might retaliate by boycotting mining machinery and all the rest of it’ – Heath replied soothingly that all was under control. He would talk to Tom Williamson, ‘one of the more level-headed members of the General Council’, and was sure that the TUC would show restraint. So, for the moment, it did, but with Frank Cousins in charge of the giant Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU) it was clear that the industrial scene was likely to grow more tempestuous. Arthur Scargill and his like were still a distant menace, but Scargill was already ensconced in his local branch of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and still a member of the Young Communist League. The problems that Heath was to confront in the mid-1970s had their genesis fifteen years before.²

Heath was genuinely well disposed towards the unions; he adhered to the view which had been propounded in One Nation, that ‘a strong and independent Trade Union movement is essential to the structure of a free society’. He set out to create a good working relationship with its leaders. Vic Feather warmed to him from the start. ‘He was ready to depart from the formal procedures and see people informally,’ Feather told Heath’s biographer, George Hutchinson. ‘He recognised that preconceived positions by the Minister are no good…He played the traditional role of being neutral…He understood the need for conciliation.’ William Carron, the president of the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU), was likely to prove one of the most influential players in the game. Heath asked him out to dinner. Carron opted for lunch but refused to meet Heath in a restaurant as being too public a venue. Finally they settled for the Carlton Club. Carron can hardly have found the environment congenial but at least there were no lurking journalists. The lunch was a great success and went on till 4 p.m. In December 1959 Heath asked if he could borrow Chequers for a working party on industrial relations. Macmillan’s appointments secretary thought this would be a dangerous precedent and was probably outside the designated purposes of the Chequers Trust. With benign hauteur Macmillan minuted: ‘I expect Mr Heath’s guests will be more-or-less house-trained. Please arrange.’³

Heath’s first few months in office were uneventful; even when a rail strike began to seem a probability it was Ernest Marples as Minister of Transport who led in Cabinet. Heath said that, since the railwaymen had refused arbitration, he would have been entitled to intervene, but he thought ‘it would be better to await developments’. The situation was complicated by the fact that the Guillebaud Committee was about to report on the issue and was certain to recommend a substantial pay increase. The 4 per cent rise on offer was therefore no more than an interim figure: two of the unions involved were prepared to accept it but the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) stood out for an immediate 5 per cent. Heath made the disagreement between the unions an additional reason for holding his own fire but when it became clear that a national rail strike was otherwise inevitable he called in the unions and the British Transport Commission for direct talks. An element of charade was added by the fact that it was by now known to ministers that the Guillebaud Committee was going to suggest a figure far higher than the NUR was demanding (in the event it offered rises of between 8 per cent and 20 per cent). Heath argued in Cabinet that, given this, to refuse the NUR demand would present ‘difficulties from the point of view of the Minister of Labour in his conciliatory role’. Some members of the Cabinet complained that this would be a surrender to blackmail and the Chancellor muttered darkly about the dangers of inflationary settlements, but the majority was anxious to avoid a pointless and damaging strike.⁴ ‘I am thinking of you all the time,’ cabled Macmillan from Cape Town. ‘Do not hesitate to let me know if there is anything you want me to do.’ The press reaction had been reasonable, Heath replied, ‘but there may be criticisms from some members of the Party’.⁵ In the event, he was considered to be the hero of the hour and those sceptics who feared the long-term effects on negotiations with the unions for the most part kept their doubts to themselves.

Heath was convinced that the time was ripe for a high-level meeting between employers and union leaders, presided over by the Prime Minister, which would open the way for a new age in industrial relations. To his dismay his Cabinet colleagues were politely unenthusiastic – the project was too ambitious, it would be dangerous to convene such a meeting until the ground had been carefully prepared and a measure of consensus established. ‘Further consideration was needed,’ concluded the Prime Minister. Undeterred, Heath battled on and by the end of July 1960 was able to tell the Cabinet that both the British Employers’ Confederation and the TUC were ready to enter into talks. He had arranged for a meeting of the Joint Consultative Committee in the near future.⁶ By the time it took place he had moved on, but he had launched a process which was to be carried on by his successor, John Hare. Heath’s relationship with the unions tends to be judged in the light of his performance as Prime Minister, particularly by the legislation which he championed intended to place the unions within the framework of the law. ‘In the period from 1959 to 1964,’ writes Eric Wigham, ‘the Ministry of Labour moved from the field of talk into that of action and legislation. Perhaps it began with Edward Heath, the future Prime Minister with the laughing shoulders and cold eyes.’ Cold eyes or not, Heath’s most considered views on labour relations in these earlier days were delivered at the Swinton Conservative College in May 1960. What should be done to improve industrial relations, he asked. ‘Some people would like to see the legal situation tightened up, but there is a grave danger in seeking legal solutions. How would they work in practice? What happens if thousands of men ignore the law and go on strike?…In dealing with these problems, we are dealing with the whole of the industrial population of this country. Those who think it is purely a legal affair would do well to remember that the law deals with criminal and civil cases in which one person or a small number of persons is involved. Here we are dealing with very large numbers indeed, with a long history behind their problems, and holding very deep feelings. They need to be approached very carefully, both by industry and by ourselves.’ It might have been better for Heath if he had had those words engraved and displayed permanently on his desk.⁷

In June 1960 Heathcoat-Amory finally retired as Chancellor. In the reshuffle that followed Heath was moved to the Foreign Office, to serve as Lord Privy Seal, with a seat in the Cabinet, under the new Foreign Secretary, Alec Home. When Heath became Minister of Labour his one stipulation had been that he should serve for the full period of the Government; now he was to be transplanted before he had been able to do more than start on what he thought was necessary. With Home in the Lords, however, he would speak for the Foreign Office in the Commons and, still more important, would be in charge of Britain’s relationship with Europe. If any other Foreign Secretary had been involved Heath might have had doubts, but he liked and trusted Home and believed that they would work successfully together. Some people predicted dire consequences from the divided leadership but James Stuart, always one of Heath’s most ardent admirers, reassured him. ‘I quite like the idea of FO in the Lords’, he wrote, ‘because the Commons mustn’t get into the way of regarding themselves as entitled to all important posts. Also, from your own personal future angle, it should be of great value to you to get the experience of another most important Department and to have to run important debates in the House.’ For Heath it was the prospect of negotiating British entry into Europe that was above all enticing. He had no doubt that he must accept the challenge. But he left Labour with regret. ‘I know you’ll do a first-class job,’ wrote Vic Feather, ‘which is why I rather wish you’d had another year or so at the Ministry of Labour where you’d so quickly won the respect and confidence of the unions. Anyway, there it is – from one hot spot to another!’⁸

Though Europe was to be at the centre of Heath’s time at the Foreign Office, it was by no means his only responsibility; indeed, for several months, it made relatively few demands on his time. In Cabinet Home tended to take the lead when any subject except Europe was under discussion but Heath would often accept responsibility when the countries of the Gulf, particularly Bahrain or Kuwait, were causing problems. He visited both states and considered himself something of an authority on the area; allegedly assuring the immensely experienced Sir William Luce, then Resident in Bahrain, that he understood how the Arabs thought and needed no advice on the subject.⁹ Otherwise he filled in for Home whenever the Foreign Secretary was out of the country or otherwise engaged. When Madame Furtseva visited London she became increasingly discontented with her programme and finally went on strike when required to visit Henry Moore’s studio – ‘It would be quite inappropriate for a Soviet Minister of Culture to inspect the work of a sculptor who put holes in people.’ Heath came to the rescue, took her to Wimbledon and the ballet and invited her to visit him in his new flat – the first time she had ever entered a British home. But though there were occasional compensations, the work was far less interesting and the responsibilities less serious than had been the case at the Ministry of Labour. Nor did his performance in the House of Commons do much for his reputation. ‘He seems to lack authority and grasp of his subject,’ said the MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed, Lord Lambton – a comment that reflects more on the amorphous nature of his job than the merits of his performance but still makes it clear how difficult it was for Heath to shine when presenting someone else’s case on issues which were not under his control. In the Sunday Graphic in July 1960, the Tory MP Gerald Nabarro had tipped ‘the tough, imperturbable Edward Heath’ as a future Foreign Secretary. A few months later he had slipped back in the stakes so far as future promotion was concerned.¹⁰

The setback was only temporary. Heath’s real work at the Foreign Office more than restored his reputation. When he was appointed Lord Privy Seal he was known to be well-disposed towards Europe and critical of the Labour Government’s failure to move towards the Common Market, but he was not generally held to be – to use the phrases current some fifty years later – a Europhile, still less a Eurofanatic. Once Macmillan had taken the decision to apply for British entry and had charged Heath with the task of negotiating acceptable terms, however, what he had always felt would be a most desirable step forward became for him the Holy Grail. Heath became totally committed to the concept of Britain as an integral part of Europe and fought for it tenaciously until the day he died.

To a remarkable extent the decision to apply for British membership was made by Macmillan alone. He had, of course, to take the Cabinet with him but it was he who led and the rest who followed. The crucial moment probably came in January 1961 when Macmillan returned from a meeting with the French President, de Gaulle, at Rambouillet to report that there were ‘some grounds for thinking that it might now be possible to make some further progress towards a settlement of our economic and political relations with Europe’. There were, he said, ‘powerful influences in favour of the development of a close political federation in Europe’. De Gaulle was resolutely opposed to any such development. He believed that the United Kingdom by and large shared his views and would be a useful ally in the battle against the federalists. While there was no guarantee that de Gaulle would welcome British entry it was at least possible that he would not oppose it. It might therefore be best to seek a settlement while de Gaulle was still in power. The Cabinet enthusiastically agreed that steps should at once be taken to see if the way could be made clear for British entry.¹¹

But what did entry into Europe mean? In Britain, wrote Heath in 1967, ‘a myth has become fashionable that we were concerned only with economic affairs…Nothing could be further from the truth. The main purpose of the negotiations was political.’ Robert Marjolin, one of the two French Commissioners on the first European Commission, called on Heath in the House of Commons in March 1961. The EEC ‘was not an end in itself but only a stage on the road to a wider political union’, he said. The question was not whether the British wished to be associated with the Community as it was today but as it would be in the future. The UK, Heath replied firmly, ‘had always made it clear that they regarded the…question as primarily political’. The historian Keith Middlemas has suggested that Heath more than any other Conservative minister recognised the full implications of this concept and accepted ‘how great and painful the adjustments would have to be’. Probably this is true, but he shared his vision with the Lord Chancellor at least. ‘I am myself inclined to feel’, he told Lord Kilmuir, ‘that we have allowed ourselves to be over-impressed by supranationality, and that, in the modern world if, from other points of view, political and economic, it should prove desirable to accept such further limitations on sovereignty as would follow from the signature of the Treaty of Rome, we could do so without danger to the essential character of our independence and without prejudice to our vital interests.’ Kilmuir replied that he thought it would be difficult to persuade parliament or the public to accept any substantial surrender of sovereignty. ‘These objections ought to be brought out in the open now because, if we attempt to gloss over them at this stage, those who are opposed to the whole idea of our joining the Community will certainly seize on them with more damaging effect later on.’¹²

Heath accepted the argument, but with reservations. It might be undesirable to let this sleeping dog lie altogether, but there was no need to wake it too energetically. The emphasis when arguing the case in public should be on the immediate advantages to be gained from British entry and the damage that would be done by staying out; not on a hypothetical threat to national sovereignty that might or might not arise in the distant future. When the issue of sovereignty did arise, Heath played it down. Speaking at a private meeting in Chatham House in October 1961, he emphasised that any move towards federation could only come about with the unanimous support of all the members: ‘Therefore the position of those who are concerned from the point of view of sovereignty is completely safeguarded.’ That he believed this to be true is certain; that he privately considered that when the time did come the arguments in favour of some surrender of sovereignty would prove irresistibly strong is no less clear. This was not the moment to argue that case, however. He did not seek actively to mislead the British public about his expectations, but he did not feel it necessary or desirable to spell out the full implications of British entry in any detail.¹³

Until July 1961, however, the British Government was not committed to make any formal application to join. Exploratory missions were despatched to the most important capitals: Macmillan and Home received an encouraging reception in Bonn, Heath went to Rome in August 1960 and was assured that the Italians would welcome British accession. It was in Paris, though, that the problems were going to be found. Heath went there in October and found the French ‘predictably difficult’. Their stance was not that they opposed British entry but that they professed not to see how it would be possible. It was not as if the United Kingdom alone was applying to join. Largely to counter the EEC, Britain had been instrumental in creating the European Free Trade Area (EFTA), a loose association of seven fringe countries forming a rival trading bloc. Heath was able to tell the Cabinet that EFTA welcomed the British application, but only on the understanding that, in any negotiations, the British ‘would have full regard to the interests of their partners’. Were such interests, the French wondered, compatible with membership of the EEC?¹⁴

Worse still, there was the Commonwealth. The French had defended the position of its former empire when the Common Market was established; such arrangements could hardly now be renegotiated to meet a still greater complex of individual needs. Macmillan hopefully proposed that, when explaining the British position to the Commonwealth, ‘we should set the economic considerations in the context of the great political issues which were involved and the importance of reaching a settlement in the interest of Western unity’.¹⁵ That was all very well, said the French, but would the Commonwealth countries necessarily put the need for Western unity ahead of their export markets? And, if they did not, would the British be prepared to abandon them? Heath was impressed by the calibre of the French negotiators but not by their readiness to compromise. Couve de Murville, the Foreign Minister, was coolly non-committal. His deputy, Olivier Wormser, was quite as cool but rather more ready to commit himself. His preliminary views on the question of Commonwealth exports were so unforthcoming that Maudling exclaimed: ‘It seems to me to be pointless to be talking about any negotiations with them. They have in effect rejected in advance any proposals on the points of vital interest to us.’¹⁶ Baumgartner, the Minister of Finance, was one of the few Frenchmen in a high position who seemed favourable to British entry; but, he warned Heath, his Cabinet was divided and ‘he did not know what General de Gaulle’s innermost thoughts were on this’.¹⁷

Nor did anyone else. The General kept his own counsel. Pierson Dixon, the British Ambassador in Paris, believed that de Gaulle was hostile to British entry but hedged his bets by saying that he would ‘not be able to turn down a genuine offer from us to join’; Macmillan clung to his hope that the General would welcome the UK as an ally against creeping federalism in Europe. Jean Monnet, the great architect of European unity, maintained that in the last resort de Gaulle would accept British entry because his views ‘were coloured and guided by thinking how history would judge his actions’. One thing on which everyone agreed was that, if a British application was in principle desirable, there was no point in deferring it in the hope that de Gaulle would make his intentions known. In May 1961 Heath told the Cabinet that the signals from Paris were more encouraging; the French seemed less unwilling to take into account British obligations to EFTA and the Commonwealth. Ministers were divided: Christopher Soames, the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, Duncan Sandys, the Minister for Defence, and Heath were eager to start negotiations, Hailsham and Maudling saw no justification for such a step, Butler was characteristically uncertain. The Prime Minister had no doubts; it would have taken more than a few sceptics to check him. The decision to enter negotiations was announced in the House of Commons on 31 July. A fortnight later, on holiday in Brittany, Heath read in a newspaper that he was to conduct the talks. When he had left London a final decision on the matter had still not been reached. ‘There was nothing that I wanted more than this.’¹⁸

A formidably competent team was quickly assembled. The original proposal had been that the leading official should be Eric Roll, a polyglot civil servant of Austrian birth, who was an academic economist by training and possessed the unusual ability to lip-read in three languages – an invaluable asset in international negotiations. Heath respected his talents but told Macmillan he doubted whether he should be the senior official on the delegation. Macmillan agreed: ‘He thinks it specially important that the official in charge should be a man of standing and authority.’ That man, at Heath’s insistence, was Pierson Dixon: ‘Knowing that French agreement was the key to success, he wanted to put the man who was closest to them in charge in Brussels.’ The disadvantage of this was that, if Dixon was much of the time in Brussels, he would no longer be so close to those making policy in Paris. Probably it made little difference to the final outcome but it certainly placed an almost insupportable burden on Dixon himself and, on balance, was a mistake.¹⁹

But the real leader was Heath himself. The members of his team were united in their admiration for his achievements. He was outstanding, said Roll. ‘He combined in a unique way the qualities of a first rate official having complete mastery of complex technical details with the necessary political touch in his contacts with Ministers and officials of other countries, with the press and with London. He was the sort of Minister British senior civil servants particularly admire and like to work with, always ready to listen to advice yet quite clear in the end as to what ought to be said and done.’ Donald Maitland, the chief press officer seconded from the Foreign Office, wrote that, within the first few days, ‘Heath managed to create an almost tangible team spirit among members of the delegation. He was relaxed yet totally in control, he let others speak, including the most junior, and he ensured that by the end of the evening we each knew what was expected of us.’ The pressure on both Heath and his team was unremitting. In the eighteen months after May 1961 Heath flew 100,000 miles and spent one night in five abroad. His team spent less time in aeroplanes but were more often away from home; when the negotiations finally ended Heath sent Donald Maitland’s wife a bouquet of flowers with an apology for so often disrupting her family life.²⁰

Jean Monnet was the European whom Heath most respected and to whose opinions he paid the greatest heed. In Monnet’s view the way was wide open for British entry: ‘The greatest difficulty was to take the decision which the British Government has taken.’ The right tactic, he urged, was that Britain should accept the Treaty of Rome as it stood and then, having acceded, seek to change things from within. The idea had obvious attractions. Even de Gaulle could hardly have rejected an unconditional application to join and if Britain had become a member in mid-1961 it would have been in time to participate in the formulation of the Common Agricultural Policy instead of being confronted with a system largely devised to meet the needs of French farmers. But though left to himself Heath would probably have proceeded along such lines, he knew that there was no possibility that either the Government or the country would let him do so. Willynilly, he was doomed to fight for the interests of EFTA and the Commonwealth. He told Monnet that Macmillan would never ‘let the substantial domestic opposition which he faced prevent him from carrying out his aim of taking the United Kingdom into the developing European Union’; but in fact Heath knew that such opposition could not be ignored and that his conduct of negotiations in Brussels would have to take account of it.²¹

When he expounded to the Cabinet the line that he intended to take in his opening statement on 10 October 1961 he said that he would stress that ‘the aims and objectives of the Treaty of Rome were accepted by the Government’. That point made, however, he would ‘deal in some detail with the three major matters – the Commonwealth, agriculture and EFTA – for which satisfactory arrangements would have to be secured if the UK were to join the Community’. If a united Europe had been eager for British accession such an approach would have been reasonable, but given the attitude of the French it guaranteed that there would be, at the very least, endless delays and difficulties, and possibly final failure. He told the Cabinet a fortnight later that the response to his speech had been ‘reasonably favourable’. When speaking at Chatham House he was still more hopeful. Fears among the Six – France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg – that Britain sought only to break up the union, or at least to impede its growth, had, he believed, been finally dispelled by his assurances. ‘The fact is that they do want us there, I believe now, broadly speaking, and we shall know finally one day.’ He would indeed. So far as five of the Six were concerned his optimism was well based, but if he found cause for comfort in the cool hostility of the French he was sadly deluding himself.²²

In retrospect it is easy to say that Heath should have fought harder in London to be allowed to decide for himself which items were worth a battle and which were not. As it was he found himself proposing terms which he knew would be unacceptable and in which he did not even believe himself. This was particularly true of the transitional periods which Heath proposed should be allowed before the full rigour of the EEC’s rules affected the Commonwealth exporters. ‘It was no good talking only about a short transitional period,’ he told the secretary general of the Italian Foreign Ministry, Cattani. ‘The Commonwealth system would continue and must be protected from anything which would seriously damage the interests of its members. It would not be possible from the internal political point of view in the UK to accept arrangements which caused such damage.’ Yet, as he admitted in his memoirs, the opening position that he was required to take up was ‘always unrealistic, at times farcically so’. The result was that even Britain’s staunchest allies among the Six wondered whether the will to join was really present; the French were exultant at such clear-cut evidence that the British were not serious in their application.²³

Once it became clear that every commodity – from butter, through bananas, to kangaroo meat – was to be the subject of lengthy bargaining, it became obvious that the negotiations would be protracted, tedious and faintly absurd. It was his activities at this period that earned him Private Eye’s mocking nickname of ‘Grocer Heath’. The noble concept which Heath cherished was almost lost in a welter of trivial haggling. Since, after every British offer, the Six had to retreat into conclave to agree on their response, the delays became almost intolerable.

The French rejoiced in this sluggish progress. It was their object to spin matters out so as to ensure that the Common Agricultural Policy would be operational before matters came to an end. Heath might reasonably have despaired at the snail-like advance of the discussions. Instead he remained alert, cheerful and resolute. ‘A less resilient personality than the Lord Privy Seal’, wrote Nora Beloff of the Observer, ‘would have been driven to distraction by the long hours he was to spend pacing in ante-rooms.’ He saw it as his function not only to remain abreast of every detail of the bargaining but to keep up the spirits of the British team. Morale was not always high. Both Eric Roll and Patrick Reilly, a future ambassador in Paris then working in the Foreign Office, believed that the extravagant demands of London, particularly those of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, had made it far more difficult for the other members of the Six to overrule the French.²⁴ Heath himself felt that, after a bold start, the British delegation had disappointed their allies by failing ‘to stand up to the French and to outwit and out-manoeuvre them’. Yet he had been left with so few cards to play that his ability to outwit or out-manoeuvre was very limited. ‘It was a gallant and indefatigable effort,’ wrote George Ball, an American diplomat who was as eager as anyone to see the negotiations succeed, ‘but inevitably mired in technicalities. During the ensuing debate the British purpose became obscure; the political momentum was lost in niggling bargaining.’²⁵

Heath was resolved that the purpose should not become obscure, that the flame should continue to burn. Late every evening in Brussels he would join the journalists in the basement bar of the Metropole Hotel. ‘On these occasions,’ remembered Maitland, ‘he was thoroughly relaxed and totally in control. His mastery of detail was complete and his confidence infectious.’ In London he used every avenue open to him to dispel what he felt to be unhelpful misunderstandings. The Labour Party, which for the most part had switched under Gaitskell’s leadership to opposition to British entry, was beyond his power to influence but he used his old contacts with the trade unions to brief them at regular intervals. Would he be giving a similar report to the House of Commons? asked the trade union leader Frank Cousins. ‘Mr Heath replied that in Parliament he could only give broad outline statements of what had been taking place and could go nowhere near so far as he had at the present meeting.’ The one point that the union leaders made repeatedly was that there should be a specific reference in the Treaty of Rome to the maintenance of full employment. Heath replied that ‘if they were successful in achieving the general aims of the Treaty, full employment would follow naturally’. Not wholly satisfied by this assurance, Cousins returned to the charge and Heath retorted that the trade unions in the Six were happy with the existing formula; the British could hardly insist on more.²⁶

It was the sceptics in his own party who required the most careful handling. Paul Channon, R. A. Butler’s pps, reported to his master that a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee was ‘well-attended and extremely friendly. Members were much impressed by the clarity and knowledge of the Lord Privy Seal.’²⁷ The 1922 Committee proved more critical. At a meeting in June 1961 d’Avigdor-Goldsmid attacked the negotiations on the ground that the interests of the Commonwealth were being neglected while Alfred Wise spoke for EFTA. Was it really necessary to be inside the EEC to influence it? he asked. ‘Has Britain had no influence up-to-date?’ This sally met ‘with a grumble of support’. Kenneth Pickthorn asked a question which preoccupied many members: ‘Can we at any time self-determine ourselves out?’ But though a majority of those who attended needed some convincing, the atmosphere was more one of enquiry than hostility. Opinion on the whole moved in favour of the Government. When a few months later Heath delivered a ‘long and complicated speech’ to the 1922 Committee it had ‘a very favourable reception’.²⁸ Though he won the argument, however, some felt that he was doing himself harm in the process. Robert Rhodes James, at that time a Senior Clerk in the House of Commons, noted that ‘an ominous note of thinly-veiled intellectual contempt for those in his party who opposed the application was sometimes clearly apparent in his speeches…For the first time, one was conscious of a substantial hostility developing towards Heath in some quarters of the Conservative party.’²⁹ ‘Substantial’ is a strong word, probably too strong. No other reports of the period make the same criticism. But when Heath knew that he was right – and he almost always did know that he was right – he was not at pains to conceal his opinion. Some members did undoubtedly feel that they were being brushed aside and their views treated with scant respect. They did not yet feel hostility towards Heath, but their affection was limited.

Persuading the Commonwealth countries that it was in their best interests to see Britain safely embarked in the Common Market was a first preoccupation of the Government. Heath firmly believed, or at least convinced himself, that this was true. Ministers were despatched to the capitals most concerned to set at rest any mind that might still be uneasy. They went out as doves, remarked Robin Turton, a strongly anti-European Conservative MP, ‘but returned not with an olive branch but with a raspberry’.³⁰ Heath went to Ottawa and received, if not a raspberry, then at least a very cautious welcome. When the Commonwealth leaders convened in London in mid-September 1962 the atmosphere was no more cordial. Heath’s own performance, noted Macmillan in his diary, ‘was really a masterpiece – from notes and not from a script. The temper was good, the knowledge of detail was extraordinary, and the grasp of complicated issues affecting twenty countries and many commodities was very impressive.’ But though the premiers of Canada and Australia, Diefenbaker and Menzies, may have been impressed, they were not converted. Two days later Macmillan wrote ruefully: ‘Poor Ted Heath…who is only accustomed to Europeans who are courteous and well informed even if hard bargainers, was astounded at the ignorance, ill-manners and conceit of the Commonwealth.’ But having let off steam and berated the British negotiators, the Commonwealth leaders took stock and concluded that they could live with the sort of settlement which Heath was envisaging. The worst was averted. ‘The meeting had ended better than it had begun,’ Macmillan told the Cabinet. Somewhat grudgingly, a green light had been given for the negotiations to continue. More than anyone else, Heath had been responsible for the change in the atmosphere. France Soir described him as being Macmillan’s ‘brillant poulain, le célibataire aux joues roses’. ‘Poulain’ – literally ‘foal’ – suggested a talented novice, a trainee. It was perhaps not exactly the description that Heath would have preferred but he accepted it as the compliment that was intended and kept the cutting among his papers.³¹

It had been his hope that, before the date of the Commonwealth Conference, every important issue in Brussels would have been resolved. It was not until July 1962 that he accepted a recess was inevitable and that negotiations would have to be resumed in the autumn. It was the fault of the French, he told the Cabinet. They had refrained from discussing their objections when the British had been present but had not hesitated to press them at meetings of the Six. ‘A high proportion of the obstacles which we were still meeting could be attributed to French initiatives.’ Almost as disturbing was the hostility to Europe which was growing in the United Kingdom. Gaitskell was not alone in his opposition. ‘If they don’t want us we certainly don’t need them’, was increasingly the attitude. But still Heath could not believe that, after so many weeks and so much bargaining, the negotiations could founder. Even the pessimistic Dixon, on the last day of the discussions before the adjournment, told Eric Roll that the French were ‘rather resentful of our rewriting their sacred writings…But they are chittering with interest; not, I judge, with hostility.’³²

Through the autumn and early winter, the mood of optimism grew stronger. Frank Giles, the exceptionally well-informed Sunday Times correspondent in Paris, said that British entry was now very nearly a certainty. ‘If the Archangel Gabriel himself were conducting the negotiations,’ he wrote, ‘he could (assuming, of course, that he was British) scarcely do better than Mr Heath.’ The crunch would come in mid-January 1963, Heath told the Cabinet. The French had agreed that there could be a long ministerial meeting and, though they had not accepted that this should be the final stage, they seemed resigned to the certainty that substantial progress would be made. The French were isolated, he announced confidently on 10 January. All the other members were ‘earnestly seeking to reach a settlement on terms acceptable to the UK’. The possibility that the French would not be deterred by the feelings of their allies, though it had been endlessly discussed, still seemed too fanciful a chimera to take seriously.³³

What disturbed Heath most was that the negotiations in Brussels were only part, and not necessarily the most important part, of the relationship between Britain and Europe, particularly between Britain and France. In March 1962, in a memorandum to the Foreign Secretary dealing with the possibility of cooperating with the European countries on the development of nuclear weapons, Heath showed that he was painfully aware of the link between such matters and British accession to the Common Market:

What alarms me more than anything, is that, at the same time as we are trying to negotiate our entry into the EEC – in which we have all too few cards to play – we are giving every indication of wishing to carry out political policies which are anathema to the two most important members of the Community. This can only increase the mistrust and suspicion already felt towards us in the political sphere…We must never forget that the countries of the Community are interested in two things: first, in jointly increasing their own prosperity – in which they regard us as a possible liability and the Commonwealth as an undesirable complication; secondly, in strengthening their defence against what they regard as the persistent and menacing threat from the Soviet Union…What they see here is our apparent determination, with the United States, to prevent the French from developing their atomic and nuclear defence…Our colleagues have instructed us to carry out a negotiation for our entry into the EEC at the same time as they – showing a complete lack of understanding of European attitudes and problems – are carrying out contrary policies in the political and defence fields. It is no wonder that these negotiations, already sufficiently difficult and complicated, threaten to become almost unmanageable.³⁴

For ‘our colleagues’ read, above all, the Prime Minister. Macmillan negotiated with the Americans at Nassau an agreement for the exclusive provision of Polaris missiles to be carried on nuclear submarines; to de Gaulle, at Rambouillet in mid-December 1962, he made it clear that, though the French were welcome to jog along as junior partners, the so-called ‘independent’ deterrent would remain firmly in British hands. ‘I only trust that nothing I have done at Rambouillet or Nassau has increased our difficulties,’ Macmillan wrote apologetically to Heath. His trust was misplaced. ‘I can well imagine de Gaulle’s feeling’, wrote Heath in his memoirs, ‘at being asked to accept the terms of an agreement negotiated in his absence by the British and American governments. With more sensitive handling, we might, at the very least, have denied him this particular excuse for behaving vindictively towards the British.’³⁵

Was the nuclear issue a decisive feature in de Gaulle’s thinking or was it just one more piece of evidence that Britain could never become truly European? From early in the negotiations Heath had been in no doubt that de Gaulle disliked the idea of British entry; he told Macmillan that ‘there was a genuine fear on de Gaulle’s part of admitting Britain as a kind of Trojan horse which would either disrupt the present system or prevent French domination’. But it did not necessarily follow that he would block British entry whatever the outcome of the negotiations. Some of the British team involved in the negotiations were convinced that that had been his intention from the start. He was determined to keep us out, says the British diplomat, Michael Butler, ‘because he feared the UK would gang up with Holland and Germany to create a Europe which was both too federal and too closely linked to the United States’. Any delay in making his position brutally clear was caused by his hope that the negotiations would break down without his intervention.³⁶ Yet Couve de Murville, whom Heath believed would not wilfully have misled him, told him just before the final sessions in Brussels: ‘No power on earth can now prevent these negotiations from being successful.’ De Gaulle, he claimed, had ‘neither the power nor the intention to veto UK membership’. Eric Roll was convinced that the General ‘made up his mind almost at the end’. The answer could be that de Gaulle did not ask himself till the last minute whether or not his mind was made up. He preferred not to contemplate the problem until it was thrust upon him. But if a decision had been forced upon him three or six months earlier he would almost certainly have acted as he did in January 1963. His mind may not have been made up earlier, but his mindset was inexorably fixed. Given his temperament it seems almost inconceivable that, whatever the course of the negotiations, whatever the feelings of the other countries involved, he would have allowed the British to enter the Community.³⁷

A few days before the last round began Heath dined with the American diplomat George Ball in Paris. He was ‘in ebullient high spirits’, wrote Ball. He described his meetings with various French ministers and concluded that, though some serious obstacles remained, he was ‘reasonably confident that the British application was in no serious trouble’. Then came de Gaulle’s press conference of 14 January, at which he stated bluntly that Britain was socially, economically and politically unsuitable to be a member of the European Community. Swiftly, Couve de Murville made it clear that, so far as the French were concerned, the negotiations were over. Heath at first hoped that so arrogant a volte-face might ‘rouse the Five to a new level of anger’, but, as he told the Government in London: ‘It begins to look as though none of them will have much stomach for the idea of carrying things to the point of breaking up the EEC.’ The last meeting of 29 January confirmed this view. Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian Foreign Minister, condemned the French behaviour in the harshest terms. It was, he said, ‘a day of defeat for Europe…If the Rome Treaty did not explode, the Community spirit was gravely, perhaps mortally wounded.’ But the Rome Treaty did not explode, nor was it near doing so. Gerhard Schroeder, the German Minister for Foreign Affairs, made the best of it when he praised ‘the splendid effort which had been made by his British friends’ and hoped that ‘the impulse for European unity would not die away in Britain. For the day would come when it could be realised.’ Heath in his reply spoke with moving dignity. There was no need for fear, he said: ‘We would not turn our backs; we were a part of Europe by geography, history, culture, tradition and civilisation.’³⁸

It was one of the worst days of his life. The journalist Nicholas Carroll recorded seeing him in his hotel just before midnight: ‘The Lord Privy Seal, normally cheerful and tireless and the best-liked negotiator here, seemed frozen into profound depression; his cheeks grey, his eyes glazed with fatigue.’ Christopher Soames recalled driving with him to the meeting when they already knew that the veto was to be applied. ‘I remember sort of putting my hand on his knee and saying: “You mustn’t mind too much, Ted. Nobody could have tried harder than you”…and I got absolutely frozen dead-pan. I could never understand how undemonstrative he was.’³⁹ Impassivity was indeed his usual reaction to any setback. Carroll must have caught him with his guard down. But he rallied with remarkable speed. Within a few days he was raising in Cabinet the possibility of a new initiative confined to those members of the Six who favoured British entry, ‘preferably of a political or military nature and linked with NATO, which might strengthen our own position in Europe and serve as a counterpoise to the ambitions of the French government’. He gained little support for his ideas. Macmillan thought it would be dangerous to press for some new form of association which might seem incompatible with the course the British had so recently been espousing, and the Cabinet endorsed his views. The truth was that a substantial minority in the Cabinet was privately relieved that the effort to join the Six had shipwrecked and the rest felt that the whole European problem had best be left to simmer for a while, at least until the General had departed the scene.⁴⁰

The debacle had done no harm to Heath’s reputation. Evelyn Shuckburgh, from the UK delegation to NATO, spoke for the whole of the British team when he found some consolation in the fact that ‘you personally have emerged from the whole affair with such a tremendous reputation and, indeed, with a position in Europe and at home which is in many ways unique. This is a really remarkable result to have achieved through a failed negotiation.’ It was remarkable, yet, as was to happen so often in his career, Heath contrived to forfeit some part of the credit that was due him by the embittered intransigence of his behaviour. Philip de Zulueta told Macmillan a few months later that Heath was being ‘a bad loser’. He was refusing to leave ill alone, constantly making speeches attacking the French, which left them irritated but unmoved and embarrassed the other Five. ‘I am sure you ought to raise this with the Lord Privy Seal,’ urged de Zulueta. There is no evidence that he did so, but Macmillan noted in his diary: ‘Heath is so bitterly anti-French as to be almost unbalanced in his hatred of de Gaulle, Couve etc.’⁴¹

One reason why he harped so angrily on the past was that he did not have enough to do. For some eighteen months his activities had centred almost exclusively on Britain’s relationship with Europe. During this time his other responsibilities in foreign affairs, ill-defined at the best of times, had largely been looked after by other people. Even if he eventually managed to re-establish his position the work would never be of adequate importance: he had been appointed to the Foreign Office above all to secure Britain’s entry into Europe, and that avenue was now closed. He was marking time. It is the lot of those who mark time to pass unnoticed. Worse still, though nobody blamed Heath personally for de Gaulle’s veto, he was associated in the eyes of the public and the party with a failure of British policy. In the first six months of 1963 his reputation went, not dramatically but noticeably, into decline. It seemed unlikely that it would recover until Macmillan overhauled his Cabinet or retired.

The moment was not long postponed. Heath had been losing confidence in his former hero since the summer of 1962. His responsibilities in Brussels had kept him to some extent remote from Westminster politics and he was even more taken aback than most of his fellow ministers when Macmillan, in the notorious ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in July 1962, savagely reshaped his Government and put six of his senior cabinet ministers out to grass. ‘I knew nothing of what he had in mind,’ said Heath some years later. ‘After all, I was engaged in Europe. But it was ill-advised. The timing was wrong. And to do it on such a scale!’⁴² The Profumo scandal, giving as it did the impression that the Prime Minister was old, inadequate and out of touch with contemporary life, further weakened his position. When ill health forced him to retire just before the Party Conference in October 1963 it caused surprise but little distress in the parliamentary party.

If the negotiations in Brussels had ended in success and Heath had been rewarded for his efforts by promotion to a senior department it is possible that he might have been a significant challenger in the jostling for position which followed Macmillan’s resignation. Even as it was, he could not entirely be ruled out. Alec Home, the dark horse who was eventually to romp home the winner, told his Minister of State at the Foreign Office, Peter Thomas, that he thought the choice was between Maudling and Heath. Maudling, he felt, had the better chance, ‘because Ted Heath’s single-mindedness and lack of rapport with some backbenchers would disqualify him in many people’s eyes’. Home said not a word to suggest that he might be a candidate himself. Macmillan himself thought Heath and Maudling were both too young, and the same went for Iain Macleod: their chance would come in five or ten years.⁴³ The Times disagreed. If Heath was really too young – ‘after all, he is a mere year older than President Kennedy’ – then R. A. Butler would be the best choice. But, considered The Times, ‘that “if” needs to be questioned. Sooner or later the reins of Conservatism will be placed in the hands of a new generation. There is much to be said for that being done now.’⁴⁴ David Bruce, the American ambassador with an extremely sensitive understanding of British political life, felt that, in the wake of the Profumo scandal, ‘an unmarried man would be at a great disadvantage’. He too felt that Heath’s time would come but that in the meantime his supporters were likely to vote for Butler or Hailsham, who could be expected to disappear from the scene more rapidly than Maudling or Macleod.⁴⁵

Heath’s own views are hard to establish. He told his pps, Anthony Kershaw, that he was not going to throw his hat into the ring. If people wanted to vote for him he could not stop them, but he would give them no encouragement. In his biography of Alec Home, D. R. Thorpe states that, while Heath was staying with the chairman of the 1922 Committee, John Morrison, at his Scottish home on Islay in July 1963, the question of the succession came up. Morrison told Heath that Alec Home was going to be urged to run and Heath agreed to back him if he did. This Heath strongly denies. He told Hailsham that he had played no part in the choice of a new leader except to tell the Lord Chancellor, Lord Dilhorne, who it was that he personally supported. He had no discussions with Butler, Maudling or Macleod, and the matter was never discussed while he was at Islay. At that time, anyway, he pointed out, Macmillan’s retirement did not seem imminent. It is almost incredible that during their days and, still more, long evenings on Islay two men as passionately concerned with politics as Morrison and Heath should not even have touched on the question of who would be Macmillan’s successor. Heath, however, had no high opinion of Morrison’s judgment or his discretion; he might well have chosen to abort the conversation or to confine himself to a non-committal grunt when Home’s candidature came into question. Whatever the truth, Heath did back Home and made no secret of his loyalties.⁴⁶

Why he did so is another matter. He knew Home well, had found him easy to work with and could be reasonably confident that, with the former Foreign Secretary in Number 10, his own career would flourish. Was that all there was to it? Jim Prior, who worked as closely with Heath as any Tory and was his strong supporter, suspected that there was more. ‘Perhaps Ted had recognised that, although his own time had not yet come in 1963, he did stand a chance of being Alec’s successor, and that he would be much more out of the running if either Rab Butler or Quintin Hailsham had been chosen. This seems the most likely explanation…but it does also reveal Ted in a more scheming guise than I was to associate with him on virtually any other occasion.’⁴⁷ A more suspicious nature still might see Heath as even more guileful. Home was twelve years older than Heath, not believed to be hungry for office or likely to be particularly tenacious in holding on to it. He would be taking command at a time when the Tory ship was heading into storms, probably into electoral defeat. He would not be a caretaker prime minister but he would more nearly fill that role than any of his rivals. Heath would probably have backed him anyway, but a measure of self-interest may well have been among his motives. Certainly Home was a far happier choice from Heath’s point of view than either Macleod or Maudling, one only two years older than him, the other two years younger. If either of these secured the succession Heath’s prospects of reaching Number 10 would have been dim indeed.

In the event it became clear that Macleod had made too many enemies on the right and centre of the party to be in the running. In a ballot of Tory MPs, Maudling secured 48 first choices to Heath’s 10, and 66 second or third choices to Heath’s 17, but since Heath was not a formal candidate this meant little. Quite as important was the fact that Maudling was credited with six ‘definite aversions’ – in effect, blackballs – against Heath’s one. Hailsham, at one time said to be Macmillan’s favoured successor, piled up so many ‘definite aversions’ as a result of his ill-judged and extravagant performance at the Party Conference that he was ruled out. In the end the Queen, largely, it seems, on Macmillan’s recommendation, sent for Home. It was the consummation Heath had hoped for. It was made even better by the fact that Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell took exception to the secretive and, as they saw it, undemocratic process by which Home was finally selected and refused to serve under him. By doing so they gravely damaged their own prospects of future promotion. On 19 October 1963, the Earl of Home, as he then was, became Prime Minister, renounced his peerage and stood for election to the House of Commons as Alec Douglas-Home. It remained to see what job he would offer Heath.

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