Edward Heath

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.