Edward Heath

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