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Edward Heath
Edward Heath

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Edward Heath

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‘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.

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