Edward Heath

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.