Читать книгу Edward Heath: The Authorised Biography - Philip Ziegler - Страница 12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a man called Edward Heath

Who looked a gift horse in the teeth.

Ted Heath who, you must understand

Is not the leader of the band,

But is the chap who has to say

What instruments the others play.

He told a bean, who told a bean,

Who told a bean who told the Queen,

We really must have someone subtler

Than Mr Richard Austen Butler.

A proper man, and what is properer

Than take a fellow out of opera

And build him up as large as life

The character of Mac the Knife?³⁹

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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