Читать книгу Edward Heath: The Authorised Biography - Philip Ziegler - Страница 14

For his first twelve years as an MP Heath’s style of living had been frugal. He lived in a tiny flat in an unfashionable area. As a Whip he had spent much of his time in the House, as Lord Privy Seal he was often in Brussels. He entertained little, and then largely on expenses. He spent most of his weekends at the family home in Broadstairs and for his holidays tended to patronise the houses of his richer friends. By the standards of a City tycoon his salary was pitifully small, but his commitments were even smaller. Each year he saved, and his money was invested for him by Brown Shipley, who took particular trouble to ensure that he was well looked after. Increasingly too he was advised by the investment maestro, Jim Slater, a man who had his problems from time to time but was generally considered to possess one of the shrewdest minds in the financial world. When he briefly rejoined Brown Shipley as a director after the Conservatives lost the election in 1964, Heath bought or was given 3,125 shares worth £7,000.¹ Though his stay with the merchant bank was brief, he made a most favourable impression: the chief foreign-exchange dealer said that Heath spent two days with him and ‘mastered every subject that I expounded…He understood it all: it takes some people years…If everyone had fallen down he could have run the bank.’² If he had remained in the City he probably would one day have run the bank; certainly the directors felt that he was somebody with whom close contact should be maintained. ‘When you get your pass sheet you will see that you have been credited with rather higher directors’ fees for the current year,’ he was told after he had resigned for the second and final time. ‘This is intended as a gesture of our thanks for your very real help.’³

The money he thus earned he guarded assiduously. He was not mean – he was capable of surprising generosity and when he entertained he liked to do so in style – but he much preferred other people to pay for things. There are innumerable anecdotes of people who thought that they were being treated to a drink or meal and ended up paying the bill themselves. Every expense was carefully considered and often begrudged. When, in 1970, the Carlton Club put up its annual subscription to £55, Heath minuted that this was ‘a monstrous sub for this useless club’. Surely he should be exempt? Enquiries were made and he was told there could be no exemption. ‘You will have to ask Brown Shipley to pay the extra,’ concluded Heath: which, seeing that it was at that time five years since he had ceased to be a director, cast a curious light on his relationship with the merchant bank.⁴ Yet he never acquired any of the skills that might have made it easier for him to economise. He could not have sewn on a button and approached with caution the task of making a bed. He could not cook.⁵ Once he volunteered to produce breakfast for the crew of Morning Cloud. He broke the eggs, put them on slices of bread in a frying pan, and could not understand why the unpalatable mess that resulted was so unsatisfactory.⁶

He kept his room in his father’s house in Broadstairs and occasionally took his father and stepmother, and his brother John with his wife, out to lunch or dinner; but he does not seem otherwise to have contributed to the household expenses. For Heath, the heart had gone out of his family with his mother’s death. He resented his father’s remarriage and never established any real relationship with his kindly if unexciting stepmother Mary. William Heath’s marriage day was a botched affair. Heath was an hour late in picking up his brother and, when they got to Ramsgate, could not find the Register Office. They arrived there only five minutes before it closed. ‘It was the saddest wedding I’ve ever been to,’ John Heath’s wife, Marian, remarked. ‘Looking back, I regret very much not taking the lead, as the boys might have followed in kissing the bride and giving good wishes. After a quiet celebration lunch, where no one proposed the health of the bride, we returned to London.’ Heath’s new stepmother had previously been married to a committed socialist, but since Heath would never have considered the possibility of discussing politics with her, this caused no problems. When asked what she thought of her stepson she replied: ‘He frightened me. It was difficult to know what to say, because he dislikes small talk. If there is nothing much to say he likes to keep silent. I find he is a man with whom you can be happily silent, however.’⁷ Many women were to make the same complaint over the next forty years, though there were few who learnt the art of being happy in the prevailing silence.

Heath spent his weekends at Broadstairs out of habit and because it was cheap. He preferred to take his holidays with his more sophisticated and richer friends. Madron and Nancy-Joan Seligman remained particularly close; he visited them frequently and almost every year spent holidays with them in France or Italy. He became part of an extended family and was accepted by the children as an honorary uncle, to be treated with affection and cheerful disrespect: ‘If only Uncle Teddy and Daddy weren’t so fat, we’d have won,’ one of the boys complained after their boat had come last in a local regatta. But though he was thoroughly at home and at the time was closer to Nancy-Joan than to any other woman, it would not have occurred to him that he might confide in her; ‘letting down one’s hair’ was a concept wholly alien to Heath’s character.

The same was true of the Aldingtons. Lord Aldington, or Toby Low as he was when Heath first knew him, was a Tory MP who, after achieving modest distinction in politics, took over the family bank of Grindlays and became chairman of GEC and Sun Alliance. His wife Araminta, like Nancy-Joan Seligman, had the knack of making Heath laugh and tolerated his moods with equanimity. If he felt inclined to be surly or sulky then he was free to indulge himself: she would pay no attention and would be happy to resume more comfortable relations when the time seemed propitious. Aldington was one of the most important people in Heath’s life. Heath respected his judgment, welcomed his advice and took advantage of his powerful connections in the world of business and the City. If ever it was necessary to cobble together some informal group which would support Heath by financial or other means, then Aldington could be relied upon to do it. Like Heath he was a consensus man; not so firmly convinced that in the end reason would prevail but always agreeing that reason should be given every chance of doing so before there was resort to other measures. Most important of all, he greatly admired Heath and supported him to the uttermost; to a man as naturally suspicious as Heath the knowledge that this powerful and well-connected figure was on his side was immensely comforting.⁸

Heath was no snob. He continued to make no effort to conceal his origins and, indeed, was not above using them to his advantage. When he was urged not to support Alec Home for leader on the grounds that the party needed someone from the middle classes, he replied that, since he was working-class himself, he could not see things in quite that way. But he liked great houses and the appurtenances of wealth: he told Sara Morrison that he found the very rich ‘interesting’; he also found them attractive and curiously exciting; he had no expectation, or even wish, that he would ever achieve the same status himself but was more than ready to accept their hospitality and, with due restraint, anything else that might be on offer. He would never have pushed some cause that he believed to be wrong because somebody had done him a favour, but if people chose to lavish their gifts upon him he was quite ready to take advantage of it. One of the things that most vexed him when he was Prime Minister was what he saw as the unreasonable insistence of the Treasury that all the silver salvers, Ming vases and cases of champagne thrust upon him by foreign dignitaries must be declared and, if retained, paid for. Once his pps, Tim Kitson, remembers him hiding an obviously very valuable ivory model of a dhow, presented to him by Y. K. Pao, the Hong Kong millionaire, as a reward for launching a ship, in case it was spotted by one of his private secretaries and impounded on behalf of the authorities.⁹

Sara Morrison, though no plutocrat, embodied many of the assets that he thought most desirable. A daughter of Viscount Long and Laura, Duchess of Marlborough, she was grand enough to satisfy any criteria. He met her at Islay, the Scottish retreat of her father-in-law, John Morrison, chairman of the 1922 Committee and the future Lord Margadale. Her husband, Charles Morrison, was also to become an MP, and both the Morrisons were strong supporters of Heath. Sara was as politically conscious as either of them and a great deal more intelligent; born twenty years later she would have been among the leaders of the Tory Party. She was not in the least in awe of Heath, obviously enjoyed his company, told him, with sometimes alarming frankness, when she thought he was making a mistake, made him laugh, and, like Araminta Aldington and Nancy-Joan Seligman, was undiscomfited when he sulked or behaved with a rudeness which would have upset anybody with less self-confidence. She was to become closer to him than any woman since his mother – not romantically or even sentimentally attached but with a real affection and loyalty that endured in spite of all the vicissitudes that from time to time assailed them.

The Aldingtons, the Morrisons, lived in a world in which Heath knew he did not belong. He never wanted to join it but he was happy to indulge in the attractions of gracious living. His frequent stays in Brussels, too, taught him expensive habits. He enjoyed eating in the most sumptuous restaurants, preferred malts to other whiskies, champagne to other wines, Dom Perignon to other champagnes. He had a large appetite and a penchant for sweet things: when he had tea with the Cromers in the South of France he seized the largest pink éclair; when he was staying at the embassy in Washington, Lady Henderson put a large box of chocolates in his room. By the next morning all were gone.¹⁰ He began to spend more money on his clothes; he bought a better car; proposed by Harold Macmillan and seconded by Michael Adeane, he joined the Beefsteak Club. ‘I have known him for more than ten years,’ wrote Adeane in his letter of support, ‘have the highest regard for him as a friend and companion and am sure those members who don’t know him already will find, if he is elected, that they have made a most agreeable addition to their number.’¹¹

But the most significant change to Heath’s way of life came in July 1963 when he moved from his mean rooms in Petty France to chambers in Albany, Piccadilly – for a sedate bachelor, probably the most eligible address in London. The main house had been built for the first Viscount Melbourne in the 1770s; in 1802 Henry Holland added a long walkway at the back lined with bachelor apartments. It had at times provided a London retreat for Lord Brougham, Palmerston, Byron, W. E. Gladstone, Macaulay, not to mention the fictional but hardly less celebrated Raffles. With Eric Roll, Pierson Dixon and a host of other dignitaries already installed there, Heath would have no shortage of eligible company: it provided status, silence, seclusion, instant access to the heart of London and, if he felt so inclined, which he rarely did, a brisk fifteen-minute walk to the House of Commons. Sets of rooms rarely came on the market and Heath had been on the waiting list for thirteen years when the death of Clifford Bax, brother of the composer Arnold, freed F2 Albany. Heath secured a seven-year lease for a remarkably reasonable £677 per annum. He at once called in the interior designer Jo Patrick and had his rooms decorated in a style that was assertively modern yet classically restrained.

The newspaper magnate Cecil King lunched there on several occasions and found the flat ‘a luxurious one, with many good prints of soldiers in various uniforms, and he had acquired some excellent white porcelain horses depicting various manoeuvres of the horses in the Spanish Riding School’.¹² This was only the nucleus of what was becoming a distinguished collection of ceramics and modern paintings and drawings. Through shrewd buying and, still more, the generosity of friends, Heath was soon able to embellish his rooms with an Augustus John drawing, the first of a series of John Piper paintings, a Picasso lithograph and, in pride of place, two landscapes by Winston Churchill. For Heath the most important item in the flat was the Steinway grand piano. In 1963, as a consolation price for the failure of the negotiations in Brussels, the city of Aachen awarded him the Charlemagne Prize for ‘encouraging international understanding and cooperation in the European sphere’. The only Briton who had received it before was Churchill. The prize was worth £450 and Heath used the money to buy a piano which would both give him something of quality to play on and suitably grace his new home.

With his rooms decorated to his satisfaction, Heath began to entertain. He was, in general, a good host and an appalling guest. At dinner in other people’s houses he was apt to relapse into morose silence or completely ignore the woman next to him and talk across her to the nearest man. Many hostesses have testified to his unreadiness to make the slightest contribution to the success of a party. Even at home he eschewed small talk and sometimes paid scant attention to guests who did not secure his interest. But he was lavish where food and wine were concerned and was usually jovial; not necessarily providing a relaxed or comfortable experience but at least making the guests feel that they were welcome. In Albany he did not often entertain guests for meals but frequently for drinks. His policy was never to ask a husband without his wife or vice versa; he cultivated assiduously every shade of opinion in the party and continued to invite the most inveterate right-wingers or bigoted Europhobes even though he can have derived little satisfaction from their company. Though he was determined that everything in Albany should be of the highest quality – whether in the vintage of the wines or the elegance of the furnishings – he never missed a chance to economise. His old friend and commanding officer, George Chadd, was now dealing in carpets: Heath expected him to provide the best for his new flat, but only at a substantial discount. Life was more expensive for Heath once he was living in Albany but he still contrived to live within his income and even to add to his savings.

Privately, Heath had coveted the job of Foreign Secretary. Harold Macmillan had told Home that he thought Heath was the obvious man for the job, and, other things being equal, the new Prime Minister would probably have taken the advice. Douglas-Home felt, however, that he must offer the twice-rejected Butler any post he wanted, and the Foreign Office was his choice. Instead Heath was given the job he had hoped for four years before: President of the Board of Trade. Regional development was one of his particular interests and he asked that it should be added to his portfolio; his full title was therefore Secretary of State for Industry, Trade and Regional Development (the order being dictated by the need to avoid the new minister being known as TIRD). It was a well-run and powerful department, ranking among the more important in the hierarchy even before the new responsibilities were added. The Permanent Under Secretary, Richard Powell, was by nature cautious and conservative, but unlike certain other Whitehall mandarins he saw his responsibility as being loyally to support his minister, not to outwit or obstruct him. The only disagreeable element was provided by the Minister of State, Edward du Cann. Du Cann was everything Heath was not: smooth, unctuous, habitually concealing his true feelings under a cloak of bland amiability. ‘By taste, habit and disposition he was an intriguer,’ wrote the journalist Hugo Young. Heath disliked him from the start and, unusually, admitted the fact in his memoirs. His ‘ingratiating manner immediately led me to mistrust him’, wrote Heath – a comment no doubt coloured by the role that du Cann was to play in Heath’s downfall twelve years later.¹³

It was quickly made clear that in Heath’s view, and it seemed in the view of Douglas-Home as well, the Board of Trade was to play an enlarged and invigorated role in the regeneration of industry and the British economy. One of his first important steps was to introduce in Cabinet a White Paper giving local authorities in South East England power to requisition land for building or for launching major development schemes. Priority, Heath emphasised, must still be given to the depressed areas in North East England and Central Scotland but the population in the South East was going to increase by 3.5 million over the next twenty years and steps must be taken to prepare for this expansion. To some of his colleagues the proposals seemed alarmingly interventionist; the Prime Minister struck a cautionary note when he said the matter ‘required further examination’. Heath himself was undisturbed by charges that he wished to interfere in the economic life of the country in ways which should not be contemplated by a Tory government. Interference, he maintained, was not merely permissible, it was essential. He ‘despairs of the efficiency and enterprise of British industry’, noted the political journalist and academic David Butler after an interview with Heath a few months later, ‘and is in a rather cynical and destructive mood. He is most worried of all about the machinery of government and thirsts after a Gaullist solution.’ For the most part his ideas were well received. Douglas-Home was intent on showing that his was a reformist government, ready to tackle the problems of society and the economy. The new, upgraded Board of Trade was a vital, perhaps the most vital, weapon in this campaign: as the political correspondent Ronald Butt argues, it had been equipped for its role by being given a minister who was distinguished by his hunger for modernisation and who had ‘a devoted personal following among younger Conservatives as well as industry and the City’.¹⁴

To one minister in particular the enhanced status of the Board of Trade and Heath’s growing reputation as a determined modernist came as an unpleasant threat. Reginald Maudling at the Treasury resented any intrusion into his territory and made a point of emphasising that he alone retained overall responsibility for economic policy. But no amount of such assertions could alter the fact of Heath’s new prominence. ‘The rise of Heath’, wrote Maudling’s biographer, ‘had a significant effect on Reggie’s chances of winning the leadership…From being the candidate of youth, Reggie was subtly transformed over the next two years into being the quiet life, steady as she goes candidate.’ This coloured their relationship. A Treasury official noted that though ‘on the surface they seemed to be like-minded colleagues, there was always an edge when Ted Heath came into the Chancellor’s office, as he often did, and the temperature dropped’.¹⁵ This tension – hostility would be too strong a word – made it inevitable that when Heath pressed for his most conspicuous and controversial piece of modernisation, the Chancellor, though a supporter in principle, in practice argued for caution.

The abolition of resale price maintenance (RPM) – the system by which manufacturers were empowered to fix prices which retailers must charge customers for their products in all their outlets – had theoretically been a Tory objective for many years. The critics of RPM argued that it restricted competition, kept prices high and safeguarded the inefficient or idle shopkeeper; its champions pointed out that it enabled the small neighbourhood shop, an important element in urban or village life, to survive in the face of what would otherwise be irresistible pressure from the supermarkets. The Board of Trade had always been in favour of abolition but had despaired of finding a minister who would have the determination and energy to force it through. The need for reform had been accepted in principle by a series of Conservative, and indeed Labour, governments, but the timing never seemed propitious. Of all the groups convinced that the abolition of RPM would gravely damage their industry, the publishers were the most vociferous; it was hardly surprising, therefore, that while Macmillan was prime minister the issue was not pressed with any great enthusiasm.

Heath too had in the past been opposed to abolition. In 1950 he had told the Bexley Chamber of Commerce: ‘I agree in principle that a manufacturer should have the power to prescribe the retail prices for goods bearing his name.’ Such a provision, he assured the local tobacconists, was necessary ‘to protect employment, industry and the small trader’.¹⁶ The issue, however, was not one about which he had thought deeply: he told the tobacconists what he knew they wanted to hear without considering the wider implications. In 1964, when he was responsible for making policy, it was a different matter. When the Labour MP John Stonehouse put down a private member’s bill on the subject, Heath realised that he must act. The war between the supermarkets in which customers were bribed to use one chain or another by gifts of trading stamps had already undermined the principle of RPM; the more he considered it the more obvious it seemed to him that the Government must introduce its own Bill to settle the issue for once and for all. Flying up to Scotland with his pps, Anthony Kershaw, he produced some draft legislation and asked what Kershaw thought of it. ‘It’s fine, but there’ll be the hell of a row!’ Kershaw commented. Heath grunted and said nothing. ‘He wouldn’t reply to that sort of observation – he never would,’ remembered Kershaw, ‘he just docketed it away in his mind…When he’s made up his mind to do something he really is completely inflexible – he takes a long time and he talks to an awful lot of people, but after he’s made it up you might as well talk to yourself.’¹⁷ His officials in the Board of Trade were delighted by this unexpected resolution but, like Kershaw, predicted that there would be storms ahead.¹⁸ Heath was unperturbed. At the end of 1963 he told the Prime Minister of his intentions. ‘This is very difficult,’ Douglas-Home replied gloomily, but he accepted Heath’s argument that the abolition of RPM would be a bold modernising move that would redound to the credit of the Government and be generally popular with the electorate.¹⁹

The first cabinet meeting at which the matter was discussed, in January 1964, showed that Heath was not going to have an easy passage. No one denied that such legislation would, in principle, be desirable; it was the timing that caused concern. The abolition of RPM would alienate an army of small shopkeepers; small shopkeepers were traditionally Tory voters; a general election could not be too far ahead; the Government’s position was already precarious. St Augustine’s celebrated prayer – ‘Give me chastity and continency, but do not give it yet!’ – summed up the position of at least half the Cabinet. Heath would have none of this. ‘The Government had committed themselves to a policy of modernising Britain and promising a more efficient use of resources,’ he reminded his colleagues. ‘This policy would fail to carry conviction if they were to tolerate the continuance of a practice so manifestly at variance with it.’ In the end the Cabinet doubtfully agreed that legislation should be introduced, subject to the exemption of booksellers and, possibly, one or two other categories of retailer. On the main issue of proscribing RPM, said the Prime Minister, ‘the Government intended to act with speed and decision’.²⁰

Delay and indecision naturally followed. The uproar in the Cabinet was as nothing to the explosion of indignation that ensued, when all those Conservative MPs with marginal seats discovered that the small shopkeepers were likely to be turned against them. The Chief Whip, Martin Redmayne, bore the brunt of their resentment. He bullied one recalcitrant MP so ruthlessly that his victim emerged from the Whips’ Office ‘brick-red in the face, his teeth tightly clenched and tears of rage squeezed out from under his eyelids’. Like Heath over the death penalty and Suez, Redmayne had the ill fortune of having to whip up support for a policy which he personally opposed. Unlike most of his colleagues he disliked the principle of abolition as well as deploring the timing. Heath, he complained, ‘showed an almost malevolent lack of interest’ in the problems that the Chief Whip was having with the backbenchers. He made Heath’s task more difficult by urging on the Prime Minister a series of exceptions to the Bill which cumulatively would have fatally weakened it. It was perhaps appropriate that, after the next election, he should have resigned his seat and become, inter alia, a director of Harrods.²¹

The backbench revolt was at its fiercest in the 1922 Committee. At the first meeting which discussed it it became clear that, while the membership divided more or less fifty-fifty on the merits of the proposal, everyone agreed that the timing was disastrous. The Committee devoted more time to the matter than they had done to any single issue since a particularly turbulent debate on MPs’ pay ten years before. John Morrison, though counting himself a friend and ally of Heath’s, was as appalled as any other member of the Committee. He told Douglas-Home that feeling ran so strong that the Government might be defeated: ‘I think I ought to put it in writing before he, Ted Heath, succeeds in breaking us up entirely which, though I sincerely trust I am wrong, is in my opinion quite likely.’²² The protests achieved little. Some concessions were made to meet the complaints of the backbenchers, particularly when it came to the onus of proving that any individual exception would not be contrary to the public interest, but Heath was emphatic that the Government must be ‘seen to adhere firmly to the basic purposes of the Bill’. The Prime Minister remained stalwart. ‘I think that your sympathetic handling of the Committee will enable us to hold our party together,’ he wrote to Heath in early April 1964, ‘but the folly of some is almost incurable…I am sure we were right, but we underestimated the reaction and the short-term damage which the sight of a party in disarray would do. But the thing to do is to plug on, and your skill and fortitude will get us through.’ John Stonehouse, whose private bill had originally launched the operation, thought that Heath had gone too far in making concessions, he was ‘a good man fallen among bureaucrats’. Scarcely any Tory member believed that he had gone far enough. The majority in the House of Commons once fell to a single vote. At one point Heath is said to have threatened resignation if the Bill was not fought through on its present basis; he himself denies that he went this far but admits that he was ‘close to resigning’. At all events he got his way. The Bill passed, substantially unaltered. It was, said Heath, ‘one of the most satisfying successes of my ministerial career’.²³

It was won at a price. George Hutchinson, his cautiously obsequious biographer who at that time was the party’s director of publicity, wrote that ‘I have never myself heard a Cabinet Minister so much abused by his colleagues, so badly spoken of and so widely condemned in the party as Heath was then.’ Part of this was due to the unpopularity of the policy he was promoting, part to the way in which he did it. What was unfortunate and damaging, wrote Robert Rhodes James, ‘was for Heath to adopt a truculent, and at times abusive, attitude towards those Conservatives who opposed his proposals’. One senior backbencher told Ronald Butt that Heath had been ‘arrogant’ and ‘autocratic’, and when Butt suggested to another ‘normally mild’ Tory MP that Heath might be driven to resignation, ‘he received the surprising reply “Who cares about that?”’ Heath was as dismissive of members of the public as he was of Tory backbenchers. An avalanche of protesting letters arrived at the Board of Trade. The Department prepared four different replies to cover the different approaches of the correspondents: Heath refused to sign any of them. Edward du Cann, who made no secret of the fact that he thought the timing of the Bill ‘tactless and politically stupid’, used to ensure that the ‘many hundreds of letters of complaint’ were directed towards him rather than to Heath, so that he could make sure they were answered. Heath’s devoted pps, Tony Kershaw, saw the damage that his master was doing himself and, as tactfully as he could, urged Heath to mend his ways. Please spend more time in the House, he pleaded. ‘There is a feeling that you are ignoring the backbenchers, because you don’t want to hear their criticisms. I think it is vitally important for you to do this, because if we lose the next election, and if it occurs fairly soon, it could be that you will be blamed for it. At the moment you are indisputably the second man in the Party, and while you must do whatever has to be done for good government, it is right also to preserve your personal position.’²⁴

That personal position had undoubtedly been damaged. And yet at the same time his reputation had been enhanced. ‘It was a very, very long-drawn-out issue,’ recalled the Minister of Education, Edward Boyle, ‘and frankly, if it hadn’t been for Ted Heath’s very great determination and personality, I dread to think what would have happened.’ Jock Bruce-Gardyne and Nigel Lawson, journalists and Tory politicians, agreed that no other Tory minister could have carried it through, indeed ‘it is not easy to think of other contemporary politicians who would not have quailed and drawn back when confronted by the rage of backbenchers and the distaste and hostility of Cabinet colleagues’. It is a curious twist of fate that the attributes that made Heath so unpopular in early 1964 – truculence, obstinacy, indifference to criticism – were suddenly to seem so desirable when the Tories were looking for a new leader a little over a year later. When asked at his seventy-fifth birthday party what, apart from Europe, had been his greatest achievement, Heath said that it was the abolition of RPM. It had opened up competition, he said, and ‘made possible the vast choice and low prices available today’. It had also, though he did not mention it and perhaps never accepted it to be the case, made it more likely that he would become prime minister in 1970.²⁵

Whether the indignation of the small shopkeepers in fact cost the Conservatives many, or any, seats in the election that followed in October 1964 must be a matter for speculation. Certainly it scarcely featured in the campaign – probably because Labour and the Liberals were themselves generally in favour of the legislation and were immensely relieved that the Tories had grasped this nettle instead of leaving it to them. Some rancour, however, may still have lingered. ‘It probably cost us seats at the general election,’ Douglas-Home told the historian Peter Hennessy; ‘it certainly cost the Tories some marginal seats’, considered John Boyd-Carpenter, a minister who had been one of those members of the Cabinet most vociferous in pleading for the deferral of the measure and who saw in Heath’s response the first signs of the ‘inflexibility and unwillingness to listen which he was later to show as Prime Minister’.²⁶ If Douglas-Home and Boyd-Carpenter were right then Heath may indeed have cost the Tories the election. Labour’s overall lead was only four; a handful of disgruntled shopkeepers could have tipped the scale in half a dozen marginal constituencies. The Sunday Express had no doubts on the subject. When the row over RPM was at its height it denounced the damage that Heath was doing to the Party: ‘For this bland, chuckling man is the Tory Jonah. Whatever he touches goes wrong. Wherever he goes there is trouble…He carries chaos in his vest pocket.’ But there were many more consumers in the electorate than there were shopkeepers and though they had less reason to air their views they may also have changed their votes because of the legislation. Heath insisted that the abolition of RPM, far from costing the Tories seats, had been responsible for the gap between the parties being so small. ‘If other departments had thrown off their stale approach in that last year by bringing forward up-to-date proposals,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘we could have won.’ On the whole the weight of opinion is against him, but he may have been right.²⁷

A week before the election R. A. Butler was asked by the journalist George Gale what he thought of Douglas-Home’s praise for the ‘young, dynamic Heath’. ‘That’s interesting,’ said Butler, ‘I think Alec’s a bit bored by him.’ Possibly Butler was just making a little mischief, a pursuit in which he from time to time indulged. There is no other evidence to suggest that Heath was out of favour. He and Maudling were given equal billing in the election period: Maudling being responsible for the daily press conferences and Heath for the television programmes. ‘I can’t thank you enough for all you have done to guide and implement our TV,’ wrote the party chairman. ‘You have been super, under circumstances [which] were bound to be trying and tricky. Thanks a million.’ If Lord Blakenham was being sincere he was in a minority. During the European negotiations Heath had been notably adept at expounding on television the complex issues which were being addressed in Brussels. Remembering this, the party managers had assumed that his skills could easily be translated to the very different arena of the political broadcast. These assumptions proved wrong. His performances were not disastrous but he was stilted and ill at ease. In one broadcast, said the political documentary maker and author Michael Cockerell, he flopped so badly that even a Tory backbencher who appeared with him and who was said ‘to have sounded “like a man in a TV programme about indigestion” was judged to have performed better’. By the time the campaign was halfway over it was obvious that Heath’s authority and drive would have been better suited to the press conferences, while Maudling’s avuncular benevolence would have come through well on television. By then, however, it was too late.²⁸

Starting from the assumption that his own achievements over RPM had produced one of the few positive features of the Tory campaign, Heath judged the party’s approach to the election to be ‘tired and shorn of new ideas’. In fact, given the way the tide had been flowing even a few months before, Douglas-Home did well to hold the swing to 3.5 per cent. Labour’s share actually fell but a substantially increased Liberal vote, achieved mainly at the expense of the Conservatives, was enough to tip the balance and give Harold Wilson’s party a tiny overall majority. Heath was worried about the inroads the Liberals might make into his majority at Bexley and told Lord Blakenham that he wanted to devote ‘as much time as possible to my own constituency’. In the event the Liberals won a little over 6,000 votes and Heath’s majority was almost halved, to 4,589 – comfortable enough, but not so large as to mean that he need have no concerns about the future. If any Tory candidate attributed his own defeat to the abolition of RPM he does not seem to have expressed his views in public; Maudling, who as Chancellor was seen to bear greater responsibility for the economic problems that had bedevilled the Tories’ last year in office, was at least as much damaged as Heath by the election setback.²⁹

The main loser was, of course, Alec Douglas-Home himself. The Tory Party judges failure harshly and, even though the result could have been much worse, an election had been lost. The nature of the defeat was particularly damaging to the former Prime Minister. Harold Wilson had fought a sparkling campaign and had contrived continually to contrast his own personality – dynamic, a man of the people, daring, innovative – with the dusty, tweed-suited, out-of-touch image of the Tory leader. Neither sketch was fair, let alone told the whole story, but there were sufficient grounds for them to give the Tory backbenchers the uneasy feeling that they were being led by the wrong man. That feeling was redoubled when it became clear that Douglas-Home, as Leader of the Opposition in the cockpit of the House of Commons, was no match for the quick-witted and unscrupulous Wilson. More and more members felt that a change was needed: the main factor inhibiting a revolt was doubt as to who the new leader ought to be.

Almost at once Douglas-Home took the first step to resolve that doubt. When parliament reconvened he announced that Maudling was to be shadow Foreign Secretary; Heath would take over as shadow Chancellor. It is unlikely that he intended to convey any clear message by these appointments – it was perfectly sensible to let Maudling widen his experience; indeed, it could well have been a stepping stone to the eventual leadership. The result was, however, that Maudling played a relatively unobtrusive role over the next nine months, while Heath was in the firing line with every opportunity to attract the attention of his party and the general public. He took his chance by launching a ferocious attack on Labour’s budget and the Finance Bill that followed. In so doing he immensely raised the morale of the Opposition, enraged the Government and frequently outmanoeuvred and confounded the Labour Chancellor, Jim Callaghan. Knox Cunningham, an Ulster Unionist MP, regularly briefed Macmillan on what was going on in the House of Commons. Early in April 1965 he reported: ‘Ted Heath made a first class speech in the budget debate. Our side were greatly pleased and at times the Government supporters looked glum’; a month or so later, ‘Ted Heath made a truly excellent speech and got under the Chancellor’s skin in the opening stages. It was a first rate performance’; at the beginning of July the Chief Whip announced a three-line whip for the whole of the following week. ‘Such was the morale of the party that not a voice was raised in protest.’

Heath asked nothing of the backbenchers which he did not give himself. Night after night at midnight or later he would go over to John Cope and Mark Schreiber, the two young men who were in attendance in case some information was called for, and say ‘I don’t think there’ll be much more happening tonight. You boys had better go off to your night clubs.’ They would instead totter off to bed; he would as often as not stay on in the House for several more hours. Sometimes he expected too much even of the most willing assistant. Leaving the House of Commons at 6.15 a.m., he turned to Peter Walker and said: ‘I’ll see you at 8.30, and you might prepare me a brief on Clauses 23 and 24.’ ‘He was somewhat shocked by my response!’ said Walker dryly. His determination, assiduity and endless resourcefulness impressed many of those who had hitherto taken it for granted that Maudling was the heir apparent. Stratton Mills, a moderate Unionist MP, told Maudling’s biographer: ‘After seeing Ted I was much more impressed by his style and approach, his energy…If Reggie had been handling that Finance Bill it would have been totally different. Callaghan ended up demoralised.’ The government was equally struck by his performance. In a censure debate on home loans Dick Crossman noted in his diary that Heath ‘made an extremely powerful oration, accusing us of welching on our pledges and deceiving the public. What was I to reply? What he said was quite true.’³⁰

Yet, however ferocious his onslaught, he was scrupulous in sticking to the truth. Once, in the debate on the Finance Bill, a Tory backbencher made use of what Heath felt to be false statistics. Angrily he said to Peter Walker: ‘If we cannot oppose bad legislation without being dishonest we shouldn’t oppose it at all.’ In the Lobby afterwards he berated the startled member for his sharp practice (unsurprisingly, the member in question was prominent in the campaign to unseat Heath as leader of the party a few years later). He also sometimes disconcerted the right wing of his party by accepting Labour propositions which they would have rejected either from conviction or for the sake of scoring points in opposition. When Callaghan introduced a capital gains tax Heath accepted that, at a modest level, such a tax might be useful ‘if it enabled people to keep more of their earnings and also removed any sense of injustice’. Enoch Powell, who thought the whole idea ‘economic and political nonsense’, was outraged by what he saw as misguided liberalism.³¹

As if waging a full-scale war in the House of Commons was not enough, Heath had also been made responsible for the whole apparatus of policy planning. As chairman of the Advisory Committee on Policy (ACP) he took over from Butler the task of rethinking the principles on which Tory government should be grounded. The probability that Wilson, with his exiguous majority, would call a general election in the near future meant that the process could not be as thorough as Heath would have liked, but whatever the outcome of such an election might be, he intended that the work should carry on until the party had been truly modernised. Thirty-six policy groups were set up and most of their reports were ready by the summer of 1965. Heath was determined that the operation should remain under his individual control: he enjoyed, said John Ramsden, the Conservative Party historian, ‘a more personal monopoly of authority in the party than any other leader since Neville Chamberlain’.³² He brooked no interference. Maudling telephoned Brendon Sewill in the Conservative Research Department and asked to see the papers. Sewill agreed but then consulted Heath. ‘Don’t give them to that bloody man, he’ll only take credit for them,’ was the disobliging reply. Sewill was forced to prevaricate and go into hiding in case Maudling arrived in his office and demanded to read the reports.³³

To the more traditional Tories such an enterprise seemed dangerously radical. Lady Douglas-Home was quoted in the Daily Mail as deploring the emergence of a ‘shiny, bright new party’ in which nobody would recognise the true Conservatives. William Anstruther-Gray, successor to Morrison as chairman of the 1922 Committee, announced at a meeting in Central Office that ‘he didn’t understand what all this talk of policy was’. It seemed to him to be ‘quite unnecessary and deeply disturbing to the party’. William Whitelaw, who had recently been appointed Opposition Chief Whip, was not so averse to the idea of reform but he too felt the exercise was ‘nothing but disaster’. He spoke, however, as somebody whose main preoccupations were to keep the party loyal to Douglas-Home and Douglas-Home prepared to continue to lead the party. Those objectives, he believed, were being undermined by the activities of the ACP: ‘There is no doubt that as the policy groups continued and Ted Heath dominated to the extent he did, many people who had not known him before, came to believe that they wanted another Leader.’³⁴

Shortly after the general election Tony Kershaw reported to Heath that there seemed to be no pressure for a quick change of leadership. This, he remarked, was just as well, ‘because at the moment Reggie Maudling is the alternative choice…Any attempt by your friends to force the pace would probably be counter-productive…’ They should work on the assumption that there would be no change for two years. ‘We must and should play it slow. We thought that a number of dinner parties would help. It would be very good, we thought, if you would also do this – it would dispel any austere-bachelor-technician image you may be surprised to learn you have.’ A poll in the Daily Telegraph in February 1965 seemed to support Kershaw’s view: three-quarters of the Tory MPs wanted Douglas-Home to carry on; if he did resign 35 per cent favoured Maudling as his replacement, 28 per cent still hankered after Butler, only 10 per cent wanted Heath.³⁵

But things were changing. There had always been a small but robust section of the party which had thought it vital that there should be a change of direction and of management. ‘We are sick of seeing old-looking men dressed in flat caps and bedraggled tweeds,’ wrote a 44-year-old industrial manager. ‘The nearest approach to our man is Heath. In every task he performs, win or lose, he has the facts and figures and looks a director (of the country) and most of all he is quite different from these tired old men.’ As Heath’s reputation grew in the ACP as a reformist and in the House of Commons as a powerful and relentless debater – so people began to see him as a future leader. As Douglas-Home time and again demonstrated that he was too gentlemanly, too courteous, too restrained to cope with the mercurial mischief of Harold Wilson, so the feeling strengthened that the change should be made as soon as possible. A new system of selection had recently been introduced which meant that the traditional sounding of opinion would be abandoned in favour of a secret ballot among all Tory MPs. So long as a general election seemed likely at short notice the would-be rebels, nervous about the notorious risks of changing horses in mid-stream, preserved their silence. In the summer of 1965, however, Wilson announced that there would be no election that year. The main reason for restraint had disappeared; the dogs of war were let slip.

What dogs and who let them slip? R. A. Butler had retreated from the political arena to become Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, but Maudling was quite as ready as Heath to replace Douglas-Home as leader if the opportunity was offered. Nevertheless, the weight of opinion suggests that it was Heath’s followers who made the running. ‘A number of Heath’s henchmen,’ wrote Humphrey Berkeley, were urging members to write to Whitelaw or du Cann, the new chairman of the Conservative Party, expressing their misgivings about the present leadership. Macleod and Walker in particular, alleged du Cann, were lobbying against Douglas-Home – ‘unknown to Heath, I dare say, though one could not be sure’.³⁶ Heath himself always vehemently rejected any such insinuation. He could make a good case in his own defence. To correspondents who urged him to press his candidature he replied that any speculation on such lines was playing into the hands of Harold Wilson; ‘the best service any of us can give to the party is to give full and loyal support to the leader’.³⁷ But he cannot have been wholly unaware of what his supporters were doing, if not in his name then at least on his behalf. Nor could he deny that he was positioning himself so that if Douglas-Home did retire he would be well placed to challenge for the succession. Nigel Fisher claimed that some of the preliminary meetings ‘designed to put him in an advantageous position should Douglas-Home decide to go’ were held in Heath’s flat in Albany. Over this period he at least twice entertained influential political journalists to lunch à deux. ‘If there were a leadership contest now I think you’d probably win it,’ said one of them. Heath considered the proposition. ‘You may be right,’ he concluded. He had no need to play a more active part himself; it was all happening without his personal intervention. As Chateaubriand said of the duc d’Orléans, he ‘did not conspire in fact, but by consent’. The worst of which Heath can be accused is that he could have called off the dogs of war. He chose not to do so.³⁸

Douglas-Home himself never blamed Heath for his behaviour. ‘Ted was very unhappy in case people thought that he was trying to undermine me,’ he told Heath’s biographer, George Hutchinson. ‘I am quite sure he was not.’ His wife, Elizabeth, was less charitable. She made no secret of the fact that she felt Heath had been indelicately quick in letting himself be drafted as the next leader. ‘The fact’, commented Rhodes James, ‘that the principal architects of Sir Alec’s removal were also those of Heath’s subsequent campaign for the leadership left an aftertaste of bitterness in some parts of the party.’³⁹

The plotters were pushing at an open door. Douglas-Home had no intention of continuing to lead a party which was not substantially behind him. On 22 July 1965 he summoned Selwyn Lloyd to his office and said: ‘I am going to let you down. I have decided to chuck my hand in and give up the leadership.’ Later the same day he announced his intention to the 1922 Committee. ‘The “rotters” eleven has won,’ snarled one knight of the shires angrily, but the feeling of the majority was some relief and a regretful acceptance of the inevitable. At once interest switched to the election of a successor. Macleod, knowing only too well his unpopularity in certain sections of the party, accepted that he must be a non-starter. Maudling and Heath were the obvious front-runners. Christopher Soames urged Selwyn Lloyd to stand: ‘He felt very much that the bulk of the party did not want either Maudling or Heath and there should be a third candidate.’ Quintin Hogg agreed that 60 per cent of the party were looking for someone else; after his experiences at the last leadership election he had no intention of himself standing again but he, too, would have backed Lloyd. Lloyd, after some reflection, decided he would not stand unless there was something near a dead heat on the first ballot and a bitter conflict would otherwise ensue. Whitelaw agreed that this was a proper course of action. Harold Macmillan let it be known that he thought it should either be Heath or Maudling: ‘That was the type of person they wanted, the age they wanted and it was no use kicking against the pricks.’ Peter Thorneycroft at first insisted that, whatever happened, he would compete himself because ‘he thought he was a better man than either of the other two’; after much persuasion he accepted that he would secure only a handful of votes and decided not to stand. Enoch Powell alone remained in the race, presumably so as to lay down a marker for the future. In effect it was to be a straight race between Heath and Maudling.⁴⁰

Maudling was the favourite at the start. He had the greater experience, had for some time been treated as deputy leader, was widely popular in the House. But his very popularity seemed to count against him: Home had been popular but Home had failed to hold his own; perhaps someone rougher, more abrasive, would better suit the need? The press for the most part favoured Heath. Cecil King, proprietor of the Daily Mirror, liked both men but he believed that Heath was ‘a positive force – a leader…certainly the best available man to be Tory PM’. More remarkably he told Heath that Beaverbrook felt the same: a striking tribute given the differences between the two men over Europe, though Maudling too was stamped in Beaverbrook’s eyes as a dangerous Europhile. Of the Tory grandees Lord Avon was noncommittal; Macmillan was decidedly for Heath – ‘I feel sure that Ted is the best choice. He is a stronger character than Maudling’. Home was equivocal; he told Michael King ‘he would have preferred Reggie: he thought lazy men came off better in a crisis’, but to Selwyn Lloyd he ‘made it pretty clear that he himself was going to vote for Heath’. Probably the most important single voice was that of Iain Macleod. If he had stood he would have gained some forty-five votes; though he made no attempt to control the way his supporters cast their votes it was well known that he favoured Heath: almost to a man, the Macleodites plumped for Heath. But for those votes, Maudling would have won. ‘It was in character,’ du Cann wrote balefully. ‘Macleod had let down Alec, now he let down Reggie. Macleod was to have his reward: Heath made him Shadow Chancellor.’ Both Margaret Thatcher and Keith Joseph were warmly in Heath’s favour. ‘I was a Heath man,’ said Joseph. ‘He had been very good to me…listening to me. He had the right ideas on management. I remember the sheer excitement when he won.’⁴¹