Читать книгу Edward Heath - Philip Ziegler - Страница 10

‘I now so often have the feeling’, Heath had written on the way back from the United States at the beginning of 1940, ‘that I’ve a lot of energy, power, ambition, and so on, and yet nothing to which to harness it. Is this, I wonder, because I’ve got so many things I haven’t thought out and that, when I’ve done that, I shall see the way to go? Or am I just blasé?’¹ Blasé was certainly not something which Heath could have been accused of being at any point in his life. To most people in 1940 he had appeared impressively clear-headed and decisive. His inner uncertainty, his doubt as to where he should go and how he should get there, were largely kept to himself: unconfiding by nature, he was least of all inclined to expose his weaknesses, even to those few whom he trusted fully. By 1946, to a large extent, those doubts had been resolved. He knew that he wished his long-term future to lie in politics; that the Conservative Party, for all its imperfections, was the only institution that offered him a chance to realise this ambition; that within that party his loyalties would lie with the left, reforming wing. The war had confirmed his belief in his own powers and helped him decide where those powers were to take him. He was tougher and more effective in 1946 than he had been six years before. It was perhaps symbolic of his evolution that the cosy ‘Teddy’ of pre-war years had now become a starker, sterner ‘Ted’. Not all his old friends made the change, even among new acquaintances some still preferred the earlier form, but by 1946 ‘Ted Heath’ had established itself as the address most usually employed. It was to remain so until his death.

His family never fully recognised the change. It was Teddy Heath who returned to the family home in Broadstairs. Even more than before the war he was the centre of attention. William Heath’s business was prospering in the post-war building boom and it was no longer necessary to take in paying guests. For the first time, Teddy and his brother, John, had separate rooms. But John had slipped still further from centre stage. To his father’s disappointment he had refused to join the family firm and had instead taken a job in a local radio shop. Within a year he had become engaged and was moving out.

The marriage lasted only a few years. John’s wife, Marian, maintained that Teddy Heath was the be-all and end-all of his mother’s and, to a lesser but still considerable extent, his father’s life. There were only two comfortable chairs in the kitchen/living room: Teddy would commandeer one while his mother sat knitting socks in the other. ‘She was always knitting socks.’ William and John helped with the washing-up; Teddy was never expected to join in. Everyone had to dress for breakfast except Teddy, who was allowed to come down in his dressing gown. His mother waited on him hand and foot: ‘I’ve seen her sitting there cracking nuts for him so that he wouldn’t have to crack them himself.’²

Teddy was ‘very clannish’ and expected the family to do things together, wrote Marian. It was always he who had the final choice as to what was to be done. On one occasion she revolted and, even though Teddy favoured a family picnic, insisted that she and John should go on the river with some cousins. ‘When I say we quarrelled, it was a case of Teddy and I crossing swords while the rest of the family sat around in awe-struck silence.’ He did not share the same circle of friends as John and Marian and was often to be seen striding along the cliffs or seafront immersed in thought. Such friends as he had in the neighbourhood were noticeably more mature – except for an occasional game of tennis he had little to do with the young. ‘My father was once invited to lunch with the Heaths,’ wrote Marian, ‘and was astounded to find Teddy walking in and out of the room without seemingly seeing anyone. He was so wrapped up in his thoughts and plans for the future.’ He was not ungenerous – more often than not he paid if they went to the cinema or on some similar outing – but Marian was told by Mrs Heath to make nothing of it: ‘Teddy hates to be thanked, he gets embarrassed,’ she explained.

When John and Marian were married, Teddy was best man and made what Marian remembered as a ‘most amusing speech’. There were no bridesmaids, so, he said, he felt in no way committed: ‘I might add that he was the only one not to kiss the bride.’ Kay Raven would certainly have been among the family friends at the wedding. ‘She was looked on by all as Teddy’s girlfriend,’ wrote Marian. ‘It was a strange relationship. Teddy never seemed very attentive, yet she didn’t seem to mind.’ She minded more than appeared but she had to put up with what she could get. John Heath never believed that there was any serious romance between his brother and Kay; so far as Teddy, at least, was concerned, it was ‘a bit of a smoke screen’ which provided him with a convincing reason for not forming a relationship with any other woman.

Broadstairs provided a convenient base to which he could retreat, but there was no question of Heath seeking a job in the neighbourhood. Politics were his long-term ambition and he hoped the wait would not be very long. His plan was to have found a seat before the next general election. By that time he would be 35 or thereabouts. But in the meantime he had to earn a living, ideally a living in a career which he could continue part-time when he had become a Member and which would pay enough to enable him to make some savings. Though he says in his memoirs that the scholarship to read law at Gray’s Inn which he had nearly secured before the war was still available, it does not seem that any specific promise had been made. Even if it had been, he had decided that the law was ‘rather dry’ and that it would take him five or six years to earn a modest salary.³ Academic life, even if he had been suited to it, was hardly the ideal jumping-off ground for politics. The Master of Balliol tried to fix him up with a job as personal assistant to the Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford; Heath had his doubts about this, the Professor had still more and looked elsewhere. One problem was that Heath made no secret of his political ambitions and this discouraged possible employers who were looking for a longer-term commitment. He could have been Meetings Secretary at the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House – a post which would have brought him into close contact with many leading politicians – but when they realised that they might only have the benefit of his services for a few years, they lost interest.

The same was true when he looked to business and industry. ‘At the moment I have six irons in the fire; two of them certainties if I want them and I hope to get them sorted out this month,’ he told a friend in November 1946. One of the certainties was ICI, but when Heath told them that he hoped to be standing for parliament at the next election the certainty became unstuck and he was told he could not be considered. Another certainty or near-certainty was the North Central Wagon and Finance Company. This job would have carried with it alluring prospects of promotion to chairman within three years, but though this would have been lucrative it would have involved a move to Rotherham, unacceptably far from the political power centre. Unilever seemed more promising but here there appears to have been some misunderstanding. Heath thought that they were not disturbed by his wish to enter parliament, but the report on his application said that he had abandoned his political ideas without regret: ‘Provided he really can subordinate his interests in politics as a career, I believe he would be very well suited to business.’ The man who interviewed him could hardly have been more flattering. Heath, he said, was ‘one of those rare men who is extremely competent intellectually yet a normal, pleasant, honest person…I found him very likeable’. Under the heading ‘Quality of Social Relations’ the interviewer said: ‘I rate this man very high. He strikes me as a well-balanced, human sort of person whom others would willingly work for and with.’ He was offered a management traineeship. Possibly the true position about his political ambitions now came to light; certainly he turned the offer down.⁴

There remained the civil service. Heath knew that if he became a parliamentary candidate he would not be able to continue to work in Whitehall but that he would be free to pursue his career until that point was reached. If he never succeeded in finding a winnable seat he would at least have a respectable profession on which to fall back; if he did escape to politics he would have gained valuable experience of the workings of the civil service. He appeared before the Final Selection Board in August 1947. Just over 200 applicants survived to face this ultimate hurdle. Twenty-two passed in, and of these Heath was top. With this glittering success he could reasonably have expected to be able to choose his department. He was told that the Foreign Office was his for the asking (whether the Foreign Office had been consulted over this is unclear; they were a law unto themselves when it came to selecting future diplomats). The idea was appealing in many ways, but Heath realised that the long periods of exile which the career would involve would be incompatible or at least hard to reconcile with a move into politics. His wish was to join the Treasury, which he felt carried the greatest prestige and wielded power over all the Whitehall departments. Peter Masefield, his eventual boss in the civil service, thought that possibly his avowed political ambitions, though no bar to entry into the civil service, counted against him when it came to the choice of a department. Heath openly admitted that his main concern was to gain experience which would be of use to him when an MP; to the Treasury this may have seemed lèse-majesté. Whatever the reason, to his chagrin he was consigned to the fledgling Ministry of Civil Aviation. His first task was to work with the future Dame Alison Munro, deciding which of the 700 mainly grass airfields dotted around the country should be retained for future development. Heath was responsible for the airfields near London, Alison Munro for the rest of the United Kingdom.⁵

Soon he found himself working almost exclusively to the head of the Long-Range Planning Department, Peter Masefield. Masefield was a man of enterprise and imagination, a temporary civil servant who, in a couple of years, was to move on to take charge of British European Airways. Masefield took to Heath, pronouncing him ‘pleasant, sound and highly intelligent…And, with all, when you get to know him (which isn’t easy) he is a sensitive and warm-hearted chap who has a direct approach and an endearing sense of the ridiculous.’ Heath quickly found himself with a finger in a wide range of pies, from the development of the Comet to the planning of Heathrow (a name for which he accepted no responsibility). This last task was particularly stressful. ‘Every time I arrive at Heathrow,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘I shudder to think that I was in any way involved in the creation of that monstrosity.’ But for his efforts, it might have been more monstrous still. The first plans provided for no parking areas and no aircraft piers to avoid the need for buses. Heath championed both causes and won the day. ‘He used to go and fight on the committee,’ Masefield remembered, ‘and come back and cry on my shoulder about all the spokes put in the wheel by bumbledom.’⁶ Another achievement with which Masefield credited him was persuading de Havillands, when the Comet was in the final stages of development, to substitute four-wheel undercarriage legs for the two-wheel version which they had been proposing to use. The ‘Heath modification’, as Masefield called it, made it possible for the Comet to land on many runways which would otherwise have been too weak to support the impact. ‘That change’, Masefield told Heath many years later, ‘enabled 77 Comets to be produced and used throughout the world.’⁷

Masefield quickly recognised that Heath was an invaluable member of his team. ‘But I fear I shall not have him here for long’, he wrote regretfully, ‘because, outside the office, he lives and dreams politics.’⁸ He was right. Heath’s first move was to try for a job in the Conservative Research Department, a body which, under Rab Butler, was busily rebuilding a new and more progressive Tory Party from the ruins left by the 1945 election. He knew that several of the cleverest and most ambitious of the young Conservatives – Iain Macleod, Enoch Powell, Reginald Maudling – were already at work there; he longed to be doing the same thing himself and was uneasily conscious of the fact that they were snatching a lead over him in the race up the greasy pole of political advancement. Michael Fraser, a wartime friend, was another rising star in the department; Heath appealed to him but was told there was no vacancy or any prospect of one in the near future. By then he was already embarked on the road which he knew he would one day have to travel: the quest for a constituency. Early in 1947 he added his name to the approved list of prospective candidates held by Central Office. He had high hopes that, with his talents and qualifications, he would quickly be selected. By the standards of some would-be candidates he did indeed have a relatively easy passage, but he still suffered some disconcerting setbacks along the way.

The first constituency to summon him for an interview was Ashford, in Kent. It went well, but when it came to the final selection the chairman said that they wanted a member who would apply himself wholeheartedly to the needs of the constituency. Would Heath promise that, if he was offered a job in any forthcoming Conservative government, he would turn it down? Heath would give no such undertaking; for him the main point of being in the House of Commons was the prospect it offered of serving in the government. Ashford rejected him, in favour of the Daily Telegraph journalist Bill Deedes. Deedes later said that he had been selected for the seat because he wore a tweed jacket for his interview while Heath wore a city suit. To this Heath retorted that, at the time, he didn’t even own a city suit.⁹ There may nevertheless have been something in what Deedes said. Though the reformers might be busily at work in London, in the shires the Tory Party was still a highly traditional if not reactionary body. The selectors in a largely rural constituency like Ashford would have wished their member, if not actually drawn from the landed gentry, at least to look and sound as if he were. Heath, with his suspect accent and unabashed lower-middle-class origins, was far from this ideal. The fact that he got through to the final round shows that any such prejudice was not held too seriously, but there could well have been an element of snobbishness in the final selection.

When Rochester and Sevenoaks followed Ashford in preferring another man, Heath began to feel discouragement, but in September 1947 the constituency of Bexley, in north-west Kent on the fringes of London, was looking for a candidate. It was a Labour seat, which meant that competition for it would not be so intense as it had been for Ashford or Sevenoaks; on the other hand the sitting member, Ashley Bramall, had a majority of only 1,851, so it would not need too significant a swing to restore the seat to its traditionally Tory incumbent. Geographically it was ideally placed, being on Heath’s route from central London to Broadstairs. Best of all, the local party chairman, Edward Dines, was said to be looking for a candidate who was ‘not rich or grand but from an ordinary family’. His other criteria for an ideal candidate – that he should be young, well educated, versed in political science and a ‘local boy made good’ – seemed equally applicable to Heath; Broadstairs was not actually Bexley but it was in the same county and, as the crow flies, not much more than fifty miles away. Best of all, Dines thought that the fact Heath was a bachelor told in his favour; marriage and family could have distracted him from his constituency work. Heath sailed through the preliminary stages and, with two other possibles, faced the selection committee for a second time on 18 September. Gladys Whittaker was one of the selectors. ‘That half-smile of his is what I will always remember,’ she said many years later. ‘Of course, he was good on policy, but it is the smile that sticks in my mind. It was not the broad grin which we are used to from him now, but a shy kind of half-smile.’ The shy smile proved decisive. Heath was selected. The approval of the choice of candidate by the Association was a formality. Heath was asked whether he proposed to live in Bexley. He replied that, given the shortage of housing in the constituency and the easy access to it from both Westminster and Broadstairs, he did not think that this was necessary or even desirable. His argument was accepted without demur and on 7 November he was adopted as candidate without a dissenting vote.¹⁰

This was only a start. The next general election might be more than two years away. Heath was confident that the tide was turning towards the Conservatives but far from sure that by then it would have moved far enough to gain him victory. ‘The landslide was so great that it is bound to be some time before there can be a complete changeover,’ he told Professor Winckler. ‘People don’t change their minds so quickly. It may take place before the next election; that will depend a good deal on the crisis and the economic situation, and how constructive the Tories can be. They have to win back a great deal of confidence before they can be certain of the result of an election.’¹¹ For him, the worst possible result would be if the Tories won the election but he failed to carry Bexley. Even if the constituency remained loyal he would be left fuming on the sidelines while his contemporaries established themselves in government. A swing great enough to return the Tories to power should also carry him into the House of Commons, but confident though Heath was in his own abilities he knew enough about the vagaries of politics to realise that the worst could happen.

That, however, was a problem for the future. Earning his living until the next election was his most immediate preoccupation. Though he was never entirely fulfilled by his work in the Ministry of Civil Aviation – ‘I couldn’t get anything done,’ he said much later. ‘I was so impatient. You mustn’t go there hoping to change the world.’¹² – he had enjoyed his time there and would happily have stayed on for another couple of years. Masefield tried to persuade the establishment that this should be allowed but got nowhere: as an adopted candidate for parliament Heath must resign and resign at once. ‘I am exceedingly sorry to lose Mr Heath,’ Masefield concluded. ‘His work during the past year has been of the utmost value and on several occasions has been favourably commented on by the Minister.’¹³ For Heath it was back to the Oxford University Appointments Board. The first job vacant turned out to be that of sub-editor on the Church Times. He knew nothing of theology and had no experience as a journalist, promotion would be unpredictable because of the small size of the staff, the work seemed likely to be easy to learn but pretty dull: on the other hand the pay – £650 a year – was good, they were ‘very pleasant people’, and they did not seem to mind about the political connection provided his name was not publicly linked with the newspaper. ‘I am still waiting to see your name emblazoned over the Church Times,’ wrote a friend. He was to wait in vain. Heath’s main task was editing other people’s copy; when he did write pieces himself they were anonymous. The last thing he wanted, indeed, was to be too conspicuous. He had belatedly discovered that the Bexley selection committee had a rooted aversion to journalists. The Church Times, he protested, was too respectable to count as a real paper; the argument was accepted but he did not want to test the committee’s tolerance too severely.¹⁴

John Trevisick, a reporter on the staff, felt that Heath had no real flair for journalism and tried to steer clear of serious writing. But he was quick to grasp the essentials of any problem and, when called on to do so, wrote with clarity and precision: ‘I have vivid memories of Heath being roped in to cover the Anglo-Catholic Congress – a really tough job…But he turned in a workmanlike précis of what he had heard, thus reflecting his ability.’¹⁵ His inexperience sometimes led him into blunders: he caused some consternation when, never having heard of the UMCA (the Universities Mission to Central Africa), he assumed it was a typing error and corrected it throughout to YMCA. But his real talent was for administration. Though his position in the hierarchy gave him no particular authority, another of his colleagues, Nicholas Bagnall, remembers that ‘after a couple of months he had us eating out of his hands. He did it by force of personality, mainly by making it obvious how hard he worked himself.’ The editor’s secretary was so impressed by his prowess that she told Bagnall: ‘Mark my words, Nicholas, that man will be prime minister one day.’ Bagnall was not prepared to go as far as that: ‘To the rest of us he simply didn’t look like Downing Street material: not nearly devious enough, we thought.’ Besides, the secretary in question, according to Bagnall, was in love with Heath. Heath, alarmed by her adoring looks, took Bagnall to a pub for a consultation. ‘What on earth shall I do about this woman?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think I was much help,’ Bagnall recorded. (When, many years later, he told this story to Mrs Thatcher, she expostulated: ‘Impossible! No one could love Ted Heath.’)¹⁶

Whatever his secretary might have felt about Heath, the editor, Humphrey Beevor, looked on him with a jaundiced eye. ‘Politically they were poles apart,’ said another member of the staff, ‘Heath to the right, Beevor to the left. Heath was an army man of steady disposition; Beevor was a navy type, a brilliant man but a man of moods.’ He would fly into a passion over some trivial slip, and delighted in trying to catch Heath out on abstruse theological points – not a difficult task, since, though Heath soon mastered the technical jargon which beset religious reporting, his bent for philosophy remained obstinately under-developed. But though Beevor had little enthusiasm for his thrusting young sub-editor he was quite content to let him pursue his political interests in his spare time. When eventually the Board considered the matter, it was minuted that, though they too had no objection, they were concerned lest his activities as a would-be member of parliament took up an undue amount of his energies. They had some grounds for disquiet: one friend complained that, whenever he rang up the Church Times and asked to speak to Heath, he was told that he was out and that ‘Mr Heath’s private movements are unknown to us’. ‘From the frequency of that remark,’ the friend commented, ‘I have gained the notion that the majority of your movements fall into this category!’ Heath was constitutionally incapable of not giving value for money but it was clear to anyone that his heart was not wholly in his work. The Board agreed that he could stay on until he actually became involved in an election, but as early as August 1948 Heath told a friend on the Oxford Appointments Board that he had decided to leave as soon as another possibility offered itself. The trouble was, he said, that he was ‘liable to be sent anywhere at any time. This means that I can never make an engagement and be absolutely certain of keeping it.’¹⁷

He wanted an employer who would offer regular hours, who would not be concerned by the fact that he would shortly be fighting an election, who might provide work on a part-time basis even after Heath became an MP and who would offer him new experiences that would be useful in his life as a politician. ‘I must say that I think it will be hard to get what you want,’ wrote his father apprehensively; then, with a return to his habitual cheerfulness: ‘Keep trying. Mummy has a feeling that something is going to turn up for you.’ Heath looked to the City of London and found the solution in Brown Shipley, a small but well-established merchant bank which specialised in financing deals in timber and wool. It was not ideal. The work would involve frequent visits to the north of England, which would provide useful knowledge for the future but would also make more difficult the nursing of his constituency. Worse still, Brown Shipley were only prepared to take him on as a management trainee at a miserable £200 a year and lunch in the staff canteen. This would involve a serious sacrifice. Heath felt it was worth it. The training would last only a few months, after which he could hope for employment as a full-time banker. Brown Shipley seemed delighted to have a potential Tory MP on their staff and were sure that they would be able to accommodate him in some way even if he did win his seat. He took the job, broke the news to a not particularly disappointed Beevor, and began work in the City in October 1949. Far more than at the Church Times, he seemed to fit in right away. ‘All the partners knew him,’ wrote the chairman, Ian Garnett-Orme, in 1970. ‘He was obviously highly intelligent and very interesting…He left a most awfully good impression here. Large numbers of people here went to help him in his election campaign. People don’t do that unless they like a man.’¹⁸

That election campaign was now imminent. Heath had been nursing the constituency assiduously and with great success. The Bexley Conservative Association had a membership of only 600 when Heath took over, within a year it had grown to 3,500, by the election it was over 6,000. Every weekend was spent in the constituency. For the work of wooing the voter and making himself a well-known local figure, Heath renounced all the social pleasures that a young man of his age could have expected to enjoy. Even more painful, he sacrificed the raffish sports car in which he had been accustomed to cover the distance between central London and Broadstairs. He loved his glamorous dark-green MG two-seater but reluctantly accepted that it did not create the right impression in a period of stark austerity and traded it in for a more mundane Vauxhall saloon.

The local party agent who insisted on such a change was right in this case, but wrong about much else. Worst of all, he suffered from folie de grandeur, and plotted to replace the chairman and other senior officers of the association by nominees of his own. Heath’s own position was not threatened in the short term but he would never have worked satisfactorily with the agent and would certainly have stood less chance of winning Bexley if no change had been made. He allied himself with the chairman, organised a counter-coup, and was triumphant. The agent resigned a few months later and it became clear that the finances of the local party were in disarray and that the fighting fund, which Heath had largely built up by his own efforts in preparation for the election, had been dissipated. With a general election probably only a year away, Heath found himself with an organisation in tatters and without the money essential to wage a successful campaign.

Things quickly improved. Central Office found an excellent replacement as an agent: Reginald Pye, a former rubber-planter in Sumatra, was hard-working, conscientious and level-headed. Quite as important, he liked Heath, appreciated his qualities and served him with total loyalty through twenty-five years and seven electoral campaigns. A good agent, especially if the MP concerned takes on responsibilities which make it hard to devote as much time as is desirable to the affairs of his constituency, is one of the most necessary elements of political life. From the moment Pye was appointed, Heath never had cause for serious concern about the running of his constituency. He was to prove as assiduous a member as he had been a candidate, but without the safety net of an efficient local organisation no MP can guard against the sort of lapse which leaves a sense of grievance among the constituents and can cost vital votes on election day. It was largely thanks to Pye that Heath was accepted, even by his political opponents, to be a model constituency member. It did not come easily. Though he genuinely enjoyed talking to the young about their ambitions and preoccupations, he lacked social graces and already showed some of the unease in company which was increasingly to mar his public life. ‘The road to Westminster’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘was not so much a long march as an interminable dinner-dance…I made more speeches, presented more prizes and danced more waltzes than I had ever done in my life.’¹⁹ Even for somebody more naturally sociable than Heath it must be a strain to be endlessly jolly while doing things that bore one with people whom one does not find particularly congenial. For Heath it must sometimes have been agonising. The prize was worth the price, but the price was a high one. It did not become smaller with the years. He developed a technique for coasting through social gatherings in overdrive, with fixed smile and a battery of bland banalities, but it never came easily and the self-discipline which kept the carapace in place became progressively more tattered as he grew in consequence and found the demands made on his time and energies ever less tolerable.

His colleagues in Brown Shipley were not the only people from outside the constituency who were ready to come to his help at election time. Among the many responsibilities which he crowded into an already amazingly cluttered life was the Territorial Army. Early in 1947 he was asked to re-form the 2nd Regiment of the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC) – a heavy anti-aircraft regiment. The HAC was the oldest surviving regiment in the British army and the second most senior territorial unit. Heath felt that the Territorial Army was a critically important element of Britain’s defences at a time when the Cold War was setting in and a hot war seemed a serious possibility. He was eager to serve in it and took immense pride in his association with a unit as ancient and distinguished as the HAC. He flung himself into the recruiting of members with all the energy and conviction he had shown in building up the Bexley Conservative Association. It was a time-consuming task: almost every day he had to devote some part of his energies to the affairs of the HAC; every Tuesday night was given up to drill at the HAC’s headquarters in Finsbury; once a year two weeks of his allotted holidays were spent at the annual training camp. For months before camp he would spend much of his exiguous spare time in preparation, while the months after would be devoted to consideration of what had gone right and what wrong. ‘Believe me,’ wrote a colleague in 1948, ‘the success at camp was due to your leadership, inspiration and enthusiasm, and in saying this I am confident that I speak for the whole Regiment.’ That he did speak for the whole regiment was shown by the number of volunteers who flocked to Bexley to help their commanding officer when the electoral campaign began.²⁰

Such military preoccupations, particularly when linked to a body as traditional as the Honourable Artillery Company, might suggest that Heath was as conservative in instincts as the political label that he bore. He did indeed cherish a nostalgic affection for some of the more picturesque and time-hallowed practices of the past but by the time of the 1950 election he had acquired the reputation of being a reformist, even, in the eyes of some, a dangerous radical. ‘Without sharing your desire for a larger opposition, I hope at least to see you here soon,’ wrote Roy Jenkins from the House of Commons. Whatever his father may have thought when he recommended Heath to Attlee as a potential Labour candidate, Roy Jenkins knew that Heath was a committed Tory, but he knew too that his Balliol friend was well to the left and that the two young men probably had more in common with each other than either did with the extremists of their own parties. At his adoption meeting Heath had told his future constituents that ‘there is still a suspicion of our party in the minds of the people’. That suspicion, he privately believed, had more than a little justification. The country was growing tired of Labour, he told Professor Winckler at the end of 1947, ‘but there is not yet, I regret to say, a very great revival of trust in the Conservatives. The Conservatives have still a lot of hard thinking to do about our present problems.’²¹

He regretted greatly that he was not himself in a position to contribute much to that process. He joined the Coningsby Club, a dining society where some of the more liberal Tories foregathered, but though this put him in touch with current thinking it was no substitute for joining in the policy making. Though he felt that the Labour Party was trying to do too much too fast, and was particularly sceptical about its belief that nationalisation was a panacea for all Britain’s social and economic woes, he accepted that much of what it was doing was necessary and desirable. He openly supported the nationalisation of the Bank of England and privately felt that it was inevitable that the coal industry too should come under public ownership. The Tory Party’s efforts to bring its policies up to date seemed to him belated but eminently desirable. He wholeheartedly backed Butler’s Industrial Charter, which for the first time in Tory circles accepted that the trade unions were a vital and desirable part of society and should be worked with rather than treated as enemies. He was a one-nation Conservative before the term had gained – or regained – popular acceptance, and he made it plain to the voters of Bexley that these were his views.

The voters of Bexley liked what he said and seemed prepared to believe him when he rejected Ashley Bramall’s claim that the Tories were bent on restoring a high level of unemployment as a means of curbing the just demands of Labour. But when the general election was called for 23 February 1950, it was anyone’s guess who would win at Bexley. Everyone accepted that the Tories had gained ground since their disaster of 1945, but would Bexley necessarily follow the national trend and, even if it did, would the swing be sufficient to wipe out Bramall’s majority? Heath had come in for his fair share of heckling and abuse at the innumerable meetings he addressed. ‘Your candidate was born in Kent,’ one local chairman had announced. No particular enthusiasm was evoked by this revelation. ‘He was educated in Kent!’ the chairman went on. Still the response was muted. ‘And he lives in Kent!’ the chairman concluded. ‘And for all I bloody well care, he can die in Kent!’ shouted a Labour supporter from the back. On the whole most of the meetings had gone well, but so too had Bramall’s. There was a Liberal candidate in the field who nobody thought would win but who was expected to poll a few thousand votes. At whose expense would those votes be cast? More satisfactorily from the point of view of the Tories, there was also a Communist standing: any votes he garnered could only come at the expense of Labour. By the early afternoon of polling day Heath was reasonably hopeful, but the flow of Labour voters on their way back from work disquieted him and by the time the count began neither Heath nor Bramall would have put money on their prospects. As the count went on it became obvious that it was going to be a desperately close-run thing. Finally the result was announced: both the leading candidates had secured between 25,000 and 26,000 votes; Heath led by a mere 166. The Communist had polled 481 votes, thus losing the election for Labour. ‘In the next election if you have any trouble finding money for your deposit I’ll look after that,’ a grateful Heath told him. ‘You must stand again. It’s your right to stand.’²²

Bramall demanded a recount. It took place and Heath’s majority shrank still further to a mere 133. A request for a further recount was lodged but refused unless the Labour candidate was prepared to meet the cost himself. This Bramall refused to do and the result was confirmed. Edward Heath at the age of 33 was Member of Parliament for Bexley. He would be joining a party still in opposition, for though the Conservative Party had made substantial gains, reducing Labour’s lead from 142 seats to a mere five, Labour could still cling on to power. From Heath’s point of view this was almost better than an overall victory. He could not have hoped to have been offered any sort of job if the Conservatives had won, it seemed likely that they would be in power after the next election, in the meantime a short period in opposition would give him a chance to make his maiden speech and establish his parliamentary identity.

Margaret Roberts, a young research chemist who was later to marry a prosperous businessman called Denis Thatcher, was standing in the neighbouring constituency of Dartford. She and Heath spoke at each other’s meetings during the campaign. ‘I hope you gallup to the top of the poll,’ read the telegram which Miss Roberts sent him on polling day. ‘Among my fellow Conservative candidates in neighbouring seats, only Margaret Roberts failed to be elected,’ Heath wrote in his memoirs. Whatever his feelings may have been when he wrote those words, at the time her failure caused him mild regret. For the rest, it was exultation.²³