by A. N. Wilson
His musical talent was, like his ability to sail, quite beyond the amateur average, but here, once again, the way he exercised that talent was devoid of charm. Each year at his constituency of Broadstairs he would conduct the Christmas carols. André Previn invited him to conduct a piece for a London Symphony Orchestra concert. Heath chose Elgar’s ‘Cockaigne’ overture. Some musicians doubted whether he fully understood what was involved in conducting symphonic music–that is, mastering simultaneously all the musical parts and following them in the score. Heath’s ‘conducting’ looked like a man merely waving his arms about while the players embarrassedly played the Elgar piece, waiting for Previn to return to the podium and conduct the Sibelius Violin Concerto. Heath devoted just one hour to rehearsing the performance, having had a two-hour Cabinet meeting on the morning of the concert and Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons. Yet his own memory was:
I realized how fully the orchestra, together and as individuals, were responding to me. I felt I could do almost anything I wanted with them. Behind me, the concentration of the audience was intense. They, too, would follow wherever we led…9
The megalomaniac illusion of control, while actually failing to engage with the way the players were actually regarding him, is a metaphor for his life as a public servant. Private Eye snootily dubbed him The Grocer, presumably because he seemed to these public school boys like a man behind a shop counter as he told the nation about the likely effect of Europeanisation on the price of British bacon or cheese. But as so often Auberon Waugh’s Swiftian cruelty touched the nerve of truth:
Grocer, as anyone who has ever stood within ten yards of him will know perfectly well, is not human at all. He is a wax-work. Many are even beginning to suspect as much from watching his television appearances.
This is the secret of the amazingly unattractive blue eyes, the awful, stretched waxy grin, the heaving shoulders and the appalling suntan.
Even scientists now admit that something has gone wrong with the pigmentation…The stark truth now appears. Grocer the waxwork, like Frankenstein’s monster before him, has run amok.10
The waxwork-quality of Heath, quite as much as his unmarried status, led to inevitable ribaldry whenever the question of his emotional or erotic preferences were discussed. Sub-editors no doubt deliberately introduced double entendres into a headline for a story concerning the night-time predatory prowls of homosexual parliamentarians on Hampstead Heath: MPs USE HEATH FOR SEX. The image of the waxwork being involved in actual sexual encounters would have been comic even before he turned into the obese, seemingly immortal curmudgeon of his many years on the back benches of the House of Commons. Inevitably, there was the suggestion that, at some earlier stage, he had been sexually active. Brian Coleman, a Conservative member of the London executive in the early twenty-first century, and himself a homosexual, claimed, in an article in the New Statesman of April 2007, that it was ‘well known’ in gay circles that Heath ‘managed to obtain the highest office of state after he was supposedly advised to cease his cottaging activities in the Fifties when he became a Privy Councillor’. There was the inevitable huffing and puffing in response to this, with Ted Heath’s successor as MP for Bexley and Sidcup, Derek Conway, saying, a little sadly, ‘Ted was absolutely wedded to politics. He didn’t have a great deal of personal companionship in his life but there are people who are capable of getting on with their lives without companionship.’
We shall probably never know for certain whether Ted Heath ever went cottaging, or ever had a companion. Though the only unmarried Prime Minister of our times, he is not the only one of whom the ‘urban myth’ does the rounds that he was a secret homosexual. Of Macmillan, it was always said that he was homosexual without completely realising it, and although this is a baffling analysis it makes sense of some of his more peculiar marital and political shifts and sways. Of at least two other Prime Ministers homosexual rumours abound. Of one it is said that he was arrested during his early career for ‘cottaging’, and having tried to give his two middle names to the police, rather than the surname, he was rescued from further embarrassment by a senior colleague. It is impossible to know if this is true or ‘urban myth’. Of the other Prime Minister it has been said that he had a homosexual life as a student at university. If so, his friends were remarkably discreet about it afterwards. Whatever the truth of these things, it is a testimony to the fact that although Gay Pride marched every year in London, there were still many homosexuals in Britain at the end of our times who remained ‘in the closet’, and this was as true of politicians as of the rest of the population. If it is true that Heath and another, younger, Prime Minister, had both indulged in the cottaging habit, it would require the pen of Joe Orton to envisage the scene in the public lavatory in which they fortuitously might have met one another.
The character of politicians is as important as the ideals for which they claim to stand. In Heath’s case, this was abundantly true, since the strategies and policies with which he earnestly set out in 1970 were all abandoned as soon as he encountered difficulties or opposition. It is not unfair to assume, as all primitive and myth-guided peoples have assumed, that bad luck itself is, as in the case of the prophet Jonah, a personal characteristic which men carry with them. No one suggests that Edward Heath wanted to lose his brilliant Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ian Macleod. Yet within five weeks of taking office, Macleod died of a heart attack. Thereafter, the nation’s economic affairs were placed into the unwilling hands of the balding, dithering Anthony Barber, who seemed like a man playing the vicar in a suburban amateur dramatics society. It can hardly have been the case that the fortunes of Heath and his government depended entirely upon the skills of Macleod. There was no shortage of clever Cabinet ministers and civil servants working in Heath’s administration. Nor on any logical level can the death of one man be an excuse for a whole government’s absolute lack of willpower when confronted with the problems of the economy and industrial relations. Other external events, most notably in Ireland, would have knocked the stuffing out of many administrations, and certainly helped to deflect Heath from the course he had set himself before he was elected.
Yet in one area he would not be deflected, and it is to Heath that Britain owes, for better or for worse, its membership of the Common Market, as it was called then, the European Union as it became.
Membership was negotiated slowly and painfully after the rejection by General de Gaulle. The British political negotiator, sitting in the position that Heath had occupied under Macmillan, was now Geoffrey Rippon and the civil servant, in a way the mastermind behind the whole story of Britain’s membership of the European Community, was Con O’Neill. The story of our times so far has been of Britain having suffered two severe blows–economic ruin at the end of the Second World War and international humiliation after the failed invasion of Suez in 1956. These cataclysms left the British uncertain of their identity. In a crisis, British politicians, like headless chickens whose muscular spasms still allowed them to scuttle aimlessly around the farmyard, reacted in one of two preconditioned ways. Those on the left behaved as if they wanted to revert to the shared austerities of wartime and of Attlee’s Britain. The solution to all problems was to make of Britain an ever-more welfare-dependent, high-spending socialist state, in which industrial problems, social problems, education and health were all the responsibility of politicians and Whitehall bureaucrats. The reaction of the other headless chicken, the Tory chicken, was to hope that somehow or another, in spite of every economic indicator to the contrary, Britain could continue to be a world power, perhaps by emphasising its continued friendship with the British Commonwealth, which to these patriots was the old Empire in all but name, and perhaps by some sort of satellite relationship with America.
The European option seemed to Heath, as to his seventy or so pro-European allies in the Labour Party, led by Roy Jenkins, a way out of this rather bleak impasse. Britain need not be an austerity socialist state, becoming poorer by the year;
nor need she be a pathetic satellite of America. She could become, instead, a partner in the European experiment, a grownup modern nation. The two aims of any government are to secure the safety, and the prosperity, of its citizens. British entry into the European Economic Community seemed, to the optimistic pro-Europeans, to offer a chance of both.
It is impossible to say, of course, how Britain would have fared if she had not joined the Market in 1970. There have undoubtedly been some economic mishaps along the road, most notably the decision in the Thatcher government to link the pound sterling to the Deutschmark at an unfavourable rate when they joined the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Poverty still existed in Britain at the end of our times, as at the beginning, but not on a scale which would have been recognised as grinding poverty by those who had lived in the 1930s. There has been no war between France and Germany. The peoples of Northern Europe have lived without the fear of invasion, aerial bombardment or financial ruin, which had been their regular lot in the first half of the twentieth century. To this extent, the European experiment surely looks like a success. Perhaps for this very reason, however, for the great majority of the British, as our times advanced, the European Union became an object of loathing, and this inevitably had its effect on Ted Heath’s posthumous reputation. In season and out of season, the old man remained doggedly proud of his achievement.
Some of the terms on which Britain entered were, even by the testimony of the most ardent Europhiles, ‘disastrous’.11 Of this the most conspicuous disaster perhaps was to sign up to the Common Fisheries Policy. By redefining what had hitherto been regarded as British waters, the negotiators did not merely put a lot of British fishermen out of business. They intruded upon something deeper. The water which surrounded the British archipelago was a friend as well as a guardian. To many British people, it felt like an ally against Britain’s enemies. It was the element which had destroyed the Spanish Armada in its storms, and, in its calm, had allowed the ‘little boats’ to relieve the marooned British troops from the beach at Dunkirk in 1940.
Such was Heath’s zeal to join the European Economic Community at any cost that he failed to see the emblematic nature of the Fisheries Policy. Of course, it could be argued, as the chief negotiator, Con O’Neill, continued to argue for decades afterwards, that, given the complexities of the issue, British fishermen got terms which were ‘reasonable, advantageous and not too onerous’.12 But Con O’Neill was a bureaucrat. Heath, as a politician, might have been expected to see what psychological effect this would have. From the moment Heath put his signature to the Treaty of Rome, and Britain joined the Common Market on 1 January 1973, the Fisheries issue was emblematic. For, what, in joining the Community, had Britain done? The issue for Westminster politicians and London journalists at the time was almost entirely seen as an economic one. Would it be to Britain’s economic advantage to join? And the answer to this, when due allowance had been made for the Commonwealth, was yes, it would be very much to her advantage, though the share of the Budget to which O’Neill and his friends committed Britain to paying was steep–8.64 percent in the first year, rising to a staggering 18.92 percent in 1977. The Labour Party continued to believe that Europe was a capitalist, anti-socialist club. That was the sum of their hostility to the project. There was very little talk of the matter of which the Common Fisheries Policy is emblematic, of British sovereignty. The One Nation group of Tories in 1962 had published a pamphlet, One Europe, which was ‘little short of a federalist tract’. It was edited by Nicholas Ridley, a passionate supporter at this stage, of a United Europe, and J. Enoch Powell never denied writing 25 percent of this document, which advocated ‘the full economic, military and political union of Europe’.13
Opinion will always be divided between those who thought that the Treaty of Rome made perfectly clear its ultimately federalist aims, and those who believed that Heath somehow managed to hoodwink the British people into signing away their sovereignty and birthright. Repetitions of this argument would occur later in the century whenever Britain was asked to ratify a piece of pan-European legislation. Margaret Thatcher, for example, after signing the Single European Act, claimed that she did so not realising what it had contained–a strange claim for one who, in her days as Education Secretary in Heath’s Cabinet, had been the keenest of Europeans. It is, as Alice’s White Queen remarked, a poor sort of memory which only works backwards. As Britain became more and more uncertain about the nature of its own identity, and as it in effect began to break up in the closing years of the twentieth century, the belief grew that it had been Europe who was to blame. Europe became the scapegoat for something which was actually happening within. And it was then that the Eurosceptic belief hardened that Heath was the architect of British dissolution. It was not how things appeared at the time.
Ireland, at that stage, dominated most British thoughts much more than the question of sovereignty. The violence in the province of Northern Ireland grew much worse in the Heath years. From 13 dead in 1969, and 25 in 1970, it became infinitely bloodier: 174 in 1971,467 in 1972,250 in 1973 and 216 in 1974. Heath and his Cabinet cannot be blamed for the jubilation which broke out among the Ulster Protestants when the Conservatives won the election, even though that was one factor which explained the escalation of the violence. The idle Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling, had probably spoken for England when, after his first visit to the province, he remarked, ‘What a bloody awful country!’–but the attitude did nothing to bring peace to Northern Ireland.14 Private Eye’s cartoonist John Kent always depicted Reggie wearing a nightshirt and nightcap, and usually asleep. Brian Faulkner, who succeeded James Chichester-Clark as the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, tried to build bridges with the Catholics by offering the SDLP seats on various committees at Stormont, the Northern Irish parliament. But he made the catastrophic mistake of introducing internment for IRA suspects: 2,400 of these republicans were arrested in the six months up to April 1972, two-thirds of whom were released without charge. The resentment caused by the injustice of internment was something felt to the end, and the Westminster government was slow off the mark in doing what should have been done years before–they abolished Stormont and introduced direct rule of the province from Westminster–but not before Belfast, Londonderry and Newry had become battlefields in which British troops fought with Irishmen armed with automatic rifles and gelignite bombs.
The worst, and most emblematic, day of the Troubles in Heath’s time was probably Bloody Sunday, in Londonderry, 30 January 1972. Marches had been declared illegal in the province but the demonstrators defied the order, and thirteen of them were shot dead by paratroopers. It was this catastrophe which finally persuaded Heath that direct rule from Westminster was the only option. Heath had acted decisively, and the levels of violence did fall off very considerably. After the 467 who died in 1972, the 250 in 1973 and 216 who died in 1974, though shocking and terrible statistics, are improvements.
It is obviously no accident that those who came to see the European Union as a threat to Britain’s identity or sovereign independence were the same journalists and diehard parliamentarians who also thought that Ulster could go on being part of the United Kingdom. The Union was sacred to the likes of J. Enoch Powell, who, after putting himself beyond the pale in Heath’s Conservative government, joined the Ulster Unionists and became the Member for South Down in 1974, or to T. E. Utley and his acolytes on the Daily Telegraph. There was a certain intellectual romance in continuing to believe in the unity of the old Kingdoms, when that unity was being so violently contested on the streets of Ireland. The truth was all much more complicated than these Unionists wanted it to be. One truth which slowly dawned on Powell was that most Unionists in Northern Ireland were not Unionists at all. Paisley was, Powell said, a Protestant Sinn Feiner, and that judgement was shown to be prescient when, after a quarter of a century of denouncing the Roman Catholic Church and the Irish Republican Army, Paisley settled down at Stormont to form an administration with those old Republican rebel
s Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams. True Unionists, those who wanted Ireland, or the six counties, to be truly a part of Britain, with the same status as Warwickshire, were very thin on the ground, as every election showed. The High Tory journalists and politicians who argued the Unionist position were simply ignoring the wishes of those who were involved in the conflict–and ‘those involved’ included, very much against their will, the people of England, Wales and Scotland. The huge majority of these took Reggie Maudling’s view of Ireland and wanted to be shot of the ‘bloody awful country’. Although the Irish Republican Army, and their supporters in America, who by bankrolling the fighters with ‘Noraid’ perpetuated the slaughter for a quarter of a century, persisted in seeing the struggle as one between Irish Independence and British Imperialism, very few British people, apart from the ideologues of the press, wanted the Northern Ireland experiment (an expedient hastily devised in the 1920s to stop the Civil War) to continue in the 1970s and 1980s. This was not ‘giving in to terrorism’ it was simply what most people wanted. The bonds which held the peoples of the United Kingdom together were loosening, and the Irish story was helping them to loosen. Whether the 5.5 million Scots and 2.75 million Welsh wanted independence, or simply a little more say in their own affairs, without the patronage of being governed through a Welsh Office and a Scottish Office in London, was a matter which the unfolding decades might reveal. But as the century petered out, it was possible to see that all Britons had become uncertain of their own identity and that these movements for independence on the Celtic fringes were only one symptom, the bloodiest of symptoms, of that uncertainty which characterised the collective British self-perception throughout our times. In 1978, the communist Tom Nairn wrote: