Desperate to fight back, Heath stirred himself to address a Conservative rally in the Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, where he revealed that the miners had rejected an offer of between £3 and £4 a week to return to work while Wilberforce was sitting. Yet for all Heath’s belligerence – which earned him severe criticism even from Conservative papers like the Daily Mail, which felt he had failed to show ‘a grain of human understanding’ – there was no mistaking the bleakness of his prognosis. ‘Severe power cuts’, he said, ‘will mean hardship for every man, woman and child in the country. The sick and the elderly, the most defenceless members of the community, will be hardest hit … Millions of men and women will be put out of work as their factories close down.’ In the House of Commons, meanwhile, John Davies was unveiling a literally chilling series of emergency measures. From Sunday, 13 February, he was banning the use of electricity for heating shops, offices, public halls, restaurants, and anything connected with recreation, entertainment and sport. And that was not all: the situation was so desperate that he was forced to announce ‘massive restrictions in the use of electricity by industry’, with most firms limited to power for just three days a week. Anyone who broke these regulations faced a three-month prison sentence or a £100 fine. On top of that, Davies warned householders that unless they cut back on their own consumption, they might find themselves in the same dark, chilly boat. ‘Except where there is sickness only one room should be electrically heated,’ he said grimly. ‘Lights should only be used where essential.’57
This was terrifying stuff; yet if anything, Davies was understating the case. By now so many power stations had shut down, an internal report warned, that in three weeks Britain would be facing cuts of almost half its electricity. Over the weekend the situation deteriorated, and on Monday, 14 February, a most unhappy Valentine’s Day, the government confirmed that 800,000 workers had been sent home, with plants across the country closing under the industrial three-day week. That evening, the Commons debated the government’s emergency powers, in what was billed ‘as likely to be one of the most super colossal parliamentary clashes of all time,’ as one sketch-writer put it. And when Davies rose to speak at ten o’clock there were indeed raucous jeers from the Labour benches, but even they fell silent as he gravely outlined the situation. Even if people followed the emergency restrictions, he said gloomily, the Central Electricity Generating Board could only hold out for another two weeks. At that point, there might not even be enough power to keep essential services going; what was certain, though, was that there would be no power either for industry or for the home. Families across the country, he said, would find themselves ‘without hot water and heat. As a matter of cold decision’ – and at the unintentional pun, the Labour benches roared with laughter. ‘Hon. Gentlemen opposite may find it exceedingly humorous,’ Davies said angrily, ‘but the problem of trying to deal with this issue in a serious and competent way is immense … This hilarity contributes nothing to one of the greatest problems we have ever had.’58
The next day’s headlines made frighteningly bleak reading: ‘Full Blackout Only Two Weeks Away, Davies Warns Commons’; ‘Power Cuts Leave 800,000 Idle’; ‘Even Essential Services in Danger if Situation Does Not Change.’ The rest of the news was little better: the front page of The Times, announcing the murder of the fiftieth soldier in Northern Ireland in twelve months, carried a photo-montage of the dead men’s faces, their young eyes gazing out from a page they would never see. By now, power cuts had become a fact of daily life. Not only were power stations closing, but so were factories, offices, schools. In hospitals, women were giving birth by candlelight; in the streets, there were reports of long queues as traffic lights failed. In London, Piccadilly Circus was as dark and quiet as a graveyard; on the banks of the Thames, the Palace of Westminster seemed a grey, ghostly monolith in the winter night. Across the country, pubs and restaurants were deserted; in the shops, there were shortages of matches and candles; in the newspapers, full-page advertisements warned of the ‘hardships, even tragedies’ if people flouted the electricity restrictions and risked three months in prison. Blue Peter’s presenters Peter Purves and John Noakes even advised children how to look out for their elderly relatives and neighbours, recommending that they lined their blankets with newspaper to keep warm. ‘With all this newspaper,’ Noakes added, ‘I shouldn’t go to bed with a candle, though.’59
Some found the power cuts exciting or nostalgic: the upper-class diarist James Lees-Milne noted that although he found reading with candles difficult, ‘how beautiful the golden light they shed. How mysterious and solemn the golden light they induce.’ But most were less sanguine. Writing to her friend Joyce Grenfell, the journalist Virginia Graham reported that she had only just ‘turned on the tele and the cut came’. The whole business, she wrote, ‘makes one wonder whether democracy is quite the answer! When we were suffering for the nation’s survival during the war the task was easy, but now we seem to be silently suffering, as we watch the country brought to its knees. It’s ridiculous that a quarter of a million men should be allowed to paralyse the country, with all that there coal just sitting behind gates which nobody dares open.’ An NUM branch secretary on holiday in Newquay even found himself being battered with an umbrella by a furious old lady who accused him of having ‘switched her electric off and fought with police’.‘You silly old twat,’ he retorted, ‘my electric were off too.’ She promptly hit him again, and retreated only when he threatened to throw her in the harbour.60
On Friday, 18 February, the denouement came. The morning’s papers gave a flavour of the intense pressure on Heath and his ministers: the front page of The Times, for example, carried a striking photograph of a nurse treating a patient at the Royal Eye Hospital by candlelight, while the lead stories reported that Ford had shut down production at its Dagenham plant, that commuter rail services had been severely cut, that thousands were marching in Belfast to protest against the sectarian murder of a bus driver, and – above all – that in a packed House of Commons, Heath’s majority on the crucial European Communities Bill had been slashed to just eight, a result marked by scenes of ‘scuffling and almost fighting’ between Labour backbenchers and the Liberals who had saved the government. For Heath, however, the worst was yet to come, for that morning Lord Wilberforce published his report. He did not merely lean towards the miners, as had been anticipated; he gave them almost everything they wanted. They had ‘a just case for special treatment’, the judge wrote, and deserved ‘a general and exceptional increase’, with surface workers getting up to £5 extra a week, underground workers getting £6, and coalface workers an extra £4.50. These new rates, he suggested, should be backdated to November 1971, giving the NUM an average increase of 27 per cent. As The Times remarked the next day, Wilberforce’s report conceded ‘almost all the miners’ case and most of the money they demanded. It reads like a printed version of the arguments used by NUM leaders over the past six weeks.’61
But with their hands around the government’s throat, the miners were not ready to loosen their grip. At a stormy meeting that morning at the Department of Employment on St James’s Square, the NUM executive narrowly voted to reject Wilberforce’s proposals and to hold out for an extra £1 a week. At eight that evening, the Cabinet met in an atmosphere of funereal gloom, the room lit only by candles, and Carr mournfully reported that the NUM had voted against the report by 14 votes to 11. (In fact, the true figure was 13–12; the miners’ vice-president had lied to Carr’s officials in order to present a stronger front.) Heath was trapped: as he told the Cabinet, he could hardly go well beyond Wilberforce’s recommendations on the very day the report had come out; yet his government ‘might find themselves unable to sustain the life of the community unless they surrendered to the miners’. Shortly after ten that night, Heath welcomed the miners’ leaders to Number 10. The mood was black: Gormley remembered later that the Prime Minister was ‘not “Smiling Ted” by any means. We didn’t see much of his teeth that night. I
wouldn’t say he was humiliated, but he was very subdued.’
Heath told Gormley that there was no way he could grant the additional £1, as the miners wanted. On the other hand, he was prepared to concede ground on other issues – which was exactly what Gormley and the NUM leaders had anticipated. Now that they had the advantage, they were determined to press it home. As the night drew on, they extracted one concession after another, from free transport to the pit and free working clothes to the consolidation of miners’ bonuses into shift rates that would mean a big boost to their overtime earnings. In the end, they won fifteen concessions worth an extra £100 million; at one point, their industrial relations officer was ‘scratching around in his files’ for long-forgotten demands passed by NUM conferences in years gone by, with Heath waving them through like an exhausted traffic policeman. When they had run out of demands, the executive voted. Even then the majority in favour of withdrawing the pickets was only 14–11, but it was enough. It was one in the morning: the strike was over, and the miners had won. Heath had not just been beaten; he had been annihilated. It was ‘a grim day’, he wrote later, ‘for the country and for the government’.62
In mining communities and left-wing circles across Britain, the settlement was greeted with the biggest outpouring of joy since perhaps the end of the Second World War. ‘I rejoice at the miners’ victory,’ the left-wing historian A. J. P. Taylor wrote to The Times, ‘and I record that February 19 will be long remembered as a glorious day in the history of the British working class.’ Battle-scarred veterans of the strike became minor local celebrities, their names applauded to the rafters. In Barnsley, Arthur Scargill came home to what the local paper called ‘a hero’s welcome’, and ‘in the streets, pubs and clubs, at further meetings in halls or pit branches, he was told by his taciturn supporters and their wives: “Well done, Arthur.” ’63
But for another proud man there were no cheers and no congratulations, only the stark reality of defeat. A few days after the end of the strike, Heath addressed the nation. Rejecting the common belief that ‘the miners won a great victory’ and ‘the Government lost that one’, he insisted that ‘in the country we live in, there could not be any “we” or “they”. There was only us – all of us. If the Government is defeated then the country is defeated.’ There had to be ‘a more sensible way to settle our differences’, and he was ready to sit down with employers and trade unionists alike to work out the best way to keep prices down and yet stimulate greater growth and employment. It was, he added, ‘the Government’s job to see that the interests of all sections of the community are properly looked after’. But, he warned ominously, ‘if one group is so determined to get its own way that it does not care what happens to the rest of us, then we are not living in the kind of world we thought we were, and we had better face up to it’.64
Public opinion strongly favoured the settlement: according to Gallup, four out of five people approved of the Wilberforce report, and sympathy for the miners, even after Saltley and the power cuts, remained high. In the press, the consensus was that Heath had been utterly humiliated; as Lord Carrington told the Guardian’s Peter Jenkins, there was ‘true blue Tory blood all over the carpet’. For the victorious miners, however, there was nothing but praise for what The Times called their ‘scrupulously constitutional’ tactics. And yet even The Times admitted ‘anxieties about the state of society and about growing violence’, not just in Northern Ireland, but everywhere from the nation’s football grounds to the floor of the House of Commons. For millions of people who had watched the miners’ strike on television – when their televisions were working, that is – it had been a disturbing sign of what could happen once the bonds of civility and consensus began to fray. Even their greatest admirers had to admit that the miners had won not because of principle, but because of their sheer industrial muscle. And at a time when the limits of state power were being brutally exposed on the streets of Belfast, many people found this deeply frightening. ‘The theme of anarchy and unmanageability’, noted Tony Benn in mid-February, was creeping into the Conservative press. In the Sunday Express, for instance, the columnist Anne Edwards argued that the violent aftermath of Bloody Sunday and the disorder of the miners’ strike were symptoms of a ‘loudmouthed, lunatic hooliganism [that] is festering all over the country’. Belfast and Saltley, she wrote, had both fallen victim to ‘mob violence, which excuses itself by claiming a cause’, but was really ‘inflicted by people with no other purpose in mind than to bash, beat up, break, scar and smash just for the kicks of doing it’.65
For the first time in decades, there was a palpable sense that the country stood at an ideological crossroads. Britain was ‘not yet in a revolutionary situation’, said the New Statesman portentously, but ‘something resembling it’ was at hand. ‘I am more and more convinced that Communism must come to this country within twenty-five years,’ wrote a despairing James Lees-Milne after watching the TUC leaders on television. Even in Whitehall there was gossip that the strike had been orchestrated in ‘King Street’, where the Communist Party had its dilapidated headquarters. And in the Prime Minister’s files, a note signed by ‘E’ and dated 23 February warned that ‘the use of violence to achieve social or political ends must increase as society becomes more complex, the vulnerable areas become more numerous, the methods of attack more sophisticated’. Next to this, somebody, probably Heath, scribbled: ‘powerful: learn the lessons for …’ But he never finished the comment – a telling sign of the sheer stress and exhaustion bearing down on this brooding, awkward, impatient man, more alone than ever as the storm broke around him.66
4
Fanfare for Europe
Hullo. As you probably know I’ve been away at a conference in Paris sorting out the final details of the merger between our company Heathco’s and the large continental combine E.E.C. Ltd. …
I would like to state categorically once and for all: THIS NEW ARRANGEMENT DOES NOT, I REPEAT, NOT, MEAN THAT WE ARE GOING TO BE TOLD WHAT TO DO BY A LOT OF FOREIGNERS.
E. Heath, Managing Director.
Private Eye, 3 November 1972
The town of Broadstairs, nestling on the tip of the Isle of Thanet on the eastern edge of Kent, has always been a link between England and the Continent. The Romans landed on the Isle – which was then detached from the Kentish mainland – in 55 BC, and returned under Claudius a hundred years later. In the fifth century, Hengist and Horsa, by legend the first of the Anglo-Saxons, are said to have settled on the Isle of Thanet, and Viking raiding parties twice wintered in the area centuries later. By the fourteenth century, a little fishing village called Bradstow – Old English for ‘broad stairs’, after the steps men had cut in the soft chalk cliffs – had been established above the broad golden sands, eventually coming under the jurisdiction of the Cinque Ports. It was associated above all with fishing and shipbuilding, and was no stranger to foreign visitors: during the 1600s, Flemish refugees settled in Reading Street, while the town’s stout sea walls testified to the fears of invasion from the south. In 1723, Daniel Defoe recorded that the town’s population were generally fishermen, although he noted that Broadstairs was also renowned as a ‘hot bed of smuggling’. Seventy years later, the town gates were urgently repaired to cope with a possible invasion from revolutionary France, and it was at Broadstairs that the imperial French eagle captured at Waterloo was brought onto English soil. And local legend has it that Broadstairs was the first English community to hear the news of Wellington’s great victory – though this was a tale that the town’s most famous son tactfully kept quiet about with his European friends.1
When Teddy Heath was growing up in Broadstairs in the 1920s, his parents used to take him for walks on the cliffs, from where on a clear day he could see the faint grey smudge of Calais and the French coast. Even as a boy, Heath was fascinated by the distant lands to the south. His father, Will, was a typical introverted Englishman, quiet, solid and serious, but his mother had travelled to Switzerland as a lady’s m
aid before her marriage, and told stories of the voyage to her children. When Teddy was 14 he had the chance to follow in her footsteps, joining a school trip to Paris – a real treat by the standards of the day. Years later, he fondly recalled the details of the great expedition: the flight from Croydon Airport, then something that few people had ever done; the extraordinary variety of Parisian restaurants, each with its own outdoor menu to intrigue the young visitors; the ‘magnificent shops’ and motor showrooms, whose catalogues he kept even as an old man; the performance of Carmen at the Opéra Comique, where he remembered seeing an attractive blonde woman in the box below struggling to keep her shoulder straps up as they ‘repeatedly slipped down in a most revealing fashion’; and perhaps above all, his illicit trip to the Folies-Bergère with some friends when they were supposed to be tucked up in their boarding house – a detail he somehow forgot to mention when he eagerly told his parents all about the trip afterwards.2
From that moment on, Heath was hooked. As a student at Oxford in the late 1930s, he seized every opportunity for travel, spending one summer in Republican Spain and another on an extraordinary tour of Nazi Germany, where he spent many happy hours in Munich’s art galleries and concert halls and also had the unusual experience of listening to Hitler at a Nuremberg rally. Afterwards, the young Heath was invited to an SS cocktail party where he was introduced to Goering (‘far more bulky and genial than I had imagined’), Goebbels (‘small, pale and, in that setting, rather insignificant-looking’) and Himmler (‘I shall never forget how drooping and sloppy [his] hand was when he offered it to me’). Two years later, in the summer of 1939, he was on a hitch-hiking tour of Berlin, Danzig, Dresden and Leipzig when news broke of the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Taking the first train out of Germany and hitching to the Channel, he arrived home in Kent only a week before Hitler invaded Poland. He did not return to his beloved Europe until June 1944, when he sailed to France as an officer in the Royal Artillery Corps, and crossed the Rhine into Germany just before VE Day. After his regiment moved into Hanover, he made it his first priority to rebuild the local opera house. ‘My men must have culture,’ he told his Brigade Commander. But perhaps the most memorable incident in Heath’s war came months later, when he returned to the blackened ruins of Nuremberg to watch the trials of the Nazi war criminals. It was an experience that left a deep imprint on this stiff, shy but impressionable young man:
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