by Chris Patten
Ted Heath was fortunate that Douglas-Home rather than Rab Butler succeeded Macmillan. He doubtless knew the way the land was likely to lie when he himself backed the 14th Earl. Had Butler won, the succession to him would likely have run in another direction, through Macleod and the rest of the old Conservative Research Department group. As it was, the Etonian earl – match sticks, shotguns, fishing rods and old-world decency – was followed by Ted, who beat the ubiquitously idle if clever Reggie Maudling, largely because of the perceived skills of the leader of the Labour Party, Harold Wilson. One modern man, who could talk credibly about economics and technology, deserved and was matched by another. It was time for the professional scholarship boys to show what they could do. The answer was the 1960s and 1970s, from which it seems to me just about the best things to emerge were the Open University, Roy Jenkins’s reforms at the Home Office, avoiding getting involved in the Vietnam War and joining the European Common Market. Beyond those things, I think that we should pass politely by, looking forward to better days.
Having become leader of the Conservative Party, and lost the 1966 election, Heath was lucky to win in 1970, perhaps because Roy Jenkins was such a responsible Chancellor, something that must have peeved his Prime Minister, Harold Wilson. It is sometimes said that this or that election would have been a good one to lose. As an ex-party chairman (oh not so happy days!) this is an idea with which I wrestle. No election seems at the time a good one to lose. But given what was about to hit Britain, I think you could make an exception for 1970. Machiavelli’s ‘fortuna’ – his idea of luck which you could if bold and skilful turn your way – was about to make way for demons and avenging angels.
The lack of competitiveness of British industry, the all too potent and irresponsible arrogance of the trade unions, the exploding tensions in John Bull’s slum, Northern Ireland: all these calamities were about to break over the Heath government’s head. At the same time, the world economy was turning sour with commodity prices (particularly for energy) soaring, when our own North Sea oil wells were not yet on stream. Their contribution to our national wealth was yet to be garnered and frittered away by future governments.
So the dark clouds rolled in. I do not believe that any Prime Minister since the war has confronted such a combination of malign events. They wrecked a programme devised for government which focused on reversing Britain’s downward drift by rebuilding competitiveness and increasing the efficiency of government. Truth to tell, ‘Selsdon man’ (as this programme was known because of the hotel where the core document was drafted) was not all that different from ‘Finchley woman’. But the second time round it all worked much better – maybe because of Margaret Thatcher’s canniness; maybe because she had previous disasters from which to learn; maybe because she was fortunate about North Sea oil revenues and a downward drift in world agriculture prices; maybe because by the 1980s Britain was fed up with the tacky and unsuccessful compromises of the past.
The Heath government’s excessively rigid and legalistic approach to union reform – well-intentioned as it was, and a centrepiece of its strategy – came apart in the government’s hands. An attempt to get industry to brace up and make its own way was sunk on the Clyde with unemployment there and everywhere else on the rise. Macroeconomic policy was dominated by stoking a boom, racking up deficits and trying to control inflation by encouraging pay moderation. Fatally for the presentation of the government’s case, and for the shaping of policy itself, Heath’s first Chancellor, Iain Macleod, died within five weeks of taking office. In later months and years, Britain seemed forever shut down, locked out, stumbling from one candlelit crisis to another. The Conservative Party shuffled, confused, with the Cabinet Secretary, William Armstrong, at Ted Heath’s side, from a market-oriented policy, designed by a regiment of policy groups in Opposition, to dirigisme and corporatism in government. There is a sense in which you can best gauge the depth of gloom and schizophrenia in the Conservative Party at the time by the fact that after losing two elections in quick succession it elected ‘that bloody woman’ – as Heath and others called her – as leader. By the end of 1974, the party’s rank and file – the envelope stuffers, Daily Telegraph readers and the unpromotable backbenchers – turned on their officers and gunned them down. Ted Heath’s ill-fortune blew him and his close colleagues away.
While it is plainly wrong to suggest that in politics you make your own fortune, the way you handle what comes your way can break you or promote you. At crucial moments, Heath was uncertain about whether to tough things out with the unions or back off and live, just about, to fight another day. In the winter of 1973/4, he could not decide whether to hit the election button quickly and decisively or postpone an electoral reckoning. Maybe it was honourable to try to avoid a divisive election campaign. But, in the event, he chose to go to the country despite what may well have been his own principled reservations. So the election came too late. It should have been earlier or not have been called at all. Hamlet tossed and turned, and the King lived on:
The time is out of joint; O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right.
‘Who governs Britain?’ Conservatives asked in February 1974. ‘Clearly not you, mate,’ replied voters. But they didn’t vote Wilson in decisively either. I do not believe that Heath’s indecision was reprehensible, but it proved politically calamitous.
Sometimes of course Heath had been dramatically decisive. Which other contemporary political leaders have moved so swiftly from one philosophical end of the economic and political argument to the other? For example, it looked to many of its supporters that a Conservative Party elected to bury Mr Benn and all his works had dusted him down and installed him at the heart of Whitehall, intervening in the economy incontinently. Whatever the excesses, it was difficult to swallow this reversal.
Fortune only tells us part of the story of a political career. There is also the question of where a man or a woman stands on the big issues of the time and whether he or she makes a difference to the way they play out. On these scores, Edward Heath comes out ahead of many of his contemporaries in politics. He was right about the perils of nationalism in Europe; right about self-determination in the old empire, at least in all but the last of Britain’s colonies; and right about racism.
Heath’s views on Spain, on the rise of Hitler and on Munich in the 1930s – he had travelled in Germany as a young man and seen Nazism at first hand – were part of the narrative that carried him on to the negotiation of Britain’s membership of what was to become the European Union. He saw the terrible harm that nineteenth-century nationalism had done to Europe in his own century. Had he been able to express himself as well as Macmillan did, I guess that his primary declared motivation for Britain’s Common Market membership would have lain in the obscenities of European history. Among those from Heath’s and Macmillan’s Oxford college who fought in the First World War, three men won Victoria Crosses (two posthumously) and two the Iron Cross. For both these Conservative leaders it was appalling that young men were brought together to study the classic works of our civilization and were then trained to kill one another by the countries that had created this civilization. The destructive nationalism of twentieth-century European history impelled Heath into the crusade for reconciliation and integration. Whatever the imperfections of the architecture that was created, at least the second half of the century was a lot happier than the first. Moreover, Britain itself – in the 1960s and 1970s, the sick man of Europe – became thereafter one of the strongest and most competitive European countries, with pretty much ‘à la carte’ membership of the club. Heath understood how Britain could, over time, transform itself; he understood too the difference between patriotism and nationalism, though it was his and his cause’s misfortune that he could not express it very well.
It was Heath’s own dogged diplomacy that eventually unlocked the French door to EU membership. He courted President Pompidou assiduously and successfully. When the suit was successf
ully brought to the altar, it was the French President who best expressed what was happening. ‘Through two men who are talking to each other,’ President Pompidou said in an after-dinner speech during the 1971 negotiations, ‘two peoples are trying to find each other again. To find each other to take part in a great joint endeavour – the construction of a European group of nations determined to reconcile the safeguards of their national identities with the constraints of acting as a community.’ Quite so.
As Opposition leader and in government, Heath refused to compromise with Ian Smith over Rhodesia’s claim to be an independent racist state, and he was equally uncompromising in resisting racism within his own party and country. Heath rode the storms, which Enoch Powell helped to stir up, and he was right to do so.
In his last years, there was one other issue which raised my doubts and my hackles about Ted Heath. When Britain signed the Joint Declaration with China over Hong Kong in 1984, Heath criticized the British government for not pressing ahead faster with the democratization of the colony. When I went to Hong Kong as Governor in 1992 and tried to ensure that the elections held there were at least free and fair, without introducing greater democracy than the limited amount allowed for in the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law, Heath denounced me and came to Hong Kong each year during my governorship, staying in my official home and criticizing us privately and publicly for what we were trying to do. Why? I think the reason is the mildly discreditable one that the Chinese leaders continued to treat him in his long wilderness years as though he were still premier. Flattery, and perhaps his commercial interest, blinded him to the sins of Leninists in Beijing and to the importance of treating our last colonial subjects honourably. I suspect his attitude also owed something to the fact that Margaret Thatcher supported me. These were not his finest moments.
I have mentioned my surprise at the number of leaders in politics who clearly do not like people very much. It will be evident from what I have said that Edward Heath was one such, by no stretch of the imagination a great ‘people person’, and he was certainly uncomfortable with the vulgarities of politics and campaigning (which is not necessarily to his discredit). But, whatever he thought of all those imperfect voters, not least the Conservative ones, and their resistance to his dreams and his managerial schemes, he did his best by the British people. He was a patriot, and he gave them his best shot. When that sadly was not enough for them, he retired for almost three decades – such a waste – in a massive sulk, retired not to his tent but to his handsome house looking on to one of Britain’s great and most iconic buildings, Salisbury Cathedral. If they were fair-minded and charitable, people surely felt just a little bit sad and sorry for him there. He had become ‘grumpy and disappointed of Salisbury’. Perhaps less grumpy after 1990 and the fall of Margaret Thatcher, but never less than disappointed until his death in 2005.
One very obvious difference between Heath and Thatcher, whose emergence as Ted’s successor was in part a result of his failures as a leader, was their use of language and their attitude to it. The language of party manifestos was an example of this. Manifestos came with a variety of titles usually close to the theme that tomorrow would be better than yesterday or today. A famous advertisement for The Times used to announce, ‘There’s something interesting in tomorrow’s Times’, which invited the response, ‘Damn it, I bought today’s.’ I was frequently given the job of writing these documents, which were largely treaties between different factions in the party and read, if at all, by very few outside Whitehall and special interest groups. The best one I wrote, in 1979, with Angus Maude, a senior Conservative MP, went without a title, simply announcing that it was the Conservative Manifesto. But, inside, it was rather more informative and certainly managed to avoid the usual clichés, describing the way in which a new government would ‘move forward to confront the challenges of change firmly but fairly’.
Ted Heath’s manifesto in 1966 went far to summarize his own approach. Action Not Words, it announced briskly: so there. This meant: ‘We don’t want any more of this guff about prosperity on sustainable foundations. What we want is a plan in a few clear sentences and then we’ll get on and do it.’ Action Not Words overlooks the fact that a lot of politics in a democracy is about words – words that motivate, give a sense of direction, mobilize to action to secure an objective that may not at first blush appear to be in the listener’s interest. As I have argued, this was not Heath’s strong suit, a point picked up in Private Eye’s caricature of him as a corporate executive obsessed with the operation of the automatic beaker disposal unit. Even on Europe, where Heath was passionately clear about what he wanted to do, the words rarely moved beyond the tepidly managerial.
Margaret Thatcher loved words. She carried around in her famously capacious handbag all manner of scraps of paper (House of Commons writing paper or Basildon Bond) on which she had jotted down the wisdom of the ages. Occasionally, after scolding her speechwriters for their inability to find a bit of poetic text to elevate an argument, she would produce these bits of paper and read some of them out, occasionally with a slight shake of the head as if admonishing her small audience for the fact that they had not produced anything as resonant as Rudyard Kipling or Milton Friedman. She liked clarity as well as poetry and usually had a direct message, partly the result of her methodical approach to life. (According to her biographer, Charles Moore, she explained to a friend on a walk at Christmas 1942 why she could not believe in angels. ‘I have worked out scientifically that in order to fly, an angel would need a six-foot-long breastbone to bear the weight of the wings.’) Conservatives, she thought, needed an equally methodical approach to deciding what they stood for: socialists had an ideology, so Conservatives needed one of their own. During the days of the party leadership election, I was visited at the Conservative Research Department, where I was by then director, by Rab Butler, who came to give his episcopal blessing from time to time to the little political cloister which he had helped to create. In the department’s Georgian premises in Westminster we had an ancient caged lift which squeaked and hiccupped its ascent to my office bearing Rab and me, Rab in his black overcoat, the collar lightly dusted by dandruff making him a passable impersonation of Mount Fuji. As we rose slowly through the building he asked me, ‘Do we have to take this Thatcher business seriously?’ To my reply in the affirmative, he responded with a question about what she believed and wanted to do. I began to reel off, as accurately as I could, what I thought she stood for. ‘Too much, too much,’ he opined. ‘Like the motions at a Party Conference.’
It was true, with the rather dangerous addition that everything had to be joined together by an uninterrupted and uninterruptable umbilical cord. If they – the socialists – had an ‘ism’, we must have one too. Her intellectual mentor, the charming and kind Keith Joseph, was to say about that time that after years in Parliament and in government he had only just discovered the ‘ism’ that represented Conservative thinking. Like a former but now guilt-laden agnostic, he suddenly discovered God and His testaments, written by Hayek and Friedman. Before taking up any further public office, we Conservatives should all do penance, confess our sins and self-flagellate before the electorate whose interests had previously been betrayed by our benighted apostasy.
Margaret, not being as gentle a soul as Keith, took things a stage further. If you did not accept the whole package – monetarism, cutting back the state, reducing taxes, ending the dependency culture, affirming stridently whatever she believed to be middle-class values – you were worse than a non-believer; you were a heretic, quisling or (in short) wet. Keith never put it in such uncompromising terms. When in 1985 I became his deputy in the Department of Education and Science, he asked me to go round to his home off the King’s Road to have tea with him. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘that we have rather different intellectual positions. So I thought I would give you a list of the books that have most influenced me.’ He was surprised that I had read some of them – including Hayek’s The Road to S
erfdom and Sam Brittan’s The Treasury under the Tories. I once asked Keith whether he thought I was a wolf in sheep’s clothing or a sheep in wolf’s clothing. He quite liked the joke.
A few of Thatcher’s more mindless acolytes regarded my own opinions, and presumably the unfathomable fact that Margaret used and promoted me, as a reason for particularly vehement hostility to my unashamed wetness. Perhaps the problem was that I did not seem to mind too much about their personal malevolence though it did puzzle me. I had always thought myself, if not exactly herbivorous, at least reasonably affable. A manifestation of this rancour occurred when I lost my seat in Bath when I was party chairman in 1992. Some of these hardliners were at a party held in the home (I was told) of Alastair McAlpine, the party’s treasurer, where the assembled Thatcher groupies apparently cheered my defeat as a Conservative gain. Many of those present were birds of passage through the Conservative Party, going on at a later election to support Jimmy Goldsmith’s Referendum Party. Lavender said I should have been flattered by the identity of most of my antagonists. As I said, your opponents are in other parties, your enemies are in your own.