Neave’s sense of impending doom did not quite match the national mood. The Festival of Britain, opened on London’s South Bank by the King and Queen in early May, was a huge success and lifted the spirits of a people still feeling the brutalisation of the war and years of austerity. The House of Commons, devastated by German bombing, had reopened. Unemployment was little over a quarter of a million, the best peacetime figure of the century. But underneath, the political ice was breaking up. Labour was weakened by the resignation of Nye Bevan, the Minister of Labour, and Harold Wilson, President of the Board of Trade, over the introduction of charges for NHS glasses and false teeth. Pressure on British forces in Korea diminished, but intensified in Egypt and a new dispute broke out with Iran, where British oil interests were threatened with nationalisation. A scandal seriously embarrassed the government when two British diplomats working in Washington, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, defected to Moscow. They had been spying for the Soviet Union since their pre-war days at Cambridge.
Returning from holiday in August 1951, Neave reverted to his ruling passion: the war against Communism. Speaking to the Ealing South Conservative Political Centre, he made a powerful plea for rearmament. Pointing to 215 Soviet divisions allegedly poised for war, he accused Attlee of paying lip service to defence while, in the Middle East, Russia was probing to see how far she could extend her influence short of provoking war. Since 1945, the British government had shown itself unwilling to stand firm in the maintenance of British interests. ‘All this in the name of peace and brotherhood, but resulting in one international crisis after another.’ Everyone but the Communists accepted the principle of rearmament, he insisted. ‘Then let us make a proper job of it.’6 The next eighteen months would be the testing time, he concluded. He would not have to wait anything like so long. In fact, the figure of 215 Soviet divisions was substantially a myth, being an improvement on the 175 divisions earlier asserted by Churchill. By this stage of the Cold War, British intelligence did not believe there was going to be a land invasion because the Red Army was taking so long to recover from its terrifying losses in the war.
On 19 September 1951, with King George VI sinking fast, Attlee used a personal broadcast after the nine o’clock news to announce a General Election on 25 October. Wearied of governing with a tiny majority, he would ask the people for a vote of confidence to deal with important issues at home and abroad, including the Korean War. As he had promised, Neave came out fighting. At a packed meeting in Ealing Town Hall, he warned that the election would be ‘a battle for the life and soul of the country’. Privately, Attlee and most of his MPs had already conceded the outcome, but the enemy was vigorously engaged. Neave’s battleground was a ‘very good, winnable seat for the Tories,’ Michael Elliott, later a Labour MEP but then a nineteen-year-old party activist, admitted, ‘but Jimmy Hudson was well dug in, and well liked. Loyalties were more rigid than they are now, and swings tended to be a lot less. Neave was regarded as a bit of a toff – not the sort of person who would appeal to the Labour vote of 1950. On the streets he was referred to as “Hairy Knees”, and people used to scrawl that on his posters.’7
In the short, fierce campaign that followed, Labour attempted to portray the Tories as warmongers, but the voters were more interested in housing and the cost of living than in war and peace. The Conservative promise to build 300,000 houses a year struck a chord with the electorate. Winston Churchill defended himself against the ‘false and ungrateful’ charge that the election of his party would hasten the prospect of a third world war. He had only stayed in public life to avert such a tragedy, he said in his last election speech. ‘It is the last prize I seek to win.’ The voters granted his wish, returning a Conservative government with an overall majority of seventeen. But not in Ealing North. On a remarkable turnout of 88.99 per cent, it was a photo finish between Neave and Hudson. On the first count, Labour had a majority of 125, and after a recount, of 120. Hudson polled 25,698 votes to Neave’s tally of 25,578. From the balcony, the relieved Labour victor was greeted with derisive remarks and some booing, while Neave received prolonged and enthusiastic cheering. He urged local Tories to continue the fight, though their applause did little to abate his indignation at losing.
But a man who has walked out of Colditz does not give up easily and Neave’s position as secretary of the CCA kept him in close touch with political opportunity. If anything, and certainly in retrospect, it was a blessing in disguise not to scrape into Westminster as MP for a highly marginal constituency that would swing back and forth between Labour and the Conservatives with the consistency of a metronome for the rest of the century. He was looking for something more solid: a seat on which he could rely and preferably in a more agreeable spot.
He did not have long to wait. The largely rural constituency of North Berkshire became available within months of the General Election, through the decision of its sitting member, Sir Ralph Glyn, not to stand again. With a fine disregard for the niceties of public life, Sir Ralph had announced his decision to leave politics during the general election. It was widely expected that he would be translated to the Lords by the new Conservative government, having sat continuously since 1924. In retrospect, his action (unthinkable today) was plainly influenced by the proximity of a Tory administration, which alone could be counted on to reward him with a peerage.
North Berkshire’s main town was Abingdon. Created a borough in 1556, with the right to send a Member to Parliament, it had the occasional high-profile MP and frequently stormy elections (in 1753 a ‘very considerable’ brewer had tried to buy the seat for his son by throwing open the public houses to the electorate), and John Wesley, the Methodist preacher, he found the citizenry ‘so stupid, senseless a people, both in the spiritual and natural sense, I scarce ever saw’.
For all that, for Neave Abingdon was a political godsend, a classic slice of conservative England. It enjoyed low unemployment, high owner-occupation and was predominantly middle class. Apart from the towns of Abingdon, Wantage and Didcot, the constituency was made up of villages with Olde English names like Hinton Waldrist, East Hendred and Kingston Bagpuize. At the 1950 election Sir Ralph had a majority of almost 4,000 over his Labour rival. Surprisingly, a Communist Party candidate took 396 votes, trailing a long way in fourth place behind the Liberals. In 1951, Sir Ralph bequeathed an increased majority of 4,883 in a straight fight with Labour.
The selection procedure to choose a prospective parliamentary candidate was set in motion within months of the poll. A long parade of hopefuls was narrowed to a shortlist of six. They were called to a selection conference at Didcot Conservative Club on 18 March 1952. Neave was nominated by the Kingston Bagpuize branch of the Conservative Association. On the night he was an easy winner, taking an overwhelming majority of the votes. The North Berkshire Herald and Advertiser carried a page lead reporting his selection, and introducing the thirty-six-year-old London barrister with a distinguished war record. Unusually, it also disclosed that Neave had been with ‘the Special Intelligence Unit’ between 1945 and 1946, after the war was over. He preferred to be addressed as plain ‘Mister’ rather than by his rank.
Neave caught Labour on the hop. They were still looking round for a candidate and appeared still to be committed to J.E.G Curthoys, who contested the seat unsuccessfully in 1951. While Neave was building up his support in the constituency Conservative Association, Curthoys was reduced to defending Attlee over the leadership ambitions of Nye Bevan and ‘a slight difference of opinion’ in the party hierarchy about the exploitation of British migrants to the colonies. Neave lost no time in establishing his credentials. In May, he spoke to Abingdon and District Rotarians about his role in the Nuremberg war trials. The following month he was busy praising the new Conservative government at a rain-hit Whit Monday party fête in Faringdon, in the west of ‘his’ constituency. He insisted that the cost of living was already coming down, citing lower prices for shoes, and he promised to take advantage of this by launching Operation Shoe
leather, in which he would take his political message to the voters. He was dismissive of the post-war Attlee administration, telling the people that if they voted for Labour they would get a welfare state that the nation could not afford, no defence against Russia and ‘that fatal thing – unbridled, deliberate class warfare’.8 Quite why he felt the Faringdon Conservatives needed to be reminded of this frightful prospect was unclear. He was on firmer ground when he urged them to ‘Give us four years to do the job. We will finish it and this country will be great and prosperous again’.
Neave scaled down his political activity during the long, hot summer of 1952, but the prospect of a by-election in the constituency revived interest sharply in the autumn. Labour had chosen as its candidate Ted Castle, originally a local man, the son of a gardener and a prominent journalist on the Daily Mirror. He was also married to the left-wing firebrand Barbara Castle, MP for Blackburn East. Tall, dapper, balding and with a neat moustache, he looked more (even to his wife) like the actor David Niven than an orthodox politician. Here was an opportunity to go on the offensive and Neave lost no time in taking it. Labour’s influential left wing in parliament was at this period led by Aneurin Bevan, flamboyant post-war architect of the National Health Service, and his adherents were invariably referred to in the Tory press as Bevanites. They had emerged as a powerful faction at Westminster in March 1952, when fifty-seven Labour MPs defied party leaders and voted against the Conservative government’s defence policy. Playing on his rival’s name and fears of the Labour left, Neave said at the conclusion of a brains trust in the village hall at Sutton Courtenay that: ‘The Bevanites are building a castle in Berkshire. But it may be you will find it not particularly strong when the election comes, because Bevanism is to a great extent out of date.’
Castle, campaigning in Wallingford the following month, sought to turn the tables by asking voters ‘Are you a Glynite or a Neavite?’ He was talking about an embarrassing move by Sir Ralph Glyn on the bill to denationalise transport then going through its Commons stages. The outgoing Abingdon MP called for the Transport Bill to be subject to a commercial enquiry, prompting Ted Castle to claim that he supported Labour’s view that the legislation was an unnecessary waste of time. Neave hit back swiftly, arguing that Conservative MPs had greater freedom of conscience than Labour members. Party leaders did not spit in the face of back-bench dissidents, he claimed, in unusually demotic style. ‘Socialist agitators against the Bill would do well to note Sir Ralph’s statement that transport should be removed from the cockpit of party politics, and cease their trumpetings about renationalisation,’ he added. Castle’s half-hearted point that the Conservatives had two representatives in the constituency – a lame-duck MP and his impatient successor – did not have the same muckraking appeal as Neave’s adroit linkage with the Bevanites. Sir Ralph was a respected figure, whereas Nye Bevan was a bogeyman.
Sir Ralph Glyn was duly given his peerage, choosing to become Lord Glyn of Farnborough, and the by-election was set for 30 June 1953, three weeks after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. International tension was easing, with the death of Stalin and his replacement by Nikita Krushchev, and the ending of the Korean War with an armistice, but Churchill was under increasing strain. Anthony Eden was recovering from surgery in an American hospital, and the Prime Minister, now nearly eighty and in failing health himself, took over the Foreign Office. The workload was too much. Four days before polling day in Abingdon, he suffered a stroke that paralysed his left side, but the news was kept secret and he retreated to his country home, Chartwell.
Neave’s by-election was a three-cornered fight against Labour and the Liberals, who were represented by George Allen, a thirty-year-old agricultural economist from Oxford. Much as he tried, Ted Castle found it hard to shake off the ‘Bevanite’ charge and equally difficult to dent Neave’s robust defence of the Tory record on housebuilding, the economy and defence. Turnout on polling day was within a whisker of the General Election. Seventy-eight per cent of the 56,543 voters went to the polls, against 79.9 per cent, an unusually high turnout for a by-election. In scenes reminiscent of earlier, more excitable days, a crowd of around 600 thronged the Market Place in Abingdon for two hours, waiting for the returning officer to announce the result at lunchtime on 1 July. It was predictable enough. Neave was in with an increased majority. He took 22,986 votes (53 per cent of the total), a majority of 5,860 over Ted Castle, who polled 17,126 votes (39 per cent) for Labour. The Liberals took 3,060 votes (7 per cent) and lost their deposit.
An exuberant Neave addressed the crowds from the balcony of the Queen’s Hotel. At the same time he also sought to mend his fences with the Opposition. ‘One word to the Labour Party,’ he said. ‘Now that I am your member, whether you voted against me or not, I want to make it clear that I will work for every one of you, whatever your politics may be. I made that promise and I will keep it now.’
This is the customary note of inclusiveness that most successful parliamentary candidates offer their opponents. In Neave’s case, it may also have been tinged with guilt about the tactics his party had used in the by-election. Ted Castle complained of unscrupulous exploitation of whispers against both him and Barbara, including an eve-of-the-poll suggestion that he was a conscientious objector. As a tabloid newspaper journalist, Ted Castle was more attuned to open disclosure than to Airey Neave’s secretive world of wartime and post-war disinformation. The charge of being ‘a conchie’ could still damage, even eight years afterwards. During the war, when Neave was engaged in all manner of heroics, Castle was night editor of the Daily Mirror, though he was no stranger to danger. As he walked to his newspaper one day in 1944, a V1 rocket landed on a crowded bus in front of him. He picked his way coolly through a macabre scene of severed limbs and was violently sick on reaching the office.
Some new MPs do their utmost to deliver their maiden speech in the Commons as soon as possible. Others, particularly after a General Election when many seats have changed hands, wait months. Neave erred on the side of celerity. At 5.44 p.m. on 29 July, just four weeks after his by-election victory, he rose during a defence debate to make his first address. It established his position for the rest of his quarter century in the House. Neave pointed out that his constituency contained a number of defence establishments, including the Military College of Science at Shrivenham, and the top-secret Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell. He offered the hope that his view would not be very contentious. ‘I served for a long time in the Territorial Army, recently leaving it when I retired two years ago, and I specialised in the last war in military intelligence. As a consequence, I want to lay emphasis on training in that sphere.’
It was clear to all MPs that a certain amount of radical rethinking was required upon defence policy, Neave argued. He was particularly concerned about retaining National Servicemen in the TA, arguing the case for ‘large and skilled reserves’ available to the regular army. ‘My first point is that the training of Territorial intelligence officers should be encouraged. That is a type of military service which would be highly suitable for certain types of men who might volunteer to remain on in the Territorial Army.’ A certain amount of machinery for that purpose already existed, he agreed, in the field security units, ‘but it should be carried much further’. In the war, no branch of the armed forces had a higher proportion of civilian soldiers than military intelligence. Many men came from offices and factories to undertake this thoroughly interesting work.
Neave sat down at 5.54 p.m. to fulsome praise from Colonel George Wigg, Labour MP for Dudley and a confirmed intelligence freak. He had impressed the House with the breadth of his knowledge, and MPs would look forward to many further contributions from the Member for Abingdon, ‘much more lengthy and more contentious’. As his latter remark signals, Wigg was being too kind. Though it lasted only ten minutes, Neave’s speech was windy, repetitious and circumspect. The points he made concerning the TA could have been made more vigorously in a third of the time. And for an
old soldier used to the terse language of war, it was a curiously tentative offering. There was ‘a certain amount’ of this and ‘a certain amount’ of that. He had shown himself much sharper on the by-election hustings. However, he had established himself as a Tory soldier – politician, one who would bring specialised knowledge of, and concern for, the role of military intelligence to the Commons.
12
The Greasy Pole
The summer of 1953 was an opportune moment for a young Conservative to enter Parliament. The Queen had just ascended the throne and a New Elizabethan age was promised. Her coronation in Westminster Abbey, watched on new-fangled television by millions of her subjects, was crowned by the news that a Commonwealth expedition had conquered Everest. It was a good time to be a patriot. The economy was doing well and Britain was struggling to find a new, independent path for her colonies, particularly in Africa.
In one of his first speeches to the Commons as peacetime Prime Minister, Churchill called for a lull in party strife and several years of quiet, steady administration ‘if only to allow socialist legislation to reach its full fruition’, a statement hardly likely to endear his strategy to Neave. However, the Labour Party was exhausted, drained by years of rule during post-war austerity and infighting thereafter. It opposed Conservative cuts in food subsidies, but in the face of compensating increases in pensions, benefits and family allowances made little political headway. The second Budget from the Chancellor, R.A. Butler, in 1953, cut income tax by 6d in the pound, increasing the Conservatives’ popularity to the point where they were able to take Sunderland South from Labour, the first time a government had won a seat from the Opposition at a by-election for almost thirty years.
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