After his maiden speech, Neave did not seek to make much of a splash on the back benches. Instead, he continued to mark out his chosen territory: defence and related issues. He was on his feet in a debate on the Navy, Army and Air Force Bill later that year, speaking up for his favourite unit, the Territorials. On 17 November, he raised a number of arcane points about the Bill’s distinction between Territorials and reservists, and to urge the army to keep track of the jobs now being done by men who faced the call-up. He had an argument with the prickly Labour MP for Brixton, Lieutenant-Colonel Marcus Lipton, about the exact date of the ‘embodiment’ of the TA in 1939, and sat down. It was not a brilliant exercise, though it did mark out his political interests and he followed up the intervention with a written question in February 1954 about training for the ‘Terriers’. The following month, he began a long parliamentary involvement with the atomic energy industry and its professionals. In the second reading of the Atomic Energy Bill, Neave observed: ‘We have reached a stage in the history of atomic power at which we can take stock of the achievements of our scientists.’ He praised the ‘mental stimulus’ of his own constituents employed at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell: here (though Neave did not say it) they not only sought peaceful ways to harness the power of the atom but also built Britain’s atomic bomb. Neave commended the ‘not very sensational or revolutionary Bill’, but urged that more homes be built for the staff at Harwell, and conveyed their anxiety about recognition for their trade unions and staff associations. Telling the House ‘I speak as a lawyer’, he also urged the right of appeal for atomic staff who might be suspected of some kind of security offence.1 It was a creditable speech, worth more than the sarcastic rejoinder of John Freeman, Labour’s brilliant rebel, that Neave was simply ‘rolling a log’ for his constituents.
Like any new member, Neave found the social side of Westminster attractive. Inside the safe confines of the Palace he could relax in the company of his own. He drank with fellow Tories in the MPs’ bars, and he also mixed in the circle of parliamentary journalists, where his tastes were surprisingly catholic, extending to the liberal Manchester Guardian. Neave operated on the principle that it was better to know what ‘the enemy’ was up to. His writing also progressed well. They Have Their Exits, the record of his wartime adventures, was greeted with critical plaudits, sold remarkably well and was still available in paperback twenty years later. Neave followed up this triumph in 1954 with Little Cyclone, a collection of true stories of the women and men who risked their lives in MI9’s escape organisations. The Sunday Times thought his second book ranked ‘with the very best of its kind’, though it did not meet with the same popular success as his first. For Neave, it was more than a book. It was an admiring tribute, and war hero Douglas Bader praised him for establishing a monument in words to their memory.
His showing in the Commons had still not attracted any attention outside the Westminster village. Andrew Roth, the veteran parliamentary observer, noted: ‘Airey Neave did not set Parliament afire.’ Despite his interest in military matters, he had nothing to say in the House about the war in Indo-China that culminated in the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu. Nor did he mark the end of the Korean War. As a new boy, he might be expected to keep his counsel about Anthony Eden’s lacklustre foreign policy. Yet surprisingly, in view of his pedestrian parliamentary performance, he had clearly impressed his political superiors. In February 1954, only eight months after being elected, he was appointed parliamentary private secretary to Alan Lennox-Boyd, the new Secretary of State for the Colonies. This was the lowest rung of the ministerial ladder. A PPS is merely the eyes and ears of his master in the Commons, and unpaid to boot. But at least he had his hands on the greasy pole of promotion.
The argument over nuclear weaponry gained fresh impetus in late 1954 when it was disclosed that the United States was experimenting with the hydrogen bomb, a device infinitely more awesome than the atomic bombs that ended the Second World War. A bomb tested in the remote Pacific atoll of Bikini was six hundred times more powerful than the atomic devices that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The government’s revelation, in the Defence White Paper of 1955, that Britain would participate in this massive extension of nuclear capability, was music to Neave’s ears and those of his Tory colleagues. It split Labour from top to bottom. Nye Bevan, dissatisfied with Attlee’s explanation as to whether Labour would use the H-bomb, led sixty-one MPs in a mass abstention from the official Opposition amendment. The parliamentary whip was withdrawn from Bevan, prompting widespread protests in local Labour parties.
The Conservatives, sensing the public mood moving their way, decided to go on the offensive. On 5 April, Churchill tendered his resignation to the new Queen, who asked Sir Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, to form a government the next day. In a broadcast from Chequers on 15 April, Eden announced that parliament would be dissolved on 6 May, and a General Election would take place on 26 May. Eden’s place at the FO was taken by Harold Macmillan, who as Housing Minister had more than honoured the Tories’ promise to build 300,000 houses. Butler’s final Budget on 19 April announced tax concessions and the Conservative manifesto, United for Peace and Progress, dwelt heavily on social issues but also promised (to Neave’s satisfaction) a programme of nuclear power stations.
His third General Election as a candidate, but first as incumbent MP, found Neave with two new rivals. Labour, runners-up in the 1953 by-election, chose Mrs Margaret Reid, a school teacher and veteran of two parliamentary polls. The Liberals again fielded George Allen, an economics lecturer at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, who had served with the Northants Yeomanry during the war. Neave addressed seventy-five meetings across the 300 square miles of his constituency, and his diligence was rewarded with an increased majority of 8,634 over Labour, benefiting in part from an increased turnout. Diana Neave was also very active, speaking for her husband ‘on a large number of occasions’, the local newspaper noted. Neave returned to a slightly enlarged House of Commons firmly under Conservative control. Eden had a majority of sixty over all other parties. His first move was to impose a State of Emergency on 31 May to counteract a national strike by railwaymen.
Neave had been a PPS for little more than a year and could not expect rapid preferment in Eden’s new government. Nor did he get it. Instead, he soldiered on as a back-bencher, steadily building a reputation in the fields of defence and atomic energy. Just before Christmas 1955, he championed the salary claims of scientists and engineers working for the Atomic Energy Authority. The Minister of Works, his friend and fellow former MI6 officer Nigel Birch, who was on the point of moving on to the Air Ministry, was non-committal.
The Commons considered defence spending in the spring of 1956, almost a year after the Soviet bloc had solidified its military effort into the Warsaw Pact. Public opinion was shifting towards Neave’s view of a strong NATO. Even the Labour Party had been converted to German rearmament. Across Europe, vast concentrations of firepower confronted each other, while Britain still had to contend with insurrection in Cyprus, Kenya and Malaya. In the debate on 20 April, Neave called for a radical rethinking of the whole defence programme, urging the need for scientific development. Given his continuing connections with his old comrades in the security services, it must be assumed that he was better briefed than he let on. He did not dispute the government’s plan for smaller and better equipped forces, but he pointed to scientific advances in the Soviet Union and insisted that ‘technical expenditure and training will be of much greater importance’. Nonetheless, he was in favour of keeping unconventional weapons until new ones were ready. It was a broad-brush speech lasting fourteen minutes and was not particularly distinguished. Perhaps the timing – he was on his feet just after 1.00 p.m. – suggests that lunch was waiting.
Abolition of the death penalty was a very live issue in that parliamentary session. Sydney Silverman, the Labour MP for Nelson and Colne, had put forward a widely supported private member’s bill to end judici
al execution, the alternative being an automatic life sentence. Neave was much exercised. During the committee stage of the bill on 25 April, he argued for more judicial discretion in sentencing those involved in so-called ‘mercy killings’. But a month later, he demanded retention of the death penalty for murders carried out during the commission of rape, just as he had unsuccessfully proposed the noose for murder committed during burglary, housebreaking or any violent crime. A vigorous debate with the abolitionists ensued, which Neave and his cohorts lost.
In the big parliamentary debates later that year, on the Russian invasion of Hungary and the Suez débâcle, Neave was again silent. As a junior member of the government, his duty was to speak when instructed. He could not simply get up and intervene in debates. British troops began leaving the Suez Canal base in June 1956 and Egypt’s President Nasser promptly nationalised the canal. Anthony Eden characterised the move as a threat to the very life of Britain, which relied on the free passage of oil from the Gulf. National pride was also at stake. The canal had been ‘British’ since Disraeli had pleased Queen Victoria with the purchase of a majority shareholding in 1875. Popular opinion, stoked by tabloid vilification of Nasser as ‘another Hitler’, set the stage for a joint Anglo-French invasion of Egypt on 31 October. Operation Musketeer, as it was christened, was a disaster, inviting international opprobrium and allowing the Russians to put down a revolution in Hungary a few days later with exemplary ruthlessness. Throughout this tumult, which shook the country and the Tory Party, Neave kept his counsel, though his support for the government was unwavering. There was never any question of a high-profile resignation over the issue. Being a member of the government, however lowly, limited his opportunities to speak in the House, even on such an issue. Not until he returned to the back benches six years later did he offer that Eden’s action had averted a third world war.
The Suez crisis forced Eden to resign and brought the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, into Downing Street as his successor in January 1957. This was Neave’s opportunity. When the new government was constituted, he was appointed joint parliamentary secretary to Harold Watkinson, Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation. Loyalty and unostentatious good work had been rewarded. He was part of the new order. He may only have been one of four (including John Profumo, later Minister of War and the most high-profile victim of the Christine Keeler scandal) but he was firmly on the ministerial ladder. Satisfaction at his promotion may well have outweighed the sense of being at the centre of power. Neave’s first task as a minister was a mundane one: replying to a motion for the adjournment about faulty lifts at Hampstead Underground Station which had resulted in a fellow Tory MP and twenty other passengers being trapped for half an hour.
If this was Neave’s introduction to ministerial responsibility, there was to be more of the same, much of it just as uninspiring. Questions answered included those concerning newspaper deliveries to the Middle East and the problems of the Aberdeen Flying Club. In July, Neave, a serious cigarette smoker, also refused to ban smoking on British European Airways routes, despite medical evidence of a link between cigarettes and lung cancer. Throughout, his style was polite, firm and unflappable. Some might have found it a touch sardonic, though he showed little of the combativeness he was capable of displaying as a back-bencher.
Neave’s years of office continued in much the same vein. He was a loyal member of the government. While the government weathered a brief but fierce economic storm, he steered the Milford Haven Conservancy Bill through the Commons, a measure allowing large-scale petrochemical and shipping development in the biggest natural harbour in South Wales. He also had to deal with the occasional brush fire. On 7 November 1957, an MP complained in the Commons about noise created by a Soviet TU 104 jet airliner taking off from Heathrow at four o’clock in the morning. Neave sympathised with the complaint, but rejected, in the nicest and most long-winded manner, claims for damage to property. There would be no free lunches while he was in charge.
Politically, 1958 opened with a bang. On 7 January, Macmillan lost his entire team of Treasury ministers – Chancellor Peter Thorneycroft, Enoch Powell and Nigel Birch – all of whom resigned in protest at rises in public spending they considered imprudent. Macmillan, not yet the ‘Supermac’ of the cartoonists, was publicly unperturbed. He embarked on a six-week tour of the warmer Commonwealth countries, explaining: ‘I thought the best thing to do was settle up these little local difficulties, and then turn to the wider vision of the Commonwealth.’ Neave, however, while attracting attention as a safe pair of hands, did not profit from the ministerial reshuffle that followed.
He built on his reputation during the year, using a fat file of statistics and civil service arguments where he could, and polite rebuttal where he could not. February’s work included support for a Merchant Shipping Bill, promoted by two MPs from Northern Ireland, to extend the liability of shipowners, and a debate on the future of air transport development. In the latter, he promised ‘a fair crack of the whip’ for independent operators seeking to compete with the state airlines. However, these remained Britain’s flag carriers. There was no hint that one day they, too, might be in private hands. A political consensus, discredited by the term ‘Butskellism’, still operated between the main parties on the wisdom of retaining air traffic in state hands.
Throughout 1958, Neave continued to polish his reputation and his dry humour. In May, Dame Irene Ward, the formidable Tory MP for Tynemouth, taxed him on the issue of dry docks. ‘Dry docks are very important,’ he replied, ‘but they are not my responsibility.’ ‘A bad reply,’ shot back the old dragon. There were some compensations for office. In May he travelled on the inaugural flight of BEA’s new service to Warsaw, and used the trip to revisit the Gestapo headquarters where he had been interrogated after his unsuccessful escape from Stalag XXa in 1941. Otherwise, he performed competently, without showing genius or originality either in his departmental or parliamentary work, but in Andrew Roth’s (perhaps ambiguous) view he was ‘a decoration to any Conservative platform’. In June, he ruled out the installation of telephones on trains and aeroplanes, describing them as ‘gimmicks’. In July, he led a debate on the accounts of the British Transport Commission, as the state railway system was then known. He was evasive about the closure of unremunerative services. In November, he defended the government’s decision to close Croydon Airport, taken in 1953, and to expand Prestwick Airport in Scotland.
1959 was to prove a momentous year. On 16 January, Neave was promoted to Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry for Air. It was a useful move up the greasy pole but it still did not make for more exciting politics. His main role remained that of answering MPs’ questions from the front bench. On 5 March, he replied to a debate on the Air Estimates, thanking MPs who congratulated him on his new post. There was, he said ‘general goodwill’ towards the RAF, before running into an argument about the value of the British atomic bomb. He pushed the government line that ‘the possession by this country of an element of nuclear power might, in certain circumstances, be a decisive factor in preventing war by miscalculation’, fending off an intervention about the circumstances in which Britain might use the deterrent independently of the USA. The whole issue of Britain and The Bomb had assumed a much higher profile since the USAF had stationed nuclear weapons on British soil the previous year, prompting the establishment of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the first Easter march on the government’s Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, in Berkshire. With his heavy constituency involvement in atomic science, and his keen interest in defence policy, Neave was utterly hostile to CND. He talked instead about the need for more pilot recruits, more women and more dentists, but he did confirm that the government was going ahead with Blue Streak, a liquid-fuel, land-based rocket capable of escaping the earth’s gravitational pull. This was designed to become Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. There were tetchy exchanges with Geoffrey de Freitas, Labour MP for Lincoln, in
which Neave was forced to apologise. Neave also went on to laud the merits of the proposed TSR2, a tactical strike and reconnaissance aircraft, capable of supersonic speeds. (The TSR2 would be aborted, in 1965, by a Labour government.)
The new minister commented briefly on press reports about missile warning stations and anti-missile developments generally. He had nothing to add to what other ministers had told MPs, ‘namely that we are collaborating closely with the Americans on this difficult problem’. It was not a very satisfactory response to an issue of public and media concern, nor was it a particularly satisfactory speech, for all its length and broad range. On 10 March, he was once more on the defensive about the RAF’s budget, but the various appropriations went through without a vote, as they customarily do. It was not exactly a baptism of fire, but the parliamentary process tested Neave’s ministerial skills as they had not been at Transport. He managed oral answers a week later with confidence, though skirting a series of awkward questions about the ill-fated Thor missile bought from America. Roy Mason, Labour MP for Barnsley and a future Defence Secretary, asked if the nuclear warhead would be a permanent feature of the missile, now in operation only for training purposes. Neave was compelled to admit that he could not give an answer; he was to be quizzed again in the subsequent months but could be no more enlightening.
Neave’s last recorded contribution as a minister came on 8 July 1959, when he answered a written question on conditions at RAF station El Adem. He admitted that this was ‘not a comfortable place to serve’ but promised a new airmen’s club and the extension of messes. As the long summer recess beckoned, the future looked mildly promising. He had not committed any major gaffes. At the age of forty-three, he was a middle-ranking minister with prospects: the kind of traditional Tory politician who might just make Cabinet rank. His home life was also secure. The family was living in the Old Vicarage in Ashbury, below the Marlborough Downs on the western edges of his constituency. Neave’s daughter Marigold remembers the period as probably their most settled: ‘It was home for us all to go to, a very nice five-bedroom Georgian house next door to the church.’ Neave often read the texts there during Sunday service. The village was close to the site of the battle of Ethendune, and a ring of sarsen stones in the old rectory garden rekindled a sense of England’s prehistoric past. Neave ‘liked the place very much’. It was his kind of Betjemanesque Britain.
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