Then, in the late summer of 1959, he had a heart attack: not massive, but sufficient for his doctors to order him to rest. ‘He wasn’t able to work,’ recollects Marigold. The family speculated that it might have been brought on by his wartime experiences, but it was more likely that quite heavy smoking and his fondness for drink, exacerbated by the stress of ministerial office and a largely sedentary lifestyle, caused his cardiac event. He had been absent from parliamentary business in January 1959, pleading ‘indisposition’, and in the same month he admitted to a ‘slight leg injury’ that had prevented him from carrying out his duties. In April, he was again absent, on this occasion laid low with flu. Whatever the cause of his heart attack, it changed his life, and, arguably, the politics of the late twentieth century. For the children it was a difficult time. ‘It was spoken of in hushed tones,’ remembered Patrick. ‘We were packed off to stay with our grandparents, and mother got in a nurse. None of his condition was discussed with us, and I never asked.’ Neave was ordered to give up smoking and alcohol, and take more exercise. For this purpose, he incongruously kept a rowing machine under the bed in the ‘dressing room’ of the Crescent Mansions flat in Fulham that was now their London home.
By far the greater impact was political. While still convalescing, Neave was compelled to go out and fight for his constituency for the third time in only six years. Nationally, the Conservatives were in a good position. On the international front, Macmillan’s visit to the USSR had raised his profile as a statesman. Cyprus had been granted her independence, with the UK maintaining sovereignty over two military base areas. At home, economic recovery proceeded apace. Income tax was down, as were beer prices. Macmillan judged it profitable to announce the dissolution of parliament on 9 September, with polling day set for 8 October. In Abingdon, Neave faced the familiar hazard of a three-cornered contest, with two new opponents. Labour fielded Philip Picard, a barrister, like Neave, and the Liberals chose Mrs Verdun Perl.
The Conservatives romped home with an overall majority of 100 seats – a remarkable achievement by ‘Supermac’ who had taken over the leadership of his party in 1957 when its fortunes were at their lowest after the Suez débâcle. Neave increased his majority substantially, to 10,972.
On his return to Westminster in late October 1959, Neave did not pick up the reins of ministerial responsibility, returning instead to the back benches. His explanation to the voters of Abingdon concealed more than it revealed. ‘I have resigned from the government and returned to industry,’ he wrote in the weekly column he contributed to the Abingdon Herald. Newspapers were a great deal more reticent about revealing the private lives of public figures in those days and readers had never been told that he had suffered a heart attack.
Most subsequent accounts argue that Neave quit office because Edward Heath, the Chief Whip, told him his political career was over. There was not much love lost between the two men. Heath was an occasional visitor to Neave’s constituency. Marigold remembers with some asperity being told that her parents could not come to her school sports day in Wantage because the Chief Whip was speaking locally. ‘My father and Heath didn’t like each other. Heath was not an easy character.’ The received version of what happened next is put simply by Heath’s biographer, John Campbell, who argues: ‘He made a lifelong enemy of Airey Neave … who returned to Westminster after suffering a coronary, expecting to be welcomed back with congratulations on his recovery, only to be told bluntly by Heath that he was “finished”.’2 Another biographer, this time of Sir Keith Joseph, related a similar story. Neave had to resign because of a minor heart problem, wrote Morrison Halcrow. When he reported his medical problem to Heath, ‘the Chief Whip had tersely commented, in effect, “That’s the end of your political career, then”, and Heath had acquired yet another enemy.’3
In his autobiography, Heath went out of his way to demolish the ‘myth’ of Neave’s desire for revenge for the alleged spiteful comment about his health. ‘There are absolutely no grounds for claiming that I was unsympathetic towards him,’ insists the former Prime Minister. As a junior minister, Neave had informed Heath ‘that his health had broken down and that his doctor had told him he should resign’. Heath further asserts that he expressed his sympathy, told him he must recover his health and urged him to come back as soon as his doctor confirmed that he could accept another appointment. As his health improved, Heath adds, Neave took up various business interests, but never indicated that he wanted to come back into government. ‘There is absolutely no justification for these false stories about my telling Neave that he was “finished”. I would never behave in that way towards a colleague.’4
In an interview with the author, Heath elaborated: ‘He had this illness, and he told me he couldn’t carry on. So I told him this was very sad, but I quite understood and if he regained his health then we could give him another job – not necessarily the same one, but a similar one, and he could go on climbing the ladder.’ The story of their fall-out in 1959, Heath believes, was ‘an invention after the Thatcher [leadership] election to justify what he had done. He never came and said he was fit enough for office again, or he could have had a job.’ Heath’s opinion of Neave as a minister and a parliamentary performer was not high. ‘He did the job perfectly well. He was competent. He didn’t blunder.’5 In private, to friends, he was more forthcoming, telling Michael Jones, assistant editor (politics) of the Sunday Times, that Neave was ‘a shitbag’.
A third explanation was offered by Andrew Roth, in his reference book Parliamentary Profiles. ‘Some of his colleagues thought his request was coupled with an incident in which he was arrested as intoxicated in charge of a vehicle. This incident received virtually no publicity.’ Even in those more censorious times, it is unlikely that a minister would be compelled to surrender ministerial office for such an offence. It would have added to the sum of his tribulations but could scarcely have been decisive. For whatever motive, Neave left no explanation, other than his curt announcement of resignation in the Abingdon Herald. In the absence of his own clarification, the evidence of the other players in the drama has to be preferred. Neave drank and smoked too much, took little exercise and was a classic candidate for cardiac failure. His later attempts to justify deep personal and political hostility to Heath on the grounds of the Chief Whip’s alleged brutal ending of his career sound like exculpatory reasoning long after the event. Airey Neave was more likely the architect of his own ministerial downfall and could not bring himself to terms with that fact. That his long-nursed resentment would have such a tumultuous outcome does not begin to justify it but does explain it.
13
Locust Years
The 1960s were for many people a decade of wider freedom and boundless expectations. National Service was abolished and higher education became more widely available to a new generation. Unemployment began to feel like a scourge of the past and trade unions were more ‘bolshie’ in their wage demands. Harold Macmillan proclaimed ‘a wind of change’ blowing through the British Empire, which would sweep away the nation’s colonial heritage. Yet Airey Neave, the product of an earlier and largely hostile generation, was on the margins of this revolution. Still a relatively young man in his early forties, he was languishing on the back benches at Westminster, the victim, as he saw it, of unfeeling treatment at the hands of his own party.
Accordingly, like many a Conservative MP before and after, he turned to business. Soon after giving up ministerial office in 1959, he joined the West Midlands manufacturing firm of John Thompson. The company was based in Wolverhampton not far from the stately home of Chillington Hall owned by Diana’s father. Some colleagues at Westminster alleged that his wife’s family got him the post in this key company, though his keen public interest in science had been evident for years. He also became a governor of the Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. The John Thompson Group manufactured power station boilers and pressure vessels, chiefly for the state-owned Central Electricity Generating Board.
Neave went to Thompson as legal and parliamentary adviser, with a seat on the main board. It was common practice of the day for MPs to have such outside interests, and there was no compulsion to log these lucrative ‘extras’ in the Commons Register of Interests as exists today. His knowledge of the nuclear power industry, derived from contacts in the atomic science industry, would also have been very useful, as indeed would his security service background. The nuclear industry was regarded as a prime target for espionage and subversion, and with his background Neave needed no vetting. John Thompson was one of the two top firms in Britain specialising in this field (the other being Babcock & Wilcox), and it had offices in Tavistock House, in the Bloomsbury area of London, where Neave ensconced himself in some comfort with two secretaries, Joy Robilliard and Hannah Hulme. The company built Berkeley nuclear power station in the Severn Valley. Brian Mares, the firm’s office manager at the time, remembered him well: ‘He took a great interest in that [the nuclear side] because a lot of the know-how came from Harwell, which was in his constituency.’1 Mares also recollected that Neave did a great deal of his constituency work in his company office, ‘because he didn’t have an office in the Commons’. At that time, it was quite common for back-bench MPs not to have a room at Westminster.
Neave did not speak in the Commons again until 3 March 1960 and when he did there was a note of nostalgia not unmixed with envy in his voice. He did not intervene again until late April, in a debate on the increasingly ill-fated Blue Streak missile. On this occasion, he was obliged by parliamentary protocol to declare a personal interest. As a director of Thompson, Neave had inside knowledge about Blue Streak. There was ‘nothing wrong’ with the project, he stated. Blue Streak was well made, had good range and considerable accuracy. He argued that the rocket could still be used for space exploration as part of a wider European programme. Neave was also keen to stress that an abandonment of Blue Streak (as was threatened) did not end British involvement in the nuclear deterrent against the Soviet bloc. He read the House a long, strongly worded lecture on ballistic missiles, interrupted from time to time by two of Labour’s most inveterate peacemongers, Sydney Silverman and Emmanuel Shinwell. He concluded that ‘a large number of V-bombers fitted with Skybolt [an American air-delivered missile] would present an effective deterrent’.
Loss of office had clearly diminished Neave’s enthusiasm for Westminster. It was almost seven months before he made a further contribution of substance in the Commons, this time in the debate on the Queen’s Speech in November 1960, when he made a passionate appeal for better scientific education. The nation’s future was bound up with the rate at which it could produce trained technologists, he insisted, also finding Cold War reasons to back up his assertion. Nikita Krushchev had recently told the United States ‘we graduate three times as many engineers as you, and whoever has the knowledge has the future at his feet’. In pure science, Neave claimed, the West was ahead of the USSR, lagging only in technology and applied science. He put his new-found interest in science to good advantage, becoming vice chairman of the Conservative Backbenchers’ Science and Technology Committee.
Some of Neave’s political ardour returned just before the winter recess, when he led a debate on the British communications satellite programme, or, more precisely, the lack of one. He criticised the Post Office (then in charge of all telecommunications) for dragging its feet on the commercial use of satellite communications. Speaking from his lofty position as chairman of the All-Party Committee on Space Research, he called for a Cabinet-level body to push through an ‘historic decision’ on the issue. His committee had held talks with the leading aviation and electronics firms, and the British Interplanetary Society, and Neave now called for a British initiative to forestall US domination of the world telephone market. He was years ahead of his time anticipating that satellites would come to dominate international communication, but his policy was becoming familiar to MPs. It rested on reactivation of the Blue Streak missile, taking a payload of 300 lb. or more into orbit 5,000 miles from earth. Once again, he declared ‘I am a director of a firm which has a financial interest in Blue Streak’, but enthused over a £243 million programme spread over twenty years, which he described as ‘an economic proposition’ offering cheaper international telephone calls. Although he inspired Woodrow Wyatt, the maverick Labour MP and socialite, who found it a ‘most excellent and comprehensive speech’, British involvement in space communication had to wait many years.
The pace of change quickened in 1961. Abroad, John F. Kennedy was ushering in a new era in the USA. At home, Macmillan brought together unions, employers and government ministers into a National Economic Development Council (‘Neddy’) in a bid to roll back wage inflation. Neave pursued his customary concerns of science and industry, a happy marriage of constituency, personal and business interests. In February that year, he advocated an accelerated nuclear power station building programme, even though nuclear power stations cost three times as much as conventional coal-fired stations. In a Commons debate, he was once more obliged to declare an interest, of being ‘directly connected with this industry’.
In March 1962, he also introduced a private member’s measure, the Carriage By Air (Supplementary Provisions) Bill, extending rights and protections of air passengers. In the debate, he told MPs: ‘I am not an international lawyer. Indeed I have ceased to practise law …’2 This was the first public indication that he had turned his back on his chosen profession, though it was true he had not practised since entering Parliament nine years previously. The government supported Neave’s Bill, and it passed into law that summer. He had a talkative summer, debating science and industry and proposals for Britain to join the Euratom project. At least he had a better summer than many Cabinet ministers: seven were sacked by a physically ailing Macmillan in the July ‘Night of the Long Knives’.
As the year drew to a close Neave welcomed Dr Beeching’s ‘new and constructive’ plans to rationalise the state railways, despite the pending closure of the only rail link to Abingdon in the heart of his constituency. In January 1963, shortly after the death of Hugh Gaitskell, leader of the Labour Party, Neave was compelled to lead a late-night adjournment debate on the rail closure, describing it as ‘a clear injustice’. The two events were unconnected but had a common background. The years of ‘Supermac’ were drawing to a close, along with his efforts to draw both sides of industry together into a common cause against inflation, especially on pay. A General Election was not much more than a year away. The Tories were losing by-elections all round the country, including in Orpington, Kent, where the Liberals had overturned a massive Conservative majority in their suburban heartlands. Neave had lost one of his constituency’s largest employers with the shutdown of the Didcot Ordnance Centre. Now the railway was going and the political future was uncertain. Gaitskell was replaced by the sharp-witted Yorkshireman Harold Wilson, whose slogan ‘Thirteen Wasted Tory Years’ was beginning to resonate with voters. Neave did not like what he saw of Wilson. The new leader originated in the Bevanite left of the Labour Party, and conspiratorial elements in the security services considered him a crypto-Communist. Moreover, George Brown, the right-wing contender for the leadership who now became deputy leader to Wilson, had been in contact with the security services during party infighting over nuclear disarmament in the early 1960s. In the view of Stephen Dorril, ‘He [Wilson] also knew that as late as July 1963 his deputy, George Brown, was still in contact with MI6 and its head “C”.’3 So was Airey Neave. He had never severed his connections with the intelligence community, and his later link up with the shadowy campaign to destabilise the Wilson government had its seeds in this change of leadership.
For the moment, however, he publicly sustained the image of a hard-working back-bencher, speaking quite regularly in debates about parliamentary reform, space satellites, the railways, science and education. On one issue he was seriously preoccupied: prisoners of war and compensation for those who had suffered. At 4.22 a.m. on 15
July 1963, he raised the case of Miss G.M. Lindell (the Comtesse de Milleville), a lady of British birth domiciled in France who had endured the horrors of Ravensbrück. She was one of Neave’s 1S9 agents, but she had missed out on the compensation paid to victims of Nazi persecution by the German Federal government in 1953. Neave had first raised her case in 1954 but nothing had been done to help her. Peter Smithers, Foreign Office Under-Secretary, promised him the Lindell case would be pursued with ‘vigour and expedition’.
In the autumn of 1963, it became clear that Macmillan could not go on. From his hospital bed on 10 October, after an operation for prostate cancer, he sent a message to the Conservative Party faithful gathered in Blackpool for their annual conference. He was stepping down, and, in the manner of the Tories in those days, ‘soundings’ were taken. The Foreign Secretary R.A. Butler was the Cabinet’s choice, while the constituency parties wanted Lord Hailsham. MPs favoured the much younger Reginald Maudling. None of them came near; instead, Lord Home emerged as Macmillan’s successor. Labour leaders could scarcely believe their luck. The government had been on the rack for months over various spy scandals: the Profumo affair, involving Neave’s former ministerial colleague at the Air Ministry; the defection of Kim Philby to Moscow to join Burgess and Maclean; the unmasking of John Vassall, a homosexual spy in the Admiralty; and the gaoling in Russia of the businessman-spy Greville Wynne. An enquiry into the Profumo affair by Lord Denning sharply criticised the government, which was now to be led by a Scottish earl who looked like a throwback to the Victorian era. Lord Home had to renounce his peerage and fight a by-election as a commoner. Only then could he begin to mobilise a badly shaken Conservative Party for a General Election. He was duly returned for Kinross and West Perthshire and the countdown began.
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