The year 1968 found Neave on familiar ground, arguing the case for pensions for the very elderly, reform of Parliament, enquiries into railway accidents, town planning (the great Abingdon gasholder dispute, which he won), the Abingdon bypass and the future of cutbacks in nuclear power research at Culham Laboratory. On the latter, he initiated a debate at six o’clock in the morning that went on for three quarters of an hour. His constituents could not say he was short-changing them. In May of that year, he was back on his feet challenging the Technology Minister, Tony Benn, arguing the case for nuclear energy (and declaring his own personal interest in the industry). Whatever he thought about Benn’s undoubted enthusiasm for science and technology, Neave was forming a deeply suspicious opinion about the nature of his politics, and indeed those of the Labour government as a whole, wrongly believing that they formed a threat to democracy.
Maurice Macmillan, the Tory MP and son of the former Prime Minister, picked up the gauntlet on pensions for the very old in 1969, introducing Neave’s original private member’s bill for the fifth time. It had, said Neave, become an ‘embarrassing and painful episode’ to come to the House year after year only for the government to vote down pensions for people whose average age was now eighty-five, despite countrywide backing for the measure. Their numbers were now down to 125,000 he told MPs. Four died every week, yet they did not have the benefit of the death grant. Speaking with feeling, he added: ‘They are too old for pensions. They are too old to die, in the eyes of the state.’ Neave reminded MPs that after the filibuster in 1965, Labour had promised a minimum income guarantee instead of pensions. ‘I had a very sharp and acrimonious correspondence with the Prime Minister on the subject, and reproached him very strongly about it,’ he went on. But nothing materialised. The debate on 7 February was equally acrimonious, with Neave interjecting ‘Rubbish’ at times. His passion was to no avail. The Bill was denied a second reading.
After his success with Sachsenhausen, Neave took up the case of Rudolf Hess, the last of the leading Nazi war criminals still in gaol, and a man who had so fascinated him during the Nuremberg trials. Hess was normally incarcerated in Spandau prison, guarded by twenty-five men and one officer, at the intransigent insistence of the Russians. Britain, together with France and the USA, would have allowed his release. In February 1970, Hitler’s former deputy was ill, lying in the British Military Hospital, Berlin, with an ulcer. Neave asked if Professor Rudolf Zenker of Zurich could examine Hess, but the Foreign Office minister George Thomson said Hess was responding to treatment and independent medical examination was unnecessary. Neave insisted that this was ‘a question entirely of humanity’ and asked if the Prime Minister could take up the matter on his next visit to the Soviet Union. Thomson agreed to consider that point, continuing: ‘I think the time has come for humanitarian considerations to prevail.’9 They did not.
Some Labour MPs contrasted unfavourably Neave’s concern for Hess with the plight of other ‘political’ prisoners around the world, not least the African nationalist leaders rotting in Rhodesian detention camps. But Neave would not be the first politician to be selective in his sympathy and it would be pointless to argue that he should have behaved like his critics. They had an entirely different, indeed opposite, agenda. Neave was a Conservative of the old school, with a caring streak that made him unusual for the Tory Party, but in most aspects he was a classic product of his time and background. The shifts and changes in British society of the decade largely passed him by. He did not see the ‘swinging sixties’ as a welcome debunking of authority and a release of people power. He was at home with the Conservative condemnation of strikes, particularly the miners’ strike of surface workers in late 1969, which presaged the convulsions that were to come.
Superficially, 1970 opened as a good year for Wilson’s second government. In January, the Chancellor Roy Jenkins reported to the Cabinet that economic growth would be up by half to 3 per cent, and the economy would have a healthy balance of payments amounting to £500 million. The Conservatives, under Ted Heath, saw their lead in the opinion polls begin to slip away. But pressure for relaxation of pay controls was building up, strikes became more common, and Jenkins’s cautious Budget of mid-April dismayed MPs looking for election bribes. However, a strong Labour recovery in the local elections in May, coupled with a poll showing the government ahead by seven points, convinced Wilson that a snap poll would give him a third term in office, albeit with a reduced majority. There was also a fond hope that England’s footballers would repeat the 1966 World Cup win in Mexico. Some of the winning sheen had rubbed off on Labour in the previous poll. On 18 May, Wilson took a gamble and called the General Election for 18 June.
Heath was caught on the hop and initially his nerve faltered. Labour exploited an improving economy to the hilt and forged ahead in the polls. Heath’s call to the nation to ‘wake up – or lose the future’ did not chime with that summer’s sense of confidence. In Abingdon, Neave faced not only his usual three-cornered fight but a much bigger electorate. His constituency now numbered almost 86,000 voters, a growth of 20,000 in only fifteen years. His rivals on this occasion were Norman Price, a thirty-four-year-old scientist standing for Labour, and for the Liberals, Caradoc Evans, who described himself modestly as a broadcaster, company director and teacher.
Labour’s composure was rudely shattered only three days before polling day when trade figures showed Britain sliding back into the red. Ministers tried to talk their way out of this bad news by claiming it was a one-off deficit caused by the state airline’s purchase of four jumbo jets, but the balance of payments figures, coupled with a demoralising defeat by Germany in the quarter-finals of the World Cup, changed the nation’s mood virtually overnight. The last opinion poll, on polling day, put the Conservatives one point ahead. When the votes were counted, it was clear that Heath had pulled off a sensational victory. Labour’s 100-seat majority had been overturned to a Conservative majority of thirty over all other parties. Heath’s biographer John Campbell rightly described the outcome as ‘the greatest upset in British politics since Attlee’s victory in 1945’.
In Abingdon, Neave romped home with a hugely increased majority of 13,073 over his Labour rival. His share of the poll also went back up to its high-watermark level of 54 per cent, and the swing towards the Conservatives in his constituency was – at 6.7 per cent – much higher than the national average of 4.8 per cent. It was a very satisfactory result and the Neave family celebrated. But the return of a Conservative government led by his old enemy was a mixed blessing: there would be no place in a Heath government for Airey Neave. At fifty-four, he was firmly on the political shelf, while his old sparring partner in the CCA, Margaret Thatcher, immediately entered the Cabinet as Education Secretary. Some saw Thatcher as ‘the token woman’, but Neave later insisted that prejudice against women in the House of Commons was a thing of the distant past. ‘This is not a place where women aren’t treated as colleagues. They are, and have been for many years since Lady Astor.’10
Neave used the debate on the Queen’s Speech to revive political interest in pensions for the very old. Death had brought down the number excluded from the state pension scheme to 110,000, so he welcomed the government’s decision, heralded in the Conservative manifesto, to do justice at last. A National Insurance Bill implementing the reform was brought to the Commons within three weeks, and its first clause gave pensions of £3 a week to single people and £4 17s to married couples left out of the 1948 pension scheme. It was not equivalent to the full state pension, but it was a victory of principle. Labour MPs accused the Tories of ‘lifting’ a proposal that they had made just before going to the polls, incensing Neave. But recognition came from an unexpected quarter – the Opposition benches – where Jack Ashley MP, the Labour campaigner for the disabled (who is himself deaf), paid tribute to Neave. ‘Irrespective of what one thinks of the arguments,’ Ashley told the Commons, ‘the hon. Member for Abingdon can take great satisfaction from the influence he has ha
d in pressing his government on an issue on which he feels so strongly.’
Later that year, Neave again took up the case of Rudolf Hess. In Foreign Office questions on 16 November, he asked for a statement, and the FCO minister Geoffrey Rippon disclosed that the British ambassador in Moscow had made an approach to the Soviet government on behalf of the Three Powers almost nine months previously, on 23 February. It was unsuccessful. Since then, however, the Russians had agreed to improvements in Hess’s conditions of imprisonment. The government would continue to watch for ‘an appropriate moment’ to raise the issue again. Neave was not satisfied. Would the Foreign Office initiate new, high-level talks with the French and American governments with a view to a fresh approach? Rippon was somewhat more forthcoming, but not much. He did, however, praise Neave’s assiduity. ‘There is certainly no man in the House or outside who has a better claim to press this matter,’ he oozed.11 Five months later, Neave raised the stakes, calling on the government to take unilateral action to free Hess from his ‘cruel and pointless detention’ as the sole prisoner in a 600-cell gaol. The Foreign Office fobbed him off on that occasion, and several more times during the parliament. Hess died alone, a broken man, in Spandau prison in 1987.
For the rest of that parliament, Neave stuck to his favourite topics: benefits for the very old, atomic energy, defence procurement and research, and science and technology. He became chairman of the All-Party Select Committee on Science and Technology, and as such a respected back-bencher. His committee produced four reports, which informed ministerial policy-making in this field. James Prior, Leader of the House, praised the ‘enormous importance for the well-being of our country’ of Neave’s work. One instance suffices. Neave showed himself remarkably progressive on the issue of birth control, arguing the case for a completely free family planning service on the NHS, including advice and the supply of contraceptives. He argued that social and environmental problems would multiply without a population control policy involving ‘all income and age groups’. His select committee urged this course of action, which was eventually implemented.
But the bees in his bonnet did not stop buzzing. He took up issues dear to his wife’s heart, such as the level of government relief for distressed Polish ex-servicemen and controversy over the murder of 4,000 Polish prisoners of war in the Katyn Forest in the closing months of the war. The Russians insisted that this outrage was the work of the Germans. Neave was convinced it was the work of Stalin, and he asked the FCO to place the issue on the agenda of the United Nations. He was rebuffed with a polite ‘No’.
On the really big issue of the day – Europe – Neave found himself at one with his Prime Minister. He supported British entry to the European Economic Community, as it then was. On 21 October 1971, the Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home moved a Commons motion approving in principle the government’s decision to join the EEC. Two hours into the debate, Neave rose to support the motion. ‘I wish the whole venture well, but I do not think that it will succeed unless there is successful exploitation of British scientific and technological effort in conjunction with the Common Market,’ he contended. In retrospect, this argument had an inadequate feel to it, compared with the great economic and political opportunities the British people were being asked to embrace. But Neave was on his hobby horse and there was no stopping him. After declaring his interest in the nuclear power industry, he waxed lyrical: ‘Science is, and was long before the Common Market was dreamed of, essentially international.’ Within the new psychological structure of the EEC, scientists could work for the common good and compete with the superpowers. He then got down to business, urging collaboration with France and Germany on the building of nuclear reactors. He envisaged that by 1985 most new electrical capacity would be nuclear, due to rising oil prices, and the industry would be dominated by perhaps two or three large European companies. He urged the government to give more attention to this development. A week later, he was among 356 MPs (a fifth of them Labour rebels) who supported entry into the EEC, in the teeth of opinion polls showing evidence that the British people opposed the move.
Apart from this momentous vote, events outside parliament dominated the news. After the dock strike came a nine-week stoppage by postal workers, which crippled communications by land. That was followed by a one-day walkout by 1.5 million workers to protest against Heath’s ill-fated Industrial Relations Bill, which sought to put the trade unions in a legal straitjacket. The legislation, based on a blueprint prepared by the Inns of Court Conservative Association to which Neave belonged, set up an Industrial Court with authority to order ‘cooling off’ periods before a dispute could begin. It also had powers to fine unions and imprison recalcitrant strikers who defied the court. More strikes followed, in the state-owned steel industry, on the railways and in the civil service, culminating in the threat of an official one-day General Strike called by the TUC when five London dockers were gaoled for contempt of an Industrial Court. Neave shared the anxiety of many Conservatives that a breakdown of civil society could be imminent. In less than four years of office, Heath was compelled to declare a State of Emergency a record five times. Unrest culminated in the first national miners’ strike since 1926, which began in January 1972 and lasted for seven weeks. The dispute, and secondary picketing of power stations, brought electricity blackouts and serious disruption to industry. Moreover, the police admitted that they could not cope with the impact of mass picketing. At the notorious ‘battle at Saltley Gates’ in Birmingham on 10 February 1972, police chiefs closed down a vital coke depot rather than risk a riot on the streets. Heath was forced to cave in, appointing a Commission of Enquiry under Judge Lord Wilberforce to award inflation-busting rises exceeding 20 per cent to the men. They only accepted after hours of face-to-face talks in Downing Street with the Prime Minister, at which miners’ leaders drank most of his whisky. Weeks later, the same treatment was given to workers in the power supply industry who went on a crippling go-slow.
Yet Neave showed a public imperturbability at the rising tension in the coal industry. When the OPEC countries quadrupled the price of oil, and the miners announced a nationwide overtime ban, he was busy arguing the case for nuclear energy without reference to the impending crisis. In a Commons debate on the economy and the energy situation on 18 December 1973, he spoke five times, urging (after yet again declaring his business interest) the merits of ordering British-built reactors. He never mentioned the looming pit strike, even though Heath had just declared a three-day week for industry starting on 1 January 1974 to conserve dwindling coal stocks. On 7 February, the day the Prime Minister called a General Election to ask the voters ‘who rules – the government or the miners?’, Neave was busy leading a Commons debate on the pay of civil service scientists. These ‘creative and brilliant people’ were ‘having a very bad time’, he told the House. He had very strong views about the miners and their insurrectionary campaign, but he did not give them public expression. Privately, he shared the views of some former army officers and ex-members of the security services that the state was losing control of events.
Polling day was set for 28 February. The bookmakers made Heath an odds-on favourite to win. The opinion polls gave the Conservatives a lead varying from two to five points. But beneath the surface, voter confidence in Heath’s premiership was ebbing away. It was not possible to hold the election to the simple constitutional challenge of ‘who rules?’. The miners, secure behind an 81 per cent secret ballot for strike action, cannily played down their industrial action. Picketing was strictly limited and there was no repetition of the battle at Saltley Gates. Labour successfully broadened the campaign to encompass the Heath government’s economic record, which was weak. Growth was stagnant, and double-digit inflation made nonsense of the Tories’ claims for price stability. Heath’s statutory pay policy was unpopular, and his Industrial Relations Act was so discredited that even the director-general of the CBI, Sir Campbell Adamson, suggested it be repealed and replaced with legislation
more acceptable to trade unionists. Despite the peril into which the nation was plunged, the Act was not used against the National Union of Mineworkers.
In Abingdon, Neave’s high-profile championship of the 1,300 civil service scientists in his constituency plainly did him no harm. Despite a one-half per cent swing against the Conservatives, his majority went up by 670 votes to 13,743, largely as a result of an increased turnout and a collapse in the Liberal vote. The Liberal candidate, Michael Fogarty, Professor of Industrial Relations at Henley Staff College, saw his vote tumble by more than half to little over 10 per cent of the total, while Labour’s man, television director Denis Moriarty, increased his party’s share. Way out in front, however, was Neave, with a comfortable 54 per cent.
Nationally, however, the picture was very different. Heath’s biographer described the result as ‘the strangest of modern times’. The Tories’ comfortable majority disappeared. The verdict of the voters was that, whoever ran the country, it certainly was not the Prime Minister. They gave Labour 301 seats, and the Tories 297. The Liberals won fourteen seats, nine Nationalists were returned in Scotland and Wales. With the twelve MPs from Northern Ireland and two others, no party could command a majority in the Commons. Heath tried desperately to cling on to power, offering a pact on electoral reform to Jeremy Thorpe if the Liberals would support a Tory – Liberal coalition. His advances were spurned and on 6 March Harold Wilson returned to Downing Street at the head of a minority Labour administration.
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