In a fit of socialist emulation, Neave’s scientists caught the mood of militancy, staging half-day strikes and demonstrations over their pay claim. At Westminster, Neave supported their campaign for ‘catch-up’ pay rises of up to 25 per cent, while subtly sustaining his demand for the state-run Central Electricity Generating Board to order English nuclear reactors not American ‘light water’ reactors. His intervention in a debate on 13 March earned the approval of John Stonehouse MP, who declared his speech ‘attractive’. (Months later, however, Stonehouse faked his own death on a Florida beach, and after being extradited from Australia was sentenced to seven years for fraud, theft, forgery and conspiracy.)
The new Labour government duly abolished the Industrial Relations Act, and big pay rises were granted to public servants, particularly nurses and teachers. However, Wilson could not continue governing for long without a clear majority. Heath was in the political doldrums, unlike his much-loved racing yacht Morning Cloud which actually sank in a storm off Shoreham, a portent for the poll that was confidently predicted for the autumn. Two weeks after this personal disaster for Heath, Wilson called a General Election on 10 October.
In Abingdon, Neave faced the same two rivals over whom he had triumphed a little over six months earlier. Voters never like being called out to elections held so soon after they have given their verdict, and this was no exception. The turnout in Neave’s constituency fell from 83 per cent in the February poll to 75 per cent. His own vote fell by more than 4,000 to 31, 956, but he increased his share of the vote. He returned to Westminster with a comfortable majority of 10,637. Again, nationally the picture was calamitous. Heath had performed well on the Tory manifesto, Putting Britain First, but his party lagged in the opinion polls throughout the short campaign and at best he limited the damage done to the Conservatives. Harold Wilson returned with an overall Commons majority of only three. He would be highly vulnerable to a reorganised and revitalised Opposition, but of the two party leaders Heath was the more immediately threatened. He had now fought four general elections and lost three of them. ‘With the best will in the world it was hard to see how the party could contemplate a fifth under his leadership,’ wrote his biographer John Campbell.12 In Neave’s view, the time for contemplation had come and gone.
14
A Very Spooky Coup
Heath’s double defeat within seven months was Neave’s opportunity to begin the process of change at the top. He had already begun to lay the ground for a coup against his old adversary after the débâcle of the ‘who rules?’ election. In March 1974, as Tory MPs returned to Westminster, this time in Opposition, Neave was elected to the powerful executive of the Conservative 1922 Committee, composed of all Tory backbenchers. When not in government the ’22 excludes only the leader and the Chief Whip. This was the body – ‘the men in suits’ – that could make or break a Tory Party leader. It was an unforgiving instrument of power, interested only in success. From 1972, its chairman was Edward du Cann, Neave’s old comrade from the campaigning days of the 1950s. As far as these hard men were concerned, Heath was on trial for his political life. If he won the election, his tenure of office was secure. If not, his ousting was simply a matter of time and procedure.
Du Cann set the note for the 1922’s approach with a deliberately ambivalent speech to Tory candidates in the opening stage of the second election campaign. He was complimentary about his leader – ‘you not only lead but command our party’ – and thanked him for a cogent explanation of the theme ‘on which you will fight the election’. John Campbell detected a subtly backhanded ambiguity to the address. It loaded the entire responsibility for success or failure on to the leader, thereby preparing the way for a swift defenestration. Du Cann was not a Heath fan. He had resigned amid acrimony from the chairmanship of the Tory Party, to which he had been appointed by Sir Alec Douglas-Home, shortly after Heath became leader. His task as chairman of the 1922 was not made easier by the Prime Minister’s refusal to make any concessions to political fellowship. ‘Ted was very unpopular with the rank and file in the House,’ he recollected. ‘And we had a very difficult time with him.’1 Du Cann’s attempts to forge closer links between the 1922 Committee and the Prime Minister proved fruitless. At a dinner in Downing Street, Heath was in a grumpy mood with his MPs. He wasted this opportunity to spread goodwill through the parliamentary party, an omen of his downfall. ‘He couldn’t even be bloody polite to us,’ remembered du Cann. ‘We did our best to keep the party behind him, but after the second election it was absolutely hopeless. We all knew he had to go. The only question was when.’2
Four days after polling day in the October election, before the new Parliament had even convened, the 1922 executive met in du Cann’s house in Lord North Street, ostensibly to discuss the routine business of election of officers. As the chairman expected, MPs were not interested in such mundane stuff. They wanted an inquest into the election disaster, and they were ‘clear and unanimous’ about one demand: Heath should stand down as leader as soon as possible. The executive instructed du Cann to convey this message in person to Heath immediately. Heath was aware of the clear and present danger. The press was full of speculation. His candid friend James Prior warned him his only chance of carrying on as leader lay in submitting himself to an early election through the 1922. Heath snubbed Prior’s advice, insisting that he would not submit himself to a leadership election ‘because he was determined to fight the right wing’. This was scarcely a time for ideological warfare, but his reaction showed just how out of touch Heath was with the gathering pace of events. Du Cann found him similarly unbending. Prior was with Heath in the leader’s room when the chairman of the 1922 reported the mood of senior back-benchers. ‘Don’t they realise what they are doing to our party?’ rasped Heath peevishly.
Du Cann, not an artless man, had an idea up his sleeve. As presently constituted, the party rules did not admit of a challenge to an existing leader. Heath could not be forced to stand down and resubmit himself for election. The notion of an insensitive leader refusing to quit had never occurred to the party hierarchy when the rules were changed in Alec Douglas-Home’s time. Du Cann accordingly suggested that Heath should reconstitute the rules committee, and introduce a new provision for a leadership election to be held ‘if required as a matter of routine’ at the beginning of each new Parliament. This move would at least buy Heath some time to regroup his forces. Du Cann was too disingenuous by half. He knew that such a reform would be the end of the Heath era, and Heath realised as much. The proposal came from an enemy, but he promised to think it over.
Events accelerated his deliberations. On the morning of the next day, 15 October, the 1922 executive met again, this time at du Cann’s City office, the headquarters of Keyser Ullman in Milk Street. They entered singly and unnoticed for secret talks around the boardroom table and endorsed du Cann’s crafty initiative, adding the rider in a letter to Heath that he should step down. As a member of the executive, Neave was privy to all these machinations. He had, as yet, no settled view as to who should succeed Heath, only a fixed determination that he should go. There was no obvious heir apparent and the list of possibles looked like the entry for the Grand National in an optimistic year. No-hopers like Christopher Soames rubbed flanks with favourites such as Willie Whitelaw and Keith Joseph. Margaret Thatcher was not highly fancied, indeed she had ruled herself out of the race the day after the election, telling the London Evening News, ‘You can cross my name off the list. I just don’t think I am right for it.’ The Economist noted drily that she was ‘a lady Joseph, but without the intellectual drive and with a more restricted suburban appeal’.
Neave’s political instincts were divided. He saw some merit in Edward du Cann, who had wide ministerial experience at the Treasury and the Board of Trade, leading the party, but he was also attracted to Keith Joseph, the Tories’ new-found ideological guru. In the view of Joseph’s biographer Morrison Halcrow, the two were ‘not really on the same wavelength. Joseph wa
s a man who was at home in an atmosphere of privacy, not secrecy.’3 Halcrow sourced the mystery and secrecy behind Neave’s ‘engaging’ personality to his wartime exploits, which called for ingenuity, boldness and circumspection, qualities of inestimable value in the coming campaign.
After the shambles of Heath’s first (and only) administration, Joseph, a cerebral Jewish millionaire Fellow of All Souls, Oxford, and a successful businessman in the family construction firm, Bovis, set out to take the Tories on a different path, towards the free market and monetarism. He had, by his own account, become ‘converted to Conservatism’ in April 1974. According to John Ranelagh, a member of the Conservative Research Department in the late 1970s, Neave was present at a post-mortem on the February election held in Heath’s rooms at the Commons during the summer of 1974.4 He shared Joseph’s views on the free market, and therefore went along with his condemnation of the Heathite philosophy of pragmatism and hostility to ‘right-wing’, anti-welfare, anti-union nostrums. Joseph went on to found the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think tank and the intellectual engine of what was to become known as Thatcherism. The CPS found no difficulty in attracting funds, some from the hard-liner James Goldsmith, the chairman of Cavenham Foods. Joseph was already testing the water for a bid to unseat Heath in the days before the election was called. In a speech in Preston on 5 September entitled ‘Inflation is caused by Governments’, he excoriated the post-war political consensus and argued the case for monetarism. It was a coded attack on Heath and all he stood for.
Neave’s initial choice as leader was Edward du Cann, an option that the chairman of the 1922 found both flattering and awkward. ‘I was extremely embarrassed to find my name being mentioned,’ he claimed later.5 Neave was part of a group under Nigel Fisher, the moderate Tory, four of whom signed a letter to du Cann urging him to stand. They maintained they could get a hundred signatures. Du Cann, whose City profile with Lonrho and Keyser Ullman was, to say the least, controversial, said: ‘It was obvious to me this was not a sensible thing to do in my personal circumstances. If I had stood against Ted Heath and beaten him easily, I would have been open to the charge that I had been fixing the rules to suit myself.’6
If not the king, then the kingmaker. As they left du Cann’s office, the 1922 executive plotting their party leader’s downfall ran a gauntlet of photographers and reporters. Someone in the Heath camp (believed to be Sarah Morrison, wife of Charles Morrison MP) had learned of the meeting, and talked about it. A Conservative Central Office press aide, identified by du Cann as Maurice Trowbridge, tipped off the press. The plot was now out in the open and the schemers were promptly dubbed the ‘Milk Street Mafia’. Heath’s contacts in the media rubbished the conspiracy, a move that proved counter-productive. When Parliament assembled later that month, feeling against Heath was running high in the parliamentary party. A crowded meeting of the 1922 Committee on 30 October gave vent to those passions, and increased the pressure on Heath to accept the du Cann plan for a fresh look at the leadership rules. Two weeks later, on 14 November, Heath gave way and announced the formation of a committee chaired by Sir Alec Douglas-Home to review the election procedure. He had been compelled to go ahead with the stratagem designed to bring him down.
Neave swiftly accepted the general, and du Cann’s own, view that the chairman of the 1922 was not an appropriate candidate. According to Ranelagh, ‘within days of the General Election’ Neave asked Joseph to stand against Heath, and Joseph considered doing so, writing to Ian Gow MP on 18 October that, ‘If Ted does decide to resign, I shall certainly allow my name to go forward.’ Unfortunately, Joseph felt that Shadow Cabinet loyalty required him to inform Heath of Neave’s approach. This move made Neave uneasy. ‘He said to his friends that when Heath learned of the extent of the operation to find a replacement leader, “He’ll kill us! He’ll kill us!” ’7 Nothing better illustrates Neave’s instinct for working in the shadows.
But the day after his letter, 19 October, Joseph committed a spectacular auto de fe on his political ambitions in a speech in Edgbaston, Birmingham. In it, he suggested that people in socioeconomic classes four and five should not have children, on the grounds that they were least fitted to bring children into the world, were of low intelligence and low educational attainment. ‘The balance of our population, our human stock, is threatened,’ he warned. ‘These mothers, under twenties in many cases, single parents from classes four and five, are now producing a third of all live births.’ His remedy was greater birth control. The speech brought predictable headlines of the ‘Sir Keith In “Stop Babies” Sensation’ variety, and cast him in the role of a heartless propounder of eugenics. It was, by his own admission, ‘jolly clumsy’ for a prospective leader of a great political party. The reception given to his speech reinforced Joseph’s natural self-doubts. On 21 November, he withdrew from the contest. Later, he admitted: ‘I was flattered by the idea and was willing to be swept along. But I was a joke, a useful joke.’
Deprived of their standard bearer before the flag could even be raised, Neave and his colleagues had to cast around for another candidate. It was only at this stage that the name of Margaret Thatcher began to emerge seriously. Joseph called on Thatcher in her office at Westminster on the day of his decision to quit the race. ‘Well, if you won’t stand, I will,’ she declared and immediately went to Heath’s office to tell him. Heath listened to her two-minute statement in his usual undiplomatic manner. He is said to have told her brusquely ‘You’ll lose’, and carried on with his paperwork. She may not have appeared a formidable rival. Her only experience of Cabinet office was in the Education Department, where she was principally remembered for abolishing free school milk: ‘Margaret Thatcher, Milk Snatcher!’ was the slogan of the left. In his Shadow Cabinet reshuffle the week before, Heath had appointed her deputy to Robert Carr, the Shadow Chancellor, giving her an opportunity to shine on the Treasury benches which she was to exploit to the full. But she had no organisation behind her in the parliamentary party, and she also faced the additional hurdle that no woman had ever scaled the topmost heights of the Conservative Party. That might work to her advantage, however. Du Cann recalled that she was ‘strikingly attractive, obviously intelligent, a goer’. He invited Thatcher and her husband Denis round to his house in Westminster. ‘They sat on a sofa together, rather like a butler and housekeeper seeking employment,’ he recollected, while concluding that she would be the best candidate.
Heath, however, was still regarded as the front-runner, both in the party and the media. A poll of constituency party chairmen found a majority in his favour, and another showed 54 per cent of Tory voters wanted him to stay. However, Heath’s backers had underestimated Airey Neave. With the benefit of hindsight, politicians and historians alike have identified his entry into the fray as the turning point in the fortunes of the Conservative Party. ‘Airey wanted to be rid of Heath,’ said Ian Gow, ‘and Airey would use whatever was the best weapon that he thought was available.’8 Gow, newly elected in 1974 as MP for Eastbourne, was later to become a close political ally of Neave.
Neave’s next step was to approach Thatcher and offer to be her campaign manager. It was an act of courage rather than calculation. The omens were not promising. Heath had enlisted John Peyton, the canny strategist, and Peter Walker came back on board as his campaign manager. ‘But,’ recollected James Prior ruefully, ‘we reckoned without the persistence and almost obsessive scheming of Airey Neave.’ Someone who had been determined enough to escape from Colditz was unlikely to be put off his objective by losing a couple of candidates. Prior, who was to offer himself as a candidate, thought that Thatcher, while ambitious, really did not believe that her time had yet come. He saw the campaign at close quarters, as his office in the Commons was directly opposite Thatcher’s, which became Neave’s headquarters. ‘There was a constant flow of MPs to see them, and I began to realise that these were drawn from a wide cross-section of the party,’ he recorded. ‘Airey Neave’s exercise was carried out
by a combination of promises and flattery, and was brilliantly masterminded.’9 There was more to it than that. Neave brought to the campaign a secret agent’s understanding of psychological operations: disinformation, manipulation and misrepresentation. He was far from being the only ex-MI6 member in the Tory ranks. His former comrade-in-arms Hugh Fraser had joined him in the House, and other Tory members with an intelligence background included Sir Stephen Hastings, Julian Amery, Maurice Macmillan, Harry Kirby and Cranley Onslow. But Neave was a uniquely ‘natural spy’. In the words of one former MP: ‘He had a lot of intelligence even the whips didn’t discover. He never imparted a piece of bum information. His power lay there.’10 Neave’s information network was unsurpassed. ‘Airey, with his efficient intelligence service, knew better than anyone precisely what the score was,’ observed Halcrow. He was better informed than the whips, who were constrained by loyalty to the leader.
Neave next approached Sir William Shelton, MP for Streatham and longstanding admirer of Thatcher, with an offer to ‘bring over his troops’ if they could come to an agreement on who was running the show. ‘I’m older than you are, so I’m number one, and you’re number two,’ Neave insisted. The pair had lunch and Shelton recalled: ‘Ted didn’t ever believe a woman could challenge him for the leadership. He felt very safe.’11 As the leadership campaign got under way, the IRA’s bombing campaign in England dominated the front pages. The Birmingham pub bombs, which killed nineteen and injured 182, exploded on the day Thatcher disclosed her intention to challenge Heath. Six days later, the Home Secretary Roy Jenkins outlawed the IRA and rushed through the Prevention of Terrorism Bill. It was a sombre backdrop to proceedings, but few could have imagined that republican violence would eventually get much closer to home.
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