by Andy Beckett
Yet all this promise and initiative led not to economic salvation but to a succession of economic crises, climaxing in November 1967 with Callaghan’s resignation and a forced devaluation of the pound, shocks from which the government never quite recovered. Over the next two and a half years, Jenkins restored a degree of calm and coherence to the Treasury. Some of the key economic statistics improved, and Labour revived in the polls. But when the general election came, for all Jenkins’ and Wilson’s reassurances, the state of the economy remained a potentially lethal issue for the government.
On 15 June, three days before the vote, the trade figures for the previous month were announced. Instead of an expected surplus, there was a small deficit of £31 million. More than half of the sum was something of a fluke: the one-off purchase of two jumbo jets from the US. Yet for the Conservatives, who had been trying, with mixed results, to make the weaknesses of the economy the focus of the election, the trade figures were just what they needed. ‘On Monday 15 June the atmosphere began to lift,’ Hurd writes. ‘We handed [Heath] the unexpectedly bad trade figures in time for him to use them for the rest of the afternoon. There seemed then … a fleeting chance of success.’ On the morning of polling day, a small-scale but thorough survey of voters by the Opinion Research Centre, conducted as the trade figures were being debated, gave the Conservatives an advantage of 1 per cent, their first lead for weeks. The poll was barely noticed or else dismissed as a freak. By the following evening, Heath was picking his Cabinet.
2
The Great White Ghost
In background and character, Heath was both the best and the worst kind of person to be a reforming prime minister. He had been born in 1916 in Broadstairs, a slightly prim clifftop resort in coastal Kent. His parents were like those of no previous Conservative leader. His mother Edith was in domestic service as a lady’s maid until she had children. His father William was a carpenter who later became a small employer of other craftsmen. The Heaths lived in cramped, spotless houses, took in lodgers and looked to improve themselves. Edward, the eldest of two sons, serious, self-contained, precociously interested in adults, was quickly seen to have the most potential. At eleven, he won a scholarship to the local grammar school, where he lobbied successfully to take the School Certificate exam a year early, and passed. In his final years, he became a school prefect with a reputation for strictness, and secretary of the debating society, making firm moralistic speeches. ‘During the school holidays,’ he remembered later, ‘I particularly enjoyed sitting outside an ice-cream parlour in Broadstairs talking earnestly with my friends about the major issues of the day.’
Heath’s upbringing was not overtly political. There were few family discussions about public affairs. But Broadstairs was a strongly Conservative seaside town, and the Heaths’ modest upward mobility, typical of the place, exerted an influence. William switched from the Liberals to the Conservatives, while maintaining a fierce small businessman’s dislike of the other alternative: ‘I was never Labour,’ he told the writer Anthony Sampson later. ‘I had too much to do with labour to vote Labour.’ In 1935, with a Conservative-dominated National Government in power in Westminster, Edward Heath stood as the National Government candidate in a mock school election. He won with the help of an endorsement he had solicited from the local Conservative MP.
As well as politics, Heath had a consuming interest in classical music. In 1934, he tried to win an organ scholarship to Cambridge. He failed, so he tried for an organ scholarship at Oxford. He failed, so he sought a scholarship to study politics, philosophy and economics there – and failed again. In the end, he had to accept an unfunded place at Oxford to take the combined degree. Kent County Council gave him a loan, and his parents, with difficulty and after some persuasion by his schoolteachers, paid the rest.
Heath arrived at Oxford in the autumn of 1935. Then, as now, it was a university made up of very different, semi-independent colleges. The one he had finally settled on was highly significant: Balliol. In the thirties, much of Oxford undergraduate life was flavoured, as it had long been, by smart social networks and a tendency not to take things too seriously. Yet, since the mid-nineteenth century, Balliol had self-consciously stood apart from such escapism and privilege. The college pioneered competitive entrance exams rather than entrance by wealth and connections; it actively sought students from less grand backgrounds and, with seemingly relentless efficiency, turned them into successful public men. Balliol produced senior civil servants and top colonial administrators, famous social reformers and chancellors, bishops and prime ministers, all in greater numbers than any comparable British institution. These ‘Balliol men’, as they sometimes called themselves with a degree of self-congratulation, were loyal members of the British Establishment, but also a distinct tribe within it: a little more driven and restless, more impatient with the traditional way of doing things, more liberal – in fact, often left-wing. Denis Healey, then a communist, was in the year below Heath at Balliol. Jenkins, whose father was a miner, was in the year below Healey. The master of the college was a Scottish socialist, A. D. Lindsay, who publicly supported the General Strike in 1926 and had Mahatma Gandhi to stay in his official lodgings for a fortnight during the Indian anti-imperialist’s visit to Britain in 1931.
Broadstairs it was not. But Heath had chosen Balliol fully aware of its reputation. He quickly took to the college: ‘No idea was too outrageous for examination,’ he remembered. ‘I revelled in the arguments.’ At the end of his first term, he finally won a scholarship, which enabled him to be there for an extra year: ‘This’, he wrote, ‘was a real privilege.’
Seven decades later, after studying at the college myself, I went to a reunion at Balliol for former undergraduates. It was the summer of 2000. Before dinner, we had drinks in the slow dusk in the main quadrangle. At the edge of the crowd, mostly casually dressed people in their twenties and thirties, I suddenly noticed Heath. He was then well into his eighties and was standing on his own, hugely stout, in a suit so pale it was almost luminous. There was an air of immense contentment about him. He came every year, someone told me afterwards, like a great white ghost.
At Oxford, Heath’s politics matured. He joined the Oxford Union debating society and the Oxford University Conservative Association, both traditional training grounds for a young Tory with ambitions. But he was open to broader political experiences. He also joined Labour and Liberal undergraduate organizations, ‘so that I could hear their main speakers’, he wrote later. At Balliol, he listened attentively to Lindsay and the college’s other socialists, and busily read books by a rising generation of left-wing or left-leaning authors. It was the mid-thirties, with the Depression dragging on and unemployment in Britain and elsewhere rising to unprecedented levels; it was hard for anyone political to avoid pondering the problems of contemporary capitalism. Even before Oxford, in Broadstairs, which like much of the south-east of England had escaped the worst, Heath’s world view had been affected by the slump. ‘I saw my father working hard in very difficult circumstances,’ he told an interviewer later. Now, at Oxford, two books in particular further crystallized his thinking:
The first was John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published in 1936. Inspired by a world depression which had been caused by laissez-faire [free-market] policies, it put forward a wholly new view of economics … that full and stable levels of employment could be maintained if governments intervened counter-cyclically [subsidized economic growth during recessions] … Although his ideas were not put into practice in Britain until after the Second World War, they provided some intellectual basis for Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’, which was already successfully pulling America out of depression.
Heath was barely twenty when he read the General Theory, but it helped convince him ‘once and for all’ that ‘neither socialism nor the pure free market could provide the answer’. What was needed was a kind of fusion of the two. Two years after the General Theory, another influent
ial book offered a formula. The Middle Way, by Harold Macmillan, then a young Conservative MP, was the other work to have a decisive impact on Heath. It argued that capitalism needed to be reformed. To make it fairer, more efficient and more stable, capitalism should be rationalized through planning. And this planning was best done by the state. Yet unlike in the Soviet Union, in Macmillan’s version of a planned economy free enterprise and the freedom of the individual would not be abolished but strengthened. Businessmen would be helped by government to think more about the long term. Wealth would be redistributed by government to the millions of Britons with little, who would live more comfortable and happier lives as a result. The country’s ‘latent productive possibilities’ would be released.
If, however, British capitalism was not reformed, Macmillan warned, ‘Anxious days … lie ahead’: there would be increased ‘class antagonism’, revolutionary stirrings from the far left, authoritarian ones from the far right. Macmillan was writing about the thirties, yet he was unintentionally prophetic about the anxieties political moderates would feel in Britain in the seventies. The Middle Way also foresaw much of what the Heath government would do to try to remove these fears. What the book could not do was predict the consequences.
Apart from the Depression, there was another feature of the thirties that profoundly shaped Heath’s ideas: the ominous political events on the Continent. He had been fascinated by Europe from boyhood, Broadstairs being one of the places in Britain closest to France. ‘Every time I walked along the cliffs,’ Heath wrote in his 1977 memoir Travels, ‘I looked across the Channel … Sometimes [the coast of France] stood out white and clear … at others it was just a dark grey smudge.’ In 1931, partly as a reward for passing his School Certificate early, his parents scraped together the money for him to cross the Channel for the first time, on a school trip to Paris. The experience, he judged later, was ‘the most exciting event of my life so far’. He walked and watched, sat outside cafes, deciphered menus, bought gateaux, wondered at landmarks and persuaded car-showroom staff to let him look at their catalogues. He was fourteen; for the next six years, he had too little money and too much studying to do to visit the Continent again. Then, in the summer of 1937, during his university holidays, his parents fixed up an exchange with a German student from Düsseldorf.
Heath spoke no German – his French accent was also atrocious – but he was undeterred: he loved the German composers and he wanted to learn about Hitler. At Oxford, Heath had already made a noted speech at the Union criticizing the National Government’s appeasement of the dictator. So, in 1937, after a few days in Düsseldorf, he set off alone on a political exploration of Germany. In Munich, he found the beer cellar where the Nazi party had first met. In the Bavarian Alps, he watched children march in formation to school every morning beneath his bedroom window. And in Nuremberg, he attended a Nazi rally:
An intense silence spread over the whole auditorium. I suddenly realized that Hitler himself was entering from the back of the hall and striding up the centre gangway to the stage … My seat was on the inside [of the] gangway and I remember thinking at the time how narrow the aisle was … Sure enough, Hitler came alongside me, almost brushing my shoulder … His face had little colour … When he mounted the platform the response became hysterical.
Heath returned to England, ‘utterly convinced now that a conflict was inevitable’. The following year, he went to the part of Europe where the war with fascism had already started. In Spain, the elected Republican government, an undisciplined coalition of left-wing and liberal parties, had been struggling since 1936 against a right-wing insurrection led by General Franco and supported by Hitler and Mussolini. In Britain, the National Government and many Conservatives, following the logic of appeasement and disliking the Republicans’ politics, refused to take sides. Yet Heath took a different view: ‘I was rather fond of quoting Gladstone’s dictum’, he writes in Travels, ‘that when in doubt about foreign policy England should always lean towards those supporting the cause of liberty.’ In the early summer of 1938, still at Oxford but now chairman of the Federation of University Conservative Associations, another shrewd move up the party ladder, Heath was invited by the Republicans to join a delegation of British students and see what was happening in Spain for himself.
As in France and Germany, Heath was seduced by the good things of Continental living that he glimpsed. Even a civil war could not dull, in his description, ‘the deep ultramarine of the Mediterranean’. But his ten days in Spain were raw as well as inspiring. By this stage, the Republicans were losing the war. Heath found their Barcelona stronghold blacked-out and short of food, yet impressively functional. ‘Law and order are very well maintained,’ he wrote afterwards in an article for the Broadstairs Advertiser & Echo. ‘At night … it is perfectly safe to go anywhere … All the cinemas and theatres are open.’
Heath and the rest of the student delegation were driven out to the battlefront west of the city. On a small stony plateau they were introduced to some Britons who were making a more profound contribution to the Republican cause: the British members of the International Brigade. ‘They were tough, hardened soldiers, burned by the Spanish sun to a dark tan,’ Heath wrote. ‘One could not but admire these men, civilians at heart, who had to learn everything of a military nature as they went along.’ The student delegation, in tweed jackets and with hair still neat enough for a debate at the Union, addressed the soldiers in their sweaty vests and open-necked shirts. Heath’s speech was stiff and cautious: ‘I confined myself to telling them that in Britain we closely followed their activities … and wanted to see them safely back.’
One of the soldiers was a young trade unionist from Liverpool called Jack Jones. He was small, slight and quietly spoken, but three years older than Heath; before Spain, he had already been a veteran of left-wing activism in the Mersey docks. Heath did not impress him. ‘I was there to fight,’ Jones said when I asked him about the encounter, ‘and he was from Oxford.’ Jones was almost as dismissive in his autobiography: ‘Heath … was to the right of the five-man [student] delegation. I suppose he reflected a strand of Conservative thinking which had some sympathy with the Republic.’ Yet a bond had been formed with significance for the future. By the time Heath became prime minister, Jones would be Britain’s most powerful trade unionist.
After visiting the battlefront, Heath and the other students were driven south. On a main road near his intoxicating Mediterranean, their convoy was spotted by an enemy aircraft, which was flying low up and down the coast machine-gunning passing vehicles. The students had to hide in a ditch until the plane departed.
Within two years, Heath was a fighting soldier himself. At first, in 1940 and 1941, he had a relatively quiet war as an anti-aircraft gunner in the north of England. With the German bombers concentrating on the south, he had time, he writes, ‘to arrive at a considered view of the prevailing social and environmental conditions of the north’, which he had never visited before. ‘I was astonished, indeed horrified, to see … the rows of tiny houses back to back … the litter and the dirt … the decaying remnants of industrial activity. I realised then how much needed to be done.’ But such musings about national renewal had to be put on hold in 1944, when Heath’s unit was sent to France. He fought there and in Belgium, Holland and Germany. He saw a recently liberated concentration camp and commanded a firing squad that executed a soldier for rape and murder.
The Heath who returned to civilian life in Britain in 1946 at the age of thirty was still a Conservative. But he had his doubts. The previous year, he had watched from Germany as the party fought a general-election campaign which claimed, tastelessly and exaggeratedly, that Labour plans to nationalize industries and decisively expand the welfare state would require ‘some form of Gestapo’. Heath considered the claim ‘objectionable’ and, after Labour under Attlee went on to win the election by a huge majority, completely out of step with public attitudes which, like his, had been shifted leftwards by the Depressi
on and the war against fascism. ‘It was only if the [Conservative] party decided to acclimatise itself to the new Britain of the late 1940s’, he writes in his autobiography, ‘that I could foresee a political career for myself.’
The party moved in the direction he wanted. Between the late forties and the mid-sixties, first in opposition and then in government, the Conservatives accepted the main ideas of what became known as the post-war consensus: a larger welfare state funded by higher taxation; a Keynesian approach to the economy as set out in the General Theory; and an acceptance of strong trade unions. Heath rose through this new Conservative Party doggedly. In 1947, he put himself forward for four parliamentary constituencies, failed to be selected for three, and finally got Bexley. In 1950, he squeezed into the House of Commons with a majority of 133. In 1951, with promising speed, he was made an assistant whip, one of the Commons’ junior prefects, helping to discipline his fellow Conservative MPs. In 1955, he was promoted to chief whip, holding the parliamentary party together during the Suez crisis. In 1959, he became minister of labour and defused a threatened strike by the National Union of Railwaymen. In 1960, he was put in charge of negotiating Britain’s entry into the Common Market, failing with honour and for the first time becoming a national figure. In 1963, he became president of the Board of Trade and boldly abolished Resale Price Maintenance, the system regulating retail prices, in favour of a more market-driven free-for-all. In 1964, he became shadow chancellor and, finally, a Commons star, attacking the new Wilson government with contempt and fluency. In 1965, he was elected Conservative leader by a small margin.