by Andy Beckett
The Heath who emerged in the sixties and became prime minister in 1970 was not an outstanding politician. The cool response to him during his five years as Opposition leader, from his party and more widely, reflected his obvious limitations. He was energetic and conscientious, but sometimes gratingly relentless; stubborn and a loner, but with a contradictory belief in consensus; inquisitive, but not a great communicator of new ideas; impatient with post-war Britain, but also full of its assumptions. Above all, he was famously difficult to get on with – a quality, unfortunate in a democratic politician, that did not diminish as he got older. In the summer of 2004, a few days after his eighty-eighth birthday, I arranged to see him.
Someone who knew Heath briefed me beforehand. Heath, he warned, would be ‘brusque’. In retirement as during his political career, Heath was ‘extraordinarily insular as a person’. He was ‘still furious’ at how his time as Conservative leader had culminated. And there was one more thing to be wary of: ‘He falls asleep after lunch.’ My interview was scheduled for straight after his nap.
It was a perfect July morning when I left London, but the clouds had closed over by the time the train reached Salisbury. The city where Heath had lived since 1985 was all traffic and tea rooms; with three hours to fill before the interview, I found a special issue of a music magazine on early seventies British glam rock in WHSmith and looked at the pictures of Heath-era male pop stars in their makeup and silver trousers. They seemed almost as ancient and alien as medieval jesters. Then I went to look at his house.
It was right next to the cathedral in a great, hushed half-square of old mansions. The three-storey house was broad, built of faded gold stone, with high gates and long windows like a French presidential residence. A single upstairs window was slightly open; otherwise, the house was symmetrical, immaculate, inscrutable. Heath’s autobiography included a four-page section on the house, of which one detail was perhaps especially significant: ‘Arundells is one of the few houses in the [Cathedral] Close which is well set back.’
When the time for my appointment came, a middle-aged policeman with a weary moustache and a machine gun materialized at the gates from somewhere in the depths of the garden. He put a single key in the lock, which was spotted with lichen, and at the other end of the long drive one of Heath’s staff opened the front door. Inside the house there was silence. In the hallway and the rooms that led off it, the floors gleamed like a museum’s and models of sailing vessels sat in glass cases – after music, sailing was Heath’s other famous off-duty interest. On the walls, closely but very neatly hung, were hundreds of political cartoons. Above the cistern in the downstairs loo, perfectly positioned at eye level for visitors, was one showing Heath dragging Margaret Thatcher along the ground by the hair.
I was shown into a small sitting room. There were bookshelves ostentatiously free of serious political volumes, and a tabletop of bottles of whisky and other spirits in the corner. Heath, I was told, would be ‘a few minutes’. I sat and waited. There was a thud from somewhere upstairs. Then an audible groan and a series of heavy steps across the ceiling. ‘I think he’s on his way downstairs,’ said one of the housekeepers.
Heath came slowly into the room, supported by a walking stick and another of his staff. His clothes – a baggy cream short-sleeved shirt with half the buttons undone, and casual grey chinos – came as a small shock after watching hours of his pinstriped and uncomfortable early seventies political broadcasts. But his face was much the same: small determined eyes, the proud dagger nose, big plump cheeks barely lined despite his lingering yachtsman’s tan – a usefully aspirational political signal back in the pre-easyJet Britain of his premiership. He acknowledged me fleetingly and sat down.
Then he realized that our chairs were side by side and that we could not face each other comfortably. He looked up at the housekeeper: ‘Can we turn this around,’ he said, a note of impatient command in his plummy, slightly studied voice, ‘so we can talk properly?’ She bent down and took one of his arms, and gestured that I should do the same. We lifted Heath a few inches towards the vertical, but then his weight told. The former prime minister landed back in his chair with a thump. We hauled him up again. This time our grip held. As we adjusted the furniture and then sat him down, Heath’s glacial blue eyes showed not a trace of embarrassment. When I sat down, he looked at me properly for the first time. ‘Right. What can I help you with?’
I asked him what he had wanted to do to Britain in 1970. ‘Speak up,’ he said, unsmiling. I asked the question again. His gaze warmed a fraction: ‘Well, we thought the country was in a bad state. Particularly in its basic framework and structure. We set out a list of policies in 1970, and it covered a great field. And all too many commentators have never bothered to find out what that list was. And we moved on all of them. We moved on all of them. In housing we got tremendous movement … We got into Europe … And we freed large areas of the economy from being tied to the arrangements of twenty or thirty years before.’ Heath looked at the bookshelves. ‘Of course, we had struggles in some areas … we gave way to a certain extent. But not very much actually.’
The memories of retired politicians, even more than their memoirs, should be regarded with a degree of caution, yet an undeniable air of confidence and momentum did accompany the Heath government in the beginning. Anthony Sampson, a self-taught expert on British power structures, picked it up in his 1971 book The New Anatomy of Britain:
Power has already begun to change [Heath] … He is more relaxed, rather fatter; he wears very good and quite trendy clothes … His hair is much longer, coming down thickly at the back, and his sideburns are more evident; he might even be mistaken for a musician.
Peter York, the veteran observer of British fashions, remembered the vogue for Heath too: ‘Among the bien pensant, among modernizers of all kinds,’ he told me, ‘the idea of Heath was quite a thing. Cleverer people than me were telling me that Heath was the new middle way.’
Heath had won power partly because Labour had underestimated him. He had won power after many on his own side and most commentators had written him off. The credit for victory went to him personally – and further Heath miracles were not considered out of the question. ‘Mr Heath’, commented The Times, ‘[is] in a position of great strength. He has no personal obligations to anybody … [His] commitments to policy … are of his own choosing … He will be a considerably more powerful Prime Minister … because he made his victory in such difficult circumstances.’ During his first months in office, Heath himself boldly talked up his government’s prospects. ‘We were returned to office to change the course of history of this nation,’ he told the Conservative Party conference in October 1970. ‘Nothing less.’
Heath’s plan for Britain had been drawn up with unusual thoroughness during his long, derided tenure as Opposition leader. ‘We produced this huge path chart, the day every bit of legislation was going to be introduced,’ remembers Brendon Sewill, director of the powerful Conservative Research Department during the period. ‘We posted it through the letterbox at Number 10 on the morning after we won the election.’ Heath relished this patient, preparatory side of politics – between leaving the army and becoming an MP he had briefly been a civil servant in the Long-Range Planning Department of the Ministry of Civil Aviation – and frequently dropped in on the Research Department’s policy discussions. The press were less interested. The legislative ambitions of Opposition parties can often seem like castles in the sky, and the regular dramas of the Wilson government seemed more substantial material.
The one exception to this pattern came in January 1970. With a general election expected soon, Sewill organized a weekend retreat for Heath and his shadow cabinet. ‘The idea was to try to pull together all the policies which had been developed by this incredible number of policy groups, and make the shadow cabinet consider them and say, “Are we trying to do too much? And do these policies conflict with each other?” And then we said to each other at the Research Department
, “Well, it would be rather good publicity too.”’
The retreat was held at the Selsdon Park Hotel, a baronial complex of long conference rooms and photogenic lawns near Croydon in south London. The shadow cabinet’s discussions were energetic and thorough but not conclusive. Little was said that challenged Heath’s central idea about how to revive Britain: that a Conservative administration could make the economy vastly more efficient through government chivvying and ingenuity, and that everything else would follow, which had been in his head since he had read Keynes and Macmillan in the thirties. Then, midway through the weekend, came a moment that would make the Selsdon conference infamous.
Peter Walker, a close ally of Heath then and since, described it to me. ‘On the Saturday morning, at about a quarter to twelve, Michael Fraser [a senior Conservative party official] said to Ted, “Don’t forget you’ve got the press at 12.15.” “Press?” said Ted. Michael said, “Yes, we agreed we’d have a press conference today to get in the Sunday papers.” So Ted said, “What on earth am I going to say to them? We haven’t decided anything.” So Iain Macleod of all people [the liberal shadow chancellor] said, “It’s quite easy, Ted, you just tell them we believe in law and order.” So Ted went off and said at the press conference, “We’re going to be very strong on law and order.” And the next day every Sunday paper did enormous right-wing stuff.’
The press – and Wilson – claimed to have sighted a new, crueller species of British Conservative: ‘Selsdon Man’, tougher on crime and on immigration, harsher in his economic thinking, impatient, in fact, with the whole herbivorous post-war consensus. In reality, ‘Selsdon Man’ was somewhere between a breathless exaggeration and a malicious fiction, but in the seventies, more than in most decades, political spectres and misrepresentations had a habit of solidifying into flesh-and-blood political issues. Heath, grateful for the publicity and for a catchphrase to differentiate his policies from Wilson’s, did not completely disown the label.
In the short term, it seemed a canny decision. With a general-election campaign coming, the Conservatives suddenly looked more focused and hungry. And in the election itself, they received more votes than usual from a group of growing social and political importance. One of the consequences of Britain’s increasing suburbanization and prosperity in the fifties and sixties was the appearance of a wealthier, more individualistic skilled working class in the new towns and commuter settlements that increasingly ringed the run-down cities. Sociologists christened them C2s; later, this sort of person would be called Essex Man. In 1969, Rupert Murdoch relaunched the Sun, aimed at upwardly mobile ‘pacesetters’, partly to appeal to the C2s. At first the paper supported Labour, expecting its readers to do likewise, but there was an abrasiveness in the Selsdon message that appealed to the embryonic Essex Man.
The long-term consequences of Selsdon for Heath himself were less favourable. The conference awakened hopes in right-wing Conservatives which he, not being a genuine right-winger, would inevitably dash when he took power. This had a damaging effect on his reputation, and ultimately on his position as party leader. And ‘Selsdon Man’ allowed left-wing Britons to believe – or to pretend to believe – that Heath was a thuggish Tory who would turn the country upside down. They would prove much worse opponents as a result.
3
Heathograd
In the first purposeful months of Ted Heath’s administration, Selsdon soon became only one political initiative among many. The government set up a new Department of Trade and Industry and a new Department of the Environment, covering housing, public works and transport. It established an official Whitehall ‘Think Tank’, then an untried concept, to work on long-term strategy. It hired businessmen to stir up the civil service. It despatched ministers to stir up businessmen. The personification of this approach, this hoped-for fusion of the public and private sectors into a vigorous new whole, was the confident young Peter Walker.
Like Heath, he came from a strikingly modest background. His father worked in an engineering factory, was unemployed for a year and a half during the Depression and later became a shop steward, a shop-floor trade-union official. But Walker’s father and mother were both Tories, and, before he reached his teens, so was he. He first stood for Parliament, in 1955, at the age of twenty-three; by the early sixties, he was a noted Conservative MP; by 1965, he was running Heath’s successful leadership campaign. Walker’s politics were typical of the rising generation of post-war liberal Tories who were in favour of material advancement for the masses and a more efficient capitalism, but what gave his views an additional credibility was his own parallel career as an entrepreneur. He had begun reading the Financial Times at thirteen. In his twenties he became a well-known City of London player in property and insurance. In 1964, he joined up with a frustrated motor-industry executive called Jim Slater to form an investment company, Slater Walker. Between 1964 and 1970, when Walker became a minister and scaled back his business activities, the firm made huge and spiralling profits by buying shares in companies that were, in Walker’s description, ‘badly managed’, taking them over and running them on a more realistic basis, or – as Slater Walker’s critics saw it – stripping their assets and quickly getting out. The company grew with an aggression and raw ambition new to the relatively gentlemanly post-war City. Slater Walker would prove too jerry-built and controversial to survive the harsher economic climate of the seventies, but Walker would have too many other interests by then to be seriously damaged.
Between 1970 and 1972, Heath promoted him from minister for housing and local government to secretary of state for the environment to secretary of state for trade and industry. Walker was still in his thirties, with a slightly gauche smile and cocky long sideburns, at a time when most of the people who ran things in Britain, such as Heath and the rest of the Cabinet, were middle-aged or older. Yet Walker sometimes approached his duties as if he alone was a man of the world:
When I became the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, my surprise was how bad top management was … The great one was at a shipbuilding yard. I had lunch with the board, and we had grouse and salmon, and you knew that the salmon had been caught by the board and the grouse had been shot by the board. They were all that sort of background. And when you started to discuss what was happening in worldwide shipping, they were lost. When I went down and had tea with the union, they were incredibly well-informed. When I left, I said, ‘If in that shipyard the shop stewards would become the board and the board would become the shop stewards, you would have the ideal combination.’
Walker finished the anecdote with a jolly laugh. He was sitting, almost slouching, with one hand in a suit trouser pocket, on a pale green sofa with gold trim in his office in the City of London. It was 2004; he was seventy-two, still slim, and a director of the Anglo-German bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. Through the glass walls of his corner office the tops of other skyscrapers steamed below us in the blue morning and the Thames was a silvery scribble. Walker’s upward trajectory and air of self-assurance had comfortably survived the seventies – he had called his memoirs Staying Power – and the very different decades that came after.
So had his belief in the Heath government. On one of the walls of Walker’s office, among photographs of him meeting various dignitaries, there were pictures of Heath as prime minister, and Walker spoke about the time as if it had been one of almost unbroken government successes and timely initiatives. ‘There was a united Cabinet,’ he said in his brisk voice. ‘There was no disunity. There was never a moment in the whole period of Ted’s Cabinet where there was disunity in the Cabinet. Margaret [Thatcher, then education secretary], Keith [Joseph, then social services secretary] – none of them were voicing opinions against Ted.’ Walker continued: ‘The start of trade union reform was done by the Heath government. The basic reform of things like water cleanliness. A new approach to the environment was done by the Heath government. I think there are areas where if we had had more time … we were very busy du
ring that government …’ His voice turned quieter and more thoughtful: ‘If we’d won that next term, then I think we would have been a very successful government.’ His confident broad-brush tone returned: ‘I think the government, when history gets it properly in perspective, will be seen as a very considerable one.’
One of the main ways the Heath administration sought to modernize Britain was through large building projects. Back in the thirties, Heath had noted the success of Roosevelt’s New Deal in reviving the American economy. The New Deal included much state-funded construction work, creating jobs and economically beneficial new infrastructure. In the early seventies, with the British economy in trouble, the Heath government embarked on massive building schemes of its own. Undeterred by almost a century of false starts, it started digging a Channel Tunnel to France. As environment secretary, Walker commissioned the Thames Barrier in east London to avert the growing possibility of the capital flooding. ‘The estimate of the cost was £60 million, and it turned out to be £600 million,’ he remembered. He gave a satisfied look: ‘And we got the go-ahead on it.’
But perhaps the most ambitious project of all, and the most revealing about how the British government still thought during this phase of the seventies – a phase which later in the decade would come to seem almost impossibly comfortable and remote – was begun about thirty miles to the east. It was a building scheme which assumed that state spending would remain relatively unconstrained, and that much of it should be directed towards the long term. The scheme was called Maplin.