The decision to try for a career in politics seems to have been taken some time during his stint at Nuremberg. It was one he would regret many times, particularly in the early 1970s, by which time, after a brief junior ministerial career, he had spent a dozen years on the back benches with little reward or thanks and no hope of a reprieve in sight. In one of many diary entries expressing gloom and disillusionment, he dropped a hint about how the fateful move was made. On Monday 30 July 1973, he recorded that he ‘had tea in the garden and reflected on what might have been’. He concluded that he had ‘been far too shaken by the war to have gone to the Bar and politics’, and he ‘should have gone into a steady job like my father wanted’, such as a post as a legal civil servant in the Parliamentary Counsel’s office, but he was ‘much too restless’. Instead, he was ‘influenced by the Kilmuirs when they were at Nuremberg into fighting elections.’ Lord Kilmuir was the title taken by David Maxwell Fyfe, whose performance at the tribunal had so impressed Neave. As well as being a star of the Bar, he was a Conservative MP who went on to become Home Secretary and Lord Chancellor. His wife, born Sylvia Harrison (sister of Rex, the actor), ended up vice chairman of the Conservatives and was a prototype of the committed and energetic political confederate that Diana would become.
That summer day in Abingdon, the gamble he had taken was vindicated and a reasonably secure future assured. It was just as well. There were mouths to feed and school fees to be found. Marigold, born in 1944, was followed in November 1947 by Richard, always known by his middle name, Patrick. William arrived six weeks after the by-election. Providing for the family was not easy. Neave seems to have received no significant financial support from his father, and the Giffards’ ancient lineage and broad acres did not mean that Diana was particularly well provided for. Apart from some later legacies that allowed them to buy two small houses that provided a rental income before being passed on to the boys, Neave had largely to live off what he could earn.
In 1943, while serving with MI9, he had found time to arrange admission to the Middle Temple, which entitled him to practise as a barrister. On leaving the War Crimes Commission, he found a place at 5 King’s Bench Walk, the chambers of Frederick Lawton, a criminal advocate and QC who welcomed young talent. At Nuremberg, Neave had been a player in a great historical and juridical event. The work on offer to a junior barrister in London in 1946, traipsing around the magistrates’ courts and quarter sessions of Greater London, represented quite a comedown. The defendants in the dock at Nuremberg had been among the greatest criminals of all time. The men and women he now had to prosecute or defend were often guilty of little more than hopelessness and stupidity. The law at this level was desperately uninspiring. Neave was no Maxwell Fyfe and had neither the natural aptitude nor the drive to haul himself easily to the higher reaches. Even after entering parliament, he was still trudging off to Home Counties courtrooms to appear in dull cases. In September 1953, he was at Wallington, Surrey, prosecuting five men who had stolen a car, smashed a shop window and made off with two television sets, then knocked over a policeman at the end of an 85 mph car chase, causing him to lose his leg. The following month he was in Essex, in a case involving underage drinkers.
Entering the Commons meant ending his active association with the military and the world that had shaped him and made his name. After returning from Germany in the autumn of 1946, he had elected to carry on in the Territorials. He chose to retain his nominal connection with the Royal Artillery but was seconded to the Intelligence Corps. He was posted to the latest incarnation of his old outfit, now officially No. 9 Intelligence School TA. By the beginning of 1950, he was second in command, and when in March the incumbent stood down due to ill health, he took over as CO in the rank of lieutenant colonel. The unit’s work was primarily concerned with retaining the knowledge and skills of escape and evasion techniques that had been built up during the war and applying them to the new circumstances of the Cold War.
In the event of a Soviet bloc invasion of Western Europe, it was intended that specialist reserve troops who were cut off behind enemy lines would form units to carry on fighting in the rear. Local support was to be provided by the same patriots who had sustained the escape organisations. Neave stood down as CO of IS9 (TA) in September 1951, citing the fact that he was a parliamentary candidate in the forthcoming general election. ‘Whether or not I am elected,’ he wrote in his resignation letter, ‘I intend to pursue a political career. In these circumstances I shall find it impossible to give adequate time to my increasing duties in command …’6 The deputy director of military intelligence agreed, recommending that ‘owing to the security nature of IS9, it is not advisable that Colonel Neave should continue to be a serving TA officer after his nomination as a parliamentary candidate.’ Neave remained on the reserve list, however, and was expected to play a useful role in any future hostilities. A note in his army file from the Air Ministry dated 3 October 1952 proposed that ‘the aforementioned officer be earmarked for the appointment of O/C Escape Section IS9 (UK) in the event of mobilisation’.
As late as May 1974, Neave was giving advice to senior NATO officers from Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe ‘about the possibility of escape and evasion in the event of war with Russia’ and putting them in contact with Albert ‘Pat O’Leary’ Guérisse.7 Neave’s critics would say that his connections with the intelligence world continued long after his formal association had ended.
Neave never fully put the war behind him. He described his exploits in a series of books, beginning in 1953 with the publication of They Have Their Exits, an account of his escapes and the journey back to Britain. It carried a foreword by Norman Birkett, one of the British judges at Nuremberg, who described the author as ‘a rising young barrister and politician’. At the time, Birkett was a very senior judge, sitting in the Court of Appeal. He was one of the great lawyers of the age, wise and humane, a Methodist preacher and lifelong Liberal who served twice as an MP. He praised the book as ‘a story of the most enthralling kind, with here and there touches of humour and even gaiety’, and ultimately a ‘revelation of the essential nobility of men and women, when faced with the most desperate and dreadful circumstances’.
Birkett’s hope that ‘this book will be widely read’ was amply fulfilled. They Have Their Exits was well reviewed and went on selling in very healthy numbers for the next twenty years. This success provided another source of income and paved the way for further works, all of which drew on his wartime experiences. It was followed a year later by Little Cyclone, which told the story of Dédée. In 1969, Saturday at MI9 gave a fuller account of the organisation’s work in occupied Europe. In 1972, he went back to the beginning with The Flames of Calais. He completed the chronicle with Nuremberg, which appeared in 1978. Neave wrote entertainingly and revealingly in an accessible style that, in the case of Little Cyclone, could border on Mills & Boon. He also started two thrillers – Low Profile and Green Card – using his political and intelligence-world experiences to authenticate the plot. Sadly, neither made it into print and the manuscripts have disappeared.
The literary output also served to boost his political profile. Neave had had a good war, but so had many other young Tory aspirants who did not write books. His fellow Old Etonian Peter Carrington, who soared through the party ranks at the same period, never publicly recorded the deeds that won him an MC. Nor did Neave’s comrade and friend Hugh Fraser publicise his considerable exploits behind the lines in the Ardennes in the autumn of 1944. But Neave needed all the help he could get. Despite the advantages he had been born with, the rewards were all fought for and hard won. Carrington, by contrast, did not have to go to the trouble of seeking election, on account of an hereditary seat in the House of Lords. Hugh Fraser was selected for the safe Tory seat of Stone in Staffordshire by the time of the 1945 election and won it with ease. Neave had to make his own luck, and reminding the world of his wartime achievements was one way of doing it.
There was more to it t
han that, though. The war had been the great formative experience of his life, for worse as well as for better. He had emerged from it bearing psychological as well as physical scars (thirty-three years after being wounded at Calais, medical examinations revealed the presence of metal in his chest). In his books, he made only glancing references to terror and anxiety. In the privacy of his intermittent diaries, he was more forthcoming. Many years after the conflict, he wrote that ‘it took me twenty years to recover from the war.’8 The emotional intimacy of his marriage made it inconceivable that he could have hidden his trauma from Diana. Whatever passed between them was not communicated to the children, let alone to any of the vast array of accumulated political and business colleagues and acquaintances (Neave owned to having very few real friends).
Nonetheless, those around him sensed a deep hurt and guessed that the war was to blame. Veronica Beckett, who worked as his secretary in the early 1960s, recalled being told – perhaps by Diana – that he would ‘sometimes wake in the night screaming’.9 The children too have their recollections of behaviour that hinted at hidden scars, such as his irrational fear of airport security scanners. The phobia is confirmed by a diary entry more than thirty years after the ‘home run’ from Colditz. ‘I loathe travel,’ he wrote after arriving in Florence for a holiday with Diana in April 1973. ‘It reminds me of my escape, with the meticulous preparations to get through controls … I am very neurotic about this and panic easily.’ Psychotherapy was in its infancy in Britain, and a Conservative politician who admitted to undergoing it risked damage to his reputation. Writing was one solution. ‘It is really my only relief from anxiety neurosis,’ read another entry later that year. ‘But I can’t get anyone else to understand this.’10
He was to some degree imprisoned by his wartime history. The paradox was that although war had damaged him, it had also made him what he was, and when he faced the world he leaned heavily on his reputation as a war hero for support. His name and that of Colditz would be linked for ever. He worked hard to buttress the connection. He would talk to anyone who asked him about his exploits, from the Wallingford Rotary Club to the Daily Mirror, and over the years delivered hundreds of lectures. He guarded the memory closely, marking each passing anniversary of the escape itself and the crossing of the Swiss frontier. In 1973, public interest in the castle was stoked by the BBC TV series Colditz. Annoyingly, from Neave’s point of view, the storylines were based on Pat Reid’s book and his own escape was barely featured, kindling some resentment and a spark of jealousy.
The relationships he had forged with MI9 colleagues do not seem to have matured into particularly strong peacetime friendships, though he kept in touch with ‘Monday’ – Michael Creswell – visiting him at his house in Surrey. However, he retained a strong emotional attachment to his old agents and, insofar as it was possible, he kept in touch. After her release from Ravensbrück, Dédée resumed nursing, and spent much of the rest of her life in Africa, working in clinics and leper colonies, so contact was difficult. They had a reunion in July 1974 when she took a break from the leper hospital she was working at in Addis Ababa. ‘She looks remarkably well but is obviously not so,’ he wrote in his diary.11 ‘Only five years ago did she recover her sense of taste. She is having a difficult time in Addis Ababa … it was a relief to meet someone who faces life so cheerfully.’
The children recall lunches and dinners with modest, discreet middle-aged men and women from Belgium and France, who they later learned were the heroes and heroines of the escape lines. Airey even retained his affection for possibly his most troublesome agent, and Mary Lindell was an intermittent visitor at the Neaves’ London flat.
The House of Commons he entered in 1953 was full of ex-soldiers, sailors and airmen. For some, memories of war sat lightly on their shoulders. In Neave’s case, the experience would continue to shape his thoughts and deeds until he died. The war provided him with an array of causes, such as his long struggle to win compensation for prisoners and other victims. But, above all, it conditioned his political thinking. What he had seen as a soldier, a prisoner, an escaper, an intelligence officer and a lawyer left him with a profound hatred of totalitarians and a determination to confront them, be they Soviet Communists or Irish Republicans.
The day after the by-election victory, he took his seat in the House to the cheers of his colleagues, ‘a well-built fellow of medium height with rugged, clean-shaven features and an air of quiet assurance,’ according to one sketch-writer.12 He was eager to get started. He was thirty-seven years old and many of his wartime contemporaries already had years of parliamentary service under their belts. At 5.44 p.m., on 29 July 1953, only four weeks after his election, he got to his feet to make his first speech, intervening in a debate on defence. It lasted ten minutes, during which he marked out the arena in which he would initially strive to make his political reputation.
As Churchill had stated in his message of support, peace was in the air. The death of Stalin in March, the accession of Khrushchev to the Kremlin and Eisenhower to the White House had raised hopes that Cold War tensions might relax. On the other hand, a nuclear arms race was now under way. Britain had to maintain its defences at maximum preparedness. The new member had some thoughts on one area where improvements could be made. He started by pointing out his qualifications for making a contribution.13 There was the geographical fact that in his constituency lay ‘certain defence establishments, in particular the Military College of Science at Shrivenham and several other Service establishments, as well as the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell.’
In addition, there were ‘personal reasons’ why he was joining the debate. He had ‘served for a long time in the Territorial Army, recently leaving it, when I retired about two years ago, and I specialised during the last war in military intelligence.’ What concerned him today was training, and how national servicemen, particularly those who had been involved in intelligence, could be persuaded to volunteer for the Territorials when their time was up, in order to build on the skills they had acquired in their two years in uniform. He stressed the need for a high-level cadre of Territorial intelligence officers to boost Britain’s contribution to NATO. He also called for increased emphasis on language training and the sending of Territorials abroad as liaison officers, to strengthen links with NATO allies and to see at first hand the terrain in which British troops might one day have to fight. Finally, he proposed equipping reserves with the up-to-date equipment and weaponry that was currently in use by regular troops, and concentrating training on practical skills rather than ‘too much in the way of regimental duties or too much foot drill’.
He sat down at 5.45 p.m. It was a sound if modest debut, heavy on verbiage, light on detail and raising obvious practical problems. Where, for example, was the money to come from to pay for all the new kit and guns? However, it produced an ecstatic response from the next speaker, George Wigg, Labour MP for Dudley. ‘I count myself most fortunate in conveying to the hon. Member for Abingdon the congratulations of the House on his maiden speech,’ he enthused. ‘My own first speech was also on defence, and I only wish I could have done half as well and spoken half as lucidly as he has done this afternoon … I am speaking very sincerely when I say to him that he has impressed the House this afternoon with the extent of his knowledge. We shall look forward in the future to many other contributions from him, much more lengthy and more contentious.’
To get such praise from a political opponent was unusual. Wigg, though, was not a typical Labour MP. At fifty-three, he was on the older end of the age spectrum and until his election in 1945 had spent almost all his career in the army. To the annoyance of many in his party, he was a fierce champion of a strong defence budget. He was also known to have close links to the Secret Intelligence Service. However sincere his sentiments, his endorsement can be seen as the tribute of one old soldier with security connections to another.
Wigg’s anticipation of many more contributions from the new member would not com
e to pass. Over the next few years, Neave’s utterances in the House were intermittent and often narrowly focused on constituency matters or detailed questions arising from defence and scientific issues. He vigorously defended his constituents’ interests, even where they clashed with those of the armed services. His first written question was an unrealistic request to stop the operation of jet aircraft from RAF Benson, near Abingdon, which received a predictably dusty reply from the Ministry of Defence. When the bill to set up the Atomic Energy Authority passed through the Commons, he was quick to seek assurances that the new arrangements would mean no job losses at Harwell, which was a major employer in the constituency.
The laboratory had been set up in 1946, sixteen miles south of Oxford, on the site of an RAF station. It was the country’s main centre for atomic energy research and development. Neave made sure to build relationships with the staff and involve himself closely in Harwell’s affairs. In his first years in the House he regularly prodded the government to ensure there would be enough houses and schools as the number of employees grew and the laboratory spread itself over the surrounding farmland, to the point where he was teased by the opposition for not missing an opportunity to ‘log roll’ on behalf of constituents.14
His interventions on defence were similarly technical and parochial. Speaking in the debate in November 1953 on a bill to streamline call-up procedures in the event of a grave international crisis, he harked back to his wartime service, asking what it would mean in particular for Territorials serving in anti-aircraft units.15
His quiet manner, attention to detail and disinclination to rock the boat was soon noticed by the party managers. In February 1954, seven months after entering the House, he got his first promotion when he was appointed parliamentary private secretary to the Minister for Transport and Civil Aviation, John Boyd-Carpenter. In August the following year, he was made PPS to the Minister for the Colonies, Alan Lennox-Boyd. These posts were unpaid and the lowest rung on the ladder of government. ‘You’re a dogsbody,’ explained one MP from the era. ‘You hang around whoever it is, you seek to promote their interests in any proper way you can, and you relay faithfully what the party’s thinking.’16 It was a necessary start, offering hope that there was life beyond the back benches – perhaps in time a ministry.
The Man Who Was Saturday Page 18