Neave’s assiduous defence of his constituents did him no harm with the electors of Abingdon. At the general election of 26 May 1955, he won an increased majority and returned to a House in which the Conservatives under Anthony Eden now enjoyed a healthy sixty-seat majority. Eden was steeped in foreign expertise and had waited a long time for the top job. Years of steady stewardship seemed to lie ahead. Then, in the summer of 1956, an overseas crisis took a hammer to Conservative complacency.
It erupted on 26 July in Cairo when General Abdel Nasser announced that he was nationalising the Anglo-French-owned Suez Canal and Egyptian troops were taking over the canal zone. Eden was outraged and determined to fight back. However, launching a military operation would be difficult. International opinion was hostile to imperialist adventures, as were many at home. Crucially, the attitude of the United States was uncertain. Washington was unsympathetic to British hopes of maintaining its empire and also concerned that Egypt would fall under Soviet control.
While public attempts to resolve the crisis ground on, the government was plotting secretly with the French and the Israelis. The plan was for Israel, citing a threat to its security, to invade Egypt, giving Anglo-French forces a pretext to intervene and restore peace, in the process regaining control of the canal. The Israeli attack went ahead on 29 October, followed by a phoney ultimatum from London and Paris demanding that both sides pull back and allow their forces to temporarily occupy the canal zone. On 31 October, Operation Musketeer was launched with the bombardment of Egyptian airfields, followed by landings and paratroop drops. Militarily, the operation was a success and within a week most of the canal zone was in the invaders’ hands. Politically, it was a disaster. America joined the condemnations in the United Nations. At home, Eden faced a sustained and eloquent assault from the Labour opposition, led by Hugh Gaitskell, whose alarm at the Prime Minister’s recklessness was shared by at least some on the government benches.
A week after British troops went in, the US had imposed a ceasefire and British troops were forced to withdraw. The debacle did lasting damage to Britain’s standing in the world and its cherished ‘special relationship’ with America. Eden’s reputation was fatally wounded by a lie told to parliament denying prior government knowledge of the Israeli attack. Two months later he was gone, replaced by Harold Macmillan. The crisis ignited passionate debate in parliament, with voices raised stridently in defence and condemnation of the action. A faction of Tory imperialists – the Suez group – first fervently backed the government, then turned against it in disgust when they accepted pressure to withdraw, with fifteen MPs refusing to back their leader in a confidence vote. For Conservatives, Suez aroused atavistic emotions and forced reflection on what sort of Tory you were: a traditionalist, fighting a rearguard action to maintain Britain’s world power status, or a progressive, a pragmatist, a realist.
Whatever thoughts Neave had on the episode he did not express in public and he made no contribution to the fiery Commons debates. He followed the bidding of the Chief Whip, Edward Heath, in the crucial divisions of 8 November and 6 December 1956. His reticence set the tone for the rest of the decade. He was a mainstream, modernising Tory, comfortable with the post-war social settlement that was honoured successively by Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Douglas-Home. At no point did he seem drawn towards the radical right-wing doctrines that would come to be associated with the woman whose ascent he engineered.
Neave’s feelings could run deep in private but his public utterances on policy were measured, based on information and analysis rather than instinct and feeling. He was a mediocre speaker at a time when rhetorical ability was highly prized in parliament, preferring the careful presentation of data over phrase-making. He was a technocrat not a romantic, and a patriot but not an imperialist. On the big issues of the day, where he might have been expected to feel the tug of tradition, he sided with progress. From the beginning, he was in favour of Britain getting aboard the great project to unite Europe, telling an audience in the summer of 1950, when the Schuman Plan that laid the foundations of the Common Market was launched, that Britain should join the debate ‘instead of standing sheepishly aside’. When Heath launched his campaign to enter the EEC, it had Neave’s backing.
There was one issue, though, on which he stood on the right of the party. In 1956, a Labour member, Sidney Silverman, introduced a private member’s bill in a renewed attempt to abolish capital punishment. Neave made two contributions to the debate and voted against the bill.17 It would be another nine years before Britain abandoned the rope. Neave continued to believe strongly that capital punishment had a place in the justice system. His assertion while Conservative spokesman on Northern Ireland that political murderers should face execution would arouse controversy and deepen Republican hatred of him.
In January 1957, he moved another rung up the ladder when he was made joint parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation, Harold Watkinson. Two years later, he was promoted to be Under-Secretary of State at the Air Ministry. To work effectively required the mastery of masses of technical detail and he set about it with characteristic dedication. It was a good-news branch of government. Work was beginning on Britain’s first motorways, and the Gatwick airport project was launched, ‘the first airport in the world to combine air, rail and road transport in one unit,’ as he proudly told the press.
With his ministerial duties and devotion to constituency affairs, there was little time for anything else. The term ‘workaholic’ was not heard much in the 1950s, but it accurately described Airey Neave’s lifestyle. Diana was scarcely less energetic. The couple had moved out of intrepid Aunt Sylvia’s flat at 39 Elizabeth Street in 1945 and into a maisonette around the corner at No. 41, where they lived until 1950. They then obtained a lease on a house at 11 Carlyle Square, not as grand as it is today but still smart. From 1957 to 1965, their town base was a flat in Crescent Mansions, at the top of the Fulham Road. They then spent three years at Marsham Court in Marsham Street, a short walk to Parliament, before crossing the road to another large apartment block, Westminster Gardens.
It took them a while to find a suitable home in the constituency. They started off by renting a cottage in Lockinge, near Wantage, where William was born. Later they spent two years in a wing of Ashdown House, Lambourn, a seventeenth-century mansion overlooking the Berkshire Downs. In 1956, they spent a further two years in another architectural gem, Compton Beauchamp House, near Uffington, which belonged to friends. After four years at Grove House South, in the village of Grove, near Wantage, they bought the place where they felt properly at home. The Old Vicarage, Ashbury, was an elegant white stucco house with pillars at the entrance, five bedrooms and a ring of sarsen stones in the garden. It sat on a hill with wonderful views over the Vale of White Horse. The house gave them both great pleasure and they improved and expanded it, adding extra rooms and installing a swimming pool.
It was a haven but also a place of work. In country as in town, both strove constantly at promoting Airey’s career. Despite the cautious figure he presented to the world, Neave’s commitment to the political life was deep. In the eyes of his eldest child, Marigold, it bordered on an obsession and it was not just her father who was in its grip. At home, the talk in front of the children was almost exclusively of politics. ‘There might be some gossip about local people or something like that,’ she remembered, ‘but not hugely.’18 William recalled a friend remarking that ‘the Neaves are the only family I know who talk politics at breakfast.’19 ‘Politics concentrated [the thinking] of my parents so much,’ remembered Patrick. ‘As children, we felt we were supporters.’ Once they were old enough, when visitors arrived before their parents had descended, they ‘opened the door, introduced the guests – might be a minister, someone important, a constituent. We brought them into the sitting room, offered them a sherry and made small talk.’20
There were few interests outside of public life. When staying with his in-laws at Chillington, while
the others were off riding, walking or shooting, Airey would stay behind in the comfort of an armchair reading a newspaper or a book. According to Marigold, he ‘didn’t play games, didn’t play tennis. He didn’t play anything that I can think of.’ She came to think that ‘it would have done him a lot of good if he had. He ought to have had an outside interest. It all became a little too introspective, really.’ His single-mindedness brought success. But nonetheless, ‘It probably wasn’t very good for him.’
Airey’s absorption in politics extended to his social life. ‘He was not the sort of person who enjoys going to clubs or attending reunions,’ said Patrick. Nor, at this stage, did family life take up the couple’s time unduly. At the age of eight, Patrick and William were sent off down the same educational path trodden by their father: St Ronan’s Preparatory School, which had now moved from Worthing to Hawkhurst, then Eton. Marigold went to a local independent school run by nuns, St Mary’s, Wantage, when she was ‘about twelve or thirteen’. It was only a few miles away from where they lived, but as her mother spent much of her time in London supporting her father, she was sent as a boarder. She was ‘rather rebellious’ and it was awkward being the daughter of the local MP. She remembers being teased. ‘At thirteen you’re a bit sensitive, and I’d just arrived from London, and everybody else had been at the junior school and I hadn’t, and it was not easy. The dreadful French mistress – I was never any good at French – used to call me “my petite MP”, and I was always made to stand up and decline all the French verbs. I didn’t like that very much.’
The war had taught Neave to respect women for both their intellects and their moral courage. He had married a woman who had operated effectively in a man’s world. Yet neither he nor Diana pushed Marigold towards higher education and a challenging career. Instead, their attitude towards their daughter’s prospects was practically Victorian. Marigold ‘wasn’t encouraged to go anywhere’. She left school at sixteen and went to a crammer to get three A levels, which she managed in a single year. Thereafter, she got a job as a secretary at Queen magazine, the style bible of the Swinging Sixties. The very different world she had plunged into provoked Diana’s mild curiosity, ‘but my father I don’t think had a clue. It wasn’t a job that involved politics and therefore it wasn’t of any interest, really.’
Looking back, she ‘would have loved to have gone to university, loved to have done what my children did … But I think that marriage was always what they hoped for. With any luck, find a husband and be off their hands.’ And this is what she did, though subsequently through her own efforts she attended the Architectural Association, earned a degree in horticulture, took a postgraduate course in historical landscape, and with her husband Richard established a large and flourishing garden business.
The Neaves’ semi-detached approach to parenting extended to the boys. ‘You didn’t have a family where [the parents] endlessly watched every football match you were playing in,’ said Patrick. The same imagery was employed by William: ‘They were marvellous parents, but they weren’t hands-on [as] parents are nowadays, constantly at the rugby pitch shouting, “Come on, school!”’ One of Airey’s secretaries remembers him dictating a letter to one of the boys ‘amid a whole lot of other letters to constituents and so on.’ The couple would turn up at the major school events, however, and on one occasion Airey even took part in the fathers race on sports day. According to Patrick, Diana used to ‘dress up quite finely in very tight skirts’ and therefore ‘wasn’t quite prepared for the mothers and sons race’.
Neave was proud of his Eton education but it was not the crucial formative event that coloured the subsequent lives of some of its old boys. He did not conform to any of the popular stereotypes of the Old Etonian. When a senior Tory colleague, Tom King, was interviewed for this book, he had forgotten or never known that Neave was one. Infrequent though they may have been, the boys remember their father’s visits to Eton with pleasure. Patrick recalls one occasion which showed Neave’s fundamental decency and sensitivity. It was at the school’s Fourth of June celebrations, at the time of the 1963 Profumo scandal. In the street Patrick pointed out to his father a school contemporary, David, the son of the disgraced minister. ‘He went right up to him and had a friendly chat … I thought it was rather good that he should do that.’
The demands of politics meant that the children spent a lot of time with their grandparents. Neave’s father now played almost no part in his life. His mother was dead and Sheffield had married again. Instead, they spent happy summers at Chillington Hall. ‘My grandmother was very supportive, knowing that my parents were so busy with the constituency,’ said Patrick. ‘My grandfather was very keen that we should learn to ride and we were given ponies … with Chillington being so large and having stables and all that, we were in a very advantageous position to do all these activities, and the parents used to come up and see us between times.’
Later William formed a close attachment to his uncle Digby, born twelve years after Airey, who had married Ulla Schmidt, a Dane, and moved to the outskirts of Paris, where he worked in the reinsurance business. The couple were sociable and fun, close friends of the Anglo-French businessman Jimmy Goldsmith and his brother Teddy, and active in the Parisian artistic scene. William went to stay in school holidays and later, at his uncle’s suggestion, took a course in French civilisation at the Sorbonne. ‘Uncle Digby was always rather important to me,’ he said, ‘a great star, almost like a second father.’
Conversely, Digby and Ulla’s daughter Philippa came to hold her uncle in great affection. She knew him as a child when Airey and Diana would come to visit. She remembers someone who was ‘very quiet … quite grave … you wouldn’t jump up and sit on his knee, it wasn’t like that, but he paid attention to you. He really looked at you and spoke to you.’21 John Giffard, son of Diana’s brother John, remembered his uncle’s ‘dry sense of humour … light laugh and big smile. He wasn’t distant from us … a good family member.’22 When, after Eton and Southampton University, John decided to join the police, Airey ‘was one of the great supporters within the family … against my parents, who were horrified, and that was really nice.’ He told them ‘to stop being so silly about it … it was a good thing that people from all backgrounds should be joining the police.’ His faith was justified and Giffard ended up Chief Constable of Staffordshire Police.
In their marriage, Airey and Diana created a space for themselves that they did not feel needed the children’s presence to be complete. Patrick remembers an occasion when the couple went on holiday à deux on the Continent, leaving him at Chillington. ‘I caught a bug and my grandmother was very worried. They didn’t know whether to get in touch with my parents. They decided not to. I had to suffer in silence.’ However, displaying a stoicism that Airey and Diana would surely have approved of, he concluded that ‘they couldn’t have done anything anyway, and by the time they got back [the bug] had disappeared.’
Sometimes the Neaves’ hands-off approach could raise eyebrows. As a young man, William met an attractive woman at a party who introduced herself as a former temporary secretary to Airey. She told him, ‘I was aged eighteen and I was delegated the duty to take you to Charing Cross station to go to prep school for the first time. I put you on the train and I think it was the worst experience I ever had.’ She ‘vowed then that if I ever had any children I would never, ever’ send them away to school.
William says now, ‘Do I remember that? No. Did it do me any harm? No.’ Like his siblings, he defends his parents’ apparent remoteness from the daily lives of their children as a matter of time and place: ‘It was a different generation and that’s how it worked in those days … I don’t doubt that they loved all their children immensely but they didn’t turn round and say so …’ Instead, they gave him ‘immense freedom’, the liberty to make his own choices and learn from his own mistakes.
As the boys approached manhood and Marigold married and began to have children, the family seems to have grown much cl
oser. The boys spent almost every weekend at the Old Vicarage and Marigold would visit regularly with Richard, and her children, Kate and Edward. It was perhaps the case that Airey found that he needed to see his children as grown-up equals before intimacy and warmth were possible. Certainly the devotion of Marigold, Patrick and William to their parents’ memory is profound and genuine. However unusual the Neaves’ approach to child-rearing might seem to contemporary eyes, they were clearly doing something right.
Airey’s punishing work rate was combined with a careless attitude to his health. He took no exercise, smoked heavily and drank more than he should have done. His wartime books reveal a close relationship with alcohol and there are indications that, in the post-war years, his intake may have gone beyond the almost ritual consumption of gin, whisky, cognac and wine that was routine in the masculine realms of the military, the law and parliament. This became a cause for family concern and, according to Marigold, ‘He did at one point have a minor drink problem.’ It was unsurprising that he developed high blood pressure and cardiac problems. In September 1959, just as a general election was looming, he had a heart attack at the then constituency home, Grove House South. He recovered sufficiently to take part in the campaign and on 8 October retained his seat with an increased majority of 10,972. Nationally, Macmillan’s decision to go early had been triumphantly vindicated. The Conservatives now had a hundred-seat majority.
The Man Who Was Saturday Page 19