However, the coronary had cast a shadow over what should have been a bright future. He was now under doctor’s orders to alter his habits. In his usual conscientious fashion he strove to lose weight. He did not find it easy. Patrick remembers a rowing machine which was stored in his room in Crescent Mansions. However, ‘I don’t think he was terribly enthusiastic about it, because it stayed under my bed all the time.’ Drink and cigarettes were definitely out. He stoically abandoned the Du Maurier cigarettes he had smoked steadily for decades and turned his back on the drinks tray and the wine cellar, thus depriving himself of a friendly prop to sustain him through the thousands of tedious official dinners and lunches that lay ahead. It was difficult, and it did not get any easier. ‘Unable to enjoy life despite many advantages,’ he wrote many years after the heart attack.23 ‘It is hard never to drink or smoke and to work so hard for so little.’ He was quieter now, his spirit apparently dimmed. Before, according to Patrick, he had been ‘very lively … very amusing’. Afterwards, as the above entry attests, he was often sombre, pessimistic and introspective. Brushes with death force reflection on life’s purpose, the audit of what has been achieved and what has been left undone, and a resolve to make the most of the time that is left. He was determined to get back into the swim and press on with what might be only a short career.
It was not to be. Some time towards the end of October 1959 he went to see the government Chief Whip, Edward Heath, at his office in the Commons. In his monumental 1993 biography of Heath, the political historian John Campbell gave an account of what happened next. Heath, he wrote, ‘made a lifelong enemy of Airey Neave … who returned to Westminster after suffering a coronary, expecting to be welcomed back with congratulations on his recovery, only to be told bluntly by Heath that he was “finished”. Neave never forgave him, but took his revenge in 1975.’24 The story stuck. When Heath died in July 2005, the Daily Telegraph obituary stated that ‘Airey Neave … had hated Heath since 1959,’ and gave a slightly different version of the same anecdote as the reason.
It is easy to see how the story gained traction, with its satisfying narrative of a throwaway snub resulting in nemesis. It helped to explain what drove Neave’s brilliant campaign to unseat Heath and enthrone Thatcher all those years later. Marigold is prepared to give it some credence, speculating that Heath might have made some observation about her father’s fitness which he might have taken the wrong way. ‘I thought it was all rather silly,’ she said. ‘My father was sometimes quite quick to take offence. And I think that might have been one of the times.’
There are reasons to question the story, however. Heath himself vehemently denied it. Neave never said anything in public about the meeting. In the diaries he began to keep thirteen years later – a period in which his relations with Heath were crucial – there is no mention of an encounter which, if it had taken place, would surely have still resonated. The evidence there suggests that, however it came about, Neave’s return to the back benches turned out to be fortuitous. ‘Diana drove me to 149 Harley Street to see Dr Graham Hayward,’ he wrote in August 1973. ‘He was very impressed at my recovery … he would have expected me to die had I remained in office …’25
Whatever the truth, by the end of 1959 he was once again at the foot of the greasy pole and years of frustration lay ahead.
9
Darkest Hour
On New Year’s Day 1973, Airey Neave confided to his diary that at the start of the previous year he had ‘had serious doubts about remaining in Parliament. After twenty years in the House, it did not seem that I should ever achieve very much.’ The defeatist mood persisted. Six weeks later, he was ‘extremely depressed’ and had decided that the ‘next General Election will be my last.’1 He was ‘absolutely fed up with being the scapegoat for everything. It is time I became a professional writer and gave up this arduous, thankless task for ever. I have long wanted to do so but have been persuaded that in some old-fashioned way it was my “duty”. I have no political future but a literary one.’2 When he wrote these words he had just turned fifty-seven and clearly believed that his political life was mostly behind him. In better spirits, he might have judged that his achievement was not so slight. After his ministerial career jumped the tracks, he had pressed on, a hard-working backbencher who butted obstinately against the ramparts of official laziness and indifference on behalf of his constituents and a number of good causes.
Their nature revealed a stubborn decency and a determination to see justice done. At the start of his parliamentary career, he had taken up the cause of about 6,000 Britons who had been placed in Nazi concentration camps, among them Mary Lindell. Nineteen years after the end of the war, thanks in large part to his continual representations, they finally received the compensation that had long before been awarded to French and Belgian victims of the Nazis.
He fought on behalf of widows who had married war veterans after they had left the services and were therefore denied a pension. In 1965, he also introduced a private member’s bill to award pensions to very old and often impoverished people who, because they had made no voluntary contributions to pre-war schemes, had been excluded when the Labour government introduced the National Insurance programme in 1948. He took up the cause on behalf of two constituents in 1964 when the Conservatives were still in power. Over the next six years he made forty-three speeches and interventions in the House. His style was low-key and courteous. He did not speak particularly well, a definite handicap in parliament. He made up for it by a grasp of statistics and detail. Beneath the old-fashioned manners, though, there was real passion and iron determination. In February 1969, he told members that ‘when I started there were 250,000 of these people … there are now 125,000. Four hundred of them are dying each week. This is a terrible thing to have to talk about, in the House or anywhere else.’3 It was more than five years before justice was done, and his efforts won praise from both sides of the House. The implacable processes of bureaucracy and the mean-spirited responses trotted out by ministers sometimes stirred him to lose his customary cool. His persistent questioning of a minister over the case of a seventy-one-year-old woman who had been denied a pension because she had not kept up her National Insurance contributions while detained for nine years in a Soviet labour camp earned him a rebuke from the Speaker.4
Neave was determined that the lessons of the war should be learned and not forgotten. He was anxious that diplomatic expediency should not be allowed to sanitise history and that the Soviet Union’s war crimes should be remembered along with those of Germany. In the face of furious Soviet denial, and to the annoyance of the Foreign Office, he agitated for years for a memorial to the thousands of Poles murdered by the Russians in Katyn forest near Smolensk and elsewhere in the spring of 1940, part of a systematic programme to annihilate the Polish officer class and ‘bourgeoisie’. After many frustrations, a site commemorating them and making clear who was responsible was finally opened at Gunnersbury, West London, in 1976.
Neave’s sense of justice was impartial. From early 1970, he began campaigning for the release of Rudolf Hess from Spandau prison in West Berlin, where he had been held since 1947. Hess was one of the defendants to whom Neave had served indictments at Nuremberg. Peering at him through the window in the cell door, he had been shocked ‘to see his worn figure … I immediately felt sorry for him.’5 When Neave, together with other MPs of all parties and Hess’s wife and son, began their campaign, the old Nazi was seventy-nine. Neave did not doubt his devotion to Hitler and the party. However, he had not been found guilty of war crimes or crimes against humanity. Neave felt decency demanded it was time to let him go. Spandau was controlled by the Four Powers and Moscow was implacably opposed to freeing Hess. He outlived Neave, hanging himself in his cell in 1987.
Neave was his own man, with a personal code that meant his views could never be taken for granted. On capital punishment, he stood on the right of the party; on immigration, on the left. Unlike some of his back-bench colleagues, he wa
s unaffected by imperial nostalgia or notions of British or white superiority. Nor was he susceptible to the weird charm that Enoch Powell exercised over some Conservatives. In the period the diaries cover, Powell was already well down the path that would lead ultimately to his deserting the party and joining the Ulster Unionists. Neave watched his progress with pity, tinged with contempt. The Wolverhampton Wanderer, he believed, talked ‘rubbish’, sounded like ‘a complete fool’ and would ‘end up a tragic figure’.6 When, in August 1972, Idi Amin expelled Uganda’s Asians, right-wing Conservative MPs – and some from the Labour benches – fought the Heath government’s decision to open the doors to the 27,000 refugees who held British or Commonwealth citizenship. Neave supported the government move and worked hard to ensure their welfare on arrival.
His war experiences had stimulated a particular interest in the well-being of those whom conflict had swept from their homes. In 1970, he was appointed British delegate to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The head was Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, a polyglot Harvard graduate, intellectual and socialite. He was also spiritual head of the world’s Nizari Ismailis, the Islamic sect to which many Ugandan Asians belonged. The conservative Englishman and the international jet-setter got on well and Neave was an effective advocate for the UNHCR, intervening many times between 1970 and 1975 to secure British aid for its projects.
None of these activities paid the school fees. With the termination of his ministerial career, he looked around for ways to bring in money. He could not live on the royalties from his books, respectable though they were, and he could never hope to command high fees at the Bar. Like many an ex-Tory minister before him, he cast around for directorships in firms where his parliamentary presence would be an asset. Family connections came to his aid.
John Thompson was a long-established engineering firm based in Wolverhampton. In the mid-1950s they were awarded a contract to provide boilers and pressure vessels for a giant nuclear power station being built on the eastern bank of the Severn, near Berkeley, Gloucestershire, which went into commission in 1962. Sir Edward Thompson lived at Gatacre Park and was a neighbour of the Giffards at Chillington. After Neave recovered from the heart attack, he was appointed the firm’s legal and parliamentary adviser and given a seat on the main board. When John Thompson was taken over by another engineering firm, Clarke Chapman, the arrangement continued. The post came with an office in Tavistock House, Bloomsbury, and a secretary, valuable perks at a time when support resources at Westminster were minimal.
It was an excellent fit. Neave’s employers were getting someone with close connections to the nuclear industry, and his keen amateur interest in science gave him a degree of technical expertise. He was proud of his scientific bent, remarking in his diary after a lunch at the Royal Society (‘nice, clever people’) that he ‘found I could keep my end up’. His competence was recognised in 1963, when he became a governor of Imperial College. In 1965, he joined the House of Commons select committee on science and technology, which he chaired for five years from 1970. In that time it produced four important papers which shaped government policy. Among them was a report on birth control which recommended that it be available free on the NHS to anyone who wanted it. Another dealt with an issue in which he had a personal and financial interest – the question of which reactors the government should buy for the country’s nuclear power stations.
There were other directorships, but the affairs of John Thompson and Clarke Chapman were Neave’s main preoccupations.7 He showed the same persistence in promoting their interests as he brought to everything, yet was scrupulous in declaring the connection and there was nothing insincere about his devotion. He believed in supporting British firms over foreign competitors and shielding them where necessary from international competition. In this respect, as in others, his outlook was in marked contrast to what came to be called Thatcherism. None of his colleagues, then or later, regarded him as an ideologue, including Thatcher herself. ‘It was difficult to pin down Airey’s politics,’ she wrote. ‘I did not consider him ideologically a man of the right. He probably did not look at the world in those terms.’8
Europe was already a divisive – potentially an explosive – issue. Heath’s great ambition was to lead Britain into the European Economic Community, and in January 1973, twelve years after the first application had been made, he succeeded. Neave was in favour of European union as a means of diminishing the potential for future war, as well as opening up new vistas to the British economy. Its capacity for bureaucratic expansion into political space was not then so evident. His devotion to parliamentary democracy, and doughty defence of its rights against the executive, make it unlikely that he would have seen the increasing power of Brussels as benign.
When, after his death, colleagues and journalists looked back over Neave’s career, it was sometimes suggested that he had carried his intelligence connections into civilian life. Later, a novel and a TV series took the idea much further, presenting him as a sinister figure with a hand in all sorts of murky, deep state operations. The known facts are less dramatic. It would have been surprising if he had not kept in touch with former colleagues and done informal favours for the security services. There is also some evidence that he played a small part in one of the great spy stories of the age.
Greville Wynne had been brought up poor in a mining village in South Wales. He trained as an electrical engineer, attending night classes at Nottingham University, where he joined the Officer Training Corps and, according to his own account, attracted the attention of the security services by alerting them to a German agent operating at his workplace, the Ericsson telephone factory.9 He was recruited by MI5 and spent the war snooping on suspected subversives. Afterwards, he set himself up as a middle man representing British engineering companies on the Continent. In the mid-1950s, he was contacted by his old MI5 controller, who was now working for MI6. He obliquely offered Wynne a chance to get back into the game, working behind the Iron Curtain.
Wynne, although by now successful, wealthy and reasonably happily married with a young son, accepted eagerly. As he observed in his engaging autobiography, ‘you become to a greater or lesser extent addicted to the cliché situations of third-rate fiction, all the paraphernalia of dead-letter drops, secret rendezvous and the ever present element of danger. Once you’ve had a taste of that, you can never be entirely happy living a safe, complacent and prosperous normal life.’ Wynne needed commissions to act as the agent for UK companies to sustain his espionage activities behind the Iron Curtain. Among the firms he represented was John Thompson. ‘The late Airey Neave, one of the firm’s directors at the time, approved my appointment,’ he wrote in 1983.
Wynne went on to act as one of MI6’s chief contacts with Oleg Penkovsky, a senior officer in Soviet military intelligence, who for a while was the West’s most important intelligence asset. From 1961 until his arrest in October 1962, Penkovsky passed on information about Soviet missiles, nuclear plans and the identities of spies, until he was unmasked by KGB double agents working in Washington. Wynne’s name soon emerged. He was arrested at a trade fair in Budapest and sentenced to eight years in a Soviet prison. Penkovsky was executed by firing squad. Wynne served one year of his sentence in appalling conditions before Britain arranged for him to be swapped for the Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale.
Neave could hardly have been unaware of Wynne’s MI6 connection when he signed off on his recruitment. Whether his involvement went further than that is unknown. Neave’s diaries hint at some sort of intelligence role in the post-war years. On 31 October 1973, he recorded a conversation with Diana in which they ‘discussed the growing demoralisation of the country which we believe is due to Communist activity’. He went on, ‘I am wondering how to act and wish I were back in the Intelligence Service.’10
Whatever the nature of his connection, by the 1970s it seems to have been tangential. His soft voice and retiring manner gave him a conspiratorial air which came in usef
ul when he was managing Margaret Thatcher’s leadership bid. It fuelled speculation that he was closer to the security services than was perhaps the case. If he was a spy, he left little trace of his activities. There is nothing in his diaries, and no family recollections, to suggest a secret parallel life. Neave may have thought it amusing, and possibly beneficial, to leave the illusion intact.
His remarks about the Communist menace might suggest an affinity with the movements that sprang up in the period pledged to take charge in the event of industrial strife causing a breakdown in law and order. In the last years of Heath’s premiership, the spirit of 1926 was in the air and the prospect of a general strike seemed real. Then, as before, there was a mood among sections of the middle classes to step in to keep the country running. Neave became tangled up in this when, perhaps unwisely, in June and July 1974 he attended two meetings with the right-wing backbencher Carol Mather, who had served in the prototype SAS and also as an intelligence officer. Mather had set up a ‘study group’ of eight MPs to look at the creation of a citizen volunteer force to impose law and order. Neave described it as a ‘civil protection group’.11 The episode chimed with the eruption onto the national stage of General Sir Walter Walker, a fire-eating soldier of the old school who had just retired after holding several senior posts at NATO. Walker publicly called for a ‘dynamic, unifying’ leadership above politics to ‘save the country from the Communist Trojan Horse in our midst’. He then took over the leadership of a movement called ‘Unison’, which claimed a 100,000-strong membership, all raring to step in if the unions brought the country to a standstill. Simultaneously, the existence of another band of patriots was revealed, an organisation called Great Britain 75, which was headed by the founding father of the Special Air Service, David Stirling. Both quickly fizzled out, but they played to the excitable mood of the time, and press and saloon bar were soon abuzz with speculation that a right-wing coup was afoot.
The Man Who Was Saturday Page 20