It was, memorably, a very hot evening on June 18 1970 – although a shade cooler in the air-conditioned ninth floor hospitality salon of the Daily Mirror, still basking in its media leadership prime under the legendary Hugh Cudlipp. It was the night of the general election – an event at which Cecil Harmsworth King was not present, having been rapidly sacked from his Mirror Group chairmanship following an absurdly arrogant front-page bid to remove Harold Wilson from 10 Downing Street and replace him with Edward Heath – or anybody else, for that matter. Oddly enough, it was left to the British voters to deliver King’s bidding.
I was present that night in my role as industrial editor of the Daily Mirror; it was an unforgettable experience. The guests included, among other mighties, Jack Cohen, founder of Tesco, who spent the evening complaining about his workers and rejoicing as Heath gradually gained enough seats to displace Harold Wilson’s second Government. It was a moment which was to become a turning point in British politics: Ted Heath’s memorable Tory victory in 1970 was, in my view, the first step along the road to ending Clement Attlee’s 1945 post-war settlement. Indeed, that night paved the way for Thatcherism and, ultimately, Tony Blair. It brought to life the cliché “defining moment” in British political life – a moment from which the Labour Party is still trying to recover.
The principal merit of this latest account of Edward Heath’s life and significance, joining a long list of biographies, is not just the author’s claim to have produced the authorised version; more important is its opening of doors on previously private, even secret, papers. This book contains the best account so far of the 1970s when Heath’s Government performed the first massive Tory policy U-turn from Selsdon Man to an unparalleled attempt to work with the trade union movement. It came closer than anything before to a deal between the TUC and a Conservative government and one which Jack Jones (in his autobiography Union Man, published in 1986) offered this amazing description: “No Prime Minister either before or since could compare with Ted Heath in the efforts he made to establish a spirit of camaraderie with trade union leaders and to offer an attractive package which might satisfy large numbers of working people.”
An astonishing declaration, coming from Britain’s most radical and powerful trade union leader, the legendary head of the Transport & General Workers’ Union. Moreover, I know he meant it. That period was also a breaking point for Heath himself as he fought tenaciously against many in his own Cabinet to produce an early prototype social contract which Jones, in particular, was later to secure with Wilson after the collapse of Heath’s Government in February 1974.
The period of Heathism in 1972 and 1973 laid the foundation stone from which, I believe, Margaret Thatcher later emerged not merely to succeed the fallen Heath but to destroy everything her predecessor had attempted. She never forgot – nor forgave – Heath’s sympathies with the trade union cause; she despised him for that as he despised her for all she did afterwards. In his Cabinet before the 1974 general election Thatcher, along with Keith Joseph, tried to stop him going to the country on the ticket of “Who governs Britain?” She wanted an all-out fight against the miners – there and then.
Philip Ziegler’s authorised story is excellently researched, massively detailed (in 654 pages) and, though not inspired in writing style, an important book. Nothing better captures the extraordinary nature of Heath’s bid for a concordat with the trade unions than his description of Hugh Scanlon, president of the Amalgamated Engineering Union: “Hugh Scanlon has the clearest, firmest and, in many ways, most persuasive mind of all the trade union leaders I met. I seldom heard him produce an argument which could be lightly dismissed.” This is a direct quote from Heath’s own memoirs The Course of My Life (published in 1998) which Ziegler pointedly repeats.
Heath, in that period of 1972-73, came as close as any Prime Minister since Attlee to direct state intervention in the economy. The Industry Act of 1972 enabled first John Davies and then Peter Walker at the Department of Trade and Industry to take over a tottering Rolls Royce and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and help finance other industrial “lame ducks”. It led to the head of the CBI, Sir Campbell Adamson, suggesting that Heath “loved the trade unions more than the employers”. It was an extraordinary period in which the Heath government played a more interventionist role than anything contemplated during Tony Blair’s residence in Downing Street.
Yet it all collapsed, chiefly due to the Middle East crisis of September 1973 which quadrupled oil prices. Then came the miners’ pay dispute, a three day week, the miners’ strike and, ultimately, the 1974 general election producing a hung Parliament before returning Harold Wilson to Downing Street. The rest, we know, became Margaret Thatcher’s gloating platform in 1979.
So how does one explain this remarkable phase when a Conservative Prime Minister seemed to pull left-wing rabbits out of his yacht? He even had Harold Wilson taunting him for conducting “socialist” policies. Ziegler has no convincing answer. Yet I don’t criticise him for that. His subject remains an enigma wrapped in mystery to this day. Given Heath’s background, and psychological make up, this is hardly surprising.
Edward, Teddy or Ted, Heath, was born in 1916 – the same year as Harold Wilson – the son of a carpenter in Broadstairs, Kent, a working-class Tory with snobbish pretensions who developed a successful local building company. However, the major influence on young Teddy was his mother Edith whose father had been a gardener in a local wealthy home where Edith served as a maid. But his mother had drive and ambitions for her first child. Heath had a younger brother John but it was Teddy who received his mother’s love and attention.
Freudians would talk of an Oedipus complex and from the age of ten, as Ziegler records, the boy was already noted for “emotional austerity”. He didn’t mix with girls and reserved all emotional enthusiasm for music, and his mother. He went to a local grammar school where he won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Roy Jenkins and Denis Healey, though he showed no signs of sharing their politics. In fact, he became President of the Oxford Union as a moderate Conservative, highly critical of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement.
His principal interest outside politics was music and he contemplated a career as a professional musician. But the war intervened. He served with the Royal Artillery and after a short stint on the editorial staff of the Church Times decided to seek a political career, finding a Tory seat at Bexley in Kent where he was elected in 1950. Winston Churchill was still leading the Conservatives and took a fatherly interest in young Heath, giving him a job in the Whips’ Office where, in 1955, under Eden, he became Chief Whip during Suez. That is where he built his reputation as a potential leader. Under Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas Home he rose steadily as a competent minister, especially as Lord Privy Seal, where he negotiated the first moves for Britain’s entry into Europe – Heath’s political obsession.
He was taunted by some Tory colleagues about his bachelor status – and warned that it carried no advantages if he aimed for the top. Yet Heath steadfastly rejected all attempts to organise a marriage, even when he was Prime Minister and close to the famed concert pianist Moura Lympany, who was ready to marry him – but Heath turned her away with cold indifference. His relationships with women, except the mothering type, remained an embarrassing flaw, though they clearly helped facilitate his shudder of contempt every time the name Margaret Thatcher was mentioned. Ziegler believes Heath was not gay, simply sexually neutral. As for his politics, the enigma remains and is unlikely ever to be resolved: a mystery oddball Prime Minister has to be the epitaph.
