In tackling the life of Airey Neave I have leaned on two versions of who he was. The public one is laid out in the several memoirs he published based on his service in the Second World War. The other is contained in the voluminous diaries he kept covering crucial years in the last period of his political career. The frequent introspective and unsparing passages make it hard to believe they were written for anyone but himself. Thus I felt I had the basis for something like a reasonably authentic portrait: Neave as he would like to be seen – and Neave as he saw himself.
There is another very important viewpoint – Neave as he appeared to everyone else. Neave struck many of his contemporaries as inscrutable. The face he presented to the world was conventional and confident. This was to some extent an act. Behind the bland mask lay a very different personality: racked by insecurities, plagued by doubts and depressions and haunted by a sense of failure and underachievement. Studying his life confirmed for me the truth of the words of the country priest whom André Malraux met when serving with the Maquis in the mountains of south-eastern France. Asked what he had learned about humanity from the many confessions he had heard over the years, he gave the answer ‘The fundamental fact is that there is no such thing as a grown-up person.’
I find that answer moving and heartening. It is said to be a hazard of writing biography that familiarity breeds contempt and in the course of the research the author comes to loathe the relative stranger they blithely shacked up with at the start of the project. I am happy to say that for me the experience had the opposite effect. I came to like Neave a lot. He had his faults: vanity, touchiness, a dissatisfied nature. But they are greatly outweighed by his virtues: physical bravery – not in short supply among his generation – but also moral courage, quiet patriotism and a basic decency.
All came to an end in a shocking death at the hands of the forces he had been opposing in one way or another all his life. He led an interesting one, and his story has a satisfying curve. The adventures and achievements of his early career seemed to promise a glowing future. Instead, there followed years of frustration that sometimes brought him close to despair. Then, unexpectedly, the stars aligned to deliver a success that was all the more satisfying for its late arrival. He lived through a period of history which, though fairly recent, now feels curiously remote. What follows is an attempt to reanimate both him and his time.
Prologue
On Friday, 30 March 1979, change was in the air. For much of the month the weather had been cold and wet, but lately it had warmed up and in London the trees were in bud. The change of season matched a great political climacteric. Two days before, the Labour administration of James Callaghan had finally stumbled to an end after months of public-service strikes, already notorious as the ‘Winter of Discontent’. In five weeks, a general election would in all probability elect a Conservative government with, for the first time in British history, a woman at its head.
When Airey Neave woke up that morning he had every reason to savour the atmosphere of promise and renewal. As the man who had engineered Margaret Thatcher’s accession to the Conservative leadership, he had played a crucial part in great events. At the age of sixty-three, after a long wait and many disappointments, he was about to taste real power.
As a reward for his services, Mrs Thatcher had offered him any shadow portfolio he wanted. To the bafflement of many, he picked Northern Ireland. Political progress in Ulster was at a standstill and political violence a fact of everyday life. It seemed a masochistic choice. Neave saw it as a challenge – a last chance to bring off an achievement that would leave his mark in history. Since adolescence he had been opposing those he saw as the enemies of democracy – as a soldier, a prisoner of war, a Colditz escapee and an intelligence officer. The position of Secretary of State for Northern Ireland would put him in command of the latest phase of the struggle – Britain’s war against Irish terrorism. The thought gave him great satisfaction.
A pleasant weekend lay ahead. He would be spending it in his Abingdon constituency with his wife Diana in the Oxfordshire village of Hinton Waldrist, where they rented a wing of the Old Rectory. Before leaving, he had some business to attend to at his office in the House of Commons. At 9.30 a.m., he left the family flat at 32 Westminster Gardens, in Marsham Street SW1, telling Diana he would be back to collect her at 3.30 p.m. The big nine-storey block was built in the 1930s and the apartments were spacious and comfortable, an ideal London base for politicians and senior civil servants.
It was half a mile from the House, but Neave chose to drive. He had long since given up smoking and drinking, following a heart attack, but was notoriously averse to exercise and his health had given his wife and children frequent cause for concern. The car, a modest Vauxhall Cavalier supplied by the engineering firm whose interests he represented in parliament, was parked in a lot beside the flats.
The journey took a few minutes. He drove through the gates of New Palace Yard, next to Big Ben, then down the entry ramp to the underground car park. Having found a space, he took the lift to the ground floor and made his way to the offices of the Leader of the Opposition, a collection of cramped rooms in a corridor behind the Speaker’s chair in the House of Commons, for a 10 a.m. meeting of the Shadow Cabinet. At 11.40 a.m. he went back to his room together with Richard Ryder, the young de facto head of Mrs Thatcher’s private office, and they spent some time discussing the election campaign.* Ryder left, and for an hour and a half Neave and his secretary, Joy Robilliard, ‘discussed constituency weekend business, Saturday morning surgery, diary dates for the next month’.1 Then Neave asked her to inform the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police that ‘he would be leaving town at 3.30 p.m. for Hinton Waldrist.’ The Special Branch were kept informed of all his movements. However, that was the extent of his personal security arrangements, and he had turned down the offer of a police bodyguard.
At 1.30 he ‘announced that he would have something to eat in the House and then take a cab to his tailor.’ This was Tom Brown in Princes Street, Mayfair, where he had a 2 p.m. appointment. Neave had been getting his suits from the same venerable establishment since his schooldays at Eton, where the original shop sits in the High Street. Today he was having the first fitting for two suits he had ordered a few weeks before.
The measuring over, he took a taxi back to the House, then descended to the underground car park to collect his car. Miss Robilliard’s evidence to the police suggests it was unlikely that he inspected it before getting in, because although he was ‘fairly good about security of the vehicle’, he would ‘not be troubled by anything lying on the floor of the car. He never checked the exterior of the vehicle.’
He climbed behind the wheel of the light-blue company Cavalier, switched on the ignition and moved off towards the ramp that led up to the cobbles of New Palace Yard. At 2.58 p.m., the Palace of Westminster was shaken by a great explosion. Richard Ryder ran to the window of Mrs Thatcher’s office. Immediately below lay the smoking remnants of Neave’s Vauxhall, ‘just blown to smithereens’.2
Policemen and parliamentary journalists ran to the wreckage. Neave was lying back in the driver’s seat. His face was blackened and his clothing charred. The explosion had removed his right leg below the knee and shattered the left leg. His face was well known in the Westminster village. One of the journalists had been with him only the night before. Neave’s injuries were so bad that for a while no one recognised him. It took almost half an hour to free him from the debris and load him into an ambulance, which took him to Westminster Hospital, a mile away. He died eight minutes after getting there, just before Diana arrived.
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