Edward Heath. Philip Ziegler

Tory Party from the ruins left by the 1945 election. He knew that several of the cleverest and most ambitious of the young Conservatives – Iain Macleod, Enoch Powell, Reginald Maudling – were already at work there; he longed to be doing the same thing himself and was uneasily conscious of the fact that they were snatching a lead over him in the race up the greasy pole of political advancement. Michael Fraser, a wartime friend, was another rising star in the department; Heath appealed to him but was told there was no vacancy or any prospect of one in the near future. By then he was already embarked on the road which he knew he would one day have to travel: the quest for a constituency. Early in 1947 he added his name to the approved list of prospective candidates held by Central Office. He had high hopes that, with his talents and qualifications, he would quickly be selected. By the standards of some would-be candidates he did indeed have a relatively easy passage, but he still suffered some disconcerting setbacks along the way.

      The first constituency to summon him for an interview was Ashford, in Kent. It went well, but when it came to the final selection the chairman said that they wanted a member who would apply himself wholeheartedly to the needs of the constituency. Would Heath promise that, if he was offered a job in any forthcoming Conservative government, he would turn it down? Heath would give no such undertaking; for him the main point of being in the House of Commons was the prospect it offered of serving in the government. Ashford rejected him, in favour of the Daily Telegraph journalist Bill Deedes. Deedes later said that he had been selected for the seat because he wore a tweed jacket for his interview while Heath wore a city suit. To this Heath retorted that, at the time, he didn’t even own a city suit.⁹ There may nevertheless have been something in what Deedes said. Though the reformers might be busily at work in London, in the shires the Tory Party was still a highly traditional if not reactionary body. The selectors in a largely rural constituency like Ashford would have wished their member, if not actually drawn from the landed gentry, at least to look and sound as if he were. Heath, with his suspect accent and unabashed lower-middle-class origins, was far from this ideal. The fact that he got through to the final round shows that any such prejudice was not held too seriously, but there could well have been an element of snobbishness in the final selection.

      When Rochester and Sevenoaks followed Ashford in preferring another man, Heath began to feel discouragement, but in September 1947 the constituency of Bexley, in north-west Kent on the fringes of London, was looking for a candidate. It was a Labour seat, which meant that competition for it would not be so intense as it had been for Ashford or Sevenoaks; on the other hand the sitting member, Ashley Bramall, had a majority of only 1,851, so it would not need too significant a swing to restore the seat to its traditionally Tory incumbent. Geographically it was ideally placed, being on Heath’s route from central London to Broadstairs. Best of all, the local party chairman, Edward Dines, was said to be looking for a candidate who was ‘not rich or grand but from an ordinary family’. His other criteria for an ideal candidate – that he should be young, well educated, versed in political science and a ‘local boy made good’ – seemed equally applicable to Heath; Broadstairs was not actually Bexley but it was in the same county and, as the crow flies, not much more than fifty miles away. Best of all, Dines thought that the fact Heath was a bachelor told in his favour; marriage and family could have distracted him from his constituency work. Heath sailed through the preliminary stages and, with two other possibles, faced the selection committee for a second time on 18 September. Gladys Whittaker was one of the selectors. ‘That half-smile of his is what I will always remember,’ she said many years later. ‘Of course, he was good on policy, but it is the smile that sticks in my mind. It was not the broad grin which we are used to from him now, but a shy kind of half-smile.’ The shy smile proved decisive. Heath was selected. The approval of the choice of candidate by the Association was a formality. Heath was asked whether he proposed to live in Bexley. He replied that, given the shortage of housing in the constituency and the easy access to it from both Westminster and Broadstairs, he did not think that this was necessary or even desirable. His argument was accepted without demur and on 7 November he was adopted as candidate without a dissenting vote.¹⁰

      This was only a start. The next general election might be more than two years away. Heath was confident that the tide was turning towards the Conservatives but far from sure that by then it would have moved far enough to gain him victory. ‘The landslide was so great that it is bound to be some time before there can be a complete changeover,’ he told Professor Winckler. ‘People don’t change their minds so quickly. It may take place before the next election; that will depend a good deal on the crisis and the economic situation, and how constructive the Tories can be. They have to win back a great deal of confidence before they can be certain of the result of an election.’¹¹ For him, the worst possible result would be if the Tories won the election but he failed to carry Bexley. Even if the constituency remained loyal he would be left fuming on the sidelines while his contemporaries established themselves in government. A swing great enough to return the Tories to power should also carry him into the House of Commons, but confident though Heath was in his own abilities he knew enough about the vagaries of politics to realise that the worst could happen.

      That, however, was a problem for the future. Earning his living until the next election was his most immediate preoccupation. Though he was never entirely fulfilled by his work in the Ministry of Civil Aviation – ‘I couldn’t get anything done,’ he said much later. ‘I was so impatient. You mustn’t go there hoping to change the world.’¹² – he had enjoyed his time there and would happily have stayed on for another couple of years. Masefield tried to persuade the establishment that this should be allowed but got nowhere: as an adopted candidate for parliament Heath must resign and resign at once. ‘I am exceedingly sorry to lose Mr Heath,’ Masefield concluded. ‘His work during the past year has been of the utmost value and on several occasions has been favourably commented on by the Minister.’¹³ For Heath it was back to the Oxford University Appointments Board. The first job vacant turned out to be that of sub-editor on the Church Times. He knew nothing of theology and had no experience as a journalist, promotion would be unpredictable because of the small size of the staff, the work seemed likely to be easy to learn but pretty dull: on the other hand the pay – £650 a year – was good, they were ‘very pleasant people’, and they did not seem to mind about the political connection provided his name was not publicly linked with the newspaper. ‘I am still waiting to see your name emblazoned over the Church Times,’ wrote a friend. He was to wait in vain. Heath’s main task was editing other people’s copy; when he did write pieces himself they were anonymous. The last thing he wanted, indeed, was to be too conspicuous. He had belatedly discovered that the Bexley selection committee had a rooted aversion to journalists. The Church Times, he protested, was too respectable to count as a real paper; the argument was accepted but he did not want to test the committee’s tolerance too severely.¹⁴

      John Trevisick, a reporter on the staff, felt that Heath had no real flair for journalism and tried to steer clear of serious writing. But he was quick to grasp the essentials of any problem and, when called on to do so, wrote with clarity and precision: ‘I have vivid memories of Heath being roped in to cover the Anglo-Catholic Congress – a really tough job…But he turned in a workmanlike précis of what he had heard, thus reflecting his ability.’¹⁵ His inexperience sometimes led him into blunders: he caused some consternation when, never having heard of the UMCA (the Universities Mission to Central Africa), he assumed it was a typing error and corrected it throughout to YMCA. But his real talent was for administration. Though his position in the hierarchy gave him no particular authority, another of his colleagues, Nicholas Bagnall, remembers that ‘after a couple of months he had us eating out of his hands. He did it by force of personality, mainly by making it obvious how hard he worked himself.’ The editor’s secretary was so impressed by his prowess that she told Bagnall: ‘Mark my words, Nicholas, that man will be prime minister one day.’ Bagnall was not prepared to go as far as that: ‘To the rest of us he simply didn’t look like Downing Street material: not nearly devious enough, we thought.’ Besides, the secretary in question, according to Bagnall, was in love with Heath. Heath, alarmed by her adoring looks, took Bagnall to a pub for a consultation. ‘What on earth shall I do about this woman?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think I was much help,’ Bagnall recorded. (When, many years later, he told this story to Mrs Thatcher,