He made no attempt to thrust himself into the limelight with a premature display of fireworks. As in the Oxford Union, he was content at first to watch and listen. He ‘took the quiet but persistent way’, remembered Anthony Eden. ‘He attended the House regularly and modestly, but missed nothing. Pains and patience are needed to learn the way at Westminster. Heath had both.’3 In his first five years in the Commons Heath only missed ten divisions, and he had been paired in six of those. He put a parliamentary question in May 1950 – on an issue relating to civil aviation on which he could reasonably be held to have some expert knowledge – but did not make a speech in the House of Commons until 26 June. When he finally spoke, however, it was to considerable effect and on the subject with which his parliamentary career was above all to be identified: that of Europe.
It can be argued that Heath would never have become so irrevocably committed to the cause of Britain in Europe if he had not been entrusted by Harold Macmillan with the negotiations for British entry in the early 1960s. He was by nature strikingly single-minded and, if he had been given some other task, would have pursued it with similar dedication. But from the time that he had fought his way across Germany in 1945 he had felt passionately that war in Western Europe must never be allowed to happen again. The only way by which he felt this could be achieved with certainty was by tying Britain, France and Germany into a union so inextricable that war would become not merely inconceivable but impossible. Britain had to be part of such a group, not just to cement it but to lead it; as the Empire disintegrated British influence in the world would inevitably be diminished; only by entering Europe would the British be able to retain that position in the world, economic as well as political, to which they were accustomed. When colleagues suggested that any European Union, if it were truly to be a force in the world, would have to involve a possibly unacceptable sacrifice of national sovereignty on the part of its members, he brushed the arguments aside. The word ‘federalism’ held no terrors for him and he envisaged a Europe where, in the long term, all important decisions, whether on foreign policy, economics, defence or social policies, would be made in common, without any individual member state being able to frustrate the ambitions of the others. ‘The nation state is dead,’ he would say. ‘What has sovereignty to do with anything in the twentieth century?’4 But though these were his private views, he was still cautious about pressing them openly unless he was certain that he was addressing a sympathetic audience. One can feel pretty sure that he did not express himself very forcibly on the subject when, in the summer of 1950, he was taken by another Conservative MP, John Rodgers, to lunch in the South of France with that arch-imperialist and enemy of British association with Europe, Lord Beaverbrook. ‘I liked your young friend,’ Beaverbrook told Rodgers after the meeting. ‘I think he should go far.’ (Beaverbrook’s favourable view of Heath did not survive the discovery of his true views on Europe. By August 1962 he was telling Alec Martin: ‘If you meet that young man Heath, of whom I once formed a good opinion, please tell him to look westward.’)5
In 1950, his dream of a united Europe with Britain at its heart seemed infinitely remote. The Labour Government had refused to take part in the conference that drafted the treaty setting up the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Heath was dismayed. ‘A very short-sighted and, for the United Kingdom, an immensely damaging decision,’ he judged it. ‘It was quite simply an abrogation of leadership.’6 The Conservatives, if only to be seen to oppose, were formally critical of the Labour policy, but Heath knew well that many of his colleagues were sceptical about the merits of European union and that the heir-apparent to the visibly crumbling Churchill, Anthony Eden, was quite as anxious to preserve full British sovereignty as any Labour minister. But though he knew that he was swimming against the tide, Heath never ceased to press the European cause when any opportunity arose. In his constituency he was as likely to talk of Germany and the need to bring it back into the comity of nations as to offer more orthodox fare about cripplingly high taxes or stultifying controls. When he visited Germany in the Whitsun recess of 1950 he was both exhilarated and alarmed by the pace of recovery; what was already a high priority in his mind took on fresh urgency. And when in June 1950 the House debated the Schuman Plan, the blueprint for European unity conceived by Jean Monnet and accepted in principle by both Germany and France, Heath saw the opportunity to make his maiden speech on a subject about which he was an authority and which he had passionately at heart.
Heath was exceptionally good at expounding complex issues with clarity and objectivity; he could produce apparently impromptu after-dinner speeches or memorial addresses which were as amusing or as moving as the occasion could demand; but he rarely excelled with the parliamentary set-piece. His maiden speech was one of the exceptions. For fourteen minutes he pleaded with the Government to take the Schuman Plan seriously and to join in its formulation before it became set in a rigid structure which might not suit our national interests. This was an opportunity which might never recur; to bind Germany into a peaceful Europe and to ensure that the voice of Britain was heard loudly in the creation of this new union. ‘It was said long ago in the House’, he concluded, ‘that magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom. I appeal tonight to the Government to follow that dictum and to go into the Schuman Plan to develop Europe and to co-ordinate it in the way suggested.’7
The Government, of course, did not follow that dictum, nor did Heath expect them to. Even the most sceptical of Labour members, however, were impressed by his authority and obvious sincerity. His own colleagues were still more enthusiastic. The content of Heath’s message was not really to Eden’s taste but he still wrote appreciatively: ‘Warm congratulations on a very capable and debating maiden speech. The House enjoyed it very much; so did I.’ Heath wrote in his memoirs that this note gave him ‘immense pleasure’.8 His own career as leader of the party might have run more smoothly if he had himself written rather more such messages to backbenchers hungry for a little encouragement from on high.
It was, however, not as a pro-European but as a committed member of the liberal wing of the party that Heath made an early mark. More than most of his colleagues he was possessed by a strong social conscience. He had been brought up in an era of mass unemployment and he felt that any government which condoned it was committing a crime against the country which it ruled. Many years later, when Heath was prime minister, the then Minister of Housing and Local Government, Peter Walker, wanted him to appoint a 26-year-old as chairman of one of the New Towns in the north of England. Heath was sceptical but asked Walker to bring his protégé along to Number 10. ‘Do you really know the north-east?’ he asked the young man. He took him up to his flat and pointed out a painting by John Cornish of a miner slumped semi-conscious at the bar of a grim Durham pub. ‘That’s the north-east!’ said Heath. ‘If I appoint you, do you think you can see that man and his children have a rather better quality of life in the future than he and his family had in the past?’9
The instincts of youth were reinforced by his experiences during the war. The men beside whom he had fought in France and Germany were now the dockers and the miners who would confront him when he was prime minister. The sense of common purpose and national unity which had existed during the Second World War could and must be revived. There was such a thing as society. The issues which were in time to separate him so starkly from Margaret Thatcher were partly personal, but it should never be forgotten that they were also separated by a very real and deep ideological divide. Throughout his life Heath was repelled by the standards of unbridled capitalism and the defeatist philosophy of laissez-faire, with which, unfairly or not, he identified Margaret Thatcher. ‘I fear that to place one’s faith in some invisible hand, rather than to grapple with problems with determination, is a failure of the human spirit,’ he told a young Conservative who questioned his political philosophy. ‘What distinguishes man from animals is his desire and his ability to control and to shape his environment.’10
The ardently left-wing trade-union leader, Jack Jones, once described