Edward Heath. Philip Ziegler

minister, resigned in 1959, he was told bleakly that his political career was over. ‘Airey deeply resented the way he felt he had been discarded and the way it had been done,’ remembered Margaret Thatcher’s future minister, Norman Fowler. Fifteen years later Neave got his revenge. Only somebody who had been present at the original interview could tell how justified his resentment really was. Another version has it that it was alcohol rather than illness that had forced Neave’s retirement and that Heath’s harshness was therefore justified. The story shows, however, that no Chief Whip, however tactful and emollient, could do his job properly without making some enemies along the way.¹⁵

      More often, however, Heath was trying to persuade members not to retire at a time when it might prove damaging to the party. When the famous former fighter pilot ‘Laddie’ Lucas reported that he felt his employment as managing director of the White City stadium was stopping him from doing a proper job as an MP, Heath replied that there had been no complaints from his constituents and that ‘as it would be very difficult for anybody else to hold his seat, it was his duty to carry on’. Lucas temporarily agreed but, two months later, wrote from holiday in Italy to say that he had finally decided to resign. ‘Italy seems to have a fatal effect on everyone’s ideas of both love and duty!’ wrote Heath resignedly.¹⁶ Sometimes he was more successful. Derick Heathcoat-Amory, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, told Heath late in 1958 that he wanted to retire and ‘spend his declining years in some useful form of service’ (a curious reflection on his estimation of his actual job). Heath persuaded him that it was his duty to soldier on, at least until the next election.¹⁷

      Another desirable quality for a Chief Whip is to be invariably equable. Here Heath was less than perfect. He always suffered from a short temper and was apt to explode if opposed in any way which he felt pig-headed and unreasonable. ‘He was fratchety as Chief Whip,’ said one not particularly rebellious member. ‘He can be very huffy if you don’t agree with him.’ Humphry Berkeley, a left-wing Tory backbencher, was lunching with a friend in the Carlton Club in 1956, discussing the capital punishment bill which was then being debated in the Commons. Heath joined them and tried to persuade them to accept the compromise proposal supported by the Government, which retained the death penalty but only for four categories of murder. He failed, whereupon, according to Berkeley, he ‘became abusive; he called us soft and then relapsed into a sullen silence, refusing to join us for coffee afterwards…We were shocked at this display of anger and rudeness on the part of the Government Chief Whip.’¹⁸ The anecdote is the more striking because Heath’s personal conviction was that the death penalty should be abolished. It was another example of his belief that a Chief Whip could have no views of his own, or at least none that he would own to publicly. It was also uncharacteristic: the explosion of bad temper was not unheard of but, at this stage of his career at least, the sustained sulk was unusual. He must have been in an exceptionally fratchety mood that day.

      ‘You’ll remember asking last Saturday what I thought about a certain person’s private affairs,’ the veteran Tory politician, Harry Crookshank, wrote mysteriously. He recommended an approach to the Queen’s private secretary.¹⁹ It was but one of many such covert communications. Heath constantly had to enquire into the private affairs of one person or another, and usually found the task distasteful. Peter Baker, the member for South Norfolk, was an alcoholic whose businesses had failed badly. He tried to persuade Heath that he was now a reformed character but the Deputy Chief Whip, as Heath then was, insisted he should resign. Baker refused, though promising not to stand at the next election. ‘What is to be done?’ asked the Prime Minister. Nothing, replied Heath, ‘short of guiding his hand to sign an application for the Chiltern Hundreds,^* which would have been particularly dangerous as he is in a Nursing Home under the care of a doctor’. Eventually Baker was charged with forgery and sent to prison.²⁰

      Another scandal erupted in 1965, when Alec Home was Prime Minister. Anthony Courtney, a Tory MP, had been photographed in Moscow – presumably by the KGB – in flagrante with an attractive Intourist guide. Courtney went to see Heath and found him ‘wholly unsympathetic’ and showing ‘a complete absence of that human quality of personal involvement which to me at any rate is the mark of true leadership towards a colleague in trouble’. He does, indeed, seem to have been unusually disobliging. If Courtney insisted on making a personal statement in the House, Heath said, he could not expect to get any support from the Government. He should go quietly. Heath always found it hard to understand or condone the sexual misdemeanours of others but in most cases he did his best to be sympathetic. On this occasion it seems probable that Courtney had been given a damning report by MI5 and that Heath had been advised to have nothing to do with him.²¹

      ‘It was commonly believed’, wrote the future Chairman of the Conservative Party, Edward du Cann, ‘that his four years as Chief Whip had given him a healthy contempt for his fellow members of parliament in the Conservative party.’ Certainly he had little respect for the Crouches and Courtneys of this world but ‘contempt’ is too strong a word to describe his attitude towards the rank and file of the party. His time as Chief Whip did, however, foster a conviction that members were cannon fodder, to be deployed according to the needs of the Government and without much consideration for their personal feelings. When Peter Walker was 22, Heath came to address his constituency party. He told its members that they should not be worried about Walker’s youth: ‘Be assured that when he gets into the House of Commons I shall, as Chief Whip, have no difficulty in guiding him.’ He no doubt meant it as a joke but, like many of his jokes, it misfired: the audience was not particularly amused and Walker was furious. Joke or not, the remark conveyed something of Heath’s true feelings: it was for him to guide, it was the duty of members to be guided. This cast of mind was not to make things easier for him when in due course he became leader of the party.²²

      There was a noticeable change of style when Heath took over as Chief Whip. Buchan-Hepburn had devoted what Heath felt to be a disproportionate amount of his time to ensuring that the requisite number of MPs passed through the appropriate lobby. Heath saw the importance of this function but felt that it was still more important to ensure that the Prime Minister and Cabinet were at every point fully aware of the feelings within the party. In his biography John Campbell observed that Heath had delegated less responsibility to his deputy, Martin Redmayne, than Buchan-Hepburn had been willing to grant him. ‘Greater’, wrote Heath in the margin. Up to a point this was true. Redmayne was left in charge of operations on the floor of the House to an extent which Heath had never been. But this says more about Heath’s order of priorities than his opinion of his number two. In his memoirs he praised Redmayne as an ‘excellent deputy’ who did a fine job looking after the daily machinery in the House of Commons, but in an unguarded interview, the text of which survives in his archive, he remarks that, as Chief Whip, he was much more concerned with policy than about ‘chasing people in the House of Commons’. Martin Redmayne, he went on, ‘did all the chasing, which he enjoyed. He was really a military type, he owned a sports shop, and he was really very dim.’²³

      The Chief Whip was not formally a member of the Cabinet but Heath was present at almost every meeting and increasingly behaved as if he belonged there as of right. He saw this as being a perquisite of his office, not a tribute to him personally. Against Campbell’s statement that Willie Whitelaw had never sat in a Cabinet before 1970, he scrawled ‘Chief Whip’. Under Eden, and later still more under Macmillan, Heath intervened in Cabinet not just to report on the feeling in the party but to make points of policy. In a discussion of the Tory manifesto in the summer of 1959 R. A. Butler urged the inclusion of a pledge to revise the laws relating to betting and gambling. ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Macmillan. ‘We already have the Toby Belch vote. We must not antagonise the Malvolio vote.’ Everyone chuckled dutifully. ‘Then’, remembered Butler, ‘the Chief Whip, ever business-like and forceful, intervened by pointing out that we had committed ourselves to such reforms.’ That settled the matter. Eden appreciated his abilities and valued his advice: ‘I have never known a better equipped Chief Whip,’ he wrote. ‘A ready smile confirmed a firm mind.’²⁴

      A majority of fifty-nine meant that the policing of the lobbies, however much Redmayne might have enjoyed it, could be reasonably relaxed. ‘The party is not vociferous about anything,’ Heath told Eden after a meeting