It was in the Oxford Union, not the Conservative Association, that Heath first attained real prominence. He did not seem a particularly promising candidate for such a role. Physically he was unremarkable. Asked by David Frost how he would describe himself, Heath said that he was 5 feet 101/2 inches tall and ‘fairly lean’. He flattered himself; even as an undergraduate he verged on the portly. ‘Glad to hear you are getting some exercise,’ wrote a friend in 1936. ‘If you keep it up you should get rid of that fat.’ Though he kept the fat within the bounds of respectability for another forty years he habitually ate and drank too much and remained inelegantly solid. His face, recalled Philip Toynbee, was ‘soft and unformed’; his most impressive attributes were his striking blue eyes which in repose could seem detached, even glaucous, but when animated blazed with vehement excitement. His voice was powerful but unmelodious, his oratorical technique more that of the battering ram than the rapier. ‘Teddy Heath was born in the summer of 1916, some two years before the Tank,’ said the Oxford magazine Isis, when it nominated him its ‘Isis Idol’. ‘Lacking the thickness of skin of this early rival, he soon outstripped it in charm of manner, and has since proved its equal in force of utterance and ability to surmount obstacles.’ There was, indeed, something relentless about Heath’s public speaking; his weapons were a powerful memory, a mastery of the facts and a capacity to marshal and deploy them to best advantage. He saw the need to leaven this mass with a little humour but while he could be genuinely witty, particularly when in a small group of people whom he knew well, his more considered efforts to amuse often seemed laborious and were occasionally embarrassing. In 1938 Alan Wood, in another Oxford magazine, Cherwell, said that Heath was ‘the Union’s best speaker’ and that he succeeded ‘by the simple process of knowing more about the subject than his opponents’. He eschewed the flamboyant and rarely made any emotional appeal. Why did he think there was no place for public political passion, he was once asked. ‘I’ve always distrusted rhetoric and I still do,’ Heath replied.16
For his first few debates Heath wisely kept silent, content to listen and learn. His most important lesson came from the then Home Secretary, John Simon, who spoke for half an hour without a note while successfully dealing with every point of substance that had been raised. Heath, who had hitherto always written out in full every speech that he delivered, resolved that Simon’s was the proper way. For the next sixty years he regularly astonished his listeners by his ability to deliver long and carefully crafted speeches with apparent spontaneity. He had still not mastered the art, however, by the time he delivered his maiden speech in the Union, defending Britain against the charge that it was a declining power. His speech was praised by Isis as ‘extremely forcible and able’, but there was no feeling that a new star had been born. Solid worth rather than fireworks marked his contributions, though the tank to which he had been likened by Isis often figured in his performances. Ian Harvey, then President of the Union, praised his confidence but warned that ‘he must be careful not to appear too aggressive’.17
He first established himself as a major player in October 1937, when he led the opposition to a motion approving the Labour Party’s programme which was introduced by the then chairman of the party and future Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton. To Dalton’s indignation and against the normal temper of the house, the motion was defeated by forty votes; a result for which Heath’s speech was held to be largely responsible and which led to him being elected secretary to the Union at the end of the term. But though on this occasion he defended the National Government and took an impeccably Conservative line, it was becoming increasingly evident that he was not disposed blindly to accept party policy. He abhorred the doctrinaire and looked always for common ground that he could share with his political adversaries. He wrote a long essay for Roy Harrod on the Popular Front. ‘I think this is an excellent paper,’ wrote Harrod. ‘I feel there is a little too much tendency to tell the Socialists that they are really only Liberals or bound to become Liberals.’18 Throughout his life Heath believed that any Socialist open to reason was really only Liberal, and that any Liberal was close to the Conservative – or at least his own branch of Conservatism. He was constantly disillusioned by the discovery that most Socialists, indeed most Conservatives, were not open to reason and refused to join him on the common ground where he was rationally ensconced. Each time he believed that such obduracy could not be repeated, only to be disappointed once more when the next occasion arose.
Appeasement was the issue on which he found himself most starkly at variance with orthodox Conservative policy. As late as 1937, Heath – assuming the fascist leaders to be as much susceptible to reason as any Socialist or Liberal – considered that war could and should be avoided. ‘I don’t agree with you on pacifism,’ his friend Tickner told him. ‘It fails. The Socialist parties in Germany and Austria adopted it.’19 Within a few months he had been convinced that Tickner was right. He was appalled by Chamberlain’s abandonment of the Czechs at Munich and in October 1938 proposed the motion ‘that this House deplores the Government’s policy of Peace without Honour’. The motion was carried, with support from many Conservatives as well as Socialists. A fortnight later a by-election became necessary in Oxford. Heath put his name forward as a possible candidate, pointing out as his principal qualification that he was opposed to the Munich agreement and would therefore be a better Foreign Secretary than the present incumbent, Lord Halifax. Unsurprisingly, the Oxford Conservatives preferred the almost equally youthful but more orthodox Quintin Hogg. The Master of Balliol, Sandy Lindsay, then announced that he would stand as an Independent Progressive candidate in the by-election. Although Lindsay was a prominent Socialist, Heath had no hesitation in joining Jenkins and Healey in canvassing for his cause. Heath much later told Basil Liddell Hart, the military historian and strategist, that a speech Liddell Hart had made to the OUCA had been the decisive factor in convincing him that he must canvass against the official Conservative candidate (Liddell Hart responded by saying that Heath was the one man who might induce him to support a Conservative government). He cannot have taken much convincing; even if his performances in the Union had not made his views unambiguously clear, his loyalty to Lindsay both as an individual and as Master of Balliol would surely have proved decisive.20
It was the issue of appeasement which won Heath the appointment he most wanted, President of the Union. He had tried the previous year and had been defeated by another Balliol man; thanks to his music scholarship he was able to stay on for a fourth year and try again. In November 1938 he moved: ‘That this House has no confidence in the National Government as at present constituted.’ He won the debate and, the following day, the presidency. Enough of Britain’s most eminent politicians had in their day been President of the Union to ensure that his appointment was widely noticed. He only had one term in which to make his mark but he used it with energy and imagination: reorganising the structure and workings of the society, enlarging its social role and thus its membership, and holding the first-ever dance in its hallowed headquarters. Even more remarkably, perhaps, he introduced these reforms without annoying those traditional elements which, in Oxford perhaps more than anywhere else, can be relied on to rise in rage at any disturbance of their cherished practices. Leo Amery, who had been persuaded to come to Oxford for a debate on conscription, remembered dining with ‘Heath of Balliol, a very nice youth’. A very nice youth would have been the verdict of most of his contemporaries. Isis paid a remarkable tribute to his performance. ‘No president for many years has provided a more interesting series of debates and visitors; no president has done more to re-establish the prestige of the Union not only as a debating society…but as a club…He will not soon be forgotten.’21
One of the more controversial debates while Heath was President was on the motion: ‘That a return to religion is the only solution to our present discontents.’ Heath tried to persuade Bernard Shaw to oppose the motion, failed, and made do with Stephen Spender. He did not speak himself; probably as much because he did not know what he wanted to say as for any other reason. Though the debate was generally deemed