Edward Heath. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ told him, were ‘the BBC and school teaching’. The BBC would require ‘submission to an intolerable bureaucracy’, teaching was ill-paid and probably involved severing one’s ties with London.³ Neither appealed to Heath. A more attractive possibility, which offered a better chance of making money quickly, was the Bar. Heath had an excellent memory, a clear mind well adjusted to grasping the essential points in any problem, a well-honed capacity for debate and argument: all qualities required of a successful barrister. If he went to the Bar and prospered he could reasonably expect to have established himself within ten or, at the most, fifteen years; the route from the Bar to the House of Commons was a well-trodden one. Before he had left Oxford he had begun on the essential preliminary of eating his dinners at Gray’s Inn.

      Even that course, however, posed financial problems. To spend another two years in study, unless supported by a scholarship, would have placed an unfair additional burden on the parents who had sacrificed so much for him. He had already been summoned to Gray’s Inn for an interview and had been led to believe that, if he turned up and made a good impression, a scholarship would probably be his for the asking. Before anything could be clinched, however, an opportunity arose to go to the United States on a debating tour. The chance was too good to miss, but it meant that he had to forgo the all-important interview. At the end of 1939, he heard that the scholarship had been awarded to someone else. ‘I had been relying on this to enable me to finish being called to the bar,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Of course, it would have been wonderful to think that after the war this money would have been waiting for me…Now this is impossible. I may have to give up the whole idea of law and go into something else…The temptation to get into politics in an era of reconstruction will be enormous.’ At least one of his friends thought that his loss of the scholarship was a blessing in disguise. ‘You have done very well for a C[hatham] H[ouse] S[chool] boy, something out of the usual,’ wrote A. C. Tickner. ‘The bar seems rather too conventional a finish for you. Hence my disappointment.’ If Heath had envisaged a spell at the Bar as anything more than a stepping stone on the way to a life in politics, Tickner’s disappointment might have been justified; as it was, the main cause for Heath’s chagrin at the loss of the scholarship was that it seemed to make more remote the time when he could hope to make his move into the House of Commons.⁴

      The trip to the United States which cost him his scholarship had been arranged under a scheme by which two debaters from English universities crossed the Atlantic each year to go on a tour of American universities. Heath was to have been accompanied by his Balliol contemporary Hugh Fraser. When war broke out both young men volunteered for military service. Fraser, who had been training as a territorial, was at once called up. Heath was told that he would not be wanted for several months. The way was open, therefore, for him to go as planned to America. Instead of Fraser he was to share the platform with Peter Street, a former treasurer of the Oxford Union.

      One Balliol contemporary doubted whether this was a good idea:

      Were I you I would go to the war rather than to the USA, because, while the propaganda in America might be a more valuable contribution to Britain, there might be a number of people who would place an uncharitable construction on your absence from this country. After all, it is more important to do what the public think right than what you might think right! That sounds cynical, but it is true in politics. A good war record is of great assistance to a politician…

      If ‘going to war’ had been a possible alternative Heath would certainly have taken it but there seemed little point in hanging around awaiting call-up when a far more interesting and potentially valuable way of using the time presented itself. If people chose to suggest that he was in some way running away or shirking his duty then they were welcome to do so. He and Street consulted the Foreign Office, were encouraged to go ahead with the tour and did so with alacrity.⁵

      The Foreign Office did, however, issue one caveat. Public opinion in the United States was in a delicate state and there were many people who would be quick to resent what they might see as an attempt to push them into the war. Two brash students, holding forth about the duty of the Americans to join the British and the French in defence of Poland, might do considerable harm. Any such debate was to be avoided: like Basil in Fawlty Towers, they were not to mention the war. The difficulty about this was that the American students with whom they were to debate thought that the war by far the most interesting topic. The University of Pittsburgh dismissed the twelve possible subjects proposed by the British team and announced that the debate would be on the motion: ‘That the United States should immediately enter the war on the side of the allies.’ When Heath and Street demurred they were told that this was the published motion and that nothing else would be accepted. To refuse to appear would seem both churlish and chicken-hearted, to speak would be to brave the wrath of the Foreign Office and perhaps to provoke an international incident. In dismay, Heath appealed to the British Ambassador, Lord Lothian. Not for nothing was Lothian known as one of the most ingeniously devious of politicians: they should agree to speak, he ruled, but only on condition that one proposed and one opposed the motion. That way nobody could claim that the visitors were trying to manoeuvre America into the war. The fact that the more eloquent and well-briefed of the speakers seemed always to be the one who favoured intervention could in no way be blamed on the British representatives.

      Heath did not delude himself that his efforts had any marked impact on American public opinion. The most usual question – not easily answered – was why, if the war was being waged in support of Poland, Britain and France were not also at war with the other aggressor, Russia. They met very little out-and-out pacifism but did not feel that they had done much to shake ‘the final and all-compelling assumption that America must stay out of the war’.⁶ Some universities were content to abide by the choice of subject made by the visitors. At Brooklyn College the debate turned on what should be done after the war to secure a lasting peace. This was a topic on which Heath had already thought deeply and which had preoccupied him during his recent trip to Europe. In the debate he envisaged various possibilities, not mutually exclusive, but inclined to the view that the best hope was a federal Europe, a ‘United States of Europe…in which states will have to give up some of their national rights…There seems to be a better view for the future if we lean towards a federalism that can be secured either by joining with a small national group and/or big group, because this seems to be the most foolproof sort of thing you can get.’⁷ It was the first public airing of a view which, though from time to time modified, was to dominate his thinking for the rest of his life.

      On his way back to England he mused on the differences between the New World which he had just visited and tired old Europe. America was a new country and ‘though it lacks dignity is filled with pulsating life’. Britain’s rulers, on the other hand, were ‘out of touch, uninspired, content to deal with new problems in an old way. The opposition is just as lifeless and tied to dogmas and formulae of which everyone is heartily sick.’ What was needed was a new breeze which would sweep away ‘stuffiness, dead convention, stultifying distinctions, all those things which paralyse our national and individual life’. But it would not be enough to produce some prophet who would ‘talk in vague generalisations’; he must be able to conjure up visions in other people’s minds, but also ‘to think things through right to the bitter end, a leader who is practical and strong’. Who that leader might be and where he would spring from, he did not surmise. Given the astonishing self-confidence that was already so apparent it would be surprising if, at the back of his mind, he did not cherish a hope that it might one day be him. At the moment the Tory Party seemed a spent force. Could it be revived? Was he right in thinking that his future lay with its left wing rather than with ‘the Liberals, whose practical policy and mode of thought is much more in keeping with my own than those of many Conservatives; or the Socialists, most of whom are from my own “class” and are perhaps more concerned than many Conservatives with domestic problems?’ It was the issue that he had faced when he joined the Conservative Association at Oxford, and he reached the same conclusion. But the question still was how they were ‘to secure greater equality of opportunity and of wealth and abolish class distinction’. The Socialist recipes – confiscation of wealth, high taxation, nationalisation СКАЧАТЬ