Edward Heath. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ The reputation of lady-killer was not one to which Heath aspired, but even if he had considered marrying Kay it would have been a long-term project, not to be contemplated until the war was over. They met rarely, and when they did the meetings, for Kay, generally ended in frustration. ‘I’m awfully sorry about spoiling it the other night,’ she wrote after their leaves had for once coincided. ‘It was the horror of months of going by and hearing nothing of you…Perhaps it won’t be so long before you are back again.’¹⁶

      By that time Heath had already spent nearly a year in Europe. His last months in England had been marred by a gangrenous appendix, which should have been operated on months before and nearly cost him his life. By the time it was removed he was convinced he was going to die. He wrote, in high emotion, to his parents, ‘It is not possible to thank you for all you have done, for your love, for my schooling, my career, and for the sacrifices which you have all the time made. Everything I have done I have owed largely to my early training and the standards you taught me.’ The tribute was most sincerely meant. Fortunately it never needed to be dispatched. The appendix was successfully removed, though its condition was so revolting that the hospital had it pickled and put on exhibition as a reminder of what should never happen.¹⁷

      Heath and his regiment crossed the Channel a month after D-Day and fought their way towards Belgium, taking part, on the way, in the bombardment of Caen and the battle of the Falaise Gap. For a time they lingered in Antwerp, then in September 1944 moved on to support the allied forces trying to relieve the airborne troops at Arnhem. Their most serious action, wrote John Campbell in his biography, was keeping open the vital bridge at Nijmegen. ‘Nonsense!’ Heath scrawled in the margin; it is hard to understand why he took exception to the comment, because the action was indeed both bloody and of critical importance.¹⁸ The level of casualties among the gunners is usually lower than that in the infantry, but in the advance into Germany Heath frequently saw men die within a few yards of him and was constantly in danger. He never wavered. This officer, said his citation, ‘showed outstanding initiative and devotion to duty…His work was of a very high order and contributed largely to the success achieved.’

      His last year as a soldier was spent in Germany. For three months he was in charge of a prisoner-of-war camp near Hanover. ‘I hope my experience and knowledge of the German people helped me to run the show with understanding and fairness,’ he told Professor Winckler.¹⁹ He was put in charge of the reconstruction of the city and gave the rebuilding of the opera house top priority. Whether the German population was entirely in accord with his scale of values is uncertain. Since the Brigade Commander was equally insistent that the racecourse should be reopened rapidly it is possible that they felt their housing needs were being unreasonably overlooked.

      In his memoirs Heath records in moving detail the execution by firing squad of a Pole found guilty by court martial of aggravated rape and murder. He was in charge and had to give the order to fire. ‘I believe’, he wrote, ‘this made a mark on my mind which later crystallised the view to which I have adhered for nearly four decades of my political career, as to the justification for abolishing the death penalty in peace time.’ He is never known to have referred to this incident until work on the memoirs was almost completed. Rupert Allason in his as yet unpublished biography of Heath casts doubt on the story. He points out that no record of such an execution exists in the files kept by the Court Martial Centre. Since the war was four months over when the incident is alleged to have taken place, the guilty man would have been hanged rather than shot. A major would not normally have commanded a firing squad. The situation is not as clear-cut as Allason suggests. A few executions by firing squad did in fact take place after the end of the war. There are no records of executions of soldiers of Polish origin serving in the British Army at the time in question but, given the situation in Germany at the time, the Ministry of Defence believes that the victim could have been a member of the Polish land forces serving under allied command. Another possibility is that the executed Pole was incorrectly described as a soldier. One Polish national, Piotr Kuczerawy, was executed in Hanover at a time when Heath’s regiment was based in the city and it is possible that he found himself charged with this grisly task. Heath was in general a scrupulously truthful man and he had nothing to gain by inventing such a story. On the whole it seems likely that his story is substantially correct. Certainly the result was as he indicated; in the course of his political career he was consistent in his opposition to the death penalty.²⁰

      He might have been in a position to vote on the issue even before the supposed incident took place. Early in 1945 an Army Council Instruction invited anyone interested in fighting the anticipated general election to fill in a form requesting the necessary three weeks’ leave. Heath applied for a copy of the form. Andrew Roth, one of Heath’s biographers, suggests that he hoped to be adopted as Conservative candidate for the Isle of Thanet. He does not seem to have made any serious effort to press his candidature. In his memoirs he writes that he decided not to stand in the 1945 general election ‘because I did not feel that I could abandon my colleagues in the regiment at such a time’. This is certainly part of the story: Heath was conspicuously loyal to those with whom he served and in the post-war years did much to help any former fellow servicemen who had got into trouble or needed a leg-up in their career. But there may have been another contributory factor; that in the circumstances of 1945, he was not sure he wanted the Conservatives to win.²¹

      He never seriously contemplated joining any other party. The nearest he came to it – and that was not very near – had arisen from a chance encounter early in 1945 when he was on leave in England. Late at night, while waiting for a train at a provincial station, he went into the tea room. There he found Arthur Jenkins, father of Roy and a pps to Clement Attlee, whom he had met several times at Oxford before the war. Jenkins, it turned out, was waiting for Attlee and when the Deputy Prime Minister arrived Heath joined them. Jenkins explained who he was. ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. ‘He’s now commanding a battery in Germany,’ said Jenkins. ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. ‘From what he’s been saying he’s obviously still interested in politics.’ ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. ‘I think he’ll make a damn good politician.’ ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. ‘I think we ought to try to grab him as one of our candidates.’ ‘Oh,’ said Attlee. At this point Heath’s train was announced. ‘This’, he concluded, ‘was the nearest I ever came to becoming a Labour candidate.’²²

      Though he is said to have told his old acquaintance and future opponent, Ashley Bramall, that he was still uncertain whether he wanted to take up politics,²³ he never doubted that if he did so it would be as a Tory. But in 1945 the disillusionment which he had expressed on the journey back from the United States still lingered. He believed that the old Conservative Party survived unregenerate, governed, as it had been before the war, by ‘stuffiness, dead convention, stultifying distinctions’. If, as almost everyone assumed would be the case, they were returned to power on the coat-tails of Churchill’s popularity, then these attitudes would survive unchanged. A period of opposition would give the modernisers a chance to take control of the party and reshape its thinking and its principles. He did not expect, still less hope for, the landslide Labour victory of 1945, but there was some comfort to be drawn from it. Certainly he rejoiced that he had not personally been involved in the debacle.

      He had one last searing experience before he returned to England and civilian life. In February 1946 he drove across a shattered Germany to Nuremberg, where the trial of the Nazi war criminals was in progress. In the dock were those leaders whom he had seen or even shaken hands with eight years before. Then they had been rulers of Germany, soon to be rulers of the continent; now they were reviled and tragic figures. In the meantime, Europe had been almost destroyed. Somehow it must be made impossible for this to happen again. ‘My generation did not have the option of living in the past: we had to work for the future…Only by working together right across our continent had we any hope of creating a society which would uphold the true values of European civilisation.’ Heath’s vision of a united Europe had been formed before the war but it was in Germany in 1945 that it found its full realisation.²⁴

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