Edward Heath. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ the Ministry of Civil Aviation – ‘I couldn’t get anything done,’ he said much later. ‘I was so impatient. You mustn’t go there hoping to change the world.’¹² – he had enjoyed his time there and would happily have stayed on for another couple of years. Masefield tried to persuade the establishment that this should be allowed but got nowhere: as an adopted candidate for parliament Heath must resign and resign at once. ‘I am exceedingly sorry to lose Mr Heath,’ Masefield concluded. ‘His work during the past year has been of the utmost value and on several occasions has been favourably commented on by the Minister.’¹³ For Heath it was back to the Oxford University Appointments Board. The first job vacant turned out to be that of sub-editor on the Church Times. He knew nothing of theology and had no experience as a journalist, promotion would be unpredictable because of the small size of the staff, the work seemed likely to be easy to learn but pretty dull: on the other hand the pay – £650 a year – was good, they were ‘very pleasant people’, and they did not seem to mind about the political connection provided his name was not publicly linked with the newspaper. ‘I am still waiting to see your name emblazoned over the Church Times,’ wrote a friend. He was to wait in vain. Heath’s main task was editing other people’s copy; when he did write pieces himself they were anonymous. The last thing he wanted, indeed, was to be too conspicuous. He had belatedly discovered that the Bexley selection committee had a rooted aversion to journalists. The Church Times, he protested, was too respectable to count as a real paper; the argument was accepted but he did not want to test the committee’s tolerance too severely.¹⁴

      John Trevisick, a reporter on the staff, felt that Heath had no real flair for journalism and tried to steer clear of serious writing. But he was quick to grasp the essentials of any problem and, when called on to do so, wrote with clarity and precision: ‘I have vivid memories of Heath being roped in to cover the Anglo-Catholic Congress – a really tough job…But he turned in a workmanlike précis of what he had heard, thus reflecting his ability.’¹⁵ His inexperience sometimes led him into blunders: he caused some consternation when, never having heard of the UMCA (the Universities Mission to Central Africa), he assumed it was a typing error and corrected it throughout to YMCA. But his real talent was for administration. Though his position in the hierarchy gave him no particular authority, another of his colleagues, Nicholas Bagnall, remembers that ‘after a couple of months he had us eating out of his hands. He did it by force of personality, mainly by making it obvious how hard he worked himself.’ The editor’s secretary was so impressed by his prowess that she told Bagnall: ‘Mark my words, Nicholas, that man will be prime minister one day.’ Bagnall was not prepared to go as far as that: ‘To the rest of us he simply didn’t look like Downing Street material: not nearly devious enough, we thought.’ Besides, the secretary in question, according to Bagnall, was in love with Heath. Heath, alarmed by her adoring looks, took Bagnall to a pub for a consultation. ‘What on earth shall I do about this woman?’ he asked. ‘I don’t think I was much help,’ Bagnall recorded. (When, many years later, he told this story to Mrs Thatcher, she expostulated: ‘Impossible! No one could love Ted Heath.’)¹⁶

      Whatever his secretary might have felt about Heath, the editor, Humphrey Beevor, looked on him with a jaundiced eye. ‘Politically they were poles apart,’ said another member of the staff, ‘Heath to the right, Beevor to the left. Heath was an army man of steady disposition; Beevor was a navy type, a brilliant man but a man of moods.’ He would fly into a passion over some trivial slip, and delighted in trying to catch Heath out on abstruse theological points – not a difficult task, since, though Heath soon mastered the technical jargon which beset religious reporting, his bent for philosophy remained obstinately under-developed. But though Beevor had little enthusiasm for his thrusting young sub-editor he was quite content to let him pursue his political interests in his spare time. When eventually the Board considered the matter, it was minuted that, though they too had no objection, they were concerned lest his activities as a would-be member of parliament took up an undue amount of his energies. They had some grounds for disquiet: one friend complained that, whenever he rang up the Church Times and asked to speak to Heath, he was told that he was out and that ‘Mr Heath’s private movements are unknown to us’. ‘From the frequency of that remark,’ the friend commented, ‘I have gained the notion that the majority of your movements fall into this category!’ Heath was constitutionally incapable of not giving value for money but it was clear to anyone that his heart was not wholly in his work. The Board agreed that he could stay on until he actually became involved in an election, but as early as August 1948 Heath told a friend on the Oxford Appointments Board that he had decided to leave as soon as another possibility offered itself. The trouble was, he said, that he was ‘liable to be sent anywhere at any time. This means that I can never make an engagement and be absolutely certain of keeping it.’¹⁷

      He wanted an employer who would offer regular hours, who would not be concerned by the fact that he would shortly be fighting an election, who might provide work on a part-time basis even after Heath became an MP and who would offer him new experiences that would be useful in his life as a politician. ‘I must say that I think it will be hard to get what you want,’ wrote his father apprehensively; then, with a return to his habitual cheerfulness: ‘Keep trying. Mummy has a feeling that something is going to turn up for you.’ Heath looked to the City of London and found the solution in Brown Shipley, a small but well-established merchant bank which specialised in financing deals in timber and wool. It was not ideal. The work would involve frequent visits to the north of England, which would provide useful knowledge for the future but would also make more difficult the nursing of his constituency. Worse still, Brown Shipley were only prepared to take him on as a management trainee at a miserable £200 a year and lunch in the staff canteen. This would involve a serious sacrifice. Heath felt it was worth it. The training would last only a few months, after which he could hope for employment as a full-time banker. Brown Shipley seemed delighted to have a potential Tory MP on their staff and were sure that they would be able to accommodate him in some way even if he did win his seat. He took the job, broke the news to a not particularly disappointed Beevor, and began work in the City in October 1949. Far more than at the Church Times, he seemed to fit in right away. ‘All the partners knew him,’ wrote the chairman, Ian Garnett-Orme, in 1970. ‘He was obviously highly intelligent and very interesting…He left a most awfully good impression here. Large numbers of people here went to help him in his election campaign. People don’t do that unless they like a man.’¹⁸

      That election campaign was now imminent. Heath had been nursing the constituency assiduously and with great success. The Bexley Conservative Association had a membership of only 600 when Heath took over, within a year it had grown to 3,500, by the election it was over 6,000. Every weekend was spent in the constituency. For the work of wooing the voter and making himself a well-known local figure, Heath renounced all the social pleasures that a young man of his age could have expected to enjoy. Even more painful, he sacrificed the raffish sports car in which he had been accustomed to cover the distance between central London and Broadstairs. He loved his glamorous dark-green MG two-seater but reluctantly accepted that it did not create the right impression in a period of stark austerity and traded it in for a more mundane Vauxhall saloon.

      The local party agent who insisted on such a change was right in this case, but wrong about much else. Worst of all, he suffered from folie de grandeur, and plotted to replace the chairman and other senior officers of the association by nominees of his own. Heath’s own position was not threatened in the short term but he would never have worked satisfactorily with the agent and would certainly have stood less chance of winning Bexley if no change had been made. He allied himself with the chairman, organised a counter-coup, and was triumphant. The agent resigned a few months later and it became clear that the finances of the local party were in disarray and that the fighting fund, which Heath had largely built up by his own efforts in preparation for the election, had been dissipated. With a general election probably only a year away, Heath found himself with an organisation in tatters and without the money essential to wage a successful campaign.

      Things quickly improved. Central Office found an excellent replacement as an agent: Reginald Pye, a former rubber-planter in СКАЧАТЬ