Edward Heath. Philip Ziegler

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       FIVE The Young Member

      Heath was no Pitt the Younger, entering parliament like a young lord taking possession of his ancestral home, but he found his first appearances in the House of Commons less stressful than did most of his newly elected colleagues. His political activities at Oxford, the year he had spent nursing his constituency, the assiduity with which he had cultivated useful connections at Westminster, all ensured that to some extent his reputation went before him; he was known to the leadership as a sound and useful man, potentially a suitable candidate for preferment. The first meetings of the House which he attended, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘reminded me more than anything of the debating chamber of the Oxford Union. Nothing could be more natural. I was coming home.’¹

      The House had undergone a dramatic transformation since it had last met. A huge Labour majority had melted away; in spite of the fact that they had won 1¹/₂ million more votes than the Conservatives they had only 33 more seats and their majority over all other parties was five. Their front bench still contained the giants of the 1945 administration – Attlee, Bevin, Cripps, Morrison – but they had been in office since the formation of the coalition government in 1940; they were older, tired, in some cases seriously sick. Even that splendid firebrand, Aneurin Bevan, seemed to burn less fiercely; as for the backbenchers, they were demoralised and diminished, conscious that they were in for some gruelling sessions and probably defeat at the end of them.

      The Tories had achieved electoral success which, if not as great as they had dreamed of, at least was vastly better than had appeared possible a few years before. One more push, it seemed, and victory would be theirs. Over the previous years, under the guidance of R. A. Butler, they had planned new Tory policies for a return to power, but it had seemed at times a dispiritingly academic exercise. Now there was a real chance that soon they would be able to put those policies into practice. This lent a new urgency to their deliberations and ensured that the members who had won their seats for the first time in February 1950 would have a chance to make their mark as representatives of a new Conservatism. The new entrants were, indeed, an outstandingly able and forward-looking group. Even the scions of the traditional Tory grandee families – Julian Amery, Christopher Soames – seemed to have a slight flavour of radicalism about them; most of the others came from minor public or grammar schools and offered some promise of a serious shift both in the social composition and in the thinking of the party. Heath was one of these, but not considered to be among those most obviously destined for stardom. Ian Trethowan, then a young parliamentary lobby correspondent, reckoned that Iain Macleod, Reginald Maudling and Enoch Powell were the three most exceptional of the new members, the men among whom a future leader of the party must be looked for. Heath, he considered, ‘in those early years seemed a conscientious but rather plodding man’.² But, along with Angus Maude, Robert Carr, Harold Watkinson, it was clear from the start that, whether or not he attained the stratosphere, he had to be reckoned with as potentially a formidable figure within the Tory hierarchy.

      He made no attempt to thrust himself into the limelight with a premature display of fireworks. As in the Oxford Union, he was content at first to watch and listen. He ‘took the quiet but persistent way’, remembered Anthony Eden. ‘He attended the House regularly and modestly, but missed nothing. Pains and patience are needed to learn the way at Westminster. Heath had both.’³ In his first five years in the Commons Heath only missed ten divisions, and he had been paired in six of those. He put a parliamentary question in May 1950 – on an issue relating to civil aviation on which he could reasonably be held to have some expert knowledge – but did not make a speech in the House of Commons until 26 June. When he finally spoke, however, it was to considerable effect and on the subject with which his parliamentary career was above all to be identified: that of Europe.

      It can be argued that Heath would never have become so irrevocably committed to the cause of Britain in Europe if he had not been entrusted by Harold Macmillan with the negotiations for British entry in the early 1960s. He was by nature strikingly single-minded and, if he had been given some other task, would have pursued it with similar dedication. But from the time that he had fought his way across Germany in 1945 he had felt passionately that war in Western Europe must never be allowed to happen again. The only way by which he felt this could be achieved with certainty was by tying Britain, France and Germany into a union so inextricable that war would become not merely inconceivable but impossible. Britain had to be part of such a group, not just to cement it but to lead it; as the Empire disintegrated British influence in the world would inevitably be diminished; only by entering Europe would the British be able to retain that position in the world, economic as well as political, to which they were accustomed. When colleagues suggested that any European Union, if it were truly to be a force in the world, would have to involve a possibly unacceptable sacrifice of national sovereignty on the part of its members, he brushed the arguments aside. The word ‘federalism’ held no terrors for him and he envisaged a Europe where, in the long term, all important decisions, whether on foreign policy, economics, defence or social policies, would be made in common, without any individual member state being able to frustrate the ambitions of the others. ‘The nation state is dead,’ he would say. ‘What has sovereignty to do with anything in the twentieth century?’⁴ But though these were his private views, he was still cautious about pressing them openly unless he was certain that he was addressing a sympathetic audience. One can feel pretty sure that he did not express himself very forcibly on the subject when, in the summer of 1950, he was taken by another Conservative MP, John Rodgers, to lunch in the South of France with that arch-imperialist and enemy of British association with Europe, Lord Beaverbrook. ‘I liked your young friend,’ Beaverbrook told Rodgers after the meeting. ‘I think he should go far.’ (Beaverbrook’s favourable view of Heath did not survive the discovery of his true views on Europe. By August 1962 he was telling Alec Martin: ‘If you meet that young man Heath, of whom I once formed a good opinion, please tell him to look westward.’)⁵

      In 1950, his dream of a united Europe with Britain at its heart seemed infinitely remote. The Labour Government had refused to take part in the conference that drafted the treaty setting up the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Heath was dismayed. ‘A very short-sighted and, for the United Kingdom, an immensely damaging decision,’ he judged it. ‘It was quite simply an abrogation of leadership.’⁶ The Conservatives, if only to be seen to oppose, were formally critical of the Labour policy, but Heath knew well that many of his colleagues were sceptical about the merits of European union and that the heir-apparent to the visibly crumbling Churchill, Anthony Eden, was quite as anxious to preserve full British sovereignty as any Labour minister. But though he knew that he was swimming against the tide, Heath never ceased to press the European cause when any opportunity arose. In his constituency he was as likely to talk of Germany and the need to bring it back into the comity of nations as to offer more orthodox fare about cripplingly high taxes or stultifying controls. When he visited Germany in the Whitsun recess of 1950 he was both exhilarated and alarmed by the pace of recovery; what was already a high priority in his mind took on fresh urgency. And when in June 1950 the House debated the Schuman Plan, the blueprint for European unity conceived by Jean Monnet and accepted in principle by both Germany and France, Heath saw the opportunity to make his maiden speech on a subject about which he was an authority and which he had passionately at heart.

      Heath was exceptionally good СКАЧАТЬ