Edward Heath. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ over the firing of salutes on occasions such as the royal birthday. He relished such opportunities and even endured with equanimity the debacle when on one occasion the ammunition was damp and all four guns failed to fire. At one point the desperate troop commander was reduced to extracting a faulty shell and, for want of a more suitable repository, flinging it into the Thames. It was a singularly courageous action but not one recommended by the drill manuals. The officer concerned could well have earned a stiff rebuke, even dismissal, but Heath and Alanbrooke between them saw to it that the War Office was not troubled by any report of the incident.

      More importantly from the point of view of his finances, once he became Deputy Chief Whip Heath felt he could no longer work part-time for Brown Shipley. As a tyro backbencher he had managed to spend most mornings in the City and even as a junior Whip he had kept up more-or-less regular attendance. The arrangement had suited Brown Shipley well: to have a promising young MP on their staff both lent the bank a certain prestige and gave them a potentially useful foothold in Westminster. In the summer of 1951 they had sent him on a visit to the United States and Canada; not to transact any particular business but so that he could get to know how Brown Brothers Harriman, Brown Shipley’s associate in New York, transacted its affairs and to make contact with people who might be useful to him both as a banker and as a politician. One of those he hoped to meet was the influential Senator Paul Douglas from Illinois. A mutual acquaintance wrote enthusiastically to urge the Senator to set up a meeting. Heath, he said, was ‘very able and exceedingly well informed and a very fine guy indeed…He’s much more “liberal” that most of our best Democrats, but withal a genuine and convinced Tory…Recently he’s been made an Assistant Whip which, I’ve just learned, makes him a Front Bencher and, should the Conservatives get in power, very likely a cabinet minister.’ Heath’s rise was not to be quite so meteoric but the judgment is of interest as showing how seriously he was already taken in political circles in the United States. A date was fixed for a meeting with the Senator but before it could take place Heath visited Ottawa, staying at the same hotel as Labour’s foreign secretary, Herbert Morrison, and his parliamentary private secretary, Eddie Shackleton. On 19 September he met the pair of them heading hurriedly towards the exit. ‘Have you heard?’ asked Shackleton. ‘Attlee has just called a general election!’ ‘And the bloody fool didn’t ask me first,’ added a disgruntled Morrison.²³

      ‘Nobody knows whether we can expect an election in the near future,’ Heath had told a friend in August 1951. ‘Personally, I don’t think there will be one for the very simple reason that the Government has nothing to gain but a lot to lose. However, only time will tell.’²⁴ Time had told, and had showed that Attlee disagreed with Heath. Though Morrison turned out to have had good reason for his doubts, Attlee was not acting irrationally. His ministry was in tatters. Cripps and Bevin had retired through ill-health; Bevin’s successor, Morrison, had made a disastrous mess of foreign policy in the Middle East; Heath’s Oxford contemporary, Harold Wilson, together with Aneurin Bevan, had resigned in protest at the increased spending on defence. Attlee could have struggled on but he concluded that the best chance for Labour was to go quickly to the country and then to rebuild the government with new blood and a new mandate. The election was called for 25 October.

      Heath must have felt reasonably confident as he hurried back across the Atlantic. On the national scene all the indications were that Labour would do worse than at the last election; in his own constituency he had consolidated his position. He had been an exemplary constituency MP; had dealt conscientiously with the problems of the voters; attended endless fetes, garden parties, dances, rotary lunches, meetings with businessmen; had escorted innumerable constituents around the House of Commons. Local elections had strengthened the position of the Conservatives. He had beaten Ashley Bramall once and was sure that he could do so again.

      But it was not only the election that preoccupied him. Shortly before he left for the United States his mother had been diagnosed with cancer and had almost immediately been operated on at the Ramsgate General Hospital. Heath thought of cancelling his tour but the operation seemed to have gone well and the prognosis was that she would be home and well on the way to recovery by the time he got back. She was home, but she was in pain and obviously extremely weak. His sister-in-law Marian told Michael Cockerell that she and her husband were with Ted in the kitchen in the Broadstairs house when William Heath broke it to them that his wife was dying. ‘Ted was absolutely devastated,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I ever saw him before or after as he was on that day.’²⁵

      It took the realisation that he was about to lose his mother to make him fully take in how much she had meant to him. He was not dependent on her, in the sense that he turned to her for advice or for moral support, but the love which she had lavished on him over the years, the knowledge that in her eyes he could do no wrong and should be the beneficiary of any and every sacrifice, had created a bond between them which he enjoyed with no one else. Though he fought the election campaign in Bexley with all the energy and conscientiousness that his supporters expected of him, the thought of her suffering was with him every moment. Each evening he would drive back to the coast to be with her; he would sit at the piano in the room directly below her bedroom playing the old sentimental songs which his father had used to sing and which he knew his mother cherished: ‘In a Monastery Garden’, ‘Love’s Old Sweet Song’, ‘When You Come to the End of a Perfect Day’. She died on 15 October, ten days before polling day. Ashley Bramall suggested that there should be a day’s truce in the electioneering on the day of her funeral. Heath gratefully accepted. Margaret Roberts, still battling away in the safe Labour seat of Dartford, wrote to commiserate: ‘I am so glad your mother saw your initial success and the way in which you followed up with a steady ascent to great things.’ The precipitous descent which she was one day to engineer lends a certain irony to this letter but, as Heath acknowledged in his memoirs, it was ‘most generous’ and, without doubt, sincerely meant.²⁶

      ‘As I think you know, I loved and admired her tremendously,’ wrote the former Kay Raven. His relationship with his mother had not been the only one that had ended about this time. A year or so before, Kay had written to announce her engagement to a regular air force officer and former bomber pilot, Richard Buckwell. ‘I hope you will be glad for me, you know I’m rather a loving kind of girl and must have been a horrid bore for you.’²⁷ For nearly fifteen years she had looked for something in Edward Heath that he was unable to supply; finally she had decided that life was too short and that she must move on. ‘Apparently her family persuaded her to go on holiday with a group of young friends, and that was when she got engaged,’ said William Heath. ‘She was keen on him. He wasn’t, or if he was he never showed it.’ It was Mrs Heath who seems to have been the most upset by the news; she had set her heart on Ted’s marriage with Kay and burst into tears when she heard of the engagement.²⁸

      Ted Heath remained impassive. He was more moved than he cared to admit, however. For so many years he had taken it for granted that she was there, permanently available in case he should one day decide that the time had come for him to marry. It is conceivable that the death of his mother and the fact that he was now well launched on his climb up the political ladder might have impelled him to marry Kay; conceivable, but on balance improbable. By 1950 he was set in his bachelor ways; the thought of sexual intercourse or of procreation would have filled him with mild dismay; how could he fit a woman into his crowded life; what sacrifices might he not find imposed on him? But her engagement was still a blow to his pride, and the closing of a door which he had liked to feel was at least a crack ajar. He soon convinced himself that he had been in love and had been robbed of a cherished aspiration. Many years later Michael Cockerell, with that startling temerity which adds such zest to his television interviews, asked Heath whether he had been saddened by Kay Raven’s engagement. ‘Yes,’ he replied. When asked if he had ever been in love, Heath again replied, ‘Yes. Why shouldn’t one love?’ Almost incredibly, given his habitual reluctance to express emotion, he seemed on the point of tears.²⁹ He kept a photograph of Kay by his bedside, though it seems to have disappeared before he died. She became a convenient alibi; designed as much to deceive himself as anyone else, to be adduced whenever it seemed possible that he might become close to some other woman. СКАЧАТЬ