Edward Heath. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ he was to get to know many women over the next forty years and become attached to two or three of them, there was never again to be a suspicion of romance, let alone matrimony.

      Perhaps inevitably this absence of female involvements meant that there were rumours that Heath was homosexual. In April 2007 one of the Conservative leaders in the London Assembly, Brian Coleman, alleged in the New Statesman that Heath regularly ‘cottaged’ along the motorways and had only desisted when he became a Privy Councillor and MI5 warned him that he must mend his ways. When asked for evidence of this Coleman was unable or unwilling to provide names but said that it was ‘generally known’ in the House of Commons that Heath was gay. General knowledge seems to have been based on little or no information. No man has ever claimed to have had any sort of sexual relationship with Heath, no hint of such an involvement is to be found among Heath’s papers and everyone who knew him well insists that he was not in the least that way inclined. He had friendly relationships with a number of women over the years, but never, it seems, one in which there was any hint of a romantic, let alone sexual, element. It may be that, after Kay Raven decided to marry someone else, he determined never to allow himself to be in a position in which he could be let down (as he might have seen it) in that way again. He certainly had a weak sex drive and may have been to all intents and purposes asexual: a condition which is by no means rare but which those who are more conventionally endowed find hard to believe exists. He was perhaps the poorer for this deficiency, but at least it left him with more time and energy for the other activities which filled his crowded life.³⁰

      For the moment it was back to the political fray. His task in Bexley was made more difficult by the fact that this time there was no helpful Communist standing to whittle away at Bramall’s vote; on the other hand there was no Liberal candidate either – a fact which on the whole seemed to favour Heath. The most controversial weapon which Labour employed in this election was the scare story, launched by the Daily Mirror (‘Whose Finger on the Trigger?’), claiming that Churchill was a war-monger and that Britain would not be safe under his leadership. Bramall had little enthusiasm for this line of argument, Heath had no difficulty in rebutting it, and the voters of Bexley appeared unconcerned by the prospect of imminent annihilation. Heath’s majority went up from 133 to 1,639, a swing slightly greater than the national average. Bexley was still a marginal seat but much less so than had been the case before. With the Conservatives enjoying an overall majority of sixteen, Heath could return to Westminster in the confidence that he left a secure base behind him. He could be confident too that, with the new Government enjoying so small a majority, a government Whip was going to have a great deal to do.

      Until this time he had been a junior Whip with plenty of work but no financial reward; now he was appointed a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury, which signified nothing in the way of additional responsibilities but meant that he was paid an extra £500 a year (comparative values mean very little, but the equivalent of £10,000 today would not be far wrong). It was not princely, but it usefully replaced the salary he was no longer receiving from Brown Shipley. He earned his pay rise, for he was given responsibility for pairing – the system by which members could miss a division only if they could ensure that a member of the Opposition would also be away. This called for much negotiation and a certain amount of bullying. It also required tact and discretion. Sometimes Heath found himself telephoning the home of a missing MP in the small hours of the morning only to be told by an unsuspecting wife that her husband was in the House. ‘Naturally we were able to demand a high degree of loyalty from colleagues in return for our concern, interest and discretion,’ wrote Heath blandly in his memoirs:³¹ a euphemism which did not conceal the fact that genteel blackmail was one of the weapons by which the Whips controlled their flock. Heath used such methods less than most: few complaints were made about the way he went about his business.

      No one was surprised when, after a year or so, he was appointed joint Deputy Chief Whip and, a few months later, was confirmed as the only Deputy. A Chief Whip, Buchan-Hepburn told one of his successors, had ‘to take the responsibility and be jolly rude at times’. Then the Deputy had to pick up the pieces. Heath ‘became very good at that. He could be very nice to people.’³² In due course Heath was to show that he could be surprisingly nice to people even when he was Chief Whip; for the moment he concentrated on building a network of relationships within the party. His new role meant that he became well-known, not only to the rank-and-file but also to the dignitaries of the party. Of these none was half as eminent or as remote from the hurly-burly of back-bench life as the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

      When Heath had first been appointed a Whip Churchill had said to him: ‘It will mean much hard work and it will be unremunerated, but so long as I am your leader it will never remain unthanked.’ That was almost all that Heath saw of the Prime Minister for the next few years. Buchan-Hepburn remembered that, when Heath had gained greater prominence, Churchill used to claim that it was he who had discovered him. This was rubbish, claimed Buchan-Hepburn: ‘He asked me more than once, even when Ted was Deputy Chief Whip, who he was.’ But later ‘he got to know him very well, and thought a lot of him’.³³ The relationship did not grow close until Heath had become Chief Whip and Churchill had ceased to be Prime Minister, but by 1953 at the latest Churchill would have had no doubts who the young Whip was. Several times Heath had to extricate him from dinner parties to come back to the House to vote when the Tory majority seemed dangerously low; once it was the other way round and Heath had to persuade him to honour an invitation to dine with the HAC on St George’s Day on an evening when Churchill decided that his duties in Westminster precluded his attendance. In July 1953 Heath was one of the very few leading Tories who knew about Churchill’s stroke and realised that the country was in effect being governed by a cabal of self-appointed substitutes. He was present when Churchill made his first speech after his illness at the Party Conference at Margate. By mistake the Prime Minister’s private secretary had left in both the original and an amended version of a certain page. Churchill began to repeat himself. ‘The Chief Whip and I looked at each other and shuddered. This must be the end of the road, I thought.’ But then Churchill stopped, rallied, remarked blandly: ‘I seem to have heard this somewhere before…’ and moved on to the next page. Heath was conscientious in presenting new Tory members to the old hero. Nigel Nicolson was already unnerved by the prospect and he was made no calmer when, as they approached the comatose figure in the smoking room, Heath murmured: ‘Remember, Winston simply hates small talk!’³⁴

      The relationship was not purely official. The visitors’ book for Chartwell, Churchill’s country home, shows that Heath stayed there nine times between 1957 and 1961, once finding himself expected to play poker for high stakes with Aristotle and Christina Onassis. Churchill liked him well enough to give him two of his paintings. He was an unlikely habitué of Chartwell. The young men whose company Churchill usually enjoyed were more socially accomplished – Jock Colville, Anthony Montague Browne – or more raffish – Brendan Bracken – than Ted Heath. Heath’s musical interests had only limited appeal to Churchill; his dedicated sense of purpose, though no doubt seeming admirable to the veteran statesman, was not calculated to amuse or stimulate. Nevertheless, Churchill clearly enjoyed his company. Mary Soames, Churchill’s daughter, believes that it was probably her mother who was primarily responsible for the repeated invitations. Heath’s social ineptness and his patent inadequacy when it came to handling women inspired in some a protective instinct. Clementine Churchill would not have been the only woman who took pity on him and resolved to make his task a little smoother than it would otherwise have been. He was appropriately appreciative and continued to invite Lady Churchill to lunches or dinners long after Churchill had died, taking pains to assemble small parties of old friends who would give her pleasure and impose no strain.³⁵

      As the Prime Minister visibly faded, Heath inevitably saw more of his designated successor, Anthony Eden. He felt for the Foreign Secretary none of the reverence that he held for Churchill but he admired and liked him and believed he would make a worthy incumbent of Number 10. He felt, too, that the sooner Eden got there, the better it would be, both for the country and for the party. Like many others, he wished that Churchill had retired after, or better still before, the defeat of 1945. He was not close enough to СКАЧАТЬ