Edward Heath. Philip Ziegler

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СКАЧАТЬ to have small directorships’; Quintin Hailsham dropped into his ‘shell-like ear’ the news that Lord Rothermere was trying to find a job for Neill Cooper and that Louis Spears badly wanted a peerage.⁹ He took whatever action he felt necessary on such requests, but without enthusiasm and with an almost perverse reluctance to further the interests of those whom he liked or to whom he felt obliged.

      Throughout his career he made up his mind slowly and with some reluctance. Michael Hughes-Young, one of his Junior Whips, remembered interminable meetings: ‘Ted would chew a subject over and over and over again, not saying much himself.’ But when he had finally come down one way or the other he was hard to shift and would fight his corner with resolution. It was not only the prime minister who got the benefit of his blunt advice. ‘I’ve seen him be very tough with ministers,’ said Hughes-Young, ‘just telling them flatly that they couldn’t do it, it wasn’t on.’ He was, indeed, more likely to be tough with ministers than with backbenchers. ‘When we were lunching together,’ wrote Eden’s press secretary, William Clark, ‘you mentioned the problem you had trying to explain to the public that you did not run the House of Commons on the authoritarian lines of a public school.’¹⁰ He never succeeded in dispelling the illusion. Indeed, it was not wholly illusory. Authority had to be exercised. But it was done with discretion and good grace. When John Rodgers, an old ally of Heath’s and parliamentary private secretary to David Eccles, the Minister of Education, rebelled over a bill about shopclosing hours, Heath came to see him, ‘his Whip’s face firmly on, and saying: “You can’t be a pps and attack the government like this: you must make your choice.”’ Rodgers chose and resigned, but two years later he was offered a ministerial job and was urged by Heath to accept. Another backbencher, David Price, had to be sharply rebuked for straying out of line. ‘I really must express my sincere appreciation of your attitude during our interview this evening,’ wrote Price. ‘You had to carpet me; I realise that, but you couldn’t have been nicer or more gentle about it.’¹¹

      Not all members were so ready to take correction. Sir William Anstruther-Gray, a Tory of the old school who probably took exception to Heath’s social origins and relative youth as well as to the fact that he was being rebuked for missing a three-line Whip, retorted haughtily: ‘I am not a member of the government, paid to take orders. I am a private member, returned by my constituents to support the party and prime minister as I think best…I shall continue to work for the party and prime minister as I think best and, while on the subject, I shall not be available to vote on Thursday, 8th.’¹² Since the gravamen of the Chief Whip’s complaint had been that Anstruther-Gray had given no warning of his absence, Heath probably let the matter rest – but a black mark would have been registered against the errant member. Not many others would have been similarly defiant. The notably independent-minded Hugh Fraser arrived at a dinner party announcing that the debate that evening was on a matter of trivial importance and that he had no intention of returning to vote. An hour later the telephone rang and the servant reported that it was the Chief Whip for Mr Fraser. Fraser left without waiting for the pudding. Heath was the last Whip to act as teller during crucial votes; on certain issues he stood by the Opposition entrance so that any rebel would have to file by directly in front of him.¹³

      He was particularly hard on any behaviour that he thought might bring discredit to the House. When the Tory MP for Dorset North, Robert Crouch, touted for business on House of Commons writing paper, Heath summoned him and sternly pointed out the impropriety of his behaviour. Crouch promised to mend his ways but shortly afterwards died, leaving many unpaid bills and an indigent widow. Heath was active in raising funds so that Mrs Crouch was not left in too parlous a state.¹⁴ If he felt a member was not and never would be up to the job he would not hesitate to plan for his replacement. He thought badly of the member for Oxford, Lawrence Turner, and did what he could to arrange a change. When Harold Macmillan was asked to drop in at the Cowley Conservative Club after a dinner in Oxford, Heath urged him to take up the invitation: ‘It would be important that the prospective candidate, the Hon Montague Woodhouse, is at the Club in order to receive the benefit of this rather than Mr Turner.’ Sometimes, in the eye of the victim at least, he seems to have behaved with some insensitivity. When Airey Neave, a junior minister, resigned in 1959, he was told bleakly that his political career was over. ‘Airey deeply resented the way he felt he had been discarded and the way it had been done,’ remembered Margaret Thatcher’s future minister, Norman Fowler. Fifteen years later Neave got his revenge. Only somebody who had been present at the original interview could tell how justified his resentment really was. Another version has it that it was alcohol rather than illness that had forced Neave’s retirement and that Heath’s harshness was therefore justified. The story shows, however, that no Chief Whip, however tactful and emollient, could do his job properly without making some enemies along the way.¹⁵

      More often, however, Heath was trying to persuade members not to retire at a time when it might prove damaging to the party. When the famous former fighter pilot ‘Laddie’ Lucas reported that he felt his employment as managing director of the White City stadium was stopping him from doing a proper job as an MP, Heath replied that there had been no complaints from his constituents and that ‘as it would be very difficult for anybody else to hold his seat, it was his duty to carry on’. Lucas temporarily agreed but, two months later, wrote from holiday in Italy to say that he had finally decided to resign. ‘Italy seems to have a fatal effect on everyone’s ideas of both love and duty!’ wrote Heath resignedly.¹⁶ Sometimes he was more successful. Derick Heathcoat-Amory, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, told Heath late in 1958 that he wanted to retire and ‘spend his declining years in some useful form of service’ (a curious reflection on his estimation of his actual job). Heath persuaded him that it was his duty to soldier on, at least until the next election.¹⁷

      Another desirable quality for a Chief Whip is to be invariably equable. Here Heath was less than perfect. He always suffered from a short temper and was apt to explode if opposed in any way which he felt pig-headed and unreasonable. ‘He was fratchety as Chief Whip,’ said one not particularly rebellious member. ‘He can be very huffy if you don’t agree with him.’ Humphry Berkeley, a left-wing Tory backbencher, was lunching with a friend in the Carlton Club in 1956, discussing the capital punishment bill which was then being debated in the Commons. Heath joined them and tried to persuade them to accept the compromise proposal supported by the Government, which retained the death penalty but only for four categories of murder. He failed, whereupon, according to Berkeley, he ‘became abusive; he called us soft and then relapsed into a sullen silence, refusing to join us for coffee afterwards…We were shocked at this display of anger and rudeness on the part of the Government Chief Whip.’¹⁸ The anecdote is the more striking because Heath’s personal conviction was that the death penalty should be abolished. It was another example of his belief that a Chief Whip could have no views of his own, or at least none that he would own to publicly. It was also uncharacteristic: the explosion of bad temper was not unheard of but, at this stage of his career at least, the sustained sulk was unusual. He must have been in an exceptionally fratchety mood that day.

      ‘You’ll remember asking last Saturday what I thought about a certain person’s private affairs,’ the veteran Tory politician, Harry Crookshank, wrote mysteriously. He recommended an approach to the Queen’s private secretary.¹⁹ It was but one of many such covert communications. Heath constantly had to enquire into the private affairs of one person or another, and usually found the task distasteful. Peter Baker, the member for South Norfolk, was an alcoholic whose businesses had failed badly. He tried to persuade Heath that he was now a reformed character but the Deputy Chief Whip, as Heath then was, insisted he should resign. Baker refused, though promising not to stand at the next election. ‘What is to be done?’ asked the Prime Minister. Nothing, replied Heath, ‘short of guiding his hand to sign an application for the Chiltern Hundreds,^* which would have been particularly dangerous as he is in a Nursing Home under the care of a doctor’. Eventually Baker was charged with forgery and sent to prison.²⁰

      Another scandal erupted in 1965, when Alec Home was Prime Minister. Anthony Courtney, a Tory MP, had been СКАЧАТЬ