At the court of King Ted, the mood was bleak. ‘They were all very tired men,’ recalled the Cabinet Secretary, Sir John Hunt, later. ‘It struck me that the smell of death was around.’ For three and a half years, ministers and officials had taken their lead from their captain, yet Heath now cut a curiously indecisive figure, listless and lethargic where he had once been curt and decisive. Some aides worried that, as a lonely man with nobody to comfort him in the midnight hour, he had succumbed to depression. No doubt his thyroid condition also played its part. And for a man who only a few years before had prided himself on his sporting hinterland, he was also suddenly and very noticeably overweight. When the Daily Express’s formidable columnist Jean Rook wondered if he was getting a bit fat, Heath blamed the three-day week. ‘Yes, I must say I am,’ he said mournfully. ‘The trouble is I don’t get any swimming now. We had to turn off the pool heating at Chequers – it’s oil.’41
Heath’s indecisiveness was particularly marked over the question of an early election to take advantage of the crisis. The idea had been floating around for a long time: as early as November 1972, Private Eye had reported ‘considerable agitation in the Tory ranks for a spring election on the simple issue of bashing the unions’. The following February, the Conservative Research Department was already making contingency plans for a ‘snap’ election fought on a single issue, and by the summer of 1973 Central Office already had a draft manifesto and a list of possible dates. The biggest champion of an early election, though, was the young journalist Nigel Lawson, who was recruited to the Conservative Research Department in October 1973 and argued tirelessly for Heath to seek a new mandate based on the oil crisis and the transition to an age of austerity. It was Lawson who persuaded Douglas Hurd – his future Cabinet colleague – that an early election was a good idea, and they were supported by the party chairman and deputy chairman, Lord Carrington and Jim Prior, who reported that local activists were itching for a fight to the death with the unions. Persuading the Prime Minister, however, was rather more difficult. ‘Slowly the band waggon for an early General Election is beginning to roll,’ Hurd noted in his diary on 18 December – ‘but EH, so far as one can gather, still unconvinced.’42
Choosing the day he will face the voters is probably the single most important decision any Prime Minister has to make, and not one to be taken lightly. But there were obvious advantages to an early election. The miners’ dispute had not done Heath’s popularity any harm: indeed, on 7 December an ORC poll put the Tories ahead of Labour for only the second time in two years. In the press, speculation mounted that Heath might take advantage of the apparent spirit of national unity at a time of crisis: The Times ran a front-page story on the possibility five days later, and on 17 December the paper’s political correspondent David Wood devoted his column to discussing the pros and cons. And even after the three-day week began, the polls remained promising. At the beginning of January, both ORC and Gallup still had the Conservatives narrowly ahead – and this, of course, after two years in which they had been consistently lagging – and on 10 January NOP reported that the Tory lead had stretched to 4 per cent. The Conservative Party seemed robust, united, hungry for the battle; by contrast, the Liberals were still desperately trying to find candidates for many seats, while Labour were arguing among themselves about the right way to handle the miners’ dispute. And as everyone knew, a new electoral register was due to come in on 15 February – and it would suit the government to fight under the old one.43
Yet Heath was uneasy at the thought of an early election. His mandate still had eighteen months to run: if he wanted, he could wait until June 1975 before he faced the voters. Crucially, almost all of his senior ministers, many of whom had waited years to get their hands on the levers of power, disapproved of the idea. Willie Whitelaw, now effectively deputy Prime Minister, was dead against it, partly because he still hoped to settle the miners’ dispute, but also because he dreaded its effect on the delicate power-sharing arrangement in Northern Ireland. The former Chief Whip Francis Pym, now moved to replace Whitelaw at Stormont, agreed with him; so did the Home Secretary, Robert Carr. Even Heath’s most influential mandarin, Sir William Armstrong, thought it was a bad idea: it would look as if the government was ‘running away’ from its problems, he said. And above all, it offended all of Heath’s political instincts. To him it smacked of cynical self-interest: going for a quick victory on the back of an international crisis and an old electoral register was just the kind of thing that Harold Wilson would do. And while his grass-roots activists and younger aides wanted him to rally the nation against the miners, he shrank from the idea. On the steps of Number 10, after all, he had promised ‘to create one nation’. He wanted the unions beside him as his partners, not against him as his enemies. And when Heath went to South Worcestershire on New Year’s Eve, addressing a Tory rally on the eve of a crucial by-election (and the eve of the three-day week), Douglas Hurd was struck by his refusal to exploit the situation. ‘He could have worked that audience to a pitch of fiery loyalty,’ Hurd wrote. ‘He could have whipped them up against the miners. He could have sent them excited and enthusiastic into the streets. It did not occur him to do so … He saw it as his duty to educate and inform, not to inflame one part of the country against another.’44
Deep down, Heath had never quite given up hope that if he held firm, if the country rallied and the three-day week worked, then the miners would see sense. ‘Heath believes that if the miners can be convinced that they have no chance of getting an increase beyond Phase 3,’ his energy minister Patrick Jenkin told Ronald McIntosh, ‘they will cut their losses and agree to talk about pensions, a long-term review of the coal industry, etc.’ What Heath was not prepared to accept, however, was a deal that went beyond Stage Three – as became clear when, on Wednesday, 9 January, the unions came up with what seemed to be an honourable compromise. The TUC’s new general secretary Len Murray had no desire to begin his tenure with a titanic battle against the government. He was keen to see the end of the three-day week, which was damaging his members’ earnings, and he was worried that the longer the dispute went on, the more it would destroy the relationship between Downing Street and the unions. Other union leaders, too, including Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon, were similarly anxious to bring the crisis to an end. And when the NEDC met at Millbank on 9 January, bringing together union leaders, ministers and business leaders, the railwaymen’s leader Sidney Greene – regarded as one of the most moderate union bosses – produced the text of a compromise. ‘The General Council accept that there is a distinctive and exceptional situation in the mining industry,’ he read aloud. ‘If the Government are prepared to give an assurance that they will make possible a settlement between the miners and the National Coal Board, other unions will not use this as an argument in negotiations in their own settlements.’ When he had finished, the other union leaders murmured their agreement. Even Jones and Scanlon, Len Murray told Ronald McIntosh, ‘were completely committed to it’.45
The TUC’s offer seemed the perfect opportunity for the government to strike a deal with the miners without sacrificing Stage Three – the perfect opportunity to have peace with honour. So McIntosh was all the more astonished when Anthony Barber immediately said no. The Chancellor ‘said several times that HMG could not in any circumstances contemplate any settlement outside Phase 3’, McIntosh recorded. The Treasury mandarin Sir Douglas Allen, who was in the middle of writing Barber a note urging him to ‘keep talking’, was stunned when his boss said curtly: ‘It’s not good enough.’ Even the union leaders were taken aback by his ‘negative and hostile’ tone, and Greene read the statement again in case Barber had misunderstood it. There is some disagreement whether Barber bothered to consult Heath: the Chancellor later claimed he slipped out to ring him from a payphone, while McIntosh and Jack Jones insisted that he never moved. Some onlookers even claim that if Heath had been there instead of Barber, he might have accepted the deal, changing the entire course of British polit
ical history. But this seems very unlikely. Sir John Hunt remembered Barber coming round to Number 10 later that afternoon to tell Heath what had happened. Their discussion, Hunt recalled, was ‘very short’ indeed: it was clear that Heath agreed with his Chancellor’s position.46
As the point at which the miners’ strike and general election of February 1974 might have been averted, Barber’s rejection of the TUC’s offer is one of the most intriguing what-ifs of modern political history. McIntosh thought Barber was mad to reject such a ‘serious and well-considered’ offer, while even Mick McGahey, whose priorities were rather different, thought that the miners would have accepted the deal, and was delighted that Barber turned it down. But the truth is that Heath and Barber never believed it could work. As Barber pointed out, the TUC had always refused to promise that other unions ‘would not do this, that or the other’, so he never believed that they could ‘bring home the bacon’. Neither he nor Heath had much faith in Len Murray, a quiet, mild man who had only just taken over at the top of the TUC. If Murray had been serious, they thought, he would have come to them privately beforehand instead of grandstanding in front of the union bosses. Above all, they had no confidence in the TUC’s ability to enforce what was basically a toothless agreement. It was all very well for the TUC to pledge that the miners were an exceptional case, Heath said later. ‘But I said, does this mean that there’ll be no other special cases? You see, you can say the miners have special circumstances, therefore they are a special case – now suppose special circumstances of a different kind come along, will you … agree that that is not a special case?’ In particular, he was worried about the electricians, whose leader Frank Chapple had already announced that if the miners got a deal outside Stage Three, he would demand one too. Could the TUC really keep him in line? And for that matter, could the union leaders really be trusted to restrain their own members?47
Of course, a more cynical politician would have taken the deal even though he knew it might fail. Jim Prior, for instance, thought that ‘it would have got us off the hook, and put the unions on their best behaviour. Had their self-restraint failed, we would then have been in a much stronger position to take whatever steps might then have been necessary.’ Even Len Murray made the same argument. ‘If [Heath] had taken the offer and it had failed to work,’ he said later, ‘he would have been home and dry with all his anti-union policies – Industrial Relations Act and incomes policy. If it had worked, it would have been his great political triumph, showing he could bring the unions to heel.’ But it was not Heath’s style to accept a bargain knowing that it might break down. By now his political instincts, never very strong anyway, had been dulled by three years in office: he saw himself as a national statesman, an honest broker, not a man who struck grubby deals for personal advantage, as Harold Wilson did. And at the point when a more cunning, supple politician might have taken the deal, presenting it as a victory while quietly preparing the ground for an offensive against the unions if they failed to honour their side of the bargain, Heath obstinately stuck to his guns. It was Stage Three or nothing, he said. So he got nothing.48
If the union leaders were astonished at Heath’s stubborn refusal to countenance a deal, they were even more struck by his uncharacteristic behaviour as the three-day week wore on. Once so proud and self-assured, the Conradian captain on the bridge of his ship, he now seemed more like a sullen, self-pitying schoolboy. Murray recalled that at their meetings ‘there were very long silences. Ted would sit for what seemed like minutes with his head sunk deep on his chest, pondering.’ But for many observers, the most revealing moment came during talks on 21 January, when the Prime Minister seemed more taciturn and miserable than ever. At last, after the meeting had got nowhere, Hugh Scanlon turned to Heath and asked directly: ‘Is there anything, anything at all, that we can say or do that will satisfy you?’ As Murray recalled, ‘Heath remained silent: his head sunk into his shoulders: wanting to say something but unable to do so.’ Yet missing from the union leaders’ account was another exchange that told the other side of the story and made the stalemate painfully clear. Later in the same meeting, Heath roused himself from his gloom, ‘turned across the table to the TUC’, and said bluntly: ‘But if an exceptional settlement were conceded to the miners, you know you couldn’t hold the line, could you?’ ‘That too was followed by silence,’ a watching civil servant recalled. ‘It seems to me that represented the distance between the two positions.’49
In the meantime, the pressure on Heath to take his case to the voters was becoming virtually irresistible. ‘Election rumours continue to grow at a fantastic rate,’ recorded Tony Benn on 12 January. By now, Tory party officials were working on the assumption that an election was coming, and Lord Carrington’s soundings among local activists found a strong consensus for going to the country in early February. On 11 January, Heath reluctantly authorized Central Office to begin its election countdown; three days later, The Times declared that there was ‘ample constitutional justification for an immediate election’, while its political correspondent David Wood wrote that unless there was an unexpected and immediate breakthrough, Heath had ‘no choice but to decide on an early election or make himself a hostage to fortune until spring’. This was Heath’s moment: by now, almost everybody expected that he would go to the country on 7 February and ask for a mandate to lead Britain through the economic crisis.50
Yet even now Heath shrank from the crucial decision. Even now an election campaign pitting the government against the unions was the last thing he wanted. And when he summoned his chief advisers to Chequers to discuss the election, it was clear his heart was not in it. ‘Everything was geared up for 7 February,’ recalled Nigel Lawson. Then: ‘13 January. Chequers. Sunday … for the first time Ted actually expressed scepticism about an election.’ Instead of giving his men the green light, Heath told Lawson to redraft the proposed manifesto – a sign, some thought, that he was losing his nerve. ‘Unhappy evening. We are in a desperate plight. I long to get the election behind us,’ wrote Douglas Hurd, one of the young hawks. Two days later, Lawson reported back. But by this stage the momentum seemed to be evaporating. When they met to review Lawson’s draft, Hurd noted, ‘the Prime Minister was slack in the chair, and we made slow progress’. He felt like one of Elizabeth I’s courtiers arguing for the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, trying to wear down the monarch’s instinctive resistance. The difference, however, was that Heath was up against a tight deadline. If he wanted an election on 7 February, he had to call it by 17 January. The day before the deadline, he seemed to be leaning towards an election at last: Carrington and Hurd thought their pressure had done the trick. But at the crucial moment they dropped their guard. Late that night, Willie Whitelaw invited his chief for a private dinner, just the two of them, and it was then that he persuaded him that the risks were too great. The next day, no announcement came. Heath had changed his mind.51
Many Tories were furious at Heath’s reluctance to call a contest. The aspiring politician Alan Clark, who had been adopted as the Conservative candidate for Plymouth Sutton, had been ‘in tremendous form’ at the prospect of fighting on an ‘anti-union platform’. ‘Now total reversal,’ he recorded. ‘Heath lost his nerve at the last moment that afternoon, morale shattered.’ Jim Prior, meanwhile, was aghast: in the Commons that afternoon he angrily told his leader that he had made a terrible mistake. ‘We had already marched the Party’s troops up the hill, ready for combat,’ he warned, ‘and then had to march them down again; it would be much harder to march them up a second time.’ By contrast, the Opposition were delighted, crowing that the Tories had lost their nerve. ‘The Labour Party and the people in the Tea Room are raising their hats to you this afternoon,’ Prior snapped, ‘and saying you let them off the hook.’52
But not everybody thought Heath had made a mistake. A week later, Alan Clark, afflicted with atrocious toothache, was sitting in his dentist’s waiting room when he noticed ‘an old gentleman wearing a mac’ loudly rustl
ing a copy of The Times ‘in a rather ego, demonstrative manner’. After a moment, Clark realized who it was – ‘Uncle Harold!’ – and when the aspiring MP went over, he found the former Prime Minister in fine and talkative form. An election, Macmillan said, ‘would be a disaster’, because the working classes ‘would see it as a loyalty vote’. He thought ‘that the miners had to be bought off until North Sea oil came on stream’, Clark recorded; ‘that it should not be difficult to outmanoeuvre Len Murray; that McGahey wasn’t popular in the TUC; that the real agitator was (Scrimgeour* was it? – the words came thick and fast and I was transfixed); that it was urgent to find some way of reassuring the middle classes who were puzzled and that we ought now to be talking to the Liberal Party.’ All good advice, as it turned out. Perhaps it was a shame for the Conservatives that Heath’s teeth were in good condition.53
State of Emergency: the Way We Were Page 80
