It was clear that his real interests lay elsewhere. Lawton recollects that Neave never had any interest in the law. His abiding passion was politics. When the partners drifted off to the local Kardomah café for a convivial chat at the end of the day, he would not be among them. Nor did he join them in El Vino’s, whose back door was conveniently close by, or the Feathers, a pub in Tudor Street where lawyers mixed with Fleet Street journalists. ‘Almost every night he was off somewhere down to Essex,’ remembered Lawton. ‘He was determined to get into Parliament, and a lot of people pulled his leg.’ But his fellow barristers were impressed by Neave’s single-mindedness. He gave them to understand that whatever he decided to do, he was determined to do.
His first big break came in his native Essex, where the Conservatives selected him as prospective parliamentary candidate for Thurrock in the General Election that would have to be held some time in the first half of 1950. Thurrock was, and remains, a slice of working-class south-east England. Then, as now, it was dominated by its docklands, though Bata Shoes had a large factory there. Before the war, the electorate was split between the divisions of South-East Essex and Romford. Rapid population growth compelled a revision of boundaries and the Thurrock constituency was carved out of these two seats during a wartime redrawing of the political map.
In 1945, Leslie Solley, a barrister who had clawed his way up to the Bar by scholarships from an elementary school to London University, won Thurrock with a majority of 13,262 over his Tory rival, Major Tom Adams. But Solley proved to be a left-wing thorn in Attlee’s side and was expelled from the Labour Party in 1949 for defying the government’s foreign policy. In the coming General Election, he would be standing as an Independent Labour candidate. He had a substantial level of support from the unions, including the mineworkers, though the nearest pit was many miles away in Kent.
The official Labour man was Hugh Delargy, a political refugee from Manchester where he had been MP for the now defunct Miles Platting division for five years. Delargy, aged forty-one, had been educated in France and Italy and by turns had been a teacher in a private school, a journalist and a labourer. He had had a good war, rising in the Royal Artillery from the ranks to staff captain at General Eisenhower’s headquarters. The Liberals also fielded a candidate, W.H.N. Siddons, an actor and descendant of Sarah Siddons. He had been a flight lieutenant in Bomber Command and won the DFC.
Thurrock was nowhere near a marginal seat, though Conservative membership was steadily on the increase and the party association could boast seventeen branches. Neave’s only hope was that the two Labour candidates would split the anti-Conservative vote, allowing him to sneak in through the middle. The growing unpopularity of Clement Attlee’s socialist government, which had been in power for four and a half years but had not yet managed to end wartime rationing, suggested that the Tories under Churchill might be in with a chance of forming a government. By now Churchill was seventy-five but as The Times guide to the election pointed out ‘his weight of years diminished not at all his zest for the fight or his robust leadership of the anti-government forces’.
At first sight, there was much common ground between the parties. Plans for a great improvement in social services had been drawn up by the wartime coalition and implemented by Labour. Family allowances, pension and health benefits were extended right across the nation. The ‘welfare state’ was born. However, there were deep divisions over the Attlee government’s determination to take over the commanding heights of the economy. With their majority of almost 150, Labour pushed through nationalisation of the coal industry, civil aviation, the Bank of England, the railways, gas, electricity, large parts of the road haulage industry and cable and wireless communications. Nationalisation of the steel industry was approved in principle, despite a wrecking campaign by the Conservative-dominated House of Lords which prompted a further curtailment of their legislative powers. Neave shared the general Tory hostility to state ownership of industry, and had serious reservations about Labour’s conduct of foreign policy, though the Opposition had by and large supported the government in the post-war period, particularly the establishment of NATO.
Worsening economic conditions, including a massive devaluation of the pound in 1949, forced Attlee into heavy cuts in public spending and investment, adding to the air of expectation that the government would have to go to the country before the end of its statutory five-year term. Attlee resisted pressure to hold an election in the autumn but was finally obliged to ask the King for a dissolution on 11 January 1950. Polling day was fixed for 23 February.
On 21 January, shortly before his thirty-fourth birthday, Neave offered his personal manifesto to the voters in the Essex and Thurrock Gazette. He dived directly into a controversial statement of political philosophy. ‘What you people who call yourselves Labour must remember is that Labour is a socialist party. Socialism means nationalisation of all the means of production, distribution and exchange,’ he wrote. ‘They call it “public ownership”, but it’s the state that makes you pay its losses. If you let them take over cement and insurance, where will it stop? I believe it will end in the state making a monopoly out of clothes, shoes, and even your beer. They will be able to charge what they like. What is more, the so-called socialist state will then be a Communist state.’
Neave conceded that coal, gas, electricity and the railways would have to remain in public hands (not least because of huge losses), but demanded denationalisation of air transport, road haulage and the steel industry. He also favoured breaking the link between trade unions and the Labour Party by abolishing the law that required union members to ‘contract out’ of paying the weekly political levy which largely financed the party and gave the unions a powerful influence in determining its policy.
Pledging himself to work for peace, and to provide adequate defence against oppression, Neave proposed building up the regular armed forces, reducing numbers conscripted by National Service and doing more for the Territorials. Taking a further swipe at the Labour Party, he suggested that it had been prepared to seek a compromise with Communism in 1945 and compared Labour’s HQ, Transport House, with Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda chief. England would only be great again when she had dropped socialism – ‘No one has much faith in it – and it doesn’t work.’
A few days later, Neave used the annual meeting of the Thurrock Division Conservative Association to take the fight to the enemy, revelling in Labour’s internal wrangling between ‘the Solleyites’ and the supporters of Delargy. The election would decide ‘perhaps for ever’ whether the prestige of Old England would be restored. He attacked the post-war record of the Attlee Cabinet, recalling Sir Stafford Cripps’s encouragement of the workers not to make munitions – and thus starve the armed forces of weapons – and took a dig at the ‘class war’ of socialism, concluding that socialism spoilt the country both economically and spiritually. In post-war Thurrock, this was a brave but foolhardy furrow to plough. Thurrock was the stronghold of the Transport and General Workers and other unions, and such declarations did not play well in the letters columns of the Essex and Thurrock Gazette, where correspondents concentrated more on the Conservatives’ past record, and unflatteringly so. One voter referred Neave to the ‘good old days’ of oppression, pawnshops, starvation, the dole and means tests.
Neave was confirmed as parliamentary candidate in the Conservative Club Hall in Clarence Road, Grays, on 3 February, in the middle of an energetic round of nightly public meetings around the constituency. Invariably, he was billed as A.M.S. Neave DSO, MBE, MC. His military rank of lieutenant-colonel, with which he had left the army, was not mentioned. His meetings were well attended but not on the scale of Hugh Delargy’s, who asserted ‘without conceit’ that he would win because he was the Labour candidate and the people wanted Labour. With little more than a fortnight to polling day, local coverage of Neave had been reduced to a two-paragraph item on his views about the other candidates. He fared rather better as the papers went to press for the la
st time before polling day, but not in the best light. At South Ockendon, a packed hall in the local school greeted him with organised heckling, forcing him to shout above the din, ‘I’ve met far tougher audiences than you!’ In a girls’ school in Grays he warned an audience of 170 people: ‘If you value your freedom, look out! Your trade unions will have no right to strike!’ He did not believe for one moment that ‘the working man’ would vote socialist just to save red-faced masters. Then, contrarily, he admonished: ‘It won’t be much use waking up in five years’ time and finding yourself in a completely Communist state. You must decide now!’
Neave’s fellow lawyers would have been surprised at the venom of which their reserved colleague was capable on the hustings. He had no compunction about raising the spectre of Communism as the natural culmination of an old-fashioned Labour government. In this he was only following his leader. Winston Churchill claimed that an Attlee government would ‘have to fall back on some kind of Gestapo’ because his party found the concept of a free Parliament ‘odious’. Neave’s hatred of totalitarianism had been sharpened by his war. ‘The whole experience had a deep influence on my future life,’ he admitted. It would have been odd had it been otherwise. But also, and crucially, he had noted the behaviour of the Russian lawyers at Nuremberg. At the diktat of the Kremlin, they had subjugated the rule of law to political ends. No doubt he made this point in reports from Nuremberg to MI6, when post-war policy was already focusing on the threat from Communism as the Soviet Union swallowed up the states of Eastern Europe one after another. Churchill first referred to an ‘iron curtain’ descending over Europe in a cable to President Truman ten days before polling day in 1945. The ensuing Cold War dominated not only the thinking of the security services and the military, but the political classes and the nation as a whole. Neave’s political attitudes and development have to be seen in that context. He may have been born in the countryside but he was no traditional knight of the shires. His politics derived more from contemporary influences, not least his continuing connection with IS9 and the clubby secret service world in London where anti-Communism was the norm.
Neave required little goading to exhibit a gut hatred of Labour, to whom he invariably referred in the Conservative style of the day as ‘the socialists’. There were occasions, too, when he talked down to the electorate, equating a vote for Labour as a blind, unthinking step down the road to Stalinism. The politics of contempt did not go down well in working-class Thurrock, as he discovered on polling day. The turnout was high: 85 per cent in mild, generally fine winter weather, and just above the national average. Delargy easily retained the seat for Labour with 22,893 votes, a majority of 9,587 over Neave, the runner-up, with 13,306 votes. On Neave’s part, it was a fair performance. He polled around 3,400 votes more than the Tories had achieved in 1945, but Delargy dropped only a few hundred and the combined Labour/Independent Labour vote (Leslie Solley, the Labour radical, had polled 4,250 votes) actually increased by more than 4,000. Neave put on a brave face, vowing that the battle would continue. It did, but without him. He moved on to greener pastures. Thurrock would not fall into Conservative hands until 1987, and then only for one parliamentary term. Across the river, his fellow lawyer Margaret Roberts, the twenty-four-year-old political prodigy, fared no better, losing at Dartford, Kent.
Neave’s performance looked even more modest when set against the national outcome. In a Commons reduced by boundary changes from 640 MPs to 625, the Tories and their associates won almost a hundred constituencies. Labour shed sixty-nine and the Liberals also fared badly. Attlee was left holed below the waterline, with an overall parliamentary majority of only six. When the Commons returned, the Prime Minister admitted that the House was more evenly divided than at any time in the previous hundred years.
Attlee was determined to soldier on but a new general election was clearly on the horizon. Neave busied himself looking for a more promising seat and became prominent in the Conservative Candidates’ Association. This organisation, a useful proving ground and a good source for political gossip, met a couple of times a year. In 1950, Neave was elected secretary of the CCA, a largely honorific post, but a useful boost to his profile.
Edward du Cann, another Tory hopeful who had had a good war – in his case, in motor torpedo-boats – met him at the association’s annual general meeting in Abbey House, off London’s Victoria Street. They numbered around 150. Du Cann remembers Neave then as ‘a solid but not dull man with an impression of competence about him’. He shared Neave’s belief that the Labour Party had failed the country in the post-war period, that Britain had somehow missed the spoils of victory. They were fired with an enthusiasm to change things.2
Neave’s search for a winnable seat was concluded with remarkable swiftness. In the first week of May 1950 he was adopted as prospective parliamentary candidate for Ealing North, a comfortable suburban stretch of west London. Ealing North contained some manufacturing industry, including strongly unionised firms like Hoover and vehicle builders AEC, and a number of large council estates, but it was a classic Labour marginal, ripe for shaking. The incumbent Labour MP, Jimmy Hudson, had had a majority of only 2,404 over the Tory candidate, Mrs Elsie Olsen, in the General Election of that year. Hudson, a former schoolmaster and Labour pioneer who represented a Huddersfield seat in the 1920s, could not have offered a greater contrast to Neave. An elderly man of pacifist views, he was almost better known as secretary of the National Temperance Federation than as an MP. He had never got beyond parliamentary private secretary – an unpaid post at Westminster – and his ministerial career had ended twenty years previously.
Accordingly, Neave was in his element when he spoke to the Northolt Conservative Association two weeks after his selection. ‘I shall fight like a tiger,’ he promised. ‘I will put up a fight you will never forget. I am going to fight right the way through.’ His martial style was greeted with prolonged applause. His rally to arms, which made the front page of the Middlesex County Times,3 posed the question of what younger people would have to look forward to in the second half of the twentieth century. The great danger of the present day, he claimed, was that Britain was breeding a race of professional politicians instead of men and women who got to know others by meeting them on their doorsteps, in their clubs or ‘even in the pubs’, a sly dig at his teetotal rival. His vigorous defence of Tory policy brought new heart to his audience. The outgoing chairman, Councillor F.E. Thomas, said, ‘I think in him we have a candidate who at last is going to crack the hard shell of socialism in this district.’
At Westminster, the Opposition harried Attlee’s hard-pressed administration, putting down three motions of censure in the first month. But Labour survived, regrouped and pressed on, despite the loss through ill health of the Chancellor, Sir Stafford Cripps, and the death of the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, a bulwark of the Cabinet. Twice the government survived only by the casting vote of the Speaker, and it was outvoted five times, though never on an issue of confidence. Churchill called again and again for a general election to give the country a firm, stable – that is, Conservative – government.
In Ealing, Neave pursued his political prize relentlessly. In June 1950 he addressed the Rotary Club of Greenford, drawing on his experiences at Nuremberg. ‘Someone has called this the century of the common man,’ he told the assembled Rotarians. ‘Never have such brutalities been perpetrated upon him. The men who did these things under Adolf Hitler were, with few exceptions, very ordinary men.’
A fortnight later he was on his feet again, speaking to his association chiefs, but more for public consumption. This was the height of the Cold War and Neave was keen to discredit his rival’s pacifist ideals. ‘Korea may be Stalin’s rehearsal for West Germany,’ he warned. ‘Old-fashioned pacifism will not stop Communist tanks … However sincere a pacifist may be, it is no use being a pacifist in 1950 until you can turn Stalin and Molotov into pacifists.’ He also supported the Schuman Plan (for integrating Europe’s iron and stee
l industries, put forward in May 1950 by the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schuman, and the nucleus of the European Community), arguing that it would lead to a pooling of output without change of ownership. Britain should at least discuss the issue of European iron and steel ‘instead of standing sheepishly aside. Then we could put our case and demand our conditions. As it is, we are going to be left looking very silly.’4 On this issue, Neave was ahead of public opinion and attitudes within his own party. The war had made him a convinced European, in strategic terms.
Over the ensuing months, Neave delivered more set speeches on foreign and domestic policy. They were a mixture of serious Merton College-type lectures with occasional dashes of Ballet Nonsense, along Colditz lines. Overall he was grave, warning that 1951 presented the nation with the very last chance of preventing another war. Six months earlier, Communist North Korea had invaded the US-backed South. American forces, supported by the United Nations, opposed the invasion and the first British troops began arriving in late August 1950. The Communists were thrown back into the north, but China joined the war in November and after bitter fighting the UN forces were driven back. Britain also faced a threat to her interests in Egypt, where King Farouk demanded withdrawal of British troops there to guard the strategic Suez Canal. It was not a time for faint hearts.
‘I am a positive man and I will speak my mind,’ Neave declared. ‘This is the year that will bring the decision.’ He accused the beleaguered Attlee government of ‘a hideous state of muddle’, pursuing a miserable Micawber-like policy of hoping that something would turn up. Labour had known perfectly well that the Soviet Union had not demobilised after 1945, yet the government had allowed the country’s defences to deteriorate into muddle. He accused them of not heeding the gathering storm. Neave moved his attack to ‘socialist controls’ of business, which threatened to turn private enterprise over to ‘spivs and barrow boys’, before returning to his favourite theme: ‘That is not the way to stop Communism.’5
Public Servant, Secret Agent Page 21
