Nor was he lacking courage. As an undergraduate, he visited the battlefront of the Spanish Civil War and only just managed to get out of Poland before war broke out. As an artillery officer, he fought his way through Belgium and Germany and saw men die alongside him. Ziegler treats Heath’s six years in the army rather skimpily (Campbell is a little better), yet this experience surely generated the hatred of war and determination to avoid it at almost all costs which were so conspicuous in his later attitudes to conflict, and also cemented his view, already formed in the late 1930s, that the best hope was a ‘United States of Europe . . . in which states will have to give up some of their national rights’. As an MP in the 1950s, he would declare in his plonking downright style that ‘the nation state is dead. What has sovereignty to do with anything in the 20th century?’
From this belief he never wavered. It was the source both of his sole claim to immortality and of the undying loathing he incurred in a considerable portion of his own party. Ziegler shows very well the energy, resourcefulness and mastery of detail that Heath deployed both as Macmillan’s minister for Europe in his first, unsuccessful bid to have Britain join the EEC and his later triumph as prime minister. It remains doubtful whether anyone else could have pulled it off. Yet, as Ziegler also makes clear in his unstressed, faintly feline way, the manner of the pulling-off remains at the very least questionable and at worst the cause of long-term public disenchantment not only with the European project but with politics in general.
Heath wanted to gloss over the popular objections, just as his hero Jean Monnet had, believing that the European project could get off the ground only if it was undertaken by the elites, with little or no reference to the people. Heath told Kilmuir, lord chancellor at the time of the Macmillan application, that ‘in the modern world if, from other points of view, political and economic, it should prove desirable to accept such further limitations on sovereignty as would follow from the signature of the Treaty of Rome, we could do so without danger to the essential character of our independence and without prejudice to our vital interests.’ In reply, Kilmuir warned that ‘these objections ought to be brought out into the open now because, if we attempt to gloss over them at this stage, those who are opposed to the whole idea of joining the Community will certainly seize on them with more damaging effect later on.’ To put it bluntly, they would be accused of having taken Britain in on a false prospectus.
Heath would later claim that he had all along said explicitly that ‘the main purpose of the negotiations was political.’ But quite what ‘political’ was supposed to mean he did not feel obliged to elaborate on, preferring to point out that any move towards federalism could only come about with the support of all members, so that concerns about sovereignty were misplaced. Ziegler puts it nicely: ‘He did not seek actively to mislead the British public about his expectations, but he did not feel it necessary or desirable to spell out the full implications of British entry in any detail.’ That seems to me at least suppressio veri, with a whiff of suggestio falsi too. There was also in Heath’s manner what Robert Rhodes James, then a senior clerk in the House of Commons, diagnosed as ‘an ominous note of thinly veiled intellectual contempt for those in his party who opposed the application’. Neither then nor later did Heath have much time for vox populi or for anyone who objected to his grands projets on grounds either of democracy or history. In old age, he developed a soft spot for dictators and was a fêted visitor to Peking and Baghdad, where they understood how to deal with dissent.
This indifference to popular sentiment was striking in the reforms of local government which he undertook in concert with his protégé Peter Walker. It is a pity that Ziegler doesn’t mention these, though Campbell covers them well, for the Heath–Walker reforms show Heathco at its crassest. Counties like Berkshire, which had lasted for a thousand years, were to be axed or have their boundaries sliced. The total number of authorities was to be reduced from more than 1200 to about 400. Bigger was better, more modern, more streamlined. Historical loyalties were for wimps. As a fledgling journalist, I was sent to interview Walker in his Commons cubbyhole and remember how astonished he was that anyone should have qualms about such alterations. Walker recanted long before his recent death; Heath did not. Some but not all of their work has been undone. It is now, I think, widely acknowledged that what we need is not less but more local government.
Elsewhere, Heath’s legacy did not endure nearly so long. When he came to power in June 1970 (much to the surprise of his opponents and most of his own side too), he inherited a bad and fast deteriorating situation in Northern Ireland. Unfortunately – an adverb one reaches for far too often in reviewing Heath’s life – he totally failed to grasp the realities of Ulster politics. Ziegler is inclined to give him credit for ramming through the Sunningdale Agreement in 1973. After all, its terms weren’t so dissimilar from those of the Good Friday Agreement twenty-five years later – the latter memorably described by the SDLP deputy leader Seamus Mallon as ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’. Doing his best for his man, Ziegler declares that ‘with the benefit of hindsight it is possible to see that he was right and that the Ulstermen were wrong.’ But is it? The trouble with this posthumous rehabilitation is not simply that Sunningdale lasted only two months, before the pro-Sunningdale Unionists were obliterated in the miners’ election that Heath had so suicidally called in February 1974. It was blindingly obvious that the Unionists would never accept the plan for an All-Ireland Council, which they regarded as a preliminary step to a united Ireland. A year or so later, Garret FitzGerald, the Irish foreign minister, was asked why they had not warned the British team that the All-Ireland Council was a step too far. FitzGerald, charmingly and not unreasonably, replied: ‘We didn’t think it was our business to tell the British how to negotiate.’
But what Ziegler also makes clear is that the Unionists really did have reason to distrust British intentions. At an informal meeting between Heath and Lord Rothschild, cabinet secretary Burke Trend and Heath’s principal private secretary Robert Armstrong (who were both hugely influential in British dealings with Northern Ireland), everyone had agreed that ‘the only lasting solution would lie in bringing about the unification of all Ireland.’ The foreign secretary, Alec Douglas-Home, also believed that ‘the real British interest would . . . be served best by pushing them [the Unionists] towards a United Ireland.’ How revealing the apposition between ‘British’ and ‘them’.
The signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 took place under completely different circumstances: the IRA had been fought to a standstill and had signalled that the war was over, and Blair had told the people of Ulster that he did not expect to see a united Ireland in his lifetime or the lifetime of anyone in his audience. The principle of majority consent was no longer a hurdle which might be dismantled twig by twig, but the foundation of a new settlement and understood as such by all parties.
What one can’t help noticing from this miserable story – more than 2000 people were killed after the failure of Sunningdale – is the singularly unresponsive quality of Heath’s mind. It is not true, as Enoch Powell claimed, that he shied away violently from anything resembling an idea. On the contrary, he espoused ideas with a passion he scarcely ever showed in human relations. But once an idea was lodged in his head, he did nothing with it; he allowed it no interplay with other ideas or other people. As a result, he had little aptitude for judging political risk or public reaction. It was not just that he didn’t know what made people tick, he made no effort to listen to the ticking. His insensitivity has often been compared with Thatcher’s, but until she was overtaken by hubris in her later years she retained a strong prudential sense of how far she could go and what she could get away with.
For the same reason, Heath’s grandiose plan for reforming the trade unions ran into collision after collision until it finally expired into irrelevance. He seems to have given little thought to how union members would react to an abrupt scrapping of all the legal exemption
s that had built up since Disraeli’s day. It did not occur to him that a step-by-step process of whittling away the more indefensible privileges might have worked, as it did for Thatcher. In the same way, he never considered building up the European Free Trade Area by voluntary agreement, gradually extending its reach into other social and economic areas, such as freedom of movement for its citizens and reciprocal welfare benefits. There is a useful alternative model here in the shape of the European Convention on Human Rights, which over the years seeped into the language of our courts until it was finally enshrined in an act of Parliament. Some right-wingers still don’t fancy it, but they can’t complain that it suffers from a democratic deficit in the way that the European Union itself now clearly does.
Nowhere is this failure to think through the consequences of an idea more embarrassing than in the case of his economic policies: the free-market approach on which he won office and the prices and incomes controls he resorted to two years later, in the great U-turn from which he never really recovered. Ziegler makes it clear that Heath was never a wholehearted believer in ‘Selsdon Man’ – the phrase was a nifty minting of Harold Wilson’s. All he was looking for was a distinct and attractive contrast to Labour’s flounderings, and so he promised a ‘quiet revolution’, in terms which understandably convinced his right wing that he had come over to their way of thinking. By instinct, though, he preferred to control things rather than let them run free and endure the consequences. Indeed, he had hardly stopped denouncing the evils of Labour’s prices and incomes freeze before he was designing one himself. It is characteristic that in this secret enterprise he should have relied not on his political colleagues, whom he mostly thought little of, but on the senior civil servants he found so much more congenial, notably Sir William Armstrong, the head of the Home Civil Service. Armstrong became widely known as the deputy prime minister before he went mad and lay on the floor of Number 10 raving about Communist conspiracies and had to be taken away.
A later generation remembers Heath mostly from the years of the Long Sulk. His graceless behaviour began before he was supplanted by That Woman (herself not the best of losers). His refusal to quit Number 10 after the February 1974 election may not have been quite as deplorable as Gordon Brown’s later carry-on, which would have made a limpet blush. Heath, after all, had secured more votes nationally than Wilson and had only four fewer MPs. Yet his behaviour imprinted the image of a lousy loser which simply got worse and worse, despite all the efforts of his friends to stage a reconciliation.
It is tempting to assume that things might have turned out better for him if he had been better humoured or if he had been married or had a close confidant. Yet Ziegler points out that there were always plenty of friends, such as the redoubtable Sara Morrison, ready to tell him when his grumpy behaviour, and general refusal to show any sign of life, was damaging his own interests. Campbell argues that he was exceptionally unlucky in having to preside over a fevered period of union unrest and oil shocks. Yet the pattern of his failures seems too insistent to be entirely excused in this way. Time and again, he tried to mould all-or-nothing answers which came to pieces in his hands before the clay was dry. The underlying trouble strikes me as having been less one of temperament than of intellect, in so far as you can separate the two things. He simply lacked the agility of mind and the openness of imagination to play through the ramifications of a theme. He knew what he wanted to happen and he thought that this was enough to make it happen.
He was, ultimately, a solipsist. Nothing is more characteristic than that he should have left the bulk of his £5.4 million estate not to his brother’s children, of whom he saw little, but to the Sir Edward Heath Charitable Foundation, the principal function of which was to house his papers and show his lovely house in the Close at Salisbury to the public. It has now turned out that there is not enough money in the kitty to carry out his wishes. This vision too has foundered on the hard and slippery rocks of reality.
MARGARET THATCHER: MAKING YOUR OWN LUCK
The first lesson that Batman learns is that ‘the will is everything’. Disraeli and Schopenhauer said much the same. And in this crop of books about Margaret Thatcher, rushed out in the weeks after her death, it is the raw will that is celebrated. The titles of the two big Lives, the first volume of her official biography by Charles Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph, and the single volume by her long-time ghost Robin Harris, bear the same title advertising her unbendable quality. The two slighter works, on her foreign policy by Robin Renwick, the diplomat who was at her side in Rhodesia, Washington and Brussels, and by Gillian Shephard, the former education secretary who has collected reminiscences of what she was like to work with, often from unsung Conservative Party officers and apparatchiks, both remind us of that unforgettable title first conferred on her by Red Star, the Soviet Army newspaper. She became the Iron Lady even before she became prime minister, by virtue of a fiery speech delivered in Kensington Town Hall less than a year after she defeated Ted Heath. She has remained the Iron Lady ever since, and that is how she will be, not unjustly, remembered.
Yet we need to clothe this naked will a little. Her tenacity had a peculiar character which, I think, conforms perfectly to Antonio Gramsci’s famous formulation, ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will’. Her assessment of the situation was always bleak and unvarnished. She had, as Renwick puts it, ‘an absolute contempt for any semblance of wishful thinking’ and ‘an innate ability to get to the heart of any really difficult or unpleasant problem and not to try to wish it away’. She loathed politicians like Harold Macmillan whose instinct was always to smooth things over – a loathing which was returned with knobs on.
One of the reasons that she thrilled to the company of Keith Joseph was his gloomy tone. In the ‘Notes Towards the Definition of Policy’ which he presented to an indignant shadow cabinet (the echo of T. S. Eliot was beautifully appropriate to Joseph’s message of decline), he argued that ‘We made things worse where, after the war, we chose the path of consensus. It seems to me that on a number of subjects we have reached the end of that road.’ They had promised too much and been guilty of ‘subordinating the rule of law to the avoidance of conflict’. ‘In short, by ignoring history, instincts, human nature and common-sense, we have intensified the very evils which we believed, with the best intentions, that we could wipe away.’ No rising Tory star of the Macmillan–Heath generation could accept Joseph’s indictment that they themselves might have been complicit in the debacle. It was all the fault of the ‘Socialists’, and if only the right chaps were back in charge, things would look up. Mrs Thatcher resisted all such Micawberish temptations, and indeed all suggestions that the road might be anything but hard and stony.
The ‘economics of joy’, as the economist Herb Stein described the policies of the carefree tax-cutters, were anathema to her. She was deeply sceptical about détente too, being convinced that ‘we are losing the Thaw in a subtle and disturbing way’. From the start, she was equally sceptical about the practicability of monetary union in Europe. On the very day she arrived in Number 10, she responded to a memo from the cabinet secretary suggesting an open-minded approach to such schemes: ‘I doubt whether stability can be achieved by a currency system. Indeed it can’t – unless all of the underlying policies of each country are right’. The fortunes of the euro thirty years later suggest that there is no getting round this uncomfortable truth. Nor did she welcome even the most astonishing success at face value. When the Berlin Wall fell, she was quick to point out that the break-up of empires was always a time of danger. She really did act out Kipling’s ‘If’ (her favourite poem, as it was the nation’s) and attempt to treat triumph and disaster as equivalent impostors.
Yet at the same time she had an ineradicable belief that ‘we (or rather I) shall overcome’. She attacked head-on R. A. Butler’s belief that politics was the art of the possible: ‘The danger of such a phrase is that we may deem impossible things which would be possible, in
deed desirable, if only we had more courage, more insight’. In refusing to accommodate herself to the inevitability of decline, she found herself at odds with virtually all her colleagues.
In her obituaries, the word ‘divisive’ was much deployed. This is pussyfooting. She was loathed, and usually despised too. Jim Prior, her first employment secretary, said ‘She is, of course, completely potty. She won’t last six months’, and later asserted that ‘she hasn’t really got a friend left in Cabinet’. Her supposed allies also moaned about her behind her back. Willie Whitelaw called her ‘that awful woman’. Even the courtly and cunning Lord Carrington was driven to explode to her principal private secretary, ‘Clive, if I have any more trouble from this fucking, stupid, petit-bourgeois woman, I’m going to go’. (He later said that he would never have used such language, though it is not clear which particular epithet could not have passed his lips.) It was Carrington, too, who, on storming out of a meeting in the cabinet room about the EEC budget without looking where he was going, collided with a Doric pillar and exclaimed, ‘My God, I’ve hit another immovable obstacle’.
At most, four of her first shadow cabinet had voted for her. Despite repeated purges, pretty much the same was true of her last cabinet when it came to the crunch. As for the Civil Service, the upper reaches of the Treasury and the Foreign Office found her alien and unappealing from the start. They were Heathite to a man, distrustful of the free market, wedded to prices and incomes policies and to greater European integration. Only lower down were a few potential kindred spirits emerging – Peter Middleton and Terry Burns in the Treasury, Charles Powell and Robin Renwick in the Foreign Office. Nor were outside assessments any more favourable. Although very taken with her, Henry Kissinger told President Ford in 1975, ‘Soames may be a big Conservative leader sometime. I don’t think Margaret Thatcher will last’. Peter Jenkins, the Guardian columnist, wrote in December 1981 that ‘a brief obituary of Thatcherism is now in order’.
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