by Andy Beckett
The shortcomings of his electioneering style and strategy were compounded by an unusually bad run of campaign setbacks. First, on the day Heath called the election, Enoch Powell resigned as a Conservative MP. Heath had sacked Powell from the shadow cabinet in 1968 for his racist ‘rivers of blood’ speech, but just as significant as their differences over immigration was their disagreement over economics. Since the fifties, Powell had been a pioneering supporter of the free-market counter-revolution that was brewing at the Institute of Economic Affairs. Now, in early February 1974, he accused the Heath government of initially pledging itself to this radical right-wing cause and then – via the ‘U-turn’ of 1971 onwards – feebly and dishonourably betraying it. In late February, Powell went further. This time the issue was Europe. Powell had long opposed British membership of the Common Market. Now he called publicly for people who shared his views to support the Labour Party, which wanted to renegotiate the terms of Britain’s EEC membership and put them to a referendum. Two days before the election, he announced that he had already voted for a Wilson government by postal ballot.
In the final week of the campaign – a campaign in which a larger-than-usual number of voters changed their minds – there were further bombshells. A leak from the Pay Board appeared to show that the government had significantly overstated the level of miners’ wages. The story that filled the newspapers turned out to be based on a statistical misunderstanding, but it was only belatedly and ineffectively rebutted by the Conservatives. Then, three days before polling day, the British trade figures for January were published, their compilation having been delayed by the three-day week. They were the worst monthly ones ever recorded. The economic crisis, it appeared, was even worse than the government had admitted. Finally, the following day, the head of the Confederation of British Industry, the main lobby group for British business, offered what he thought was an off-the-record opinion at a conference: that the Heath government’s trade union laws were ‘surrounded by hatred’ and in need of repeal. In fact, the speech was on the record. The BBC was taping it for broadcast.
The Heath government had been unpopular almost from the start. Its luck had been poor. Its response to the great economic and political shocks it had suffered had often lacked conviction. It had failed to achieve many of its ambitions. And it had an awkward leader. Yet despite all this, from the beginning until the end of the campaign, it recorded a narrow lead over Labour in almost every opinion poll. On election day, the Daily Mail headline for a poll giving the Conservatives a lead of 4.5 per cent summed up the prevailing sense of how the contest would conclude: ‘A Handsome Win for Heath’.
Since the polls had underestimated Tory support in 1970, the assumption was that they were doing so again. Such expectations were reinforced by Wilson’s performance for much of the campaign. A lingering throat infection shrank his small voice. He did fewer walkabouts. His wily bloodhound face had grown heavier and paler. In public and in private, he seemed tired and withdrawn; over the past four years he had not been energetic as leader of the Opposition. Wilson was only fifty-seven, not old for a seventies politician, but this was his fourth general election as Labour leader, and his prospects looked bleak. Journalists covering his campaign events commented on how stooped and elderly he seemed. There were rumours about his health, that he did not want to win – or that, if he did, he did not want to be prime minister for a full term. And if he lost, as anticipated, he would almost certainly be quickly finished as Labour leader. Six days before the vote, Tony Benn went with Wilson to a campaign rally in London. ‘I think he does realize that he is perhaps within a week of the end of his political career,’ Benn wrote in his diary. Bernard Donoughue, an academic from the London School of Economics whom Wilson had recently hired as an adviser, discovered that when he phoned ‘leading party figures’ to ask them to take part in campaign press conferences, ‘Many of them saw little point in participating,’ he wrote later, ‘as they believed we were going to lose.’
The preoccupation with Wilson’s political mortality meant that the strengths of Labour’s campaign went almost unnoticed. Wilson retained his shrewdness. He had discreetly wooed Enoch Powell for months before the election, the two of them always meeting in the same men’s toilets at the Commons. Once the campaign began, the precise timing and content of Powell’s dramatic anti-Tory interventions was coordinated with Labour’s plans. There was also an element of calculation to Wilson’s subdued behaviour in public. With Heath making apocalyptic speeches, and the general sense of crisis that had been hovering since the autumn, there was advantage to be had from seeming unexcitable, familiar, even a bit boring. While the Labour manifesto reflected a leftward shift in the party since 1970 and sounded radical – it promised ‘a fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people’ – Wilson used the word ‘socialism’ only twice in his election speeches. Instead, the Labour campaign claimed he would be able to bring unions and management together. He would be able to calm everyone down. Perhaps the most important element of the manifesto was its anodyne title: ‘Let Us Work Together’.
Wilson’s enduring appeal was not the only key influence on the election to be underestimated: there was also the rise of the Liberals. During 1972 and 1973, under the sometimes flashy, often innovative leadership of Jeremy Thorpe – who on occasions travelled between campaign events by hovercraft – they had won a spectacular series of by-elections. Since the twenties, when the Liberals had last been in power, they had intermittently enjoyed such surges, usually when the government was in a mid-term trough, only to see this support largely evaporate at general elections. But during this campaign the opposite happened. In early February, the Liberals were at 12 per cent in the polls; by mid-month, they had climbed to near 20 per cent; by the end, they were scoring 25 per cent or even higher. In spite or perhaps because of a rickety electoral machine – whose overstretched components included campaign coordinators based in the cosy gloom of the National Liberal Club in London, and a party leader who looked like an angular Edwardian undertaker and was based many miles to the west in Atlantic-battered North Devon, where he had a tiny majority to defend and was only periodically contactable by telephone – the Liberals had considerable appeal in disillusioned times. ‘Are you voting Liberal to get rid of Mr Heath or Mr Wilson?’ one character asked another in ‘The Stringalongs’, the painfully accurate Times cartoon about trendy middle-class Londoners.
Thorpe’s absence from the capital insulated him against hostile scrutiny, while the Liberals’ long absence from government insulated them against blame for Britain’s problems and meant that their more idealistic solutions – greater public ‘participation’ in government, ‘partnership’ between bosses and workers – were not mocked. Meanwhile, the drama and novelty of the third party’s advance became a self-sustaining story. It was not until the last week of the campaign that the Conservatives saw the danger, and even then they attacked the Liberals only in the most general terms.
In the event, the Liberals did less well in the election than the polls suggested. They won 19 per cent of the vote and only fourteen seats – the British electoral system, with its crushing bias against smaller parties, making a mockery of Thorpe’s climactic campaign rhetoric about forming a government. Nevertheless, 6 million Britons had voted Liberal, three times as many as in 1970. Exactly where those extra votes had come from was difficult to say, given the unusual volatility of the election, a substantial jump in turnout and the usual changes in the electoral register, but there were clues in the fates of the main parties. The Labour vote fell by half a million, yet the Conservative vote fell by over a million and a quarter. The Tory total was still narrowly ahead of Labour’s, but translated into seats, with the electoral system interpreting the will of the people in its usual approximate fashion, the Conservatives now had 297 MPs to Labour’s 301. Heath had lost his majority; the size of the vote for the Liberals and other minor parties meant that Wilson had not acq
uired one.
There had not been a hung Parliament since 1929. For four days afterwards there was confusion. Heath did not resign. Instead, with some difficulty, he contacted Thorpe, who had been leading a victory procession around his constituency, and asked him to come to Downing Street. During two secret meetings and a series of telephone conversations, Heath suggested that the Liberals join the Conservatives in a coalition government or in a less formal ‘understanding … on measures in a programme to be agreed’. In return, according to official minutes and transcripts of the exchanges, Heath offered Thorpe an official inquiry to consider the reform of the electoral system and two Cabinet posts for the Liberals. Thorpe was tempted: ‘We may be moving in a somewhat helpful direction,’ he told Heath after consulting with senior colleagues. ‘I am sorry, this is obviously hell – a nightmare on stilts for you. Somehow I personally hope we can work something out.’
But there were two major obstacles. The Liberal Party as a whole wanted guaranteed electoral reform, not just the possibility of it, and Thorpe, for all his sympathetic words, thought that Heath, having called an early election and failed to win it, could not continue as prime minister. Heath was not prepared to meet either of these demands. Another sticking point was Thorpe’s wish to be home secretary. ‘I had been warned by the Secretary of the Cabinet’, Heath writes in his autobiography, ‘that there were matters in Thorpe’s private life, as yet undisclosed to the public, which might make this a highly unsuitable position for him to hold.’
The secret talks continued. Wilson, knowing that the government’s position was becoming less dignified and less tenable by the hour, simply waited and said little. As a last throw, Thorpe ambitiously suggested to Heath ‘a conference of all the party leaders with a view to the formation of a national government’. The Cabinet decided that ‘The time for it was not ripe.’ Heath’s options had run out. That evening, Wilson became prime minister.
It was not an outcome Heath had prepared for. ‘I had been far too busy in the run-up to the election to make contingency plans for my own future,’ he writes. ‘So I was temporarily without a home. I tried to get the lease back on my Albany flat [which had expired in 1970], but a French couple had taken it up and were not enthusiastic about making way for me.’
Not all of right-wing Britain was cast into mourning by the election result. ‘The squatter in No. 10 Downing Street has at last departed,’ began an acidic editorial in the Spectator in March 1974. ‘He clung with grubby fingers to the crumbling precipice of his power … Policy after policy was reversed, and disastrous alternatives were introduced … Mr Heath has spent nine years trying to ruin the Conservative Party, and three and a half trying to ruin the country.’ Ralph Harris, the director of the Institute of Economic Affairs in the seventies, was still contemptuous about Heath’s lack of right-wing backbone when I met him thirty-two years later. ‘Heath deserved to lose,’ he said. ‘I voted Labour in ’74. It was in the papers. We lost an IEA supporter, a sponsor, over it. It cost us the equivalent of £10,000 a year. But that’s how angry I was. It was totally pathetic that Heath had given way to the miners.’
In Salisbury, I asked Heath why he thought he had lost. There was a monumental pause. Heath’s big head was as still and expressionless as a sculpture on Easter Island. And then he spoke, more digressively than usual, as if he was still trying to work it all out. ‘Well, the view is that if we had had the election a fortnight earlier, then we would have won. That’s a very debatable point. But, from my point of view – you can say, there you are, I was always too considerate – we’d also got two leading figures [in the Cabinet] who were opposed to an early election. In fact, they wouldn’t have had an election in 1974 at all. They’d have just faced the situation, and gone on for another year. But how one could have carried that off without … catastrophe, they’ve never really explained …’ His voice trailed off.
The next time I was in Salisbury was for his funeral. It was another grey July day, almost exactly a year later. In London, 2005’s second wave of terrorist bombings had just occurred and the most ominous preoccupations of the Heath era suddenly did not seem so distant. But in Salisbury the shopping streets were busy with schoolchildren and families, too young to make comparisons with, or probably to care about, the early seventies. Few people turned to look at the clusters of men of a certain age, all of them in dark suits, hurriedly making their way towards the cathedral. Until the cathedral green itself there was no one lining the pavements, and then only a thin curve of a crowd, perhaps 200-strong, politely waiting in anoraks behind the police barriers. On the other side of the green from the cathedral, behind its high gates, Heath’s house was even more inscrutable than usual, all its window blinds right down.
Inside, the cathedral was a hushed museum of pinstripe and mid-twentieth-century haircuts. When the hymns started, they were sung with familiarity and gusto, a reminder of the old church-going Toryism and of the muted friendships and shared interests that sustained the private Heath. Seeing my notebook, the woman next to me whispered with a smile, ‘My husband knew him from music groups in Broadstairs.’
The other whispers I heard between the hymns would have pleased Heath much less. Near the front of the cathedral, not far from where his large coffin rested under a mound of white lilies and a Union Jack, there was a row of politicians: a couple of Labour Cabinet ministers, the then Conservative leader Michael Howard, the last Conservative prime minister John Major – more recently beleaguered Tories whose struggles cast Heath’s in a more favourable light – and then Margaret Thatcher. Beneath the dark overhang of her hat, her expression was a little fixed and uncomfortable. Her nose still jutted, proud as Arthur Scargill’s, but some of the dominant gleam had gone from her eyes. Yet people’s gazes were on her. They nudged neighbours in next-door pews to point her out. At the end of the service, when Thatcher was led from the cathedral, looking tiny and thin despite her high heels, there was a surge towards the police barriers: photographers, adult onlookers, even children all running across the green to get a glance. Afterwards, Douglas Hurd and the other loyal lieutenants of the Heath government emerged from the cathedral to what was left of the crowd.
A reception followed in Heath’s house and garden. The rain had held off and the wind had dropped, so guests wandered out with their teacups and sandwiches onto the long, dipping lawn that ran down to the river. The party was for invited ‘friends and colleagues’, but many people looked around as if they were visiting for the first time. ‘Is that his as well?’ said one confident middle-aged man to another as they stared across the perfect glassy river to the meadows on the far bank. ‘… And Mrs Thatcher was here!’ said someone else into their mobile. The mood was almost jolly: Heath might have been a rather original, intriguing, but ultimately embarrassing member of some great clannish family, who had, at long last, passed away. On the train back to London, I realized that during the funeral and the reception I had not seen a single damp eye.
7
Waiting for the Collapse
On the evening of 4 March 1974, Harold Wilson returned to Downing Street as prime minister. As he emerged from his official car, there were cheers and boos from the crowd waiting in the cold. The mild weather that had softened January and February had recently ended. Wilson walked slowly – almost trudged – the few yards to the front door of No. 10, with his shoulders slack and his back to the crowd. On the doorstep he turned and waved, a little woodenly, without any apparent joy. He gave the briefest flicker of a smile. He looked from side to side at the press of people and microphones; there was a wariness, and even a deadness, in his narrow eyes.
‘Mr Wilson,’ said a reporter, ‘can we ask you, sir, what it feels like to be back here?’ The prime minister began to open his mouth. Then he stopped and glanced twice at his wife Mary, pinned next to him by the flashbulbs and the television lights. There was a long pause. The crowd quietened. Wilson opened his mouth and shut it again. He swallowed twice. And then he finally spoke, flatly
and with deliberation: ‘We’ve got a job to do. We can only do that job as one people. And I’m going right in to do that job now.’
Taking Wilson at face value is a risky business. ‘Harold Wilson always operated on several levels concurrently,’ writes his former adviser Bernard Donoughue, who already had years of experience with tricky Labour politicians as an influential party member and politics lecturer. ‘He was perhaps the most complex character I have met in my life.’ On the last afternoon of the February 1974 campaign, with the polls seemingly predicting a Labour defeat, Wilson had ‘astonished’ Donoughue with a typically abrupt revelation:
He proposed … to switch secretly from the Adelphi to a smaller hotel … then to slip away unseen in our plane, indicating to the air traffic controllers that he was going to London, but during the flight to divert to a small airfield in Bedfordshire. Wilson would then race away by car to some secret hideaway in the country. He … was assuming that he would lose the election and was preparing his getaway …
The later years of Wilson’s career are shadowed by many such conspiratorial, not fully corroborated stories. But as well as having their more solid elements – on election night that February, Donoughue records in his detailed diary of the period, Wilson and his entourage did leave the Adelphi for a smaller hotel without telling the press – these stories have a recurrent theme that fits with the broad, undeniable trajectory of Wilson’s life. By the time he became prime minister in 1974, he and the political world he represented were winding down.
