Edward Heath

It was the sceptics in his own party who required the most careful handling. Paul Channon, R. A. Butler’s pps, reported to his master that a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee was ‘well-attended and extremely friendly. Members were much impressed by the clarity and knowledge of the Lord Privy Seal.’27 The 1922 Committee proved more critical. At a meeting in June 1961 d’Avigdor-Goldsmid attacked the negotiations on the ground that the interests of the Commonwealth were being neglected while Alfred Wise spoke for EFTA. Was it really necessary to be inside the EEC to influence it? he asked. ‘Has Britain had no influence up-to-date?’ This sally met ‘with a grumble of support’. Kenneth Pickthorn asked a question which preoccupied many members: ‘Can we at any time self-determine ourselves out?’ But though a majority of those who attended needed some convincing, the atmosphere was more one of enquiry than hostility. Opinion on the whole moved in favour of the Government. When a few months later Heath delivered a ‘long and complicated speech’ to the 1922 Committee it had ‘a very favourable reception’.28 Though he won the argument, however, some felt that he was doing himself harm in the process. Robert Rhodes James, at that time a Senior Clerk in the House of Commons, noted that ‘an ominous note of thinly-veiled intellectual contempt for those in his party who opposed the application was sometimes clearly apparent in his speeches…For the first time, one was conscious of a substantial hostility developing towards Heath in some quarters of the Conservative party.’29 ‘Substantial’ is a strong word, probably too strong. No other reports of the period make the same criticism. But when Heath knew that he was right – and he almost always did know that he was right – he was not at pains to conceal his opinion. Some members did undoubtedly feel that they were being brushed aside and their views treated with scant respect. They did not yet feel hostility towards Heath, but their affection was limited.

Persuading the Commonwealth countries that it was in their best interests to see Britain safely embarked in the Common Market was a first preoccupation of the Government. Heath firmly believed, or at least convinced himself, that this was true. Ministers were despatched to the capitals most concerned to set at rest any mind that might still be uneasy. They went out as doves, remarked Robin Turton, a strongly anti-European Conservative MP, ‘but returned not with an olive branch but with a raspberry’.30 Heath went to Ottawa and received, if not a raspberry, then at least a very cautious welcome. When the Commonwealth leaders convened in London in mid-September 1962 the atmosphere was no more cordial. Heath’s own performance, noted Macmillan in his diary, ‘was really a masterpiece – from notes and not from a script. The temper was good, the knowledge of detail was extraordinary, and the grasp of complicated issues affecting twenty countries and many commodities was very impressive.’ But though the premiers of Canada and Australia, Diefenbaker and Menzies, may have been impressed, they were not converted. Two days later Macmillan wrote ruefully: ‘Poor Ted Heath…who is only accustomed to Europeans who are courteous and well informed even if hard bargainers, was astounded at the ignorance, ill-manners and conceit of the Commonwealth.’ But having let off steam and berated the British negotiators, the Commonwealth leaders took stock and concluded that they could live with the sort of settlement which Heath was envisaging. The worst was averted. ‘The meeting had ended better than it had begun,’ Macmillan told the Cabinet. Somewhat grudgingly, a green light had been given for the negotiations to continue. More than anyone else, Heath had been responsible for the change in the atmosphere. France Soir described him as being Macmillan’s ‘brillant poulain, le célibataire aux joues roses’. ‘Poulain’ – literally ‘foal’ – suggested a talented novice, a trainee. It was perhaps not exactly the description that Heath would have preferred but he accepted it as the compliment that was intended and kept the cutting among his papers.31

It had been his hope that, before the date of the Commonwealth Conference, every important issue in Brussels would have been resolved. It was not until July 1962 that he accepted a recess was inevitable and that negotiations would have to be resumed in the autumn. It was the fault of the French, he told the Cabinet. They had refrained from discussing their objections when the British had been present but had not hesitated to press them at meetings of the Six. ‘A high proportion of the obstacles which we were still meeting could be attributed to French initiatives.’ Almost as disturbing was the hostility to Europe which was growing in the United Kingdom. Gaitskell was not alone in his opposition. ‘If they don’t want us we certainly don’t need them’, was increasingly the attitude. But still Heath could not believe that, after so many weeks and so much bargaining, the negotiations could founder. Even the pessimistic Dixon, on the last day of the discussions before the adjournment, told Eric Roll that the French were ‘rather resentful of our rewriting their sacred writings…But they are chittering with interest; not, I judge, with hostility.’32

Through the autumn and early winter, the mood of optimism grew stronger. Frank Giles, the exceptionally well-informed Sunday Times correspondent in Paris, said that British entry was now very nearly a certainty. ‘If the Archangel Gabriel himself were conducting the negotiations,’ he wrote, ‘he could (assuming, of course, that he was British) scarcely do better than Mr Heath.’ The crunch would come in mid-January 1963, Heath told the Cabinet. The French had agreed that there could be a long ministerial meeting and, though they had not accepted that this should be the final stage, they seemed resigned to the certainty that substantial progress would be made. The French were isolated, he announced confidently on 10 January. All the other members were ‘earnestly seeking to reach a settlement on terms acceptable to the UK’. The possibility that the French would not be deterred by the feelings of their allies, though it had been endlessly discussed, still seemed too fanciful a chimera to take seriously.33

What disturbed Heath most was that the negotiations in Brussels were only part, and not necessarily the most important part, of the relationship between Britain and Europe, particularly between Britain and France. In March 1962, in a memorandum to the Foreign Secretary dealing with the possibility of cooperating with the European countries on the development of nuclear weapons, Heath showed that he was painfully aware of the link between such matters and British accession to the Common Market:

What alarms me more than anything, is that, at the same time as we are trying to negotiate our entry into the EEC – in which we have all too few cards to play – we are giving every indication of wishing to carry out political policies which are anathema to the two most important members of the Community. This can only increase the mistrust and suspicion already felt towards us in the political sphere…We must never forget that the countries of the Community are interested in two things: first, in jointly increasing their own prosperity – in which they regard us as a possible liability and the Commonwealth as an undesirable complication; secondly, in strengthening their defence against what they regard as the persistent and menacing threat from the Soviet Union…What they see here is our apparent determination, with the United States, to prevent the French from developing their atomic and nuclear defence…Our colleagues have instructed us to carry out a negotiation for our entry into the EEC at the same time as they – showing a complete lack of understanding of European attitudes and problems – are carrying out contrary policies in the political and defence fields. It is no wonder that these negotiations, already sufficiently difficult and complicated, threaten to become almost unmanageable.34

For ‘our colleagues’ read, above all, the Prime Minister. Macmillan negotiated with the Americans at Nassau an agreement for the exclusive provision of Polaris missiles to be carried on nuclear submarines; to de Gaulle, at Rambouillet in mid-December 1962, he made it clear that, though the French were welcome to jog along as junior partners, the so-called ‘independent’ deterrent would remain firmly in British hands. ‘I only trust that nothing I have done at Rambouillet or Nassau has increased our difficulties,’ Macmillan wrote apologetically to Heath. His trust was misplaced. ‘I can well imagine de Gaulle’s feeling’, wrote Heath in his memoirs, ‘at being asked to accept the terms of an agreement negotiated in his absence by the British and American governments. With more sensitive handling, we might, at the very least, have denied him this particular excuse for behaving vindictively towards the British.’35

Was the nuclear issue a decisive feature in de Gaulle’s thinking or was it just one more piece of evidence that Britain could never become truly European? From early in the negotiations Heath had been in no doubt that de Gaulle disliked the idea of British entry; he told Macmillan that ‘there was a genuine fear on de Gaulle’s part of admitting Britain as a kind of Trojan horse which would either disrupt the present system or prevent French domination’. But it did not necessarily follow that he would block British entry whatever the outcome of the negotiations. Some of the British team involved in the negotiations were convinced that that had been his intention from the start. He was determined to keep us out, says the British diplomat, Michael Butler, ‘because he feared the UK would gang up with Holland and Germany to create a Europe which was both too federal and too closely linked to the United States’. Any delay in making his position brutally clear was caused by his hope that the negotiations would break down without his intervention.36 Yet Couve de Murville, whom Heath believed would not wilfully have misled him, told him just before the final sessions in Brussels: ‘No power on earth can now prevent these negotiations from being successful.’ De Gaulle, he claimed, had ‘neither the power nor the intention to veto UK membership’. Eric Roll was convinced that the General ‘made up his mind almost at the end’. The answer could be that de Gaulle did not ask himself till the last minute whether or not his mind was made up. He preferred not to contemplate the problem until it was thrust upon him. But if a decision had been forced upon him three or six months earlier he would almost certainly have acted as he did in January 1963. His mind may not have been made up earlier, but his mindset was inexorably fixed. Given his temperament it seems almost inconceivable that, whatever the course of the negotiations, whatever the feelings of the other countries involved, he would have allowed the British to enter the Community.37

A few days before the last round began Heath dined with the American diplomat George Ball in Paris. He was ‘in ebullient high spirits’, wrote Ball. He described his meetings with various French ministers and concluded that, though some serious obstacles remained, he was ‘reasonably confident that the British application was in no serious trouble’. Then came de Gaulle’s press conference of 14 January, at which he stated bluntly that Britain was socially, economically and politically unsuitable to be a member of the European Community. Swiftly, Couve de Murville made it clear that, so far as the French were concerned, the negotiations were over. Heath at first hoped that so arrogant a volte-face might ‘rouse the Five to a new level of anger’, but, as he told the Government in London: ‘It begins to look as though none of them will have much stomach for the idea of carrying things to the point of breaking up the EEC.’ The last meeting of 29 January confirmed this view. Paul-Henri Spaak, the Belgian Foreign Minister, condemned the French behaviour in the harshest terms. It was, he said, ‘a day of defeat for Europe…If the Rome Treaty did not explode, the Community spirit was gravely, perhaps mortally wounded.’ But the Rome Treaty did not explode, nor was it near doing so. Gerhard Schroeder, the German Minister for Foreign Affairs, made the best of it when he praised ‘the splendid effort which had been made by his British friends’ and hoped that ‘the impulse for European unity would not die away in Britain. For the day would come when it could be realised.’ Heath in his reply spoke with moving dignity. There was no need for fear, he said: ‘We would not turn our backs; we were a part of Europe by geography, history, culture, tradition and civilisation.’38

It was one of the worst days of his life. The journalist Nicholas Carroll recorded seeing him in his hotel just before midnight: ‘The Lord Privy Seal, normally cheerful and tireless and the best-liked negotiator here, seemed frozen into profound depression; his cheeks grey, his eyes glazed with fatigue.’ Christopher Soames recalled driving with him to the meeting when they already knew that the veto was to be applied. ‘I remember sort of putting my hand on his knee and saying: “You mustn’t mind too much, Ted. Nobody could have tried harder than you”…and I got absolutely frozen dead-pan. I could never understand how undemonstrative he was.’39 Impassivity was indeed his usual reaction to any setback. Carroll must have caught him with his guard down. But he rallied with remarkable speed. Within a few days he was raising in Cabinet the possibility of a new initiative confined to those members of the Six who favoured British entry, ‘preferably of a political or military nature and linked with NATO, which might strengthen our own position in Europe and serve as a counterpoise to the ambitions of the French government’. He gained little support for his ideas. Macmillan thought it would be dangerous to press for some new form of association which might seem incompatible with the course the British had so recently been espousing, and the Cabinet endorsed his views. The truth was that a substantial minority in the Cabinet was privately relieved that the effort to join the Six had shipwrecked and the rest felt that the whole European problem had best be left to simmer for a while, at least until the General had departed the scene.40

The debacle had done no harm to Heath’s reputation. Evelyn Shuckburgh, from the UK delegation to NATO, spoke for the whole of the British team when he found some consolation in the fact that ‘you personally have emerged from the whole affair with such a tremendous reputation and, indeed, with a position in Europe and at home which is in many ways unique. This is a really remarkable result to have achieved through a failed negotiation.’ It was remarkable, yet, as was to happen so often in his career, Heath contrived to forfeit some part of the credit that was due him by the embittered intransigence of his behaviour. Philip de Zulueta told Macmillan a few months later that Heath was being ‘a bad loser’. He was refusing to leave ill alone, constantly making speeches attacking the French, which left them irritated but unmoved and embarrassed the other Five. ‘I am sure you ought to raise this with the Lord Privy Seal,’ urged de Zulueta. There is no evidence that he did so, but Macmillan noted in his diary: ‘Heath is so bitterly anti-French as to be almost unbalanced in his hatred of de Gaulle, Couve etc.’41

One reason why he harped so angrily on the past was that he did not have enough to do. For some eighteen months his activities had centred almost exclusively on Britain’s relationship with Europe. During this time his other responsibilities in foreign affairs, ill-defined at the best of times, had largely been looked after by other people. Even if he eventually managed to re-establish his position the work would never be of adequate importance: he had been appointed to the Foreign Office above all to secure Britain’s entry into Europe, and that avenue was now closed. He was marking time. It is the lot of those who mark time to pass unnoticed. Worse still, though nobody blamed Heath personally for de Gaulle’s veto, he was associated in the eyes of the public and the party with a failure of British policy. In the first six months of 1963 his reputation went, not dramatically but noticeably, into decline. It seemed unlikely that it would recover until Macmillan overhauled his Cabinet or retired.

The moment was not long postponed. Heath had been losing confidence in his former hero since the summer of 1962. His responsibilities in Brussels had kept him to some extent remote from Westminster politics and he was even more taken aback than most of his fellow ministers when Macmillan, in the notorious ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in July 1962, savagely reshaped his Government and put six of his senior cabinet ministers out to grass. ‘I knew nothing of what he had in mind,’ said Heath some years later. ‘After all, I was engaged in Europe. But it was ill-advised. The timing was wrong. And to do it on such a scale!’42 The Profumo scandal, giving as it did the impression that the Prime Minister was old, inadequate and out of touch with contemporary life, further weakened his position. When ill health forced him to retire just before the Party Conference in October 1963 it caused surprise but little distress in the parliamentary party.

If the negotiations in Brussels had ended in success and Heath had been rewarded for his efforts by promotion to a senior department it is possible that he might have been a significant challenger in the jostling for position which followed Macmillan’s resignation. Even as it was, he could not entirely be ruled out. Alec Home, the dark horse who was eventually to romp home the winner, told his Minister of State at the Foreign Office, Peter Thomas, that he thought the choice was between Maudling and Heath. Maudling, he felt, had the better chance, ‘because Ted Heath’s single-mindedness and lack of rapport with some backbenchers would disqualify him in many people’s eyes’. Home said not a word to suggest that he might be a candidate himself. Macmillan himself thought Heath and Maudling were both too young, and the same went for Iain Macleod: their chance would come in five or ten years.43 The Times disagreed. If Heath was really too young – ‘after all, he is a mere year older than President Kennedy’ – then R. A. Butler would be the best choice. But, considered The Times, ‘that “if” needs to be questioned. Sooner or later the reins of Conservatism will be placed in the hands of a new generation. There is much to be said for that being done now.’44 David Bruce, the American ambassador with an extremely sensitive understanding of British political life, felt that, in the wake of the Profumo scandal, ‘an unmarried man would be at a great disadvantage’. He too felt that Heath’s time would come but that in the meantime his supporters were likely to vote for Butler or Hailsham, who could be expected to disappear from the scene more rapidly than Maudling or Macleod.45

Heath’s own views are hard to establish. He told his pps, Anthony Kershaw, that he was not going to throw his hat into the ring. If people wanted to vote for him he could not stop them, but he would give them no encouragement. In his biography of Alec Home, D. R. Thorpe states that, while Heath was staying with the chairman of the 1922 Committee, John Morrison, at his Scottish home on Islay in July 1963, the question of the succession came up. Morrison told Heath that Alec Home was going to be urged to run and Heath agreed to back him if he did. This Heath strongly denies. He told Hailsham that he had played no part in the choice of a new leader except to tell the Lord Chancellor, Lord Dilhorne, who it was that he personally supported. He had no discussions with Butler, Maudling or Macleod, and the matter was never discussed while he was at Islay. At that time, anyway, he pointed out, Macmillan’s retirement did not seem imminent. It is almost incredible that during their days and, still more, long evenings on Islay two men as passionately concerned with politics as Morrison and Heath should not even have touched on the question of who would be Macmillan’s successor. Heath, however, had no high opinion of Morrison’s judgment or his discretion; he might well have chosen to abort the conversation or to confine himself to a non-committal grunt when Home’s candidature came into question. Whatever the truth, Heath did back Home and made no secret of his loyalties.46

Why he did so is another matter. He knew Home well, had found him easy to work with and could be reasonably confident that, with the former Foreign Secretary in Number 10, his own career would flourish. Was that all there was to it? Jim Prior, who worked as closely with Heath as any Tory and was his strong supporter, suspected that there was more. ‘Perhaps Ted had recognised that, although his own time had not yet come in 1963, he did stand a chance of being Alec’s successor, and that he would be much more out of the running if either Rab Butler or Quintin Hailsham had been chosen. This seems the most likely explanation…but it does also reveal Ted in a more scheming guise than I was to associate with him on virtually any other occasion.’47 A more suspicious nature still might see Heath as even more guileful. Home was twelve years older than Heath, not believed to be hungry for office or likely to be particularly tenacious in holding on to it. He would be taking command at a time when the Tory ship was heading into storms, probably into electoral defeat. He would not be a caretaker prime minister but he would more nearly fill that role than any of his rivals. Heath would probably have backed him anyway, but a measure of self-interest may well have been among his motives. Certainly Home was a far happier choice from Heath’s point of view than either Macleod or Maudling, one only two years older than him, the other two years younger. If either of these secured the succession Heath’s prospects of reaching Number 10 would have been dim indeed.

In the event it became clear that Macleod had made too many enemies on the right and centre of the party to be in the running. In a ballot of Tory MPs, Maudling secured 48 first choices to Heath’s 10, and 66 second or third choices to Heath’s 17, but since Heath was not a formal candidate this meant little. Quite as important was the fact that Maudling was credited with six ‘definite aversions’ – in effect, blackballs – against Heath’s one. Hailsham, at one time said to be Macmillan’s favoured successor, piled up so many ‘definite aversions’ as a result of his ill-judged and extravagant performance at the Party Conference that he was ruled out. In the end the Queen, largely, it seems, on Macmillan’s recommendation, sent for Home. It was the consummation Heath had hoped for. It was made even better by the fact that Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell took exception to the secretive and, as they saw it, undemocratic process by which Home was finally selected and refused to serve under him. By doing so they gravely damaged their own prospects of future promotion. On 19 October 1963, the Earl of Home, as he then was, became Prime Minister, renounced his peerage and stood for election to the House of Commons as Alec Douglas-Home. It remained to see what job he would offer Heath.