Will Philip Ziegler’s new biography be read in Downing Street? It should be. Ted Heath was a relentlessly pragmatic Tory leader who had poor relations with his party in parliament and in the country. He began in government seemingly fixed on a clear course of reform and modernisation. But then he hit stormy waters and, lacking an ideological compass that might have helped guide him through, was blown over. Having failed to build good relations with his colleagues, he had no reservoir of loyalty on which to draw. When Margaret Thatcher emerged he was sunk.
David Cameron has several advantages over Ted Heath. Cameron is entirely comfortable in his own skin, has considerable charm and is very cool under fire. The latest Tory leader fixed a deal with the Liberals at the start of his premiership, rather than trying and failing to patch one together at the end of it, as Heath did in 1974. Cameron is also not up against Harold Wilson. It looks like he will face a Miliband at the next election. His career to date suggests that he is a lucky politician.
But Philip Ziegler’s life of Heath should most definitely be read by those inside Number 10, as a warning from history about the limits of pragmatism and the dangers of poor party management. If the Cameroons do fancy a trip back to the 1960s and 1970s, and pick up a copy, what will they find?
The first problem with a biography of Ted Heath is that it’s about Ted Heath. His coldness as a character makes it exceedingly difficult to empathise or sympathise with the former Prime Minister in all but the most extreme of circumstances. After a while, it becomes difficult to care what happens to him. This is a significant problem when he is the subject of biography almost 600 pages long.
It comes as a serious relief when Heath is removed as Tory leader, taking the pressure off the reader. The realisation that the Heath saga is nearly over produces a lift in the spirits. Surely his defeat by a knock-out would shake Ted up a bit? Perhaps force him to recognise that he had had a long run as leader of his party, not made a particularly good job of being PM, fought four elections and only won one and should relax and move on. He had a variety of talents, as a skilled musician and a yachtsman of standing. But despite all that he entered ‘the long sulk’ - the most famous, tedious and sustained bad mood in recent British political history.
None of this is Ziegler’s fault. In the circumstances he has produced a taut and readable account. The problem is the subject.
Ziegler describes Heath as lonely and incapable of forming intimate relationships with his fellow human beings. There is no evidence that he ever had a sexual encounter of any kind. The thought of such contact - with either sex - seems to have repelled Heath.
There was rudeness, which Heath practiced on an epic scale. Various women recount not being spoken to once during dinner. Asked one guest, ignored by the host at his post-Downing Street home in Salisbury, ‘Are you going to speak to me then?’ Ted gave it a few moments thought before declaring: ‘No.’ To say that Heath disliked small talk is an understatement; if he could not be bothered, he favoured no talk at all. There are a great many such examples, which cumulatively suggest a blindness to the needs of others, and a presumption that as well as being the centre of his own universe he expected others to regard him as the centre of their universe too. In the current phrase: he lacked ‘emotional intelligence.’
But there’s the puzzle. Why, despite all of the difficulties, wrong-turns and grumpiness, could this man inspire such loyalty and respect from a variety of sources? His rise was admirable. After success at school and then Oxford (Zeigler captures the early life well) it became apparent in the artillery during the Second World War that he was a young man who could lead. He was highly rated and appears to have been well respected by his men. Politics called and he won Bexley in the general election of 1950. Soon Heath was a sharp chief whip, doing the job during the Suez crisis, and after that a minister held in high regard by officials.
By the early 1970s, as Prime Minister, he had clustered around him real rising stars who showed more than just the standard deference a party leader can expect. Kenneth Baker and Ken Clarke were devoted. Why did they and others stick with Heath, despite his failings? It is not enough to say that the reason was ‘Europe’; that his obsession with European integration caused the young ‘One Nation Tories’ to bury any doubts they might have had about his character.
No, in the 1960s Ted Heath was the Tory personification of what then seemed like the wave of the future. Europe was just one feature in a much bigger picture. Here was the natural leader of the party’s liberal wing, a product of the then fashionable meritocracy. He had emerged from the ranks of the aspirational working classes but his family had made the transition to the lower middle classes by dint of hard work and ingenuity (his mother invested all of her hopes and ambitions in Ted, and was rewarded with his adoration and professional success.)
Amusingly, Heath’s claim that he had not bothered to read John Campbell’s earlier biography published in the 1993 is revealed as bogus. As the authorised biographer, Ziegler had access to Heath’s papers. There he discovered a copy of Campbell with notes made by Heath in the margins. The former PM took particular exception to implications that he was sensitive about his humble origins, scrawling ‘nonsense’ next to one passage.
However, to his supporters, class was a significant part of his appeal. He was the antidote to tweed-clad grouse-moor Toryism, using words such as ‘modern’ and talking of economic efficiency. He promised ‘managerialism’ before the term became an insult. He demanded ‘action not words.’
Heath believed most of all in the avoidance of national division. There should be no need for it. If everyone would just listen to Ted explain the facts then they would see sense and do as suggested.
But managerialism has its limits, as Britain was to discover between 1970 and 1974.
The Conservatives pulled off a surprise general election win and it wasn’t long before it became clear that Heath lacked a clear ideological analysis of the country’s economic problems. Of course he thought Britain needed to become more efficient. But how should it be done? For a while he hitched his wagon to a programme of reform that sounded a little like what would become Thatcherism. There would be no bail-outs for lame duck industries.
But, as soon as trouble showed up in the shape of the trade unions, the concessions started. The government caved in to the shipyard workers of Glasgow and the miners. He had also stoked a credit boom that added consumer misery to the mix.
Little good it did Heath that he had, in a futile attempt to get the union leaders on side, entertained a group of them at his flat in Albany, off Piccadilly, when in opposition. He was asked to play the Red Flag on the piano for Jack Jones, and obliged.
Heath, for similar reasons to Jim Callaghan, could not believe that the unions would actually wreck the post-war consensus by behaving selfishly. Callaghan thought his brothers wouldn’t endanger the Labour movement in which he had grown up and on which they depended. Heath could not conceive that there were others who did not share his one-nation concept of all classes working harmoniously in pursuit of a common goal. That was the spirit of the war years, as he had experienced it anyway. Just as then, now in peacetime, events should be directed by people who knew best. Such as Ted Heath.
But both Heath, and later Callaghan, had misunderstood the nature and seriousness of Britain’s problems.
The result was a collective nervous breakdown in the political class that ran Britain amidst a mad period of strikes, three day weeks, disorder and economic mismanagement. Ziegler makes too little of this, not quite capturing the strangeness and decay of those years. For that, go to Lord Donoughue’s memoirs of Downing Street under Wilson and Callaghan.
Emerging from the wreckage, Heath famously asked the country to decide in 1974 ‘Who runs Britain?’ Back came the answer: ‘Not you.’
In essence he had not been up to it and was humiliated. Immediately his closest associates and allies urged him to stand down. Ziegler cites Kenneth Baker visiting Heath at his house in Wilton Street the morning after the second election of 1974. He found him still in his dressing gown at 11am. ‘You had better resign now as leader if you don’t want to get hurt.’
His friend Sara Morrison was equally direct: ‘If he were genuinely working-class, she exploded, he’d understand the advantages of ‘gentlemanly behaviour’,’ if only as a way of serving his best interests. As it was, he was stuck behind a carapace of bottomlessly middle-class self-righteousness, incapable of seeing himself in the round let alone imagining how he must appear to others. Heath endured this outburst with commendable calm, but it did not noticeably affect his conduct.
Strangely for a former chief whip, he was atrocious at the art of party management - refusing to schmooze junior colleagues. Conservative backbenchers were treated with disdain: that was a terrible speech you made in the House the other day, he told one backbencher during one of his rarer trips to the Commons tea room. Out of office in 1974 he discovered that he had not stockpiled loyalty. His party thought he did not like it much, and the feeling had become mutual.
On he ploughed, straight into the inevitable leadership contest. To his horror and embarrassment he lost, and to Margaret Thatcher of all people. Struggling to accept that his party would not come to its senses, well into the 1980s he expected some kind of recall. It never came. On top of failure there was a bitter aftertaste.
Add in Ulster, involving his appalling treatment of the unionists and the escalation of the Troubles on his watch, and it is not much of a record.
But then there is Europe. A Europhile can easily redeem Heath by pointing to his successful drive to take Britain into the EEC.
Like many of his generation and profession he was motivated by the desire to ensure that there was never war in Europe again. The horrors of 1914-18 and 1939-45, the requirement to reconcile Germany and France and the need for a continental counterweight to the might of America, all drove him to believe that the loss of sovereignty involved was not much of a loss.
Why it required the machinery of a superstate, as opposed to co-operation on trade between independent sovereign states, was never adequately explained by Heath when he was alive. Ziegler doesn’t find an answer.
But Europe suited Heath ‘the expert,’ the man who knew best. It was and remains America’s opposite - a club of like-minded leaders and bureaucrats in which democracy is an afterthought or a nuisance. Once the UK was in the EEC, the pesky electorate at home (that had once rejected Ted and would do so again twice in 1974) would have to get on and do what it was told by people who better understood Europe’s destiny.
Was Heath’s European policy a betrayal of his country or a historic masterstroke that altered Britain’s relationship with its neighbours? I doubt there is a single soul alive who will have their mind changed either way by reading Ziegler’s account. But if Heath is to be measured by the impact he had, then he was an enormous figure. The era of English and then British exceptionalism in Europe, ring-fenced by a robust defence of sovereignty, began with Henry VIII and ended with Ted Heath signing the Treaty of Rome. It is quite a legacy.
Iain Martin is Deputy Editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe.