8
In the early afternoon of 1 July 1953, Airey Neave stood on the balcony of the Queen’s Hotel, Abingdon, with Diana at his side, as supporters in the crowd below cheered the new MP. Like most of the important things in Neave’s life, success had not come without effort. This was his third attempt to enter parliament. The struggle had not been made easier by the sight of lesser men breezing their way to Westminster – not least, his untrustworthy subordinate of IS9 days, Peter Baker, who had made it on his first try, in the 1950 general election.
Neave had also stood in the 1950 election, contesting the Labour stronghold of Thurrock, where he was, as expected, thrashed. In the election called in October the following year, he lost again to Labour in the more promising constituency of Ealing North, where he came within a whisker of success, only 120 votes behind the winner. He nonetheless decided to try his luck elsewhere. Within a few months of the election, a glittering prize beckoned. Sir Ralph Glyn, Conservative MP for the Abingdon division, was standing down. Neave presented himself with a clutch of other hopefuls and reached the shortlist of six. He was youngish (thirty-six), by now reasonably well established as a barrister in London and had a fine war record. On 18 March 1952, after a selection meeting at Didcot Conservative Club, he was selected as candidate.
It was another fourteen months before Sir Ralph was raised to the Lords, and the by-election to replace him was set for 30 June 1953, three weeks after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. He was facing manageable opposition. The main threat came from Labour, represented by Ted Castle, a pencil-moustachioed David Niven lookalike who was selected less than a fortnight before polling day. He had seen out the war as night editor of the Daily Mirror and was married to the formidable Barbara Castle, one of the few women in the House of Commons. She was a combative redhead and an acolyte of Labour’s deputy leader, Aneurin Bevan, whose ferocious manner and radical agenda rattled the teacups of Middle England. Such associations were unlikely to endear Castle to undecided voters in what was a traditional Tory seat. Neave did his best to link his opponent to the Bevan camp and claimed that his credo included ‘near-Communist ideas’.1 Castle protested in vain that he ‘never had any connection whatsoever with the Bevanite group’. His cause was not helped when ‘Nye’ appeared during the campaign to harangue a crowd of five hundred in a field.
The by-election came nineteen months into the Churchill premiership and was seen as an important test of the government’s standing. The great man sent Neave a message of support, flaying the ‘Socialists’ – as the Tories invariably referred to their opponents – and trumpeting his administration’s achievements. Churchill reminded voters that the Korean War was over, and far from being – as Labour charged – Cold Warmongers, ‘hopes of peace are foremost in our minds.’ At home they were keeping their promise to build 300,000 new homes a year and ‘a new and bright spirit’ was pervading the nation. Journalists descended on the constituency, including the Daily Mirror’s ‘Cassandra’ – the columnist William Connor. ‘Abingdon is a maddeningly amorphous constituency that is very hard to get a grip on and has driven both the candidates red-eyed with the weariness of pursuit,’ he wrote. ‘There are 127 outlying villages. There are thousands of resolute Tories and an equal number of unshakeable Socialists. Their occupations range from growing turnips to making nuclear energy.’2
Naturally, Connor spoke highly of his colleague, describing Castle as ‘lively, energetic, likeable’. But he also had positive words about Neave. He was ‘compact, somewhat reserved, and with a military record that, if valour on the field was the same as political ability, would sweep him to Westminster.’ He went on, ‘Unfortunately the two qualities are not interchangeable.’
As Airey criss-crossed the division, Diana was almost always by his side, undaunted by the fact that she was only weeks away from the birth of their third child, William. Many years later, she told him that it had been ‘a tremendous vote-catcher being pregnant’.3 As it turned out, Abingdon was in effect gaining two members for the price of one. Over the years, Diana Neave would devote almost as much energy to the constituency as her husband did, and later perhaps more so when he was diverted by his Northern Ireland duties. Neave won by a comfortable margin of 5,860, increasing the Tory vote by 977. He now had a solid base on which to build a career in national politics and would represent the constituency until his death. It suited the Neaves very well, particularly Diana. Marigold can remember her mother ‘being not at all keen on Ealing’, and ‘Thurrock equally she wasn’t too excited about.’4
It covered nine hundred square miles, a vast area including five main towns, stretching from the suburbs of Oxford in the north to the outskirts of Swindon in the west, enclosing ancient market towns like Wantage and Faringdon and the mellow villages of the Vale of White Horse. It was well populated with traditional Tories of robust views. Though he was courteous and attentive to this layer of his support, such folk were not really the Neaves’ type. One night they went to dine with a retired general, a stalwart of the local party in a neighbouring district, who ‘did a good deal of drinking’. Afterwards Neave recorded in his diary his host’s ‘patronising’ attitude to the local MP, and his surprise at the fact ‘that Diana was allowed to make political speeches’. As he drove away from the general’s manor house, he was ‘glad it is not in my constituency’.5
More to their liking were the Oxford dons, literary figures and scientists among his constituents. They included the workforce of both the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell and the Royal Military College of Science at Shrivenham. Neave had received little formal scientific training, but his interest was deep and in time he taught himself enough to be able to understand the fundamentals of important contemporary technological developments. Their impact on politics and the economy would become his special subject and his primary area of parliamentary expertise.
Abingdon might be considered safe Tory territory, but he never took his tenure for granted. Despite comfortable majorities at every successive election, he fretted constantly over the soundness of every ward and village, badgering his agent, Leslie Brown, and local party chairwoman, Meredydd Saunders-Davies, a former intelligence officer, for information about the local mood and machinations. Neave’s relationship with Brown was sometimes fractious but Meredydd, a true-blue spinster, stout and good-hearted, who lived with her sister Gwenfra, was a friend as well as a vital ally whose judgement he relied on heavily. His successive secretaries, Hannah Hulme and Joy Robilliard, provided another mainstay. They dealt stoically with a heavy workload, typing up and despatching the scores of daily letters to constituents, officials and ministers that in the pre-email age drove political activity, as well as dealing with his business interests.
For the next twenty-two years, the Neaves’ life – for in many ways it was a single existence – was largely passed shuttling back and forth between London and the constituency. His appetite for work was insatiable, his engagement complete, and if interest and energy and a modicum of aptitude are the key ingredients of political success, then steady advancement seemed assured. With hindsight, the transition from soldier to MP appears natural, but there was nothing inevitable about the development. Neave wrote much about the forces that drove his wartime service. None of his books say anything about why he decided on a peacetime political career.
There was no real family tradition of political service and there were few early indications that he was set on a course for Westminster. The adolescent trip to Germany had stimulated an interest in ‘abroad’, but at university he took only a casual interest in the Oxford Union, traditional nursery of aspiring politicos, and never sought office. Despite his engagement with the wider world, there is not much evidence that he was particularly concerned with what went on at home. He left nothing behind that reveals his attitude towards the great question of what sort of Britain should emerge from the blood, sweat, toil and tears of war. There is no record of his thoughts about the Beveridge Report, which ushered in the welfare state, nor his reaction to the shock defeat of Winston Churchill in July 1945.
That he chose the Conservatives was unsurprising, but not inevitable. There were others with his background and wartime experience who decided that the future lay with Labour; men like Aidan Crawley, who took part in numerous escape attempts from Stalag Luft III. Crawley would prise staunchly Conservative Buckingham from the Tories with a massive swing in the 1945 election. Neave was not burdened with the attitudes towards those beneath him on the social ladder that afflicted some with a similar upbringing. The war had provided continuous proof that it was unwise to make assumptions about people on the basis of background. Nonetheless, he was no radical, inclined rather towards gradualism and continuity. He had a strong romantic streak, but it was circumscribed and qualified, only given full rein in time of war and in matters of the heart.
The decision to try for a career in politics seems to have been taken some time during his stint at Nuremberg. It was one he would regret many times, particularly in the early 1970s, by which time, after a brief junior ministerial career, he had spent a dozen years on the back benches with little reward or thanks and no hope of a reprieve in sight. In one of many diary entries expressing gloom and disillusionment, he dropped a hint about how the fateful move was made. On Monday 30 July 1973, he recorded that he ‘had tea in the garden and reflected on what might have been’. He concluded that he had ‘been far too shaken by the war to have gone to the Bar and politics’, and he ‘should have gone into a steady job like my father wanted’, such as a post as a legal civil servant in the Parliamentary Counsel’s office, but he was ‘much too restless’. Instead, he was ‘influenced by the Kilmuirs when they were at Nuremberg into fighting elections.’ Lord Kilmuir was the title taken by David Maxwell Fyfe, whose performance at the tribunal had so impressed Neave. As well as being a star of the Bar, he was a Conservative MP who went on to become Home Secretary and Lord Chancellor. His wife, born Sylvia Harrison (sister of Rex, the actor), ended up vice chairman of the Conservatives and was a prototype of the committed and energetic political confederate that Diana would become.
That summer day in Abingdon, the gamble he had taken was vindicated and a reasonably secure future assured. It was just as well. There were mouths to feed and school fees to be found. Marigold, born in 1944, was followed in November 1947 by Richard, always known by his middle name, Patrick. William arrived six weeks after the by-election. Providing for the family was not easy. Neave seems to have received no significant financial support from his father, and the Giffards’ ancient lineage and broad acres did not mean that Diana was particularly well provided for. Apart from some later legacies that allowed them to buy two small houses that provided a rental income before being passed on to the boys, Neave had largely to live off what he could earn.
In 1943, while serving with MI9, he had found time to arrange admission to the Middle Temple, which entitled him to practise as a barrister. On leaving the War Crimes Commission, he found a place at 5 King’s Bench Walk, the chambers of Frederick Lawton, a criminal advocate and QC who welcomed young talent. At Nuremberg, Neave had been a player in a great historical and juridical event. The work on offer to a junior barrister in London in 1946, traipsing around the magistrates’ courts and quarter sessions of Greater London, represented quite a comedown. The defendants in the dock at Nuremberg had been among the greatest criminals of all time. The men and women he now had to prosecute or defend were often guilty of little more than hopelessness and stupidity. The law at this level was desperately uninspiring. Neave was no Maxwell Fyfe and had neither the natural aptitude nor the drive to haul himself easily to the higher reaches. Even after entering parliament, he was still trudging off to Home Counties courtrooms to appear in dull cases. In September 1953, he was at Wallington, Surrey, prosecuting five men who had stolen a car, smashed a shop window and made off with two television sets, then knocked over a policeman at the end of an 85 mph car chase, causing him to lose his leg. The following month he was in Essex, in a case involving underage drinkers.
Entering the Commons meant ending his active association with the military and the world that had shaped him and made his name. After returning from Germany in the autumn of 1946, he had elected to carry on in the Territorials. He chose to retain his nominal connection with the Royal Artillery but was seconded to the Intelligence Corps. He was posted to the latest incarnation of his old outfit, now officially No. 9 Intelligence School TA. By the beginning of 1950, he was second in command, and when in March the incumbent stood down due to ill health, he took over as CO in the rank of lieutenant colonel. The unit’s work was primarily concerned with retaining the knowledge and skills of escape and evasion techniques that had been built up during the war and applying them to the new circumstances of the Cold War.
In the event of a Soviet bloc invasion of Western Europe, it was intended that specialist reserve troops who were cut off behind enemy lines would form units to carry on fighting in the rear. Local support was to be provided by the same patriots who had sustained the escape organisations. Neave stood down as CO of IS9 (TA) in September 1951, citing the fact that he was a parliamentary candidate in the forthcoming general election. ‘Whether or not I am elected,’ he wrote in his resignation letter, ‘I intend to pursue a political career. In these circumstances I shall find it impossible to give adequate time to my increasing duties in command …’6 The deputy director of military intelligence agreed, recommending that ‘owing to the security nature of IS9, it is not advisable that Colonel Neave should continue to be a serving TA officer after his nomination as a parliamentary candidate.’ Neave remained on the reserve list, however, and was expected to play a useful role in any future hostilities. A note in his army file from the Air Ministry dated 3 October 1952 proposed that ‘the aforementioned officer be earmarked for the appointment of O/C Escape Section IS9 (UK) in the event of mobilisation’.
As late as May 1974, Neave was giving advice to senior NATO officers from Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers in Europe ‘about the possibility of escape and evasion in the event of war with Russia’ and putting them in contact with Albert ‘Pat O’Leary’ Guérisse.7 Neave’s critics would say that his connections with the intelligence world continued long after his formal association had ended.
Neave never fully put the war behind him. He described his exploits in a series of books, beginning in 1953 with the publication of They Have Their Exits, an account of his escapes and the journey back to Britain. It carried a foreword by Norman Birkett, one of the British judges at Nuremberg, who described the author as ‘a rising young barrister and politician’. At the time, Birkett was a very senior judge, sitting in the Court of Appeal. He was one of the great lawyers of the age, wise and humane, a Methodist preacher and lifelong Liberal who served twice as an MP. He praised the book as ‘a story of the most enthralling kind, with here and there touches of humour and even gaiety’, and ultimately a ‘revelation of the essential nobility of men and women, when faced with the most desperate and dreadful circumstances’.
Birkett’s hope that ‘this book will be widely read’ was amply fulfilled. They Have Their Exits was well reviewed and went on selling in very healthy numbers for the next twenty years. This success provided another source of income and paved the way for further works, all of which drew on his wartime experiences. It was followed a year later by Little Cyclone, which told the story of Dédée. In 1969, Saturday at MI9 gave a fuller account of the organisation’s work in occupied Europe. In 1972, he went back to the beginning with The Flames of Calais. He completed the chronicle with Nuremberg, which appeared in 1978. Neave wrote entertainingly and revealingly in an accessible style that, in the case of Little Cyclone, could border on Mills & Boon. He also started two thrillers – Low Profile and Green Card – using his political and intelligence-world experiences to authenticate the plot. Sadly, neither made it into print and the manuscripts have disappeared.
The literary output also served to boost his political profile. Neave had had a good war, but so had many other young Tory aspirants who did not write books. His fellow Old Etonian Peter Carrington, who soared through the party ranks at the same period, never publicly recorded the deeds that won him an MC. Nor did Neave’s comrade and friend Hugh Fraser publicise his considerable exploits behind the lines in the Ardennes in the autumn of 1944. But Neave needed all the help he could get. Despite the advantages he had been born with, the rewards were all fought for and hard won. Carrington, by contrast, did not have to go to the trouble of seeking election, on account of an hereditary seat in the House of Lords. Hugh Fraser was selected for the safe Tory seat of Stone in Staffordshire by the time of the 1945 election and won it with ease. Neave had to make his own luck, and reminding the world of his wartime achievements was one way of doing it.
There was more to it than that, though. The war had been the great formative experience of his life, for worse as well as for better. He had emerged from it bearing psychological as well as physical scars (thirty-three years after being wounded at Calais, medical examinations revealed the presence of metal in his chest). In his books, he made only glancing references to terror and anxiety. In the privacy of his intermittent diaries, he was more forthcoming. Many years after the conflict, he wrote that ‘it took me twenty years to recover from the war.’8 The emotional intimacy of his marriage made it inconceivable that he could have hidden his trauma from Diana. Whatever passed between them was not communicated to the children, let alone to any of the vast array of accumulated political and business colleagues and acquaintances (Neave owned to having very few real friends).
Nonetheless, those around him sensed a deep hurt and guessed that the war was to blame. Veronica Beckett, who worked as his secretary in the early 1960s, recalled being told – perhaps by Diana – that he would ‘sometimes wake in the night screaming’.9 The children too have their recollections of behaviour that hinted at hidden scars, such as his irrational fear of airport security scanners. The phobia is confirmed by a diary entry more than thirty years after the ‘home run’ from Colditz. ‘I loathe travel,’ he wrote after arriving in Florence for a holiday with Diana in April 1973. ‘It reminds me of my escape, with the meticulous preparations to get through controls … I am very neurotic about this and panic easily.’ Psychotherapy was in its infancy in Britain, and a Conservative politician who admitted to undergoing it risked damage to his reputation. Writing was one solution. ‘It is really my only relief from anxiety neurosis,’ read another entry later that year. ‘But I can’t get anyone else to understand this.’10
He was to some degree imprisoned by his wartime history. The paradox was that although war had damaged him, it had also made him what he was, and when he faced the world he leaned heavily on his reputation as a war hero for support. His name and that of Colditz would be linked for ever. He worked hard to buttress the connection. He would talk to anyone who asked him about his exploits, from the Wallingford Rotary Club to the Daily Mirror, and over the years delivered hundreds of lectures. He guarded the memory closely, marking each passing anniversary of the escape itself and the crossing of the Swiss frontier. In 1973, public interest in the castle was stoked by the BBC TV series Colditz. Annoyingly, from Neave’s point of view, the storylines were based on Pat Reid’s book and his own escape was barely featured, kindling some resentment and a spark of jealousy.
The relationships he had forged with MI9 colleagues do not seem to have matured into particularly strong peacetime friendships, though he kept in touch with ‘Monday’ – Michael Creswell – visiting him at his house in Surrey. However, he retained a strong emotional attachment to his old agents and, insofar as it was possible, he kept in touch. After her release from Ravensbrück, Dédée resumed nursing, and spent much of the rest of her life in Africa, working in clinics and leper colonies, so contact was difficult. They had a reunion in July 1974 when she took a break from the leper hospital she was working at in Addis Ababa. ‘She looks remarkably well but is obviously not so,’ he wrote in his diary.11 ‘Only five years ago did she recover her sense of taste. She is having a difficult time in Addis Ababa … it was a relief to meet someone who faces life so cheerfully.’
The children recall lunches and dinners with modest, discreet middle-aged men and women from Belgium and France, who they later learned were the heroes and heroines of the escape lines. Airey even retained his affection for possibly his most troublesome agent, and Mary Lindell was an intermittent visitor at the Neaves’ London flat.
The House of Commons he entered in 1953 was full of ex-soldiers, sailors and airmen. For some, memories of war sat lightly on their shoulders. In Neave’s case, the experience would continue to shape his thoughts and deeds until he died. The war provided him with an array of causes, such as his long struggle to win compensation for prisoners and other victims. But, above all, it conditioned his political thinking. What he had seen as a soldier, a prisoner, an escaper, an intelligence officer and a lawyer left him with a profound hatred of totalitarians and a determination to confront them, be they Soviet Communists or Irish Republicans.
The day after the by-election victory, he took his seat in the House to the cheers of his colleagues, ‘a well-built fellow of medium height with rugged, clean-shaven features and an air of quiet assurance,’ according to one sketch-writer.12 He was eager to get started. He was thirty-seven years old and many of his wartime contemporaries already had years of parliamentary service under their belts. At 5.44 p.m., on 29 July 1953, only four weeks after his election, he got to his feet to make his first speech, intervening in a debate on defence. It lasted ten minutes, during which he marked out the arena in which he would initially strive to make his political reputation.
As Churchill had stated in his message of support, peace was in the air. The death of Stalin in March, the accession of Khrushchev to the Kremlin and Eisenhower to the White House had raised hopes that Cold War tensions might relax. On the other hand, a nuclear arms race was now under way. Britain had to maintain its defences at maximum preparedness. The new member had some thoughts on one area where improvements could be made. He started by pointing out his qualifications for making a contribution.13 There was the geographical fact that in his constituency lay ‘certain defence establishments, in particular the Military College of Science at Shrivenham and several other Service establishments, as well as the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell.’
In addition, there were ‘personal reasons’ why he was joining the debate. He had ‘served for a long time in the Territorial Army, recently leaving it, when I retired about two years ago, and I specialised during the last war in military intelligence.’ What concerned him today was training, and how national servicemen, particularly those who had been involved in intelligence, could be persuaded to volunteer for the Territorials when their time was up, in order to build on the skills they had acquired in their two years in uniform. He stressed the need for a high-level cadre of Territorial intelligence officers to boost Britain’s contribution to NATO. He also called for increased emphasis on language training and the sending of Territorials abroad as liaison officers, to strengthen links with NATO allies and to see at first hand the terrain in which British troops might one day have to fight. Finally, he proposed equipping reserves with the up-to-date equipment and weaponry that was currently in use by regular troops, and concentrating training on practical skills rather than ‘too much in the way of regimental duties or too much foot drill’.
He sat down at 5.45 p.m. It was a sound if modest debut, heavy on verbiage, light on detail and raising obvious practical problems. Where, for example, was the money to come from to pay for all the new kit and guns? However, it produced an ecstatic response from the next speaker, George Wigg, Labour MP for Dudley. ‘I count myself most fortunate in conveying to the hon. Member for Abingdon the congratulations of the House on his maiden speech,’ he enthused. ‘My own first speech was also on defence, and I only wish I could have done half as well and spoken half as lucidly as he has done this afternoon … I am speaking very sincerely when I say to him that he has impressed the House this afternoon with the extent of his knowledge. We shall look forward in the future to many other contributions from him, much more lengthy and more contentious.’
To get such praise from a political opponent was unusual. Wigg, though, was not a typical Labour MP. At fifty-three, he was on the older end of the age spectrum and until his election in 1945 had spent almost all his career in the army. To the annoyance of many in his party, he was a fierce champion of a strong defence budget. He was also known to have close links to the Secret Intelligence Service. However sincere his sentiments, his endorsement can be seen as the tribute of one old soldier with security connections to another.
Wigg’s anticipation of many more contributions from the new member would not come to pass. Over the next few years, Neave’s utterances in the House were intermittent and often narrowly focused on constituency matters or detailed questions arising from defence and scientific issues. He vigorously defended his constituents’ interests, even where they clashed with those of the armed services. His first written question was an unrealistic request to stop the operation of jet aircraft from RAF Benson, near Abingdon, which received a predictably dusty reply from the Ministry of Defence. When the bill to set up the Atomic Energy Authority passed through the Commons, he was quick to seek assurances that the new arrangements would mean no job losses at Harwell, which was a major employer in the constituency.
The laboratory had been set up in 1946, sixteen miles south of Oxford, on the site of an RAF station. It was the country’s main centre for atomic energy research and development. Neave made sure to build relationships with the staff and involve himself closely in Harwell’s affairs. In his first years in the House he regularly prodded the government to ensure there would be enough houses and schools as the number of employees grew and the laboratory spread itself over the surrounding farmland, to the point where he was teased by the opposition for not missing an opportunity to ‘log roll’ on behalf of constituents.14
His interventions on defence were similarly technical and parochial. Speaking in the debate in November 1953 on a bill to streamline call-up procedures in the event of a grave international crisis, he harked back to his wartime service, asking what it would mean in particular for Territorials serving in anti-aircraft units.15
His quiet manner, attention to detail and disinclination to rock the boat was soon noticed by the party managers. In February 1954, seven months after entering the House, he got his first promotion when he was appointed parliamentary private secretary to the Minister for Transport and Civil Aviation, John Boyd-Carpenter. In August the following year, he was made PPS to the Minister for the Colonies, Alan Lennox-Boyd. These posts were unpaid and the lowest rung on the ladder of government. ‘You’re a dogsbody,’ explained one MP from the era. ‘You hang around whoever it is, you seek to promote their interests in any proper way you can, and you relay faithfully what the party’s thinking.’16 It was a necessary start, offering hope that there was life beyond the back benches – perhaps in time a ministry.
Neave’s assiduous defence of his constituents did him no harm with the electors of Abingdon. At the general election of 26 May 1955, he won an increased majority and returned to a House in which the Conservatives under Anthony Eden now enjoyed a healthy sixty-seat majority. Eden was steeped in foreign expertise and had waited a long time for the top job. Years of steady stewardship seemed to lie ahead. Then, in the summer of 1956, an overseas crisis took a hammer to Conservative complacency.
It erupted on 26 July in Cairo when General Abdel Nasser announced that he was nationalising the Anglo-French-owned Suez Canal and Egyptian troops were taking over the canal zone. Eden was outraged and determined to fight back. However, launching a military operation would be difficult. International opinion was hostile to imperialist adventures, as were many at home. Crucially, the attitude of the United States was uncertain. Washington was unsympathetic to British hopes of maintaining its empire and also concerned that Egypt would fall under Soviet control.
While public attempts to resolve the crisis ground on, the government was plotting secretly with the French and the Israelis. The plan was for Israel, citing a threat to its security, to invade Egypt, giving Anglo-French forces a pretext to intervene and restore peace, in the process regaining control of the canal. The Israeli attack went ahead on 29 October, followed by a phoney ultimatum from London and Paris demanding that both sides pull back and allow their forces to temporarily occupy the canal zone. On 31 October, Operation Musketeer was launched with the bombardment of Egyptian airfields, followed by landings and paratroop drops. Militarily, the operation was a success and within a week most of the canal zone was in the invaders’ hands. Politically, it was a disaster. America joined the condemnations in the United Nations. At home, Eden faced a sustained and eloquent assault from the Labour opposition, led by Hugh Gaitskell, whose alarm at the Prime Minister’s recklessness was shared by at least some on the government benches.
A week after British troops went in, the US had imposed a ceasefire and British troops were forced to withdraw. The debacle did lasting damage to Britain’s standing in the world and its cherished ‘special relationship’ with America. Eden’s reputation was fatally wounded by a lie told to parliament denying prior government knowledge of the Israeli attack. Two months later he was gone, replaced by Harold Macmillan. The crisis ignited passionate debate in parliament, with voices raised stridently in defence and condemnation of the action. A faction of Tory imperialists – the Suez group – first fervently backed the government, then turned against it in disgust when they accepted pressure to withdraw, with fifteen MPs refusing to back their leader in a confidence vote. For Conservatives, Suez aroused atavistic emotions and forced reflection on what sort of Tory you were: a traditionalist, fighting a rearguard action to maintain Britain’s world power status, or a progressive, a pragmatist, a realist.
Whatever thoughts Neave had on the episode he did not express in public and he made no contribution to the fiery Commons debates. He followed the bidding of the Chief Whip, Edward Heath, in the crucial divisions of 8 November and 6 December 1956. His reticence set the tone for the rest of the decade. He was a mainstream, modernising Tory, comfortable with the post-war social settlement that was honoured successively by Churchill, Eden, Macmillan and Douglas-Home. At no point did he seem drawn towards the radical right-wing doctrines that would come to be associated with the woman whose ascent he engineered.
Neave’s feelings could run deep in private but his public utterances on policy were measured, based on information and analysis rather than instinct and feeling. He was a mediocre speaker at a time when rhetorical ability was highly prized in parliament, preferring the careful presentation of data over phrase-making. He was a technocrat not a romantic, and a patriot but not an imperialist. On the big issues of the day, where he might have been expected to feel the tug of tradition, he sided with progress. From the beginning, he was in favour of Britain getting aboard the great project to unite Europe, telling an audience in the summer of 1950, when the Schuman Plan that laid the foundations of the Common Market was launched, that Britain should join the debate ‘instead of standing sheepishly aside’. When Heath launched his campaign to enter the EEC, it had Neave’s backing.
There was one issue, though, on which he stood on the right of the party. In 1956, a Labour member, Sidney Silverman, introduced a private member’s bill in a renewed attempt to abolish capital punishment. Neave made two contributions to the debate and voted against the bill.17 It would be another nine years before Britain abandoned the rope. Neave continued to believe strongly that capital punishment had a place in the justice system. His assertion while Conservative spokesman on Northern Ireland that political murderers should face execution would arouse controversy and deepen Republican hatred of him.
In January 1957, he moved another rung up the ladder when he was made joint parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation, Harold Watkinson. Two years later, he was promoted to be Under-Secretary of State at the Air Ministry. To work effectively required the mastery of masses of technical detail and he set about it with characteristic dedication. It was a good-news branch of government. Work was beginning on Britain’s first motorways, and the Gatwick airport project was launched, ‘the first airport in the world to combine air, rail and road transport in one unit,’ as he proudly told the press.
With his ministerial duties and devotion to constituency affairs, there was little time for anything else. The term ‘workaholic’ was not heard much in the 1950s, but it accurately described Airey Neave’s lifestyle. Diana was scarcely less energetic. The couple had moved out of intrepid Aunt Sylvia’s flat at 39 Elizabeth Street in 1945 and into a maisonette around the corner at No. 41, where they lived until 1950. They then obtained a lease on a house at 11 Carlyle Square, not as grand as it is today but still smart. From 1957 to 1965, their town base was a flat in Crescent Mansions, at the top of the Fulham Road. They then spent three years at Marsham Court in Marsham Street, a short walk to Parliament, before crossing the road to another large apartment block, Westminster Gardens.
It took them a while to find a suitable home in the constituency. They started off by renting a cottage in Lockinge, near Wantage, where William was born. Later they spent two years in a wing of Ashdown House, Lambourn, a seventeenth-century mansion overlooking the Berkshire Downs. In 1956, they spent a further two years in another architectural gem, Compton Beauchamp House, near Uffington, which belonged to friends. After four years at Grove House South, in the village of Grove, near Wantage, they bought the place where they felt properly at home. The Old Vicarage, Ashbury, was an elegant white stucco house with pillars at the entrance, five bedrooms and a ring of sarsen stones in the garden. It sat on a hill with wonderful views over the Vale of White Horse. The house gave them both great pleasure and they improved and expanded it, adding extra rooms and installing a swimming pool.
It was a haven but also a place of work. In country as in town, both strove constantly at promoting Airey’s career. Despite the cautious figure he presented to the world, Neave’s commitment to the political life was deep. In the eyes of his eldest child, Marigold, it bordered on an obsession and it was not just her father who was in its grip. At home, the talk in front of the children was almost exclusively of politics. ‘There might be some gossip about local people or something like that,’ she remembered, ‘but not hugely.’18 William recalled a friend remarking that ‘the Neaves are the only family I know who talk politics at breakfast.’19 ‘Politics concentrated [the thinking] of my parents so much,’ remembered Patrick. ‘As children, we felt we were supporters.’ Once they were old enough, when visitors arrived before their parents had descended, they ‘opened the door, introduced the guests – might be a minister, someone important, a constituent. We brought them into the sitting room, offered them a sherry and made small talk.’20
There were few interests outside of public life. When staying with his in-laws at Chillington, while the others were off riding, walking or shooting, Airey would stay behind in the comfort of an armchair reading a newspaper or a book. According to Marigold, he ‘didn’t play games, didn’t play tennis. He didn’t play anything that I can think of.’ She came to think that ‘it would have done him a lot of good if he had. He ought to have had an outside interest. It all became a little too introspective, really.’ His single-mindedness brought success. But nonetheless, ‘It probably wasn’t very good for him.’
Airey’s absorption in politics extended to his social life. ‘He was not the sort of person who enjoys going to clubs or attending reunions,’ said Patrick. Nor, at this stage, did family life take up the couple’s time unduly. At the age of eight, Patrick and William were sent off down the same educational path trodden by their father: St Ronan’s Preparatory School, which had now moved from Worthing to Hawkhurst, then Eton. Marigold went to a local independent school run by nuns, St Mary’s, Wantage, when she was ‘about twelve or thirteen’. It was only a few miles away from where they lived, but as her mother spent much of her time in London supporting her father, she was sent as a boarder. She was ‘rather rebellious’ and it was awkward being the daughter of the local MP. She remembers being teased. ‘At thirteen you’re a bit sensitive, and I’d just arrived from London, and everybody else had been at the junior school and I hadn’t, and it was not easy. The dreadful French mistress – I was never any good at French – used to call me “my petite MP”, and I was always made to stand up and decline all the French verbs. I didn’t like that very much.’
The war had taught Neave to respect women for both their intellects and their moral courage. He had married a woman who had operated effectively in a man’s world. Yet neither he nor Diana pushed Marigold towards higher education and a challenging career. Instead, their attitude towards their daughter’s prospects was practically Victorian. Marigold ‘wasn’t encouraged to go anywhere’. She left school at sixteen and went to a crammer to get three A levels, which she managed in a single year. Thereafter, she got a job as a secretary at Queen magazine, the style bible of the Swinging Sixties. The very different world she had plunged into provoked Diana’s mild curiosity, ‘but my father I don’t think had a clue. It wasn’t a job that involved politics and therefore it wasn’t of any interest, really.’
Looking back, she ‘would have loved to have gone to university, loved to have done what my children did … But I think that marriage was always what they hoped for. With any luck, find a husband and be off their hands.’ And this is what she did, though subsequently through her own efforts she attended the Architectural Association, earned a degree in horticulture, took a postgraduate course in historical landscape, and with her husband Richard established a large and flourishing garden business.
The Neaves’ semi-detached approach to parenting extended to the boys. ‘You didn’t have a family where [the parents] endlessly watched every football match you were playing in,’ said Patrick. The same imagery was employed by William: ‘They were marvellous parents, but they weren’t hands-on [as] parents are nowadays, constantly at the rugby pitch shouting, “Come on, school!”’ One of Airey’s secretaries remembers him dictating a letter to one of the boys ‘amid a whole lot of other letters to constituents and so on.’ The couple would turn up at the major school events, however, and on one occasion Airey even took part in the fathers race on sports day. According to Patrick, Diana used to ‘dress up quite finely in very tight skirts’ and therefore ‘wasn’t quite prepared for the mothers and sons race’.
Neave was proud of his Eton education but it was not the crucial formative event that coloured the subsequent lives of some of its old boys. He did not conform to any of the popular stereotypes of the Old Etonian. When a senior Tory colleague, Tom King, was interviewed for this book, he had forgotten or never known that Neave was one. Infrequent though they may have been, the boys remember their father’s visits to Eton with pleasure. Patrick recalls one occasion which showed Neave’s fundamental decency and sensitivity. It was at the school’s Fourth of June celebrations, at the time of the 1963 Profumo scandal. In the street Patrick pointed out to his father a school contemporary, David, the son of the disgraced minister. ‘He went right up to him and had a friendly chat … I thought it was rather good that he should do that.’
The demands of politics meant that the children spent a lot of time with their grandparents. Neave’s father now played almost no part in his life. His mother was dead and Sheffield had married again. Instead, they spent happy summers at Chillington Hall. ‘My grandmother was very supportive, knowing that my parents were so busy with the constituency,’ said Patrick. ‘My grandfather was very keen that we should learn to ride and we were given ponies … with Chillington being so large and having stables and all that, we were in a very advantageous position to do all these activities, and the parents used to come up and see us between times.’
Later William formed a close attachment to his uncle Digby, born twelve years after Airey, who had married Ulla Schmidt, a Dane, and moved to the outskirts of Paris, where he worked in the reinsurance business. The couple were sociable and fun, close friends of the Anglo-French businessman Jimmy Goldsmith and his brother Teddy, and active in the Parisian artistic scene. William went to stay in school holidays and later, at his uncle’s suggestion, took a course in French civilisation at the Sorbonne. ‘Uncle Digby was always rather important to me,’ he said, ‘a great star, almost like a second father.’
Conversely, Digby and Ulla’s daughter Philippa came to hold her uncle in great affection. She knew him as a child when Airey and Diana would come to visit. She remembers someone who was ‘very quiet … quite grave … you wouldn’t jump up and sit on his knee, it wasn’t like that, but he paid attention to you. He really looked at you and spoke to you.’21 John Giffard, son of Diana’s brother John, remembered his uncle’s ‘dry sense of humour … light laugh and big smile. He wasn’t distant from us … a good family member.’22 When, after Eton and Southampton University, John decided to join the police, Airey ‘was one of the great supporters within the family … against my parents, who were horrified, and that was really nice.’ He told them ‘to stop being so silly about it … it was a good thing that people from all backgrounds should be joining the police.’ His faith was justified and Giffard ended up Chief Constable of Staffordshire Police.
In their marriage, Airey and Diana created a space for themselves that they did not feel needed the children’s presence to be complete. Patrick remembers an occasion when the couple went on holiday à deux on the Continent, leaving him at Chillington. ‘I caught a bug and my grandmother was very worried. They didn’t know whether to get in touch with my parents. They decided not to. I had to suffer in silence.’ However, displaying a stoicism that Airey and Diana would surely have approved of, he concluded that ‘they couldn’t have done anything anyway, and by the time they got back [the bug] had disappeared.’
Sometimes the Neaves’ hands-off approach could raise eyebrows. As a young man, William met an attractive woman at a party who introduced herself as a former temporary secretary to Airey. She told him, ‘I was aged eighteen and I was delegated the duty to take you to Charing Cross station to go to prep school for the first time. I put you on the train and I think it was the worst experience I ever had.’ She ‘vowed then that if I ever had any children I would never, ever’ send them away to school.
William says now, ‘Do I remember that? No. Did it do me any harm? No.’ Like his siblings, he defends his parents’ apparent remoteness from the daily lives of their children as a matter of time and place: ‘It was a different generation and that’s how it worked in those days … I don’t doubt that they loved all their children immensely but they didn’t turn round and say so …’ Instead, they gave him ‘immense freedom’, the liberty to make his own choices and learn from his own mistakes.
As the boys approached manhood and Marigold married and began to have children, the family seems to have grown much closer. The boys spent almost every weekend at the Old Vicarage and Marigold would visit regularly with Richard, and her children, Kate and Edward. It was perhaps the case that Airey found that he needed to see his children as grown-up equals before intimacy and warmth were possible. Certainly the devotion of Marigold, Patrick and William to their parents’ memory is profound and genuine. However unusual the Neaves’ approach to child-rearing might seem to contemporary eyes, they were clearly doing something right.
Airey’s punishing work rate was combined with a careless attitude to his health. He took no exercise, smoked heavily and drank more than he should have done. His wartime books reveal a close relationship with alcohol and there are indications that, in the post-war years, his intake may have gone beyond the almost ritual consumption of gin, whisky, cognac and wine that was routine in the masculine realms of the military, the law and parliament. This became a cause for family concern and, according to Marigold, ‘He did at one point have a minor drink problem.’ It was unsurprising that he developed high blood pressure and cardiac problems. In September 1959, just as a general election was looming, he had a heart attack at the then constituency home, Grove House South. He recovered sufficiently to take part in the campaign and on 8 October retained his seat with an increased majority of 10,972. Nationally, Macmillan’s decision to go early had been triumphantly vindicated. The Conservatives now had a hundred-seat majority.
However, the coronary had cast a shadow over what should have been a bright future. He was now under doctor’s orders to alter his habits. In his usual conscientious fashion he strove to lose weight. He did not find it easy. Patrick remembers a rowing machine which was stored in his room in Crescent Mansions. However, ‘I don’t think he was terribly enthusiastic about it, because it stayed under my bed all the time.’ Drink and cigarettes were definitely out. He stoically abandoned the Du Maurier cigarettes he had smoked steadily for decades and turned his back on the drinks tray and the wine cellar, thus depriving himself of a friendly prop to sustain him through the thousands of tedious official dinners and lunches that lay ahead. It was difficult, and it did not get any easier. ‘Unable to enjoy life despite many advantages,’ he wrote many years after the heart attack.23 ‘It is hard never to drink or smoke and to work so hard for so little.’ He was quieter now, his spirit apparently dimmed. Before, according to Patrick, he had been ‘very lively … very amusing’. Afterwards, as the above entry attests, he was often sombre, pessimistic and introspective. Brushes with death force reflection on life’s purpose, the audit of what has been achieved and what has been left undone, and a resolve to make the most of the time that is left. He was determined to get back into the swim and press on with what might be only a short career.
It was not to be. Some time towards the end of October 1959 he went to see the government Chief Whip, Edward Heath, at his office in the Commons. In his monumental 1993 biography of Heath, the political historian John Campbell gave an account of what happened next. Heath, he wrote, ‘made a lifelong enemy of Airey Neave … who returned to Westminster after suffering a coronary, expecting to be welcomed back with congratulations on his recovery, only to be told bluntly by Heath that he was “finished”. Neave never forgave him, but took his revenge in 1975.’24 The story stuck. When Heath died in July 2005, the Daily Telegraph obituary stated that ‘Airey Neave … had hated Heath since 1959,’ and gave a slightly different version of the same anecdote as the reason.
It is easy to see how the story gained traction, with its satisfying narrative of a throwaway snub resulting in nemesis. It helped to explain what drove Neave’s brilliant campaign to unseat Heath and enthrone Thatcher all those years later. Marigold is prepared to give it some credence, speculating that Heath might have made some observation about her father’s fitness which he might have taken the wrong way. ‘I thought it was all rather silly,’ she said. ‘My father was sometimes quite quick to take offence. And I think that might have been one of the times.’
There are reasons to question the story, however. Heath himself vehemently denied it. Neave never said anything in public about the meeting. In the diaries he began to keep thirteen years later – a period in which his relations with Heath were crucial – there is no mention of an encounter which, if it had taken place, would surely have still resonated. The evidence there suggests that, however it came about, Neave’s return to the back benches turned out to be fortuitous. ‘Diana drove me to 149 Harley Street to see Dr Graham Hayward,’ he wrote in August 1973. ‘He was very impressed at my recovery … he would have expected me to die had I remained in office …’25
Whatever the truth, by the end of 1959 he was once again at the foot of the greasy pole and years of frustration lay ahead.