10
In the summer of 1973, the Neaves prepared to welcome a special visitor to the Old Vicarage. Airey had known Margaret Thatcher for almost twenty years. He had first met her when she arrived as a pupil at Frederick Lawton’s chambers in 1954.1 As aspiring politicians they came across each other at meetings of the Conservative Candidates’ Association. Margaret Roberts, as she then was, stood out for several reasons. She was a woman who wanted to be an MP, still a rare species in early 1950s Toryland. She was bright, and she was attractive. Not all of the dark-suited, mainly public-school men who crowded the ranks of hopefuls found her appealing. According to one aspirant, Edward du Cann,* she was ‘strikingly attractive, obviously intelligent, a goer’, and first on her feet at meetings to ask a question. However, ‘most of her fellow-candidates found this habit off-putting: they thought her too keen by far, too pushy.’2
Neave’s thoughts on first encountering the woman whose fate would become so entangled with his are not recorded. Their paths often crossed thereafter. She helped him with his old-age pensions campaign and for a while they were neighbours in Westminster Gardens. By the time she and Denis made their visit to Ashbury he was, unreservedly, a fan. Margaret Thatcher was now Secretary of State for Education and Science, appointed by Heath after his victory in June 1970. She was due to visit some schools in the constituency and Airey and Diana had invited the Thatchers to stay the night. For the Neaves, it was clearly a big event. Thatcher was the only cabinet minister with whom he had a personal connection. Planning began two months before. The couple wanted the stay to be relaxed. When a neighbour tried to lure them and their guests out to dinner on the night of their stay, Airey vetoed the invitation. He felt ‘Margaret should be given a rest.’3 Instead, they would dine at home, with Meredydd Saunders-Davis and Dr Walter Marshall, the witty Welshman who was director of Harwell, and his wife Ann.4
The morning of Friday 6 July 1973 was overcast and thundery. Airey and Diana set off at 9.30 from Ashbury for Thameside primary school in Abingdon. They got there a quarter of an hour before Margaret arrived, ‘dressed to the nines in a yellow coat and hat’.5 The school was ‘open plan with children doing their own things all over the place and a number of parents helping’. Diana and Margaret ‘thought it a mess; no discipline’. The next stop was more to their liking. Radley College was housed in a mansion and set in landscaped grounds. They enjoyed ‘a very pleasant visit’ and Mrs Thatcher was ‘much impressed’. After lunch with the staff she toured the facilities before presenting prizes.
Airey gave the vote of thanks, quoting from Wordsworth. In his diary he gives the name of the poem as ‘She was a Transport of delight’. In fact, its title is ‘She was a Phantom of delight’. The lines he chose to share with the boys are not mentioned, but any would have been outrageously flattering. The paean to ‘a lovely Apparition sent’ ends:
A perfect Woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command;
And yet a Spirit still, and bright
With something of angelic light.
The sentiments faithfully reflected Neave’s admiration. ‘[She] is really beautiful and brilliant,’ he wrote after watching her charming the Radley boys and their teachers. He was not so taken with Denis, who turned up in the morning, ‘an awkward, complaining character, very jealous of his wife’. They got back to Ashbury at 7 p.m. There was champagne before dinner – boeuf en croûte, followed by strawberry meringue. During it there was ‘a good deal of talk about select committees’, gratifying for Airey, given his chairmanship of the science and technology committee and fervent belief in their value. By the end, ‘Margaret was obviously exhausted’ and Diana put her to bed. Three quarters of an hour later, as midnight chimed, Denis announced that they would not be staying the night after all, but returning to London, ‘since the plumber was coming at 9 a.m. and he wanted a bath!’
Airey came to form a more positive opinion of Denis. His devotion to Margaret would only increase. He seems to have seen in her some of the qualities he admired in his wartime women agents. Indeed, he had drawn on four lines from ‘She was a Phantom of delight’ in the dedication to Little Cyclone, his book on Dédée and Comet. Like Dédée and Trix, she was mentally tough and courageous and undaunted by odds that most would regard as insuperable. They shared an interest in science and saw eye to eye on some political issues. Thatcher at this stage was not firmly associated with the political ideology to which her name would be attached, and, for all that passed between them, Neave would never really be considered as a Thatcherite. What attracted him was her energy and her optimism, which shone out all the more brightly for the contrast it made with the fog of defeatism that frequently swirled over the parliamentary Tories.
He was also drawn to her as a female. Airey liked women. His diary is full of appraisals of their brains and appearance. ‘Looks a steady blonde,’ he noted of the night sister who brought him his Horlicks as he lay in the London Clinic awaiting a bladder examination. ‘The last time I [was] here I was only 21 and after the nurses with great success.’6 The wives and daughters of colleagues, the girls the boys brought home, women in the publishing world – all caught his admiring or critical eye. He judged Emma Nicholson, a computer analyst who went on to become a Tory MP, ‘very intelligent and attractive’ after she came to a lunch party at the flat in July 1973.7 However, ‘needs to slim’ was the verdict on a girl Patrick brought down to Ashbury for Sunday lunch.8 Female parliamentary colleagues were given the once-over. ‘The new girls elected for the Labour Party all rather attractive, especially Helen[e] Middleweek,’† he reported after the October 1974 election.9
Veronica Beckett was the sort of young woman he liked: educated, good-looking and well turned out. She worked for a while as his secretary in the early 1960s, before starting a successful career in the Foreign Office, ending up ambassador to the Republic of Ireland and Commonwealth Deputy Secretary-General. She found he had ‘a strong feminine side … he wasn’t a man’s man, actually. He had a lot of men friends but in some circumstances he found the company of intelligent women more agreeable than that of men.’10 It seemed that it was not just their minds that interested him and he could be a ‘flirter’.
He saw himself as a man of the world, with a full appreciation of the power of sex. In his Nuremberg book, he stated that ‘all prisoners thought of sex … it was a reason for escape.’11 It was an important ingredient in happiness. Following a lunch party at Ashbury attended by several unmarried female twenty- and thirty-somethings, he and Diana decided that ‘many of the girls who came yesterday were suffering from depression … sex seems to be the problem with many of them.’12 The Neaves were no prudes and seemed rather proud of their ability to withstand the studiedly shocking cultural offerings of the time. During a week’s holiday in Fiesole at Easter 1973, they went to see Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris. ‘I found this disappointing after the book,’ he wrote. ‘Marlon Brando does little acting and the explicit sex scenes are almost boring.’13
If Diana was ever bothered by Airey’s devotion to Margaret Thatcher, he does not mention it. However, Marigold suspects there may initially have been a twinge of jealousy. In time, the women would develop an almost sisterly relationship, with Diana, the elder by six years, advising Margaret on her clothes and hair. There was, it seems, little reason for concern. Airey did have certain attributes that would have appealed to Margaret. He was her senior by nine years and she liked older men. His war record was a big commendation. ‘His manner was quiet yet entirely self-assured,’ she wrote. ‘As a writer and a war hero who escaped from Colditz there was an air of romance about him.’14 What is more, he was upper class, and for all the disruption to the class system she wrought later, Thatcher had no animus towards toffs. Physically, though, Airey was not her type. Her preference was for the tall, the smooth and the handsome; the likes of Ian Gilmour, Cecil Parkinson and Humphrey Atkins, all of whom could reduce her to blushing girliness. Her admiration for Neave did not belong to this category. When the author asked Jonathan Aitken, who has some expertise in the matter, whether ‘there was any chemistry’ between them, he replied with an emphatic ‘No’.15
The visit to Ashbury marked the start of a friendship that would soon become an alliance. When politicians returned to work in September 1973, a turbulent year seemed to have settled down and there was reason to hope that an easier passage lay ahead. The industrial scene was quiet, inflation appeared to be under control for the time being and industrial production and export figures were healthy. It was the calm before the tempest, but even before it broke, Neave was recording the first stirrings of a belief that Heath would have to go. ‘Diana and I discussed whether we can stand him much longer,’ he wrote on 15 September, while on a short break to Brittany. ‘He lacks any idea of how to handle MPs or their wives and has annoyed the country by his irritating habit of telling people how good things are … The country is only going to work for somebody who inspires and leads them, but who is this going to be? Heath has now got everybody on the wrong side.’16
In the same passage he made a first attempt to answer his own question. Heath’s only rivals, he reckoned, were ‘Whitelaw, Barber and possibly Margaret Thatcher.’ The first two were fairly obvious candidates for the succession. Anthony Barber was Chancellor of the Exchequer and had presided over the tax-cutting ‘Barber Boom’, which he (wrongly) claimed would stimulate growth and preserve jobs without fuelling inflation. William Whitelaw was a former Chief Whip and Leader of the House, now Northern Ireland Secretary, widely liked and respected, and a reassuring figure. Both had been loyal to Heath, but if Ted had to go, they might provide stability and continuity.
Margaret Thatcher was a much more radical proposition. In her time as Education Secretary she had become a national figure, but not because of her brilliant handling of the department. She had been branded ‘milk snatcher’ after cutting free milk for primary school pupils. It was rather unfair. In other respects she had been remarkably open-handed, and education was one of the biggest spenders in a government that came to power promising to slash public expenditure. Her colleagues appreciated her diligence and huge energy. However, she was little known among backbenchers. MPs spent a good deal of time at the House and late-night sittings were frequent. Enforced proximity in the lobbies, tearooms and bars meant they all knew each other reasonably well: their strengths, weaknesses and leadership qualities. Thatcher was much too busy to hang out in the watering holes of Westminster.
Even if she had had the time or inclination, she would probably have been unwelcome. The environment was heavily masculine – there were only twenty-six women in the House – and those who inhabited it were far from fully adjusted to the new climate that the women’s liberation movement was creating in the world outside. That Neave was prepared to entertain her as even a possible challenger to Heath is evidence of his prescience and open-mindedness. He had never been constrained by the suppositions and prejudices that his upbringing might have lumbered him with, and his wartime experiences and marriage had provided ample evidence that women were every bit as effective as men in even the most extreme situations.
In the eyes of some Tories, however, Mrs Thatcher had a disadvantage other than her sex. Although she might look like and sound like a Home Counties bourgeoise, and a rather old-fashioned one at that, she was in fact from the lower middle class. Ted Heath declared his origins to be working class, but he was a man. At this time the combination of sex and what Harold Macmillan would have called ‘background’ constituted a serious obstacle to a bid for the highest office. The social upheavals of the Sixties had made it obligatory for Tories to decry class distinctions. In private, though, snobbery did not die quietly. What class Margaret Thatcher was born into does not seem to have bothered Airey Neave one way or the other. He was not prone to the ancestor-worship that beset some with his upbringing and took only a mild interest in his own antecedents.
The diary entry for 15 September marks the planting of a seed. It would take many months and a succession of dramas before it flowered. In October 1973, the slow downfall of Ted Heath began. It was a combination of the National Union of Mineworkers, the oil sheikhs and his own personality that did for him. The large pay rise awarded to the miners after the 1972 strike had not kept the peace for long. The government dreaded another conflict: one billion pounds had been poured into the industry to prevent closures and preserve jobs and, it was hoped, to win some goodwill. In November 1972, statutory wage controls had been put in place setting limits on pay rises. The policy was to be implemented in stages. The first two had passed off without trouble. Stage three fell in October 1973. The NUM annual conference had passed resolutions demanding a 35 per cent pay increase regardless of government policy. However, during the summer Heath held informal talks with the union’s relatively moderate leader, Joe Gormley, in the garden of No. 10. Both believed they had found in the tortuous provisions of the pay policy a formula involving ‘unsocial hours’ that would allow a settlement which satisfied Gormley’s men without embarrassing the government.17
The subsequent offer, made by the National Coal Board, which ran the industry on behalf of the government, was the biggest the miners had won without a strike. However, it arrived just after their bargaining power had received an enormous and unforeseen boost. Once again, events in the Middle East had combined to confound a Tory Prime Minister. The Arab–Israel war broke out on 6 October and lasted nineteen days. At the end of it the Israelis had won a great military victory. The Arabs – or those who produced oil – had secured an economic one. Anger, real or confected, at the West’s overt or tacit support for Israel required punishment. The Arabs now controlled the oil producers’ cartel, OPEC. They cut deliveries to the West and raised the price of crude by 70 per cent.
Britain depended on cheap oil, and production from the North Sea fields had not yet come on stream. The crisis further strengthened the hands of the militants in the NUM whose power had been boosted by the election of a Scottish communist, Mick McGahey, as vice-president. The union’s national executive committee rejected the NCB offer and in early November called an overtime ban, which within a few days had cut production by 40 per cent. The government declared a state of emergency, the fifth since the Conservatives had arrived in power.
Heath’s reactions were confused. He believed the miners’ militancy to be politically motivated, a conviction strengthened by McGahey’s class-war rhetoric. He was also determined to preserve the baroque architecture of the incomes policy. But at the same time he was reluctant to go head-to-head with the miners. Some advisers urged him to call an early election, to be fought on the question ‘Who governs Britain?’ Heath’s instinct was always to stress national cohesion. He recoiled from a campaign that seemed bound to aggravate divisions and destroy his mission to recast the Tories as the party of all Britons, employer and worker alike. But the alternative, no matter how it was dressed up, would seem like another defeat. Caution and boldness pulled him in opposite directions. He shrank from the big decision and procrastinated.
On 13 December he went on television, a medium he had avoided for most of the year, to speak to the nation. He insisted that the government was standing firm and emphasised what a good deal was on offer. Yet at the same time he declared there was ‘absolutely no question of taking on the miners’. Airey and Diana were not impressed. ‘Watched the PM give a wooden appeal to the nation,’ he wrote. By now, his feeling that the Prime Minister’s days were numbered was hardening into something more than wishful thinking. ‘I am quite relieved that he might be forced out,’ he had recorded the day before. Even before the broadcast, he had been canvassing his fellow MPs about a possible successor. ‘Today I suggested to some members that Whitelaw should be PM but they thought him “too emotional”,’ he wrote.18 All this was premature. It would be another thirteen months and many humiliations before Heath was cast out. In the meantime, though, Airey’s reputation as an enemy of Ted and an awkward-squad skirmisher grew.
Among the Prime Minister’s pronouncements was the introduction of special measures to conserve fuel and reduce electricity consumption. The nation, he warned, was facing ‘a harder Christmas than we have known since the war’. The three TV stations were to cease broadcasting at 10.30 p.m. (though restrictions would be lifted for the festive period). This was a further dampener after the announcement two days previously of heating restrictions in schools, offices and shops, and possible petrol rationing. The real bombshell was the revelation that from 1 January, almost all electricity supplies to factories, shops and offices would be limited to three consecutive days a week. The idea was to preserve coal stocks and maintain some level of electricity supply to keep industry going, albeit at reduced capacity. The measure worked surprisingly well, and after six weeks productivity was nearly back to normal, raising the question in some minds as to whether it had been needed in the first place and might not rather be a political stunt designed to demonise the miners.
The Three-Day Week came to symbolise government weakness and indecision and, above all, the absence of a positive solution to Britain’s core problem. It created a beleaguered atmosphere that for anyone above the age of forty was all too familiar. On 2 January, Neave drove through central London, noting ‘little traffic in the streets as if in wartime’. At his office at Clarke Chapman, he wrote, ‘We are allowed neither heat nor light, so it is very difficult for Joy [Robilliard] to type after 3 p.m., when the office under the new regulations is obliged to close.’19
There was almost a year and a half before the next election was due by law. But given the challenge to the parliamentary system that the union threat seemed to pose, Neave, like many, thought it ‘now clear that an early election has to be seriously considered’. The idea filled him with dread. But circumstances had made one inevitable and it was best to get it over with. The Prime Minister continued to hesitate. He was unwell, suffering from an underactive thyroid which puffed him up and sapped his energy. At first glance the choice seemed a fairly easy one. Polls showed the Conservatives ahead by as much as 4 per cent. The party was united. Yet the more he thought about it, the harder the decision became. Victory would not necessarily change anything. Unless the Tories went into the election with radical new policies with which to confront the crisis, the miners would still be there when the dust settled, and the question of ‘Who governs?’ unresolved. Negotiations continued through January. The NUM sensed weakness and upped the stakes, calling a ballot to authorise an all-out strike. On 4 February, the results were announced: four out of five members had voted in favour. There were no straws left for Heath to clutch at. Three days later, he announced a general election, to be held on 28 February.
Given the end-of-days backdrop and the dramatic terms in which the contest was framed, the campaign was flat and bland. Heath was reluctant to come out of his corner swinging. The performance of the Labour leader, Harold Wilson, offering the electorate a fuzzy ‘social contract’ with the unions, was scarcely more dynamic. Airey and Diana blitzed the constituency in their accustomed style. By the end, he had spoken at a hundred meetings, while Diana followed her own programme of visits, doing ‘a fine job making her own speeches and answering questions’.20 This was Airey’s seventh election and he felt ‘an air of unreality … no communication from anyone else, only the occasional [Conservative] Central Office notes. Presumably one is supposed to take one’s cue from the PM on TV. The electorate are naturally confused.’ The outstanding impressions were that not ‘many people take the “Reds under the Bed” scare seriously’. Voters were unimpressed by televised slanging matches between the main parties. As a result, they were looking elsewhere. After a visit to Botley shopping centre five days before the poll, Neave noted that ‘Liberal support is growing. They call themselves “don’t knows”.’21
He expected a ‘knife edge’ outcome and so it was. The results gave Labour 301 seats and Conservatives 297. The Liberals won fourteen, a poor return for their six million votes. Ulster Unionist parties returned eleven MPs and there were seven Scottish Nationalists. There was ‘no overall majority for anyone. The worst possible result.’22 Neave had got home comfortably with a slightly improved majority of 13,743. However, his share of the vote was down – both the big-party candidates had lost votes to the Liberal.
Heath did not quit No. 10 without a fight. Over the weekend of 1–3 March, the cabinet discussed offering the Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, a junior partnership in a coalition of moderates, in return for an undertaking to look at the Liberals’ perennial demand for proportional representation. Only two voices were raised in dissent – the Social Services Secretary, Keith Joseph, and Margaret Thatcher. A large part of the Liberal vote came from disaffected Tories, she claimed. They should not ‘sell [the] constitution for a mess of pottage [but] keep our integrity’.23
Neave agreed. ‘No future in the Liberals, who cannot be trusted,’ he wrote in his diary when he heard on Saturday that Thorpe had gone to Downing Street. ‘I thought from the start that E. Heath would have been better to resign.’24 The bargaining soon collapsed. At 6.25 on Monday 4 March, Heath went to Buckingham Palace and offered his resignation to the Queen. She now asked Harold Wilson to form an administration – his third.
Heath’s manner of leaving office did nothing to enhance his standing with the doubters. The chances were, though, that Wilson’s government would be unable to survive for long and that another election was only months away. The thought of a disruptive leadership contest, when there was no obvious replacement in sight, persuaded many it was better to leave Heath where he was. But positive forces were also in play. Even after an ill-judged and poorly fought election, he still inspired confidence and loyalty, both in his front-bench camarilla and among Tory officials outside parliament. The ticking bomb had been handed to Labour. There was a good chance it would soon go off, leaving Ted and the Tories to resume power in what would surely be improved circumstances.
Heath’s problem lay with the backbenchers, and already a cohort was forming to hasten his early departure. Leading the charge was Airey’s old wartime comrade Hugh Fraser, who invited him to a conspiratorial dinner at his house in Campden Hill Square, Holland Park. Diana urged caution, counselling him to be ‘more reticent’ on the subject of the leader and worrying that there would be ‘wild talk’ at supper.25 Airey countered that ‘I am the one who keeps Hugh in check.’ In fact, the table talk chez Fraser was sober and restrained. Neave noted with a touch of regret the absence of his host’s wife, the writer Antonia (‘much too grand for politicians … beautiful and arrogant like Lady Glencora Palliser’). Present were Edward du Cann, chairman of the 1922 Committee, Nicholas Ridley and Philip Goodhart. They decided that ‘Heath would not go’ and expected an election in the summer which ‘may be impossible to save’.26 Some sort of informal alliance seems to have been created, for they decided to ‘invite Willie Whitelaw next time to our “club”, we none of us having anything to lose by being outspoken.’
They were, for the time being at least, political allies and an eclectic bunch. Du Cann, saturnine and evasive, was a man of the moment, a Rolls-Royce-driving City slicker whose business affairs often carried a whiff of dodginess. Fraser was as straight as a die, but disgruntled after a political career that had prospered under Macmillan and Douglas-Home, but hit the buffers with the advent of Heath, and he belonged, it seemed, to the past. Ridley was an aristocratic Old Etonian free-marketeer, a chain smoker with a caustic tongue who did not mind making enemies, and at the time (though he changed his opinion radically later) pro-European. Goodhart came from a wealthy American banking family, brimmed with ideas and was a staunch anti-Communist. As Neave’s remark suggested, there was little chance of patronage or preferment to lure them into line and they could afford to play the maverick.
Neave was now in a good place from which to exercise some influence in the leadership drama. A few days before – to his delight and surprise – he had been elected to the eighteen-member Executive of the 1922 Committee, which brought together all Tory backbenchers and acted as a forum in which they could make their views known to the party leadership. His voice in party affairs was henceforth amplified, and his new standing is reflected in the tone of his diaries. The references to jacking it all in dwindle, the mood lightens and there is a growing sense that he is enjoying a time in which things are at last going his way.
As spring turned to summer, the nascent conspiracy continued to coalesce. On 13 June, the five dined together with others at the home of Sir David Renton QC, a distinguished lawyer-politician. Continued dissatisfaction with Heath was such that they agreed ‘we might have to take action if things blew up. Edward [du Cann] would have to tell Heath that the party would not support him. People do not think we have yet reached this point but I think we soon shall. The difficulty is Heath will fight.’27
That meant it would need another crisis before the challenge could be made. In the meantime, Neave watched his leader closely, noting his actions and moods dispassionately, shrewdly and, it must be said, fairly. Someone as scrupulously polite as Neave could never quite forgive Ted his chronic bad manners. Yet he did not write him off and there is no expression of real dislike, let alone hatred, even when he recorded his conviction – undoubtedly correct – that he could expect no honours while Heath was in charge.28 After seeing him in the House on Budget day, he wrote, ‘He looks red, much fatter and depressed. I feel sorry for him.’29 There were flashes of insight into this most complex among his contemporaries. He was an autocrat but ‘seems as afraid of everyone as they are of him’.30 There was still hope for him if he could only learn to communicate with the back benches and be ‘made to understand that he will lose another election if he does not lose his curt attitude. But can he do it?’
The answer, it became clear, was no. In May, the Neaves threw a party at Westminster Gardens for some of the new intake of Tory MPs. When Airey mentioned it to Kenneth Baker, Heath’s PPS, he asked him whether his boss had been invited. Caught on the hop, Neave replied they were planning another party after Whitsun to which Ted would of course be asked.31 Diana saw the event as an opportunity to further her quiet campaign to put more wind in Airey’s gently filling sails. There was no harm in seeking a fair breeze, from no matter what direction. ‘Plans being made for invitations for 2 July,’ he wrote. ‘Diana has ambitions to make us popular with the Establishment!’32
On the previous day, the pair had set off to Oddbins and bought eighteen bottles of champagne for the thirty-eight acceptees. As well as the new members and their wives (there was only one woman in the intake, Lynda Chalker, and she seems not to have been present), there was a sprinkling of party brass, including the former Solicitor General Geoffrey Howe and his wife Elspeth, and the Deputy Chief Whip, Bernard Weatherill, usually referred to as ‘Jack’. Marigold and her husband Richard, Patrick and Joy Robilliard were drafted in to serve the drinks. Heath turned up at the flat at 7 p.m., along with a crush of other guests. Airey wrote that he was ‘very frosty for the first 10 minutes. I had a job to get him to talk to anyone. I started with George Gardiner and wife, then Patrick Mayhew and others … the party went quite well and they drank 16 botts of champagne … Heath seems rather pathetic but cheered up after the champagne.’33
Diana also recorded the event in a very rare journal entry. She was not feeling well but had arranged the flowers, cut from the garden at Ashbury, and bought the food herself. ‘Ted … was a bit sticky to start with,’ she wrote. ‘However, he took Marigold’s glass of champagne which she had just got for herself and cheered up after several more. Airey and I worked hard introducing all the members’ wives and in some cases the members who had never spoken to him before. It is certainly not his métier to do this sort of thing, but it was pretty important to him as he needs their support. I cannot make up my mind whether he realises this.’34
Airey and Diana were used to Heath’s ways. They thought he had done fairly well by his standards. Not so Marigold. Her recollection was that he ‘held out his champagne glass … to any passing bottle … When we got to him there was never a word. He never said anything. He was extraordinarily rude [and] he was even ruder to the poor young MPs who he was there to meet up with.’35
The party produced a strange example of Ted’s usually carefully concealed sense of humour. Among the guests was Winston Churchill, grandson of the great man. Heath asked him what he was doing at the party. Churchill replied with the same question and got the puzzling response ‘I am the chief fornicator.’ Neave repeated the exchange to Nigel Fisher, his host at a lunch party the following day. ‘That’s palpably untrue,’ he said to laughter.36 After the party, a bouquet arrived for Diana signed ‘Love from the Führer’. Airey remarked to Kenneth Baker that it seemed that Heath did in fact have a sense of humour. It soon emerged that the flowers were actually sent by Richard Webb, Marigold’s husband. Two weeks later Heath had still not bothered to thank Diana.37
Labour had solved the miners’ dispute by the simple means of paying them what they asked. It was clear, though, that sooner or later Wilson would have to go to the country again to seek a working majority. A long hiatus did not mean security for Heath. Neave wrote on 25 July that the leader’s position ‘is steadily deteriorating’. Endless speculation buzzed about a successor, and to his eyes ‘it seems that Margaret Thatcher has a chance.’ Neave saw her main rival as Keith Joseph, increasingly her ideological soulmate, whose prospects were damaged by his penchant for ill-timed and needlessly outspoken speeches. There were several other possibles. The names of Ian Gilmour, Willie Whitelaw and even the colourless former Home Secretary Robert Carr were all floated around dinner tables that summer.
In the uncertain atmosphere, Neave was anxious that they should be prepared for all eventualities, urging du Cann to convene the 1922 Executive during the summer recess if necessary. ‘If there were any question of the leadership, we should be ready to act,’ he wrote. ‘Many would be glad to do anything to drop Heath. It is nonetheless important not to damage our election chances. If there is no election in the autumn, we must take things into our own hands.’38
But there was a general election. On 17 September, Wilson announced that he was going to the country on 10 October. Once again the Neaves trekked back and forth across the constituency addressing any gathering, no matter how small, in village halls, schools and shopping centres. ‘Plenty of apathy, it seems,’ he wrote after a day which finished with him addressing a handful of the curious from the war memorial in the village of Brightwell.39
It was hardly surprising. Everyone was sick of elections, the leaders included. It was the fourth time Wilson and Heath had faced each other in nine years. Labour’s main message was that the ‘social contract’ between government and unions was working, while the Conservatives offered only more confrontation. Heath derided the arrangement as a ‘political protection racket’. The Conservative manifesto instead offered a high-minded but vague-sounding commitment to national unity. They would not govern in a ‘narrow partisan spirit’ but reach out to the ‘leaders of other parties, and with the leaders of the great interests in the nation … to join with us in overcoming Britain’s difficulties.’40 Neave had thought from the outset that ‘our main problem will be the unpopularity (esp. with Conservatives) of our leader.’41 But as the campaign progressed, Heath found new reserves of energy and seemed unusually cheerful and relaxed.
When the results came in, he had done unexpectedly well. The Tory share of the vote was within 4 per cent of Labour’s, but Wilson was home with a majority of three. It was tiny, but in the circumstances Neave felt that ‘it surely means that Labour is in power for three or four years.’42 Ted had fought four elections and lost three of them. No one except himself could justify his unchallenged continuance as party leader.
* Edward du Cann (1924–2017), educated Colet Court, Woodbridge School and St John’s College, Oxford; Conservative MP for Taunton, 1956–87; Chairman of the Conservative Party, 1965–67; Chairman of the 1922 Committee, 1972–84; knighted, 1985.
† Helene Middleweek (1949–), educated Wolverhampton Girls’ High School and Newnham College, Cambridge; Labour MP for Welwyn and Hatfield, 1974–79; created Baroness Hayman, 1996; Lord Speaker of the House of Lords, 2006–11.