Epilogue
St Margaret of Antioch is the sort of church you expect to find in an old English village. It is small and plain, with a slate roof and a castellated tower, and the tussocky grass of the churchyard is studded with gently subsiding headstones. It feels unchanging and timeless, and despite the reminders of death there is a sense of continuity. Airey Neave is buried here. Diana lies beside him. His life is commemorated in a stained-glass window behind the altar. Set in the left-hand pane is an image of Colditz. The church stands opposite the Old Rectory, in a wing of which the Neaves spent the last four years of their lives together. The tableau is completed by Hinton Manor, which lies behind the church. Taken together, they form a stone, brick and mortar symbol of Tory England.
After Neave was laid to rest, the Conservative leader he had helped to power began a reformation of the party that in turn transformed the country itself. Had he lived, it seems likely that there would have been much he found disquieting in the new Britain that took shape under his heroine. Airey’s relationship with Margaret had been marked by mutual respect. In the early days of her leadership he was a comforting and protective presence. According to Tom King, she was ‘nervous of the gentry … Carrington, Whitelaw and Soames.* She had the feeling that they didn’t think she was good enough. Airey was a sort of shield and protection against that.’1
When he spoke, she listened, showing due reverence for his war record and the debt of gratitude she owed to him. However, the intellectual distance between them was clear. ‘He was ponderous compared to her,’ said Caroline Ryder.2 Caroline’s husband and then boss, Richard, recalled that ‘[Margaret] was very fast … she would know within a minute what he wanted to say.’ Their conversations were about practical matters, not high policy, and ‘there was no ideological discussion between them. He wasn’t interested in ideology at all.’
By 1979 his job was done. He cannot, then, be said to have played any significant part in forming the political creed that carries Margaret Thatcher’s name. Nor did he have any influence on her thinking over Northern Ireland. The loyalty and affection she felt for him did not imply any obligation when she came to power to press on with the policies he had pursued in opposition. The new Northern Ireland secretary, Humphrey Atkins, dropped the regional council plan and Tom King, who served in the post from 1985 to 1989, judged that the Neave approach was ‘pretty much the opposite of where we ended up, really’.3
With Thatcher’s election, the old Tory guard were changing, to be replaced by men of a different stamp, who had not known active service. Neave belonged to a Tory tradition that was fundamentally shaped by the war and rested on a belief in consensus and cooperation. Admiring though many of its members were of Mrs Thatcher’s courage and determination, they were less comfortable with the hostility to collectivism inherent in her outlook.
His political creed was instinctive rather than intellectual or ideological, based on concepts of right and wrong that were already looking old-fashioned when he died. It came with a certainty, a quiet conviction – ‘decent, dedicated, diligent’, in Richard Ryder’s words – that carried him through his public and private life. At sixty-three, his ministerial career was unlikely to have lasted much more than one parliamentary term.
His departure was premature, robbing his wife and children of his love and company. But he died a soldier’s death and, by going when he did, was spared the sight of men against whom he had fought the last battles of his life being hailed as heroes and peacemakers. Norman Tebbit said of him that, in his approach to life, ‘Airey was utterly sure of the destination and was prepared to take the route to it, however difficult that might be.’4 He did so with a determination that never flagged with age. The churchyard at Hinton Waldrist where he now lies brings to mind the lines that T. S. Eliot wrote when contemplating a very similar place: St Michael’s, in the Somerset village of East Coker:
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity …
* Christopher Soames (1920–87), educated Eton and RMC, Sandhurst; Conservative MP for Bedford, 1950–66; Ambassador to France, 1968–72; European Commissioner for External Relations, 1973–77; married Winston and Clementine Churchill’s youngest daughter, Mary, in 1947.