Alan Bennett’s plays of this period captured the flavour of England being mysteriously lost. There is an atmosphere of inevitability about its dismantlement, and yet no one involved can completely understand why it has to be dismembered so fast, and so brutally. In Habeas Corpus, which opened at the Lyric Theatre on 10 May 1973 with Alec Guinness as the pathetic down-at-heel doctor who can’t stop fumbling with the female patients, many of the familiar Bennett figures and themes were aired. The chorus was the charwoman, Mrs Swabb, originally played by Patricia Hayes, whose rendition of comical working-class characters became famous on television, and which belonged to a tradition of humour going back to Dickens. These women themselves, who were to provide Bennett with much of his stock in trade over the next thirty years, were part of the obsolescence. Their very names–Elsie, Edna, Hilda, Ena, Minnie–were passing out of use. Habeas Corpus was a bedroom farce in which otherwise respectable men found themselves running about on stage with no trousers on. The characters are all imprisoned in unsatisfactory bodies, or bodies which make unwanted jokes out of their lives. Wicksteed’s sister Connie feels cheated by life because she is flat-chested, and much of the plot hinges on her ordering ‘falsies’. The randy old men and the sex-starved middle-aged are almost wistful in their repeated allusions to the Permissive Society. Mrs Swabb, the expert, says, ‘Me, I don’t bother with sex. I leave that to the experts.’ The play is a comedy, but it isn’t without its message. Lady Rumpus, the colonial widow whose return to the old country sparks off the farcical train of the play’s events, says, ‘From end to end I’ve searched the land looking for a place where England is still England.’
Wicksteed exclaims, ‘And now she’s hit on Hove.’1 John Osborne had entered comparable territory over the last decade or two of plays. Bennett’s TV dramas unearthed a host of emotionally undernourished lives, but at the back of the story there was always this sense which Lady Rumpus had given off. That England was vanishing. The play in which this notion was given its best airing in Bennett’s work was Forty Years On, whose first performance was given at the Apollo Theatre on 31 October 1968, with John Gielgud as the headmaster and Alan Bennett himself as a junior master called Tempest.
The occasion is the headmaster’s last term at Albion House, a public school on the South Downs, a place whose proud traditions have descended into absurdity, and whose very future existence is in question. ‘Albion’ is, in the last strains of the drama, let out. ‘A valuable site at the crossroads of the world. At present on offer to European clients. Outlying portions of the estate already disposed of to sitting tenants. Of some historical and period interest. Some alterations and improvements necessary.’2 If the allegory seems a bit heavy when read, it had a tremendous impact upon stage not only in its first West End run, but in its revivals. Bennett was one of those Englishmen intensely conservative in everything but politics. He was more than a little in love with Albion House, its arcane traditions, its unswervingly traditionalist, and on the edge of kinky, headmaster. The drama consists of a play within a play in which a more liberal master, Franklin, puts on a school play lampooning the traditional British readings of the First and Second World Wars, and of heroes such as Lawrence of Arabia. (‘Speaking fluent Sanskrit he and his Arab body servant, an unmade Bedouin of great beauty, had wreaked havoc among the Turkish levies.’3) Yet there was a deep nostalgia in the play. The audiences who piled in to laugh at Bennett’s jokes were as often conservative as they were revolutionaries. It captured the mood, as did the cartoon strip in Private Eye about England having been turned into a thrusting new company called HeathCo, of wistfulness about what was being thrown away.
‘I do not suppose,’ Lady Dorothy Macmillan remarked in the early 1960s, ‘anyone realizes the overwhelming regard and affection my husband has for Mr Heath.’ Many Tories shared Macmillan’s high regard for this very competent Chief Whip, which was why, in their new system of choosing a party leader–election by fellow MPs–he comfortably beat his two rivals, after the resignation of Alec Douglas-Home. The votes were 150 for Heath, 133 for Reginald Maulding and 15 for J. Enoch Powell.
Of the three candidates, Powell was obviously the most inclined towards monetarism. But of the two candidates who had stood any chance of winning, Heath was the more right wing. That is, he stood for limiting the power of the trades unions, controlling inflation by interest rate rises, and pursuing the goal of joining the European Economic Community. (Being pro-Europe was right wing in those days.) Heath’s voting record in the Commons was eloquent: on 13 December 1964 he abstained during the Abolition of Capital Punishment Bill. On 2 March 1965 he voted for Sir Cyril Osborne’s bill to halt Commonwealth immigration; on 26 May 1965 he voted against Leo Abse’s bill to implement the Wolfenden proposals, allowing consensual homosexual acts for men aged over twenty-one.4 Moreover, Heath, with his non-public school background, would surely appeal to the wider electorate? He came from Broadstairs in Kent, where his enterprising father had risen from being a carpenter to running his own small firm, W. G. Heath, Builder and Decorator.5 When still an undergraduate, at Balliol College, Oxford, he consulted the young Arnold Goodman, then working as a solicitor for Royalton Kisch, who had a seaside house near Broadstairs where he had employed W. G. Heath, about the possibility of suing the student paper the Isis for referring to his father as ‘a jobbing builder’. This prickliness was kept well concealed, however. (Goodman, of course, dissuaded him from suing.) At Oxford, where he had been a music scholar, he excelled; he was President of the Union, and he later had a good, if slightly uneventful war, rising to be a colonel in the Royal Artillery. Thereafter, he had a number of occupations, including news editor of the Church Times, and a half-hearted attempt to work in a merchant bank.
Undoubtedly, he won the 1970 election (having lost the election of 1966) because of the association of the Conservative Party with Enoch Powell. No doubt Heath was genuinely repelled by racialist sentiments, but this cunning ex-Chief Whip knew that, after he had sacked Powell from the Shadow Cabinet in 1968, there were still very many Tories in the country at large who agreed with the Wolverhampton Prophet’s views on immigration, and many backbench Tory MPs also. Private Eye’s cover for 16 April 1968 had a photograph of the unmarried Heath, a bubble coming from his mouth to say, ‘Enoch may be talking balls, ducky, but there’s no denying he’s a vote catcher.’
Heath had been an assiduous Chief Whip, and as the old order of Macmillan and Home gave place to a more socially inclusive Conservative Party, he seemed an adventurous, unstuffy choice of pugilist to pit against the cleverness of Harold Wilson. If one Prime Minister, from the eleven Prime Ministers in our times, had a claim to have made an historic step, it was Edward Heath. He is the one out of the eleven without whom the history of our times would have been very distinctly different. He could easily have lost the leadership contest, and the Conservative Party could have been led by the lazy, genial slightly Eurosceptic Reggie Maudling, who would never have had the energy or political courage to push through Britain’s entry to the EEC. Equally, Heath could have lost the election in 1970, in which case Harold Wilson, with his eye on the Eurosceptic left in his own party, would probably not have ventured entry either. As Hugo Young said in his magisterial history of Britain and Europe, from Churchill to Blair, This Blessed Plot, ‘The most qualified “European” in Tory politics assumed the leadership of Britain at the time when the question of entry to Europe was ready for its final resolution.’6 Yet, having negotiated British entry to Europe, Heath presided over a calamitous administration which was defeated humiliatingly, not by another party, but by the National Union of Mineworkers, whom he had challenged to a political contest not of its nor the nation’s choosing. In a short spell in office, he reversed all the economic ambitions with which he had set out when he entered Number 10. He was cursed with very bad luck–above all the descent of the Irish situation from one of periodic violence to near civil war. At the end of his time he watched the price of oil rise as the result of a Middle Eastern war. But the worst of his fortunes was to have been born with his character–stubborn, and weirdly disengaged. So, although he was an honourable man and–unlike his successors in the role–never ‘briefed’ against Cabinet colleagues whom he did not like, he was incapable of geniality, feigned or otherwise. After the humiliations of the first 1974 election, for example, when he summoned his Cabinet (or ex-Cabinet), he had no word of encouragement for them or thanks for their support. ‘In the Cabinet he would sit there glowering and saying practically nothing’, remembered one colleague.7 His ‘outlets’ were sailing and music, to both of which he devoted himself with a competitive fervour, though quite with whom the competition was being waged it was never clear. He was a world-class yachtsman, and it was typical of the man’s defiant attitude to his snobbish critics that he chose to call his yacht Morning Cloud–the second word of which he always impenitently pronounced Clyeowd. It cost £7,450, a tidy sum for an MP with no private income, and with it he won the Sydney–Hobart Race and the Admiral’s Cup. The second Morning Cloud was even bigger (it had a crew of eight) and even more expensive, competing honourably, though not winning, in the Fastnet Race. ‘It was an unprecedented feat for a serving Prime Minister to have captained his national team in an international sporting event, let alone won it,’ wrote his biographer John Campbell.8 Morning Cloud III, a yet bigger yacht, was capsized near the Isle of Wight by two freak waves. Two of the crewmen were lost. It was an example of the capricious misfortune which dogged Heath, in politics, as in life.
His musical talent was, like his ability to sail, quite beyond the amateur average, but here, once again, the way he exercised that talent was devoid of charm. Each year at his constituency of Broadstairs he would conduct the Christmas carols. André Previn invited him to conduct a piece for a London Symphony Orchestra concert. Heath chose Elgar’s ‘Cockaigne’ overture. Some musicians doubted whether he fully understood what was involved in conducting symphonic music–that is, mastering simultaneously all the musical parts and following them in the score. Heath’s ‘conducting’ looked like a man merely waving his arms about while the players embarrassedly played the Elgar piece, waiting for Previn to return to the podium and conduct the Sibelius Violin Concerto. Heath devoted just one hour to rehearsing the performance, having had a two-hour Cabinet meeting on the morning of the concert and Prime Minister’s Questions in the Commons. Yet his own memory was:
I realized how fully the orchestra, together and as individuals, were responding to me. I felt I could do almost anything I wanted with them. Behind me, the concentration of the audience was intense. They, too, would follow wherever we led…9
The megalomaniac illusion of control, while actually failing to engage with the way the players were actually regarding him, is a metaphor for his life as a public servant. Private Eye snootily dubbed him The Grocer, presumably because he seemed to these public school boys like a man behind a shop counter as he told the nation about the likely effect of Europeanisation on the price of British bacon or cheese. But as so often Auberon Waugh’s Swiftian cruelty touched the nerve of truth:
Grocer, as anyone who has ever stood within ten yards of him will know perfectly well, is not human at all. He is a wax-work. Many are even beginning to suspect as much from watching his television appearances.
This is the secret of the amazingly unattractive blue eyes, the awful, stretched waxy grin, the heaving shoulders and the appalling suntan.
Even scientists now admit that something has gone wrong with the pigmentation…The stark truth now appears. Grocer the waxwork, like Frankenstein’s monster before him, has run amok.10
The waxwork-quality of Heath, quite as much as his unmarried status, led to inevitable ribaldry whenever the question of his emotional or erotic preferences were discussed. Sub-editors no doubt deliberately introduced double entendres into a headline for a story concerning the night-time predatory prowls of homosexual parliamentarians on Hampstead Heath: MPs USE HEATH FOR SEX. The image of the waxwork being involved in actual sexual encounters would have been comic even before he turned into the obese, seemingly immortal curmudgeon of his many years on the back benches of the House of Commons. Inevitably, there was the suggestion that, at some earlier stage, he had been sexually active. Brian Coleman, a Conservative member of the London executive in the early twenty-first century, and himself a homosexual, claimed, in an article in the New Statesman of April 2007, that it was ‘well known’ in gay circles that Heath ‘managed to obtain the highest office of state after he was supposedly advised to cease his cottaging activities in the Fifties when he became a Privy Councillor’. There was the inevitable huffing and puffing in response to this, with Ted Heath’s successor as MP for Bexley and Sidcup, Derek Conway, saying, a little sadly, ‘Ted was absolutely wedded to politics. He didn’t have a great deal of personal companionship in his life but there are people who are capable of getting on with their lives without companionship.’
We shall probably never know for certain whether Ted Heath ever went cottaging, or ever had a companion. Though the only unmarried Prime Minister of our times, he is not the only one of whom the ‘urban myth’ does the rounds that he was a secret homosexual. Of Macmillan, it was always said that he was homosexual without completely realising it, and although this is a baffling analysis it makes sense of some of his more peculiar marital and political shifts and sways. Of at least two other Prime Ministers homosexual rumours abound. Of one it is said that he was arrested during his early career for ‘cottaging’, and having tried to give his two middle names to the police, rather than the surname, he was rescued from further embarrassment by a senior colleague. It is impossible to know if this is true or ‘urban myth’. Of the other Prime Minister it has been said that he had a homosexual life as a student at university. If so, his friends were remarkably discreet about it afterwards. Whatever the truth of these things, it is a testimony to the fact that although Gay Pride marched every year in London, there were still many homosexuals in Britain at the end of our times who remained ‘in the closet’, and this was as true of politicians as of the rest of the population. If it is true that Heath and another, younger, Prime Minister, had both indulged in the cottaging habit, it would require the pen of Joe Orton to envisage the scene in the public lavatory in which they fortuitously might have met one another.
The character of politicians is as important as the ideals for which they claim to stand. In Heath’s case, this was abundantly true, since the strategies and policies with which he earnestly set out in 1970 were all abandoned as soon as he encountered difficulties or opposition. It is not unfair to assume, as all primitive and myth-guided peoples have assumed, that bad luck itself is, as in the case of the prophet Jonah, a personal characteristic which men carry with them. No one suggests that Edward Heath wanted to lose his brilliant Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ian Macleod. Yet within five weeks of taking office, Macleod died of a heart attack. Thereafter, the nation’s economic affairs were placed into the unwilling hands of the balding, dithering Anthony Barber, who seemed like a man playing the vicar in a suburban amateur dramatics society. It can hardly have been the case that the fortunes of Heath and his government depended entirely upon the skills of Macleod. There was no shortage of clever Cabinet ministers and civil servants working in Heath’s administration. Nor on any logical level can the death of one man be an excuse for a whole government’s absolute lack of willpower when confronted with the problems of the economy and industrial relations. Other external events, most notably in Ireland, would have knocked the stuffing out of many administrations, and certainly helped to deflect Heath from the course he had set himself before he was elected.
Yet in one area he would not be deflected, and it is to Heath that Britain owes, for better or for worse, its membership of the Common Market, as it was called then, the European Union as it became.
Membership was negotiated slowly and painfully after the rejection by General de Gaulle. The British political negotiator, sitting in the position that Heath had occupied under Macmillan, was now Geoffrey Rippon and the civil servant, in a way the mastermind behind the whole story of Britain’s membership of the European Community, was Con O’Neill. The story of our times so far has been of Britain having suffered two severe blows–economic ruin at the end of the Second World War and international humiliation after the failed invasion of Suez in 1956. These cataclysms left the British uncertain of their identity. In a crisis, British politicians, like headless chickens whose muscular spasms still allowed them to scuttle aimlessly around the farmyard, reacted in one of two preconditioned ways. Those on the left behaved as if they wanted to revert to the shared austerities of wartime and of Attlee’s Britain. The solution to all problems was to make of Britain an ever-more welfare-dependent, high-spending socialist state, in which industrial problems, social problems, education and health were all the responsibility of politicians and Whitehall bureaucrats. The reaction of the other headless chicken, the Tory chicken, was to hope that somehow or another, in spite of every economic indicator to the contrary, Britain could continue to be a world power, perhaps by emphasising its continued friendship with the British Commonwealth, which to these patriots was the old Empire in all but name, and perhaps by some sort of satellite relationship with America.
The European option seemed to Heath, as to his seventy or so pro-European allies in the Labour Party, led by Roy Jenkins, a way out of this rather bleak impasse. Britain need not be an austerity socialist state, becoming poorer by the year; nor need she be a pathetic satellite of America. She could become, instead, a partner in the European experiment, a grownup modern nation. The two aims of any government are to secure the safety, and the prosperity, of its citizens. British entry into the European Economic Community seemed, to the optimistic pro-Europeans, to offer a chance of both.
It is impossible to say, of course, how Britain would have fared if she had not joined the Market in 1970. There have undoubtedly been some economic mishaps along the road, most notably the decision in the Thatcher government to link the pound sterling to the Deutschmark at an unfavourable rate when they joined the Exchange Rate Mechanism. Poverty still existed in Britain at the end of our times, as at the beginning, but not on a scale which would have been recognised as grinding poverty by those who had lived in the 1930s. There has been no war between France and Germany. The peoples of Northern Europe have lived without the fear of invasion, aerial bombardment or financial ruin, which had been their regular lot in the first half of the twentieth century. To this extent, the European experiment surely looks like a success. Perhaps for this very reason, however, for the great majority of the British, as our times advanced, the European Union became an object of loathing, and this inevitably had its effect on Ted Heath’s posthumous reputation. In season and out of season, the old man remained doggedly proud of his achievement.
Some of the terms on which Britain entered were, even by the testimony of the most ardent Europhiles, ‘disastrous’.11 Of this the most conspicuous disaster perhaps was to sign up to the Common Fisheries Policy. By redefining what had hitherto been regarded as British waters, the negotiators did not merely put a lot of British fishermen out of business. They intruded upon something deeper. The water which surrounded the British archipelago was a friend as well as a guardian. To many British people, it felt like an ally against Britain’s enemies. It was the element which had destroyed the Spanish Armada in its storms, and, in its calm, had allowed the ‘little boats’ to relieve the marooned British troops from the beach at Dunkirk in 1940.
Such was Heath’s zeal to join the European Economic Community at any cost that he failed to see the emblematic nature of the Fisheries Policy. Of course, it could be argued, as the chief negotiator, Con O’Neill, continued to argue for decades afterwards, that, given the complexities of the issue, British fishermen got terms which were ‘reasonable, advantageous and not too onerous’.12 But Con O’Neill was a bureaucrat. Heath, as a politician, might have been expected to see what psychological effect this would have. From the moment Heath put his signature to the Treaty of Rome, and Britain joined the Common Market on 1 January 1973, the Fisheries issue was emblematic. For, what, in joining the Community, had Britain done? The issue for Westminster politicians and London journalists at the time was almost entirely seen as an economic one. Would it be to Britain’s economic advantage to join? And the answer to this, when due allowance had been made for the Commonwealth, was yes, it would be very much to her advantage, though the share of the Budget to which O’Neill and his friends committed Britain to paying was steep–8.64 percent in the first year, rising to a staggering 18.92 percent in 1977. The Labour Party continued to believe that Europe was a capitalist, anti-socialist club. That was the sum of their hostility to the project. There was very little talk of the matter of which the Common Fisheries Policy is emblematic, of British sovereignty. The One Nation group of Tories in 1962 had published a pamphlet, One Europe, which was ‘little short of a federalist tract’. It was edited by Nicholas Ridley, a passionate supporter at this stage, of a United Europe, and J. Enoch Powell never denied writing 25 percent of this document, which advocated ‘the full economic, military and political union of Europe’.13
Opinion will always be divided between those who thought that the Treaty of Rome made perfectly clear its ultimately federalist aims, and those who believed that Heath somehow managed to hoodwink the British people into signing away their sovereignty and birthright. Repetitions of this argument would occur later in the century whenever Britain was asked to ratify a piece of pan-European legislation. Margaret Thatcher, for example, after signing the Single European Act, claimed that she did so not realising what it had contained–a strange claim for one who, in her days as Education Secretary in Heath’s Cabinet, had been the keenest of Europeans. It is, as Alice’s White Queen remarked, a poor sort of memory which only works backwards. As Britain became more and more uncertain about the nature of its own identity, and as it in effect began to break up in the closing years of the twentieth century, the belief grew that it had been Europe who was to blame. Europe became the scapegoat for something which was actually happening within. And it was then that the Eurosceptic belief hardened that Heath was the architect of British dissolution. It was not how things appeared at the time.
Ireland, at that stage, dominated most British thoughts much more than the question of sovereignty. The violence in the province of Northern Ireland grew much worse in the Heath years. From 13 dead in 1969, and 25 in 1970, it became infinitely bloodier: 174 in 1971,467 in 1972,250 in 1973 and 216 in 1974. Heath and his Cabinet cannot be blamed for the jubilation which broke out among the Ulster Protestants when the Conservatives won the election, even though that was one factor which explained the escalation of the violence. The idle Home Secretary, Reggie Maudling, had probably spoken for England when, after his first visit to the province, he remarked, ‘What a bloody awful country!’–but the attitude did nothing to bring peace to Northern Ireland.14 Private Eye’s cartoonist John Kent always depicted Reggie wearing a nightshirt and nightcap, and usually asleep. Brian Faulkner, who succeeded James Chichester-Clark as the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, tried to build bridges with the Catholics by offering the SDLP seats on various committees at Stormont, the Northern Irish parliament. But he made the catastrophic mistake of introducing internment for IRA suspects: 2,400 of these republicans were arrested in the six months up to April 1972, two-thirds of whom were released without charge. The resentment caused by the injustice of internment was something felt to the end, and the Westminster government was slow off the mark in doing what should have been done years before–they abolished Stormont and introduced direct rule of the province from Westminster–but not before Belfast, Londonderry and Newry had become battlefields in which British troops fought with Irishmen armed with automatic rifles and gelignite bombs.
The worst, and most emblematic, day of the Troubles in Heath’s time was probably Bloody Sunday, in Londonderry, 30 January 1972. Marches had been declared illegal in the province but the demonstrators defied the order, and thirteen of them were shot dead by paratroopers. It was this catastrophe which finally persuaded Heath that direct rule from Westminster was the only option. Heath had acted decisively, and the levels of violence did fall off very considerably. After the 467 who died in 1972, the 250 in 1973 and 216 who died in 1974, though shocking and terrible statistics, are improvements.
It is obviously no accident that those who came to see the European Union as a threat to Britain’s identity or sovereign independence were the same journalists and diehard parliamentarians who also thought that Ulster could go on being part of the United Kingdom. The Union was sacred to the likes of J. Enoch Powell, who, after putting himself beyond the pale in Heath’s Conservative government, joined the Ulster Unionists and became the Member for South Down in 1974, or to T. E. Utley and his acolytes on the Daily Telegraph. There was a certain intellectual romance in continuing to believe in the unity of the old Kingdoms, when that unity was being so violently contested on the streets of Ireland. The truth was all much more complicated than these Unionists wanted it to be. One truth which slowly dawned on Powell was that most Unionists in Northern Ireland were not Unionists at all. Paisley was, Powell said, a Protestant Sinn Feiner, and that judgement was shown to be prescient when, after a quarter of a century of denouncing the Roman Catholic Church and the Irish Republican Army, Paisley settled down at Stormont to form an administration with those old Republican rebels Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams. True Unionists, those who wanted Ireland, or the six counties, to be truly a part of Britain, with the same status as Warwickshire, were very thin on the ground, as every election showed. The High Tory journalists and politicians who argued the Unionist position were simply ignoring the wishes of those who were involved in the conflict–and ‘those involved’ included, very much against their will, the people of England, Wales and Scotland. The huge majority of these took Reggie Maudling’s view of Ireland and wanted to be shot of the ‘bloody awful country’. Although the Irish Republican Army, and their supporters in America, who by bankrolling the fighters with ‘Noraid’ perpetuated the slaughter for a quarter of a century, persisted in seeing the struggle as one between Irish Independence and British Imperialism, very few British people, apart from the ideologues of the press, wanted the Northern Ireland experiment (an expedient hastily devised in the 1920s to stop the Civil War) to continue in the 1970s and 1980s. This was not ‘giving in to terrorism’ it was simply what most people wanted. The bonds which held the peoples of the United Kingdom together were loosening, and the Irish story was helping them to loosen. Whether the 5.5 million Scots and 2.75 million Welsh wanted independence, or simply a little more say in their own affairs, without the patronage of being governed through a Welsh Office and a Scottish Office in London, was a matter which the unfolding decades might reveal. But as the century petered out, it was possible to see that all Britons had become uncertain of their own identity and that these movements for independence on the Celtic fringes were only one symptom, the bloodiest of symptoms, of that uncertainty which characterised the collective British self-perception throughout our times. In 1978, the communist Tom Nairn wrote:
There are those who believe that this rump of the former empire will last forever, in an essentially unchanging evolution. Their number includes virtually all England, and a still formidable mass of allies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. On the other hand stands the growing opposition–within sight of being a majority in Scotland–which accepts the verdict a great part of the outside world passed on Britain long ago: that it is a matter of time before it founders. Its post-empire crisis is long overdue, and not even to be regretted.15
The paradox is that many of the keenest supporters of British membership of the European Community, as it would become, would probably have agreed with this analysis in its broad outline, even if they considered its stridency childish. Those who voted for Heath, and those who initially liked what he was doing, rejoiced at his apparent abolition of ‘Butskellism’ and his embrace of the modern. Reporting on his first speech as Prime Minister to the Party Conference at Blackpool in October 1971, Jean Campbell wrote for the Evening Standard, ‘It was aggressive Toryism at last. A far cry from the defensive Toryism of Rab Butler which had shared room and board with Socialism for the last 22 years. Heath was pulling down the Butler boarding house… Instead he plans to build a skyscraper with self-operating lifts. When the speech ended the crowd went wild, and being accustomed to American conventions, I know a happy crowd when I see one.’16
Very typical of Heath’s modernity, his skyscraper, was the decision to reorganise local government and to abolish many of the ancient counties of England. This was accomplished by a Heathite ‘whizzkid.17 named Peter Walker, who sought to rationalise what Heath’s faithful biographer John Campbell scornfully calls ‘the traditional patchwork of counties, county boroughs, on-county boroughs, rural and urban district councils and parish councils’…whose ‘boundaries no longer reflected realities and some smaller counties were clearly unviable’.18 So, away went Rutland and all the Welsh counties. Hereford was ‘merged’ with Worcestershire. Wales was carved up into districts, some with the names of ancient kingdoms which non-Welsh speakers have difficulty in pronouncing (Dyfed, Clwyd, Gwynedd). Away went the Assize Courts, and the judges’ lodgings. In came supposedly more efficient County Courts. The ancient drama of the judge arriving in the county town with his clerk and hearing the most serious cases was removed. ‘And where on earth is Avon?’ asked Betjeman. Another bit of old England was lost.
The government of Heath came unstuck because of the trades unions. The historian Robert Blake mercilessly stated in The Conservative Opportunity, ‘The Cabinet began with the intention of “getting government off people’s backs”, but, lacking any clear intellectual mandate to do so, somehow ended with an even larger number of public employees in the non-productive sector than ever before. It began with a determination to abandon lame ducks and avoid all forms of intervention in wage-fixing, but it ended by capitulating to the sit-in at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders and by trying to impose the most complete statutory wage policy ever attempted.’19 This supposedly right-wing government had spent on average more than 30 percent each year than the previous Labour government.
The volte-face over wages came about because Heath was unable to bring in the necessary legislation to curb the power of trades unions. He tried to do so.
Then, in October 1973, came the Yom Kippur War, followed by an oil embargo, and a fourfold increase in oil prices. It was the last piece of misfortune to assail the beleaguered Heath. A month after the war, the National Union of Mineworkers voted for a large wage increase–understandably enough since inflation was soaring, and retail prices alone had risen 10 percent in the previous four weeks. The very men who might be able to help the country through the fuel crisis were set upon destroying it. On 13 December Colonel Heath declared that in order to save fuel, the country must be put upon a three-day week. In the weeks before Christmas, the country was cast into darkness, with electricity switched off and fuel supplies limited. It really felt as if the country, far from being in a state of temporary crisis, might have actually come to an end. Heath supposed that the miners were being influenced by their communist vice president Mick McGahey, rather than their rather right-wing President Joe Gormley. Sensing, probably wrongly, that the miners were attempting to make political capital out of the fuel crisis, and to bring down the elected government, Heath petulantly called an election in February 1972, with the single campaign slogan–‘Who governs?’ The electorate were not sure of the answer to this question, but they had already seen who wasn’t governing, or at least who wasn’t governing very well. In spite of opinion polls assuring the public that the Conservatives were in the lead, the votes were inconclusive. The result was that although the Tories won more votes than Labour (just), the Labour Party won four more seats–Labour 301 and Conservative 297. There followed a humiliating farce in which Heath refused to concede defeat in the election, and walled himself up in Downing Street. Adding to the air of absurdity on one of the news bulletins that day, a large van arrived at the door of Number 10 to deliver a gargantuan quantity of lavatory paper; clearly the delivery was coincidental, but it suggested a determination by the Prime Minister to dig in for the long siege, and the inescapable mental image of his bulky, pink form seated on the lavatory and making use of the infinite rolls of Andrex did not endear him to the electorate. He tried to persuade the leader of the Liberal Party to come into the government. The Liberals had won fourteen seats and if they threw their vote behind the Conservatives there would still have been a chance of defeating the Socialists. But although tempted, the Liberal leader, Jeremy Thorpe, could not persuade his party, and so the three and a half years of HeathCo came to a humiliating end. His bitterness never abated, nor did the determination of his party to distance themselves from his mistakes.
It was at the Council of Clermont in November 1095 that Pope Urban II first made his announcement that the Christian West should march to the rescue of the beleaguered Christian East and the First Crusade had begun. A comparable moment in the history of monetarism occurred when Sir Keith Joseph addressed the Conservatives of Preston on 5 September 1974 with the message which he had only lately discovered for himself. The title of the speech, which was a rallying cry to free marketeers everywhere, was ‘Inflation is caused by Governments’… ‘Inflation is threatening to destroy our society…The distress and unemployment that will follow unless the trend is stopped will be catastrophic.’20
The doctrine to which Sir Keith Joseph had been converted was that it was not enough for governments to try to abate inflation by incomes policy if they themselves were not bold enough to switch off the tap: to stop printing more and more money, as successive ‘consensus’ British governments since the Second World War had tried to do. J. Enoch Powell had been preaching this doctrine for years and he remarked somewhat sourly, ‘I have heard of death-bed repentance. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to refer to post-mortem repentance.’21
The words of the speech in Preston were spoken by Joseph, but they had been written by an in some ways unlikely friend, Alfred Sherman. Whereas Keith Joseph, the son of a Lord Mayor of London, had been brought up in the height of luxury in the house formerly belonging to the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy, and educated at Harrow, Sherman came from the East End, was an alumnus of Hackney Downs County Secondary, and had followed the Red Brigades to Spain. Yet it was Sherman who convinced Joseph that ‘Keynes is dead. Dead.’ An associate of Sherman’s, who would play a vital role in the future of British Conservatism, was a businessman called John Hoskyns, one of the first to exploit the commercial potential of computers.
The monetarists took the view, which events would seem to have borne out in the late 1970s, that unless something were done to curb succeeding governments’ lust for printing money, Britain would be bankrupted. They had arrived, to use the immodest but accurate title of Hoskyns’s autobiography, Just in Time.