Ted Heath, dour and unpersonable though he might be, was pulling his considerable weight in his party’s cause, to great effect. When he spoke on television, many were struck by his urgency and clarity. By contrast, Wilson came across as complacent and superior. Then arose the worry that Labour voters might not turn out in the numbers needed. It took all too little to tip the scales – a shift of no more than 5 per cent. The Conservatives won 46 per cent of the vote and 330 seats; Labour 43 per cent and 288 seats; while the Liberals had to make do with six.
Wilson contrived to remain phlegmatic; perhaps he knew that his era had not quite ended. He bequeathed to his successor a balance of payments rather less than projected, and a nation rather less optimistic than it had been some six years before. Indeed, among the many swansongs for the Sixties, a gentle ballad by the Stones perhaps best captures this mood: ‘No Expectations’.
45
Bugger them all
When Edward Heath received applause, it was with an open-mouthed beam. It was as if, beneath his carapace of surly self-reliance, he could not quite believe his good fortune. But this smile was seen after concerts he had conducted, not after his electoral win. The expression he wore when he walked into Downing Street was more sombre – there was work to be done. It has been said that the choicest prey for nemesis is the man with too many talents, and this was certainly true of Heath. A skilled yachtsman, conductor and musician, he was also a far abler politician and prime minister than many allowed at the time or have conceded since. His failure, if such it was, was a table of misfortunes ready-laid for him. Then he had his own nature with which to contend. More than any prime minister before him, he was convinced of his self-sufficiency.
Douglas Hurd recalled the moment when he realized that the election had swung to the Conservatives: ‘The car radio persisted in telling us extraordinary good news … Extraordinary to me, but not to Mr Heath. To him it was simply the logical result of the long years of preparation, and of the fact that the people of Britain, like the people of Bexley, were at bottom a sensible lot.’ Heath had planned for power, and his appointments reflected this. Many of the old guard were to remain, and others to be promoted. It was a ‘young’ cabinet, with forty-seven the average age. His ‘power base’ was to be formed of those who owed everything to Heath himself. His mood may be inferred from an uncharacteristic instance of vulgarity: ‘Bugger them all,’ he is said to have exclaimed. ‘I won.’ ‘They’ were the naysayers, the sneerers and jeerers of the Tory right and of the press. However, they were not yet routed, whatever Heath may have hoped.
It was unfortunate that Heath’s premiership should have coincided with a miners’ strike in January 1972 followed by a dockers’ strike in July of the same year, both of them ominous auguries. Nor did matters improve when the government, having so loudly proclaimed its compassion and commitment to ‘fairness’, announced that it would be renewing sales of arms to South Africa. This, and the Rhodesia question, would sour relations with the Commonwealth for years to come. But, as Heath never wearied of explaining to the nation, there was work to be done. The dockers’ strike led to the proclamation of the first state of emergency. Four more were to follow.
Of all the relations that concerned the people, particularly after the compromises and failures of the previous government, those with the unions loomed largest. On television, Heath was challenged on the question. ‘Would you face a general strike?’ ‘Yes. I have always made it plain. I have said we are going to carry out a thorough reform of industrial relations.’ He promised, too, a ‘quiet revolution’. Such revolutions rarely set the public aflame, and this was to be no exception.
In any case, there was no real revolution. Heath’s chief object was to contain the forces of organized labour, rather than to undermine them. Indeed, he always proclaimed a steadfast admiration for the TUC in particular and the unions in general, however opaque this regard often seemed to the public. Union leaders usually found him both responsive and affable. Jack Jones was to recall Heath’s willingness to give his opponents a sensitive and respectful hearing, a judgement that would have surprised those who saw only the unsmiling face or unbending rhetoric. He was not to be the last prime minister betrayed by his affection for organized labour.
Heath had long been convinced that politics was a matter for specialists, and so he began to invite businessmen into the business of government. Like so many of his ventures, it was well-intentioned, but he had Whitehall to reckon with. His Programme Analysis and Review was an attempt to bring a degree of specialist knowledge to questions of policy and reduce the need for bureaucracy. Whitehall’s response was polite and inexorable. It was noted by a Whitehall observer, Peter Hennessy, that ‘their first step was to remove it from the grasp of Heath’s businessmen … and to draw it into their own citadel in Great George Street from which it never emerged alive’. It was to become a familiar story: Heath’s attempts to reduce bureaucracy more often than not added to it. In this instance, the number of civil servants increased by 400,000.
It was Heath who coined the expression ‘think tank’, to describe a body chosen to advise the cabinet on policy. A scion of the Rothschild clan headed the first of these bodies, but its warnings of an oil crisis went unheeded. Most importantly perhaps, Lord Rothschild had identified the enemy: ‘that neo-Hitler, that arch-enemy, inflation’. Inflation, long recognized as a hindrance, was now the foe-in-chief.
A further strike by miners in February 1974 led to a second state of emergency. The willingness of Heath to resort to such a measure under conditions that rarely justified the title ‘emergency’ revealed much about his attitude to opposition. Beneath the granite self-confidence could often be heard the slam of a childish foot on a floorboard. And yet it was a time for which the expression ‘U-turn’ might have been coined. Rolls-Royce, in trouble over engines to be supplied to American ‘Lockheeds’, had to be rescued, in clear defiance of Heath’s election promises. But what could he do? It would not be true to suggest, as some have, that Heath despised or underrated America’s contribution to world prosperity or world peace. There can be little doubt, however, that he viewed the ‘special relationship’ as a hindrance to his European ideal. That the United States had consistently supported Britain’s attempts to join the bloc was a circumstance that Heath contrived to ignore. Henry Kissinger put it thus: ‘His relations with us were always correct, but they rarely rose above a basic reserve that prevented – in the name of Europe – the close cooperation with us that was his for the taking.’ As ever, it was not that Heath had no ear for advice or public opinion, merely a poor nose for changes in the wind.
On the question of the swelling war between India and Pakistan, Heath’s rejoinder to Kissinger could not have been clearer:
What they wanted from the special relationship was to land Britain in it [the war between India and Pakistan] as well … and I was determined not to be landed … Did we lose anything by it? No, of course not. We gained an enormous amount. I can quite see that it’s rather difficult for some Americans, including Henry, to adjust themselves to this, but it’s necessary for them to do it. Now, there are some people who always want to nestle on the shoulder of an American president. That’s no future for Britain.