TED HEATH is unlikely to go down as one of the 20th century’s great prime ministers, yet as political leader of the nation in the 3½ years he reigned at No 10 he had one outstanding merit. He knew what he wanted to do and he did it.
If the basic divide among prime ministers is between those who enjoy being in office and those who seek power in order to do something, Ted Heath belonged defiantly to the second category. Unlike his immediate predecessor, Harold Wilson, he never wanted merely to play at being the boy in the signal box: if he pulled the levers of power he always did so with the conscious and deliberate intention of changing the direction of the train.
I first met him through Randolph Churchill when he was Chief Whip to Harold Macmillan. Even at that time he was plainly a man dedicated to politics and motivated solely by a determination to leave his mark on British history. Since I was young and brash, we used in those days to argue over the part he had played in the ludicrous Suez adventure of Macmillan’s predecessor, Anthony Eden, to whom he had also served as Chief Whip. He always struck me as being distinctly unhappy in the defences he attemp-ted to make of Eden’s policy. He had only one good point which was that as Chief Whip, it was his duty to preserve the unity of the party.
I would never claim to have been an intimate of his, but then that was a hard thing to be. He was very much the “loner” in politics, continuing well into his forties to live in a one-bedroom flat in Petty France just opposite St James’s Park station in Westminster. (It was not until the merchant bank Brown Shipley made some money for him that finally, in the early 1960s, he moved into a set of chambers in Albany.)
He was always somewhat secretive and had good reason to be so. He had the most modest background of any 20th century prime minister (not excluding Lloyd George or Ramsay MacDonald) and, compared with him, Margaret Thatcher was a pillar of middle-class respectability. Heath’s mother had been in service and his father was a carpenter who later became a small-time builder in Broadstairs.
The Tories, while they winced occasionally at his tortured vowels, took to his presence in the leadership with surprising ease. I can recall only one wife of a Tory grandee who famously commented to me: “Sadly, Ted has no manners at all but then you could hardly expect him to, could you?” That, however, was as far as social criticism was allowed to go. I do not believe he ever intended to be brusque or rude: it was just his way, and he did mellow.
Still firmly fixed in my mind is our last meeting together at his house in Belgravia, where, as I was departing, he put his arm round my shoulder and bid me to “take care of yourself”. Such was my astonishment that I very nearly fell down the steps.
For what it is worth, my own view is that the combat between him and Margaret Thatcher was not mortal until she took the unforgivable step (for him) of excluding her predecessor from the Cabinet she formed in 1979. As he makes clear in his autobiography, he had confidently expected to be appointed her Foreign Secretary, just as he had made Alex Douglas-Home his own one in 1970 and A. J. Balfour had become Lloyd George’s in 1916.
Impossible though he no doubt would have been as a Cabinet colleague, he had some ground for feeling bitter. He had taken on the whole burden of the referendum campaign in 1975 — the new Leader of the Opposition was then at least nominally a pro-European — and had campaigned loyally for her up and down the land in the 1979 election. The derisory offer of the embassy in Washington (made at a tête-à-t ête interview with him in his own home) was probably rightly regarded by him as being nothing short of an insult. He turned his back on his visitor, stared out of the window and refused to make any response.
An easy man? Certainly not. A proud one? Without doubt. But, whether in the full panoply of power or in the impotence of isolation, he consistently did the State some service. I shall always be ashamed that, when his world fell apart on February 28, 1974, I laughed out loud at a notice just outside my own local polling station declaring “Ted Heath is just a rough, tough, cream puff”. With his own interests ranging from music to sailing — and just the occasional blind spot over Saddam Hussein or Chairman Mao — Heath was much more than that. He may not have been, as Margaret Thatcher found it in her heart to say yesterday, “a political giant”. But, unlike some of his more recent Tory successors, he was certainly no political pygmy.
Grotesque figures
THE salaries and bonuses that the BBC announced last week for its “executive board” struck me as being grotesque — and full marks to the new Director-General, Mark Thompson, for refusing to take his own bonus of £168,000. These are ludicrous figures and I’m relieved that the Board of Governors will in future be limiting such so-called “performance bonuses” to 10 per cent rather than the 30 per cent of the current awards.
But how did a public service corporation get to the position where it is sloshing money around within the kissing ring of its own senior staff? I blame all those business consultants that Lord Birt was incessantly bringing in. Their advice, I’m sure, was that there was no alternative to paying competitive salaries in a highly-paid media world. I hope no one will take offence if I say that, looking at the names and photographs of the recipients that appeared under those telephone number digits, I did not see any of them making that sort of money in the more rigorous climate of independent production.
Changing Forces
I WAS taken aback last weekend to hear General Sir Peter de la Billière say that the fastest growing part of our Armed Forces is now the Army Legal Services. Apparently it is a direct consequence of our having signed up to be subject to the International Criminal Court. I confess to having originally been in favour of our becoming a signatory and to have been critical of the Americans for their failure to follow suit. Maybe, though, having been brought up in a “compensation culture”, they knew a trick or two that we did not.
A vocation missed?
THE British military commander in the first Gulf War made his statement in the course of a talk he gave at the Buxton Festival, a bustling, buoyant celebration of opera, classical music and literature that seems to grow in strength every year. This year I even scored a career first of my own — a “homily” delivered at the Eucharist, broadcast on Radio 4, to mark the festival. It was, admittedly, a bit of a cheat. A resourceful member of the BBC religious department simply came to my flat in London and recorded four-and-a-half minutes of my talking about St Benedict and his Rule. (They wanted a made-to-measure contribution and were not prepared to risk my wandering off the script.) Never mind, when I heard it on my transistor it did not sound too bad. It has had, however, one unfortunate effect. Rather late in the day I have begun to wonder whether I might not have missed my true vocation.
