I FIRST encountered Ted Heath at the age of 4 when, clutching me in her arms, my mother threw a tin of red paint over him outside 10 Downing Street on his first day as Prime Minister of Great Britain.
This was the time before security gates were put across the entrance to Downing Street, when curious crowds could still gather virtually on the Prime Minister’s doorstep. At 2pm on Saturday, June 20, 1970, Heath’s motorcade swept into the street. As he got out of his car, smiling and waving, the people packed around us cheered and stretched their necks for a view. Mum wasn’t cheering. Dressed in a red blouse and black skirt, she was grim-faced and silent as she reached into her shoulder bag and opened a small tin of emulsion with her door keys.
On Heath’s first arrival the previous evening, after kissing hands with the Queen at Buckingham Palace, a nest of microphones and cameras had captured the pieties of his victory speech at the steps of No 10: “To govern is to serve . . . Our purpose is not to divide but to unite and, where there are differences, to bring reconciliation.” Unfortunately for Heath, my mother had no wish to be served by him or to be reconciled with those voting Conservative.
His victory over Harold Wilson, in which he turned a Labour majority of nearly 100 into a Tory one of 30, was the biggest electoral upset since Attlee defeated Churchill in 1945. It also defined the era. Coming a few weeks after the Beatles split up, and four days after England were knocked out of the World Cup by West Germany, it seemed to confirm that the vibrant, freewheeling optimism of the Sixties had ended. Thirteen million people had voted for Heath, heeding his warning that the British economy was in a perilous state.
My mother was not a member of the Labour Party or politically active in any way. But as an 18-year-old university student she had voted Labour at the general election of 1964, and was upset by the triumphal glee at Wilson’s downfall.
The memories of my mother’s protest are the most vivid of my early childhood. The acrid smell of slopping emulsion hit my nostrils as she carried me forward through the crowd, then broke past the police cordon and ran up to where Heath and his entourage were standing on the pavement. Saying nothing, she hurled paint over the new Prime Minister, who ducked and raised an arm to protect himself, then, realising he had not been hurt, said: “That was a stupid thing to do, wasn ’t it?”, as if admonishing a niece for writing on the wall. As well as decorating his blue suit, red paint splashed on to the limousine that had just delivered him to Downing Street, and on to William Whitelaw, who was standing by his side. A furious Whitelaw hissed: “You f***ing bitch!” with a venom that she never forgot as he and a bodyguard bustled Heath through the door of No 10.
Then pandemonium began. Tory matrons in the crowd shouted at Mum and tried to hit her as policemen swooped down to separate the two of us. Spattered with paint and terrified, I screamed: “I want my mummy!” so hard that I was given back to her. Seconds later, we were bundled into a van and driven to Cannon Row police station. I was reassured that Mum was just answering a few questions because she’d been “naughty”, and was scrubbed down in a sink by a policewoman, then given fresh clothes and a fry-up from the station canteen, a rare treat for a little boy from a vegetarian household. (Most of our relatives were carnivorous Tory-voting Norfolk farmers, who were furious with Mum for what she did.)
My mother was charged with four offences: threatening behaviour, possessing an offensive weapon (the paint pot), wilful damage to one suit (valued at £32), and 54 shillings’ worth of damage to an official car. After an unpleasant couple of nights in the cells at Cannon Row, she appeared at Bow Street Court the next Monday. The magistrate handed her a three-month suspended sentence, telling her: “What you did goes well beyond the bounds of reasonable protest.”
At the time, she was a picture researcher at Macmillan Publishers, which was then still owned by the former Prime Minister, and Heath’s political mentor, Harold Macmillan, whom she would occasionally see around the building. The firm’s directors were as appalled as our family had been at her behaviour — not least Harold’s son, Maurice, who had just been re-elected as a Tory MP. Although they hoped she would resign, when Mum returned to work nothing was said to her and she was allowed to keep her job, probably because they feared that sacking her would look like a political act. Years later Macmillan published my first book.
My mother eventually left publishing and went on to become a respected figure in the London art world. Heath went on to preside over one of the most troubled periods in recent British history, which led to him being demonised by neo-Conservatives.
Satirists saw the incident as a curse on his premiership. After Heath lost the general election of October 1974, and his rivals began manoeuvring into position, the cover of Private Eye showed him splashed with paint, the caption reading “OK Chaps I'll resign! I'll resign!” Even his finest hour was coloured by the event. On January 22, 1972, as he arrived at the Palais d’Egmont in Brussels to sign the Treaty of Accession to the European Community, a woman hurled ink over him in a copycat attack.
Twenty-five years after Mum and I rattled away from No 10 in a police van, I sat facing Heath across the sky-blue and gold-coloured sitting room of Arundells, his palatial Jacobean home in Salisbury. He was interviewing me for the job of principal researcher on his memoirs, for which he had just been advanced a six-figure sum. Heath had no idea of the bizarre way our lives were connected and I, knowing of his grudge against Thatcher, wondered if he was also nursing one about my mother.
My chance to confess came after questions about my professional credentials, when he asked what my first political memory was. “You,” I replied. “Oh?” he said, looking suspicious.
