“Er, do you remember a woman chucking paint over you on the day you became Prime Minister?” “Of course I do,” he harrumphed, “she caused an awful fuss and ruined my best suit.”
“Um . . . well, that was my mother.”
“And the little boy screaming his head off?” “Er, that was me.”
There was a startled pause, during which his aides exchanged nervous glances and I thought, ‘Sh**, I’ve blown it’. Then, to my intense relief, the old man’s eyes twinkled, his stern, jowly features lifted into a smile and he began to laugh, those famous shoulders shaking up and down. “What an extraordinary coincidence,” Heath said. “You’ve got the job!”
We shook hands and agreed that the story should not be mentioned in the book we were going to produce together over the next three years.
I began work with a team of researchers and writers in September 1995. Despite possessing the gargantuan ego that all political leaders require and despite still having an active life as an MP, Heath was a fundamentally lonely man. And he could often be the cold, defensive and pompous figure that the public knew, especially when asked to confront the problems and failures of his premiership, or simply when asked what he “felt” about any given event. However, he could also be warm, charming and amusing, especially if we were talking over a drink or dinner. Watching the six o’clock news together at Arundells became an evening ritual peppered with his caustic asides on every subject from Northern Ireland and the monarchy to the implosion of the Conservative Party over Europe and “sleaze”.
Once, as we sat watching John Major being humiliated for the umpteenth time, I asked Heath if my mother’s blow for the Labour movement had spoiled his big day. “Not at all,” he said, “although of course I was relieved she didn’t have a weapon. What did bother me was sitting down in the evening with Willie Whitelaw and Francis Pym to choose my Cabinet and discovering that Wilson hadn’t left any damn food in the fridge.”
“What about the ink thrower of Brussels?” “I just thought, ‘Oh, not again! Another mad woman and another ruined suit!’ ” The jocularity passed. “I’m proud of her, you know,” I told him. He paused and, looking me straight in the eye, said: “So you should be; it was a brave thing to do.”
Tired of commuting from London to Salisbury, I rented a house near Arundells shortly before Heath’s 80th birthday in July 1996. On a balmy Friday evening later that summer, Heath and I were sitting in his study after a tortuous hour discussing the Three-Day Week, when he asked me what I was up to at the weekend.
“My mother’s visiting me from London,” I replied. To my astonishment, he said: “Would she like to come round for a drink tomorrow afternoon?” — and then, with a playful smile — “It would be nice to see her again.” The idea was presented as a spontaneous gesture of hospitality, but it seemed to me he had been waiting for a chance to meet her in private and to be reconciled without too much drama or emotion.
My mother agreed. She too felt the need for reconciliation and from the start had seen my job as a fated opportunity for us to close a circle in our lives. And although she had not lost her political principles, Thatcherism had caused her to look more sympathetically at “one nation” Conservatives like Heath. So the next afternoon, with Mum’s handbag firmly closed, we were ushered through the iron gates of Arundells by an armed policeman unaware of her record. As we began crunching our way up the gravelled drive, Heath appeared at his front door to greet us, a task he usually left to the housekeeper. “Do come in, Angela,” he beamed, leading us in to the sitting room where I had endured my interview.
Drinks were poured and the conversation began to flow. They talked of Europe, of the Second World War and the cultural heritage that Britain shares with the Continent. Classical music was Heath’s passion. But he also liked showing off his art collection, and his delight was evident as Mum paused to appreciate paintings by Walter Sickert and John Piper on the tour he gave her. The paint throwing was mentioned only once. “I’m to the left of Tony Blair, you know,” he said proudly, when Mum asked him what he thought of the new Labour leader. “I know,” she replied, “and if I’d realised how awful your Tory successors were going to be I might not have attacked you.”
“If only the trade unions had realised it too,” he murmured ruefully, before the conversation returned to art.
The atmosphere was friendly, but shot through with the tension of what remained unsaid. As I watched them together I thought how very English it was that, apart from a brief exchange, they never discussed the ideological conflict that had driven my mother to risk her liberty and career. And yet it was a deep sense of their Europeanness that connected these two, very different, people. “Your mother was charming,” Heath said to me when next we spoke, “and such a good European! Do thank her for coming.”
I’m sure of one thing: Heath was not the curmudgeonly old sulk of caricature. Certainly he never forgave Thatcher for taking the Conservative Party back to the Right (his remaining ambition, he once told me, was to outlive “THAT woman”). I suspect, too, that his mischievous sense of humour was one of the reasons he employed me and invited his former assailant into his home. Long after they met, Heath continued to ask after Mum and would catechistically remind me of her importance to my life. This was partly the sentiment of a bachelor boy who had kept a picture of his own mother by his bed for more than 60 years.
However, Heath's emotional generosity towards my mother stemmed mainly from the fact that his life and career were characterised by a belief in the necessity of reconciliation. More than most new prime ministers, I think he really meant the words he had uttered outside No 10. His failure as a leader lay in his inability to communicate private emotion in public life and in a refusal to accept that there will always be people, sometimes with just cause, for whom reconciliation and compromise mean surrender and defeat.
As Heath stood at the door waving us goodbye, I thought of what, in The Whitsun Weddings, Philip Larkin described as the “frail travelling coincidence” of strangers meeting on a train. “What it held”, wrote Larkin, “Stood ready to be loosed with all the power/ That being changed can give.”
Quietly, and with no cameras present, the three of us had created our own small piece of history and somehow been redeemed by it.
Richard Weight’s book, Patriots: National Identity in Britain, 1940-2000 is published by Pan Macmillan (£9.99).
