The Heathite future that never was
Edward Heath did not want to step down as Conservative leader after losing the general elections of 1974; what did the future look like in his mind?
For reasons I can’t explain, except perhaps a restless and curious mind, I am fascinated by counter-factual history in all its forms. My interest was first properly piqued about the political aspect of this art form when, as a teenager, I read Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone’s autobiography A Sparrow’s Flight (yes, I was that cool). At that age—16, I think, perhaps 17—I was not yet steeped in post-war politics, knowing only the bare lineaments of that which had happened between VE Day and whenever my own memory kicked in around the mid-1980s. In Hailsham’s book, I read that he had been a leading contender to become prime minister in 1963 when Harold Macmillan resigned, and, indeed, had been at first Supermac’s favoured candidate (as often Macmillan would shift his position without ever admitting any inconsistency). It made me wonder what a Hailsham, or rather Hogg, premiership might have looked like.
This meant that the publication in 1999 of Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, edited by my now-friend Niall Ferguson, was manna from heaven. It took nine historical scenarios, political and foreign policy-related, and asked eminent historians to explore what might have happened if events had gone the other way. Ferguson himself dealt with the question of what might have been if the United Kingdom had not joined the First World War in 1914, for example, while American historian and lawyer Diane Kunz proposed a scenario in which President Kennedy had not been assassinated in Dallas in November 1963.
Some historians are deeply suspicious and rather snooty about counter-factual history. It is regarded as an unserious parlour game, and often an exercise in wish fulfilment. I disagree. The process can be fun, certainly, but I also think it has genuine analytical value. Imagining what might have happened forces you to examine the importance of each event which did happen, and to assess how likely each factor was, and how easily things could have been different. They keep us alive to the role of tiny chances in great historical developments and give us a useful sense of perspective.
Perhaps the most famous example is the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. It was such a concatenation of tiny twists of fate which came together in a way they might easily not, setting in train a series of events which opened one of the bloodiest and most traumatising wars in human history. For example, the archduke was only in Sarajevo because he was military governor of Bosnia, and as governor, rather than heir to the throne, his wife would be given proper respect (he had contracted a morganatic marriage and therefore his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, did not share his rank and precedence). There had been an assassination attempt on them shortly after arrival, and after a short rest at the governor’s residence the royal couple insisted on visiting those who had been injured; but no-one told the drivers of the motorcade, and they got lost. The place they stopped to turn around was across the road from a café where Gavrilo Princip, the eventual assassin, was sitting dejected. Any of these might not have happened.
Back to the matter I want to look at in this essay. When the Conservative government lost the general election of February 1974, called to settle the question “Who governs?” (and answered with “Not you”), Edward Heath had by then lost two of the three elections he had contested as Conservative leader. But he showed no sign of being chastened. A man perennially lacking in insight, he saw no fault in himself, and pressed on, although the mood in the parliamentary party was becoming mutinous. Naturally, once he accepted that he could not remain in Downing Street—he tried for a few days to reach an agreement with Jeremy Thorpe’s half-dozen Liberal MPs but Thorpe could not wring enough out of him—he formed a shadow cabinet, taking account of those former ministers who had stepped down or left the Commons at the end of the 1970 Parliament.
The danger signs for Heath were already there. Kenneth Clarke, then a junior whip, was told by a senior backbencher to “just tell that man to stop messing about. We have lost an election, we cannot form a government, we have been defeated and we must go with dignity”. Years later, journalist Alan Watkins would blame Heath’s internal unpopularity on his “brusqueness, his gaucherie, his lack of small or indeed any talk, his sheer bad manners”. Elsewhere, Sir Keith Joseph, who had been secretary of state for social services (and head of one of the highest spending departments in Whitehall), was beginning to have the almost-spiritual crisis which would wrack him for months and lead to his “road to Chicago” conversion to monetarism.
Let us, then, have a look at Heath’s shadow cabinet. It is hard but important to recall that he had no idea that he would be skittled out of the leadership by Margaret Thatcher within a year, so his front bench appointments were not as pro tem as they seem to us. Rather, they reflected the direction in which he wanted to take the party to refresh and renew. Some young talent was promoted as other warhorses departed, whether voluntarily or not. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, having had a gilded second life as foreign secretary, stepped down and would leave the Commons at the year’s second general election. Anthony Barber, the chancellor who was so associated with the economic U-turn of 1972, also left the front bench, while the Scottish secretary, Gordon Campbell, was defeated in his Moray and Nairn constituency. John Davies, who had come to politics after running the CBI, had failed to impress and returned to the back benches. This, then, was the team that Heath assembled in March 1974 after he had moved his possessions out of Downing Street.
(Note: records for the shadow cabinet in 1974-75 are surprisingly scarce and occasionally contradictory. But I have done my best to reconcile all the information I can find and I am relatively confident that it is at worst 80-90 per cent accurate.)
Leader of the Opposition Edward Heath
Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer Robert Carr
Shadow Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary. Geoffrey Rippon
Shadow Home Secretary Jim Prior
Shadow Leader of the House of Commons "
Shadow Defence Secretary Ian Gilmour
Shadow Education and Science Secretary Norman St John Stevas
Shadow Employment Secretary William Whitelaw MC
Shadow Energy Secretary Patrick Jenkin
Shadow Environment Secretary Margaret Thatcher
Shadow Social Services Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe QC
Shadow Trade Secretary Peter Walker
Shadow Industry Secretary Michael Heseltine
Shadow Prices & Consumer Protection Secretary. Paul Channon
Shadow Scottish Secretary Alick Buchanan-Smith
Shadow Welsh Secretary Peter Thomas QC
Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Francis Pym MC
Shadow Agriculture Minister Joseph Godber
Shadow Leader of the House of Lords Lord Windlesham
Opposition Chief Whip Humphrey Atkins
Chairman of the Conservative Party Lord Carrington KCMG MC
Spokesman without Portfolio Sir Keith Joseph Bt
Spokesman without Portfolio Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone QC
What can we say at first examination? Not many of the shadow ministers were in the same portfolios they had held in government: apart from Health (obviously), only Whitelaw, Gilmour, Thomas, Pym, Godber and Atkins were shadowing their former positions (though Walker was also shadowing part of his, having been trade and industry secretary before his old department was carved up by Harold Wilson). In addition, Jenkin stepped up from being a junior energy minister to the chief shadow.
There were some obvious heavyweights around whom Heath intended to focus his new opposition. Robert Carr was regarded as the ultimate safe pair of hands; he had been employment secretary, briefly leader of the House of Commons and then home secretary. In the first capacity he had managed the Industrial Relations Act 1971 on to the statute book, to the horror of the trades unions (it was a measure of its success in Conservative eyes that the Labour government then repealed it almost straight away with the Trade Union and Labour Relations Act 1974). As home secretary, despite the 1970 manifesto having been traditionally right-wing on law and order, he introduced a clutch of reforms to the prison system, including scrapping the traditional punishment of bread-and-water diet, allowing more frequent prison visits by relatives, abolishing censorship of prisoners’ letters; and largely restoring remission lost through alleged misconduct. He had a good relationship with Heath (though regarded the leader as “too serious”) and, only a few months younger and unshowy, posed no threat. But as shadow chancellor he was outgunned by the Labour Party’s most heavily armed capital ship, Denis Healey, and was unable to make much impact despite the unpromising economic conditions.
(It is also true that shadow chancellor in a party which has just left office is a difficult role, as the new government can for some months attribute any economic woes to their predecessor. Reginald Maudling (1964-65) and Roy Jenkins (1970-72) certainly declined in reputation and standing thereafter, while, decades later, Peter Lilley would find little success or lustre.)
Jim Prior had started the Heath administration as an up-and-coming minister; after five years as Heath’s parliamentary private secretary, a demanding role with a leader as unclubbable and frosty and Heath, he was made minister of agriculture in 1970, a post for which he was suited as a farmer with a first in land economy from Cambridge. He remained close to the leader and admired him, feeling in tune with his broadly One Nation approach to politics, and his promotion to shadow home secretary after two years in the procedural and conciliatory role of leader of the House of Commons was his admission to Heath’s holy of holies.
The crown prince of the Heath government was undoubtedly Peter Walker. Only 38 when he oversaw the creation of the “super-ministry” of the Department of the Environment in 1970, before transferring to the other great Heathite fortress of the Department of Trade and Industry two years later, he had bounced into the House of Commons at a by-election aged 28. During the 1960s, he grew wealthy as the junior partner of corporate raiders Slater, Walker Securities. He seemed the epitome of the “new” Conservative Party of the 1960s: from a working-class background, he had attended Latymer Upper, then a direct grant grammar school, and had not gone on to university. Instead he was a self-made man, thanks to a modern and dynamic-seeming career in asset stripping, but lacked the flashiness of Michael Heseltine or Ernest Marples, whom the grandees of the party despised. In 1972, Francis Pym, then chief whip, advised Heath that Barber was struggling as chancellor and should be moved; he recommended Walker as his successor. That he was only shadow trade secretary in the new team was a reflection of the fact that the DTI had been split up, and he held on to one of the remnants, but he was younger by some way than all of Heath’s other trusties, and was clearly the Heathite of the future.
The promotion of Geoffrey Rippon to shadow foreign secretary, to replace the massively accomplished Alec Home, was more peculiar. Rippon was an unobjectionable barrister who had served an apprenticeship in local government, and had been out of the Commons from 1964 to 1966, but, after the reshuffle in the wake of Iain Macleod’s death in July 1970, he had been appointed by Heath to lead the negotiations for the UK to accede to the European Economic Community. There was close supervision from Downing Street but Rippon concluded the negotiations successfully, completing Heath’s only political passion project, and then, appropriately for a former mayor of Surbiton, took over the environment brief—essentially local government and housing—from Peter Walker for the rest of the administration. Heath regarded Rippon as “reliable”, hence his retention, but it was not a universal opinion; Pym had recommended he be dismissed two years before, telling the leader that he was an “embarrassing figure” whose “reputation has ebbed away since 1970”. Choosing a cricketing metaphor so beloved of politicians, Pym warned Heath that Rippon was “unlikely to make you any runs ever”. His senior position in the shadow cabinet must reflect more Heath’s preference for loyalty and steadiness, as well as broad ideological adherence.
Heath’s indulgence for the loyal and politically sympathetic was also reflected in Gilmour’s appointment as shadow defence secretary. As ever it was a demanding policy area: the military contribution to the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the management of the UK’s strategic posture after the withdrawal from East of Suez and the clash of two NATO member states in the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in July 1974 would all pass across the defence secretary’s desk in the mid-1970s. Admittedly, Gilmour had been secretary of state for the last two months of the Heath government. He was, in later parlance, one of the wettest of the wets, socially liberal and pro-European, and he enthusiastically championed the cause of the Arabs in foreign policy. He had also spent the whole period from 1970 to 1974 in MoD posts. Gilmour was also a polite, affable, intellectual aristocrat whose editorship of The Spectator (which he also owned) from 1954 to 1957 had been regarded as a high point for the magazine. But as a politician he was diffident, quietly querulous and lacking in weight, and the sharp-tongued Pym had recommended he be dropped in 1973. But he was pliable and anathema to the Tory right, which seems to have persuaded Heath to retain him. He would prove a more effective occasional critic of the right than an effective and influential minister of the left.
If Walker was the crown prince of the Heathmen, then Michael Heseltine was surely the heir presumptive. Rich and self-made, he was furiously hard-working, passionately pro-European and fond of grands prôjets like the Anglo-French Concorde which he had saved as aerospace minister at the DTI from 1972 to 1974. He was the ideal Heathite in many ways: energetic, interventionist and suspicious of the new learning of monetarism. He was also charismatic—though unpopular with his colleagues—and a gifted speaker, both in the House of Commons and at party conferences. Pym was a fan, telling Heath in 1972 that Heseltine was “so good” and “very much the professional”, and recommending his promotion to cabinet as trade and industry secretary. It was the portfolio tailor-made for Heseltine, but, although he was given the industry brief on which he was enthusiastic, he would not find himself at the helm of the DTI until fully 20 years later, under John Major’s premiership.
One potential dissenter in ideological terms whom Heath had been happy to promote was Geoffrey Howe, to whom he assigned the large-budget health and social security brief—social security spending was a fifth of all government spending—opposite Labour’s red queen, Barbara Castle. He was showing signs of incipient monetarism, but had performed well in government: first as solicitor-general, where he had undertaken much of the fighting in the parliamentary trenches to pass the Industrial Relations Act as well as dealing with the legal relationship between the UK and the EEC; then as the minister responsible for price control and consumer protection at the DTI, with a seat in the cabinet. But he was easy to get on with, and would prove under Thatcher that he was capable of extraordinary beyond all reasonable provocation. Although Denis Healey would later describe clashing with Howe in debate as resembling “being savaged by a dead sheep”, he was a steady and robust performer who could soak up a remarkable amount of enemy fire.
The other wild card was Howe’s predecessor at the social services brief, Sir Keith Joseph. A vastly intellectual figure who had won a first at Magdalen College, Oxford, before securing a prize fellowship at All Souls, he had been a largely technocratic minister under Macmillan, Home and Heath, but at the beginning of 1974 had a strange but profound conversion to monetarist economics. Shortly after Thatcher’s seizure of the party leadership, he would reflect in agonised self-doubt, “It was only in April 1974 that I was converted to Conservatism. (I had thought I was a Conservative but I now see that I was not really one at all.)” It was in Joseph’s character—was it a particularly Jewish form of self-excoriation? It certainly seems horribly familiar—that he not only changed his mind but had to tell everyone he met, as well as delivering a healthy dose of self-criticism. Heath had little sympathy: “A good man fallen amongst monetarists. They’ve robbed him of all his judgment. Not that he ever had much in the first place.” The leader kept him in the shadow cabinet without a particular portfolio at first, as he roamed the ideological landscape, but he was a clear outrider.
Willie Whitelaw was perhaps Heath’s most trusted ally and firefighter. He had been the Conservative chief whip in opposition, then leader of the House of Commons for the first two years of the government. After that, he went where he was needed: first Northern Ireland after the imposition of direct rule in 1972, then the Department of Employment at the end of 1973 as industrial relations began to overwhelm the government. He remained as shadow employment secretary for the time being, but Heath wanted him to become chairman of the Conservative Party, partly because the party itself was so obviously the place where the next battles would have to be fought, and partly because the dryly witty, urbane and charming Peter Carrington was extremely keen to leave a role for which he could hardly have been worse suited. So Whitelaw was in a kind of limbo. It was clear that there would be another election before long, since Wilson led a minority government and would obviously go to the polls to try to bolster his numbers in Parliament. However, there could be no swap until Heath could be sure that a new régime at Central Office would have a month or two to bed in before an election was called.
Then there was a clutch of new faces. Alick Buchanan-Smith, replacing the defeated Gordon Campbell speaking on Scotland, was an amiable, well-born Scot, not quite 42, who had been a junior Scottish Office minister throughout the government. He was broadly Heathite in outlook and committed to devolution (which would lead to his departure from the front bench in 1976, when Thatcher abandoned the party’s commitment to a Scottish assembly). Paul Channon, 38, was the scion of the Guinness brewing dynasty and cherished only child of the Conservative MP and diarist Sir Henry “Chips” Channon. He had been elected to the Commons as an Oxford undergraduate, taking over Southend West from his father, his grandmother and his grandfather (the Guinness connection held the seat from 1912 to 1997). He had been on the front bench for all of Heath’s leadership, and was calm, diligent and rather intense. He did not initially find favour under Thatcher.
Patrick Jenkin came from a distinguished family of engineers. He became a tax barrister then served as a Treasury minister throughout the Heath government until he became a junior minister at the new Department of Energy in January 1974. In that role he—perhaps unwisely—advised the electorate to manage the three-day week by brushing their teeth in the dark. It was a carelessness which probably held him back despite his obvious ability. The other newcomer, as shadow education and science secretary, was the florid and witty Norman St John Stevas, a high intellectual of high camp tendencies. Having earned no fewer than four law degrees, he was called to the Bar in 1952 but ended up teaching his subject (and winning armfuls of prizes). He was one of Margaret Thatcher’s junior ministers before taking on responsibility for the arts in 1973. Although he protested his seriousness, the temptation to poke fun or make jokes probably stopped him from rising further up the ladder but he was an elegant if louche adornment to Heath’s top team.
The appointments to Heath’s final shadow cabinet said a great deal about the man. Loyalty, not so much to the leader himself but to the centrist, One Nation, almost Butskellite creed Heath seemed to favour, was the principal criterion. There were some genuinely talented figures, like Heseltine, Walker and Channon, but some lame ducks (to adopt a phrase redolent of the Heath era) like Rippon and Gilmour. Despite the urging of allies, Heath found little room for figures from the party’s right wing: Howe was given a substantial portfolio, but Joseph and Thatcher were retained largely on sufferance—Heath found Thatcher in particular unbearable—and were not at the centre of things. He refused to bring right-wingers into the cabinet despite names like Angus Maude, Edward du Cann and John Peyton, and had neglected grand names from the Macmillan era when he had formed his cabinet in 1970, leaving Duncan Sandys, Ernest Marples and John Boyd-Carpenter in the cold. Julian Critchley, that bitchy but accurate chronicler of the Conservative Party, later wrote that the party comprised three parts, the moderates, the traditional right and the Powellite right, and that it was the moderate wing “from whom in the main the government is recruited”.
We know, as Heath did not (though should at least have suspected), that he would be ousted by his backbenchers within a year. Critchley described the change of leadership as “the Peasants’ Revolt”. What is clear is that Heath saw no need to change direction and was bringing on moderate young MPs as the next generation of cabinet ministers. It was, ironically, a much more robust and uncompromising approach to factions than Thatcher would pursue in her early years, and it is largely agreed that she was in a minority in her own cabinet until at least 1981. It is, still, a tantalising glimpse of what might have been—and it is a matter of personal taste whether one regrets it or not.