paid to take orders. I am a private member, returned by my constituents to support the party and prime minister as I think best…I shall continue to work for the party and prime minister as I think best and, while on the subject, I shall not be available to vote on Thursday, 8th.’12 Since the gravamen of the Chief Whip’s complaint had been that Anstruther-Gray had given no warning of his absence, Heath probably let the matter rest – but a black mark would have been registered against the errant member. Not many others would have been similarly defiant. The notably independent-minded Hugh Fraser arrived at a dinner party announcing that the debate that evening was on a matter of trivial importance and that he had no intention of returning to vote. An hour later the telephone rang and the servant reported that it was the Chief Whip for Mr Fraser. Fraser left without waiting for the pudding. Heath was the last Whip to act as teller during crucial votes; on certain issues he stood by the Opposition entrance so that any rebel would have to file by directly in front of him.13
He was particularly hard on any behaviour that he thought might bring discredit to the House. When the Tory MP for Dorset North, Robert Crouch, touted for business on House of Commons writing paper, Heath summoned him and sternly pointed out the impropriety of his behaviour. Crouch promised to mend his ways but shortly afterwards died, leaving many unpaid bills and an indigent widow. Heath was active in raising funds so that Mrs Crouch was not left in too parlous a state.14 If he felt a member was not and never would be up to the job he would not hesitate to plan for his replacement. He thought badly of the member for Oxford, Lawrence Turner, and did what he could to arrange a change. When Harold Macmillan was asked to drop in at the Cowley Conservative Club after a dinner in Oxford, Heath urged him to take up the invitation: ‘It would be important that the prospective candidate, the Hon Montague Woodhouse, is at the Club in order to receive the benefit of this rather than Mr Turner.’ Sometimes, in the eye of the victim at least, he seems to have behaved with some insensitivity. When Airey Neave, a junior minister, resigned in 1959, he was told bleakly that his political career was over. ‘Airey deeply resented the way he felt he had been discarded and the way it had been done,’ remembered Margaret Thatcher’s future minister, Norman Fowler. Fifteen years later Neave got his revenge. Only somebody who had been present at the original interview could tell how justified his resentment really was. Another version has it that it was alcohol rather than illness that had forced Neave’s retirement and that Heath’s harshness was therefore justified. The story shows, however, that no Chief Whip, however tactful and emollient, could do his job properly without making some enemies along the way.15
More often, however, Heath was trying to persuade members not to retire at a time when it might prove damaging to the party. When the famous former fighter pilot ‘Laddie’ Lucas reported that he felt his employment as managing director of the White City stadium was stopping him from doing a proper job as an MP, Heath replied that there had been no complaints from his constituents and that ‘as it would be very difficult for anybody else to hold his seat, it was his duty to carry on’. Lucas temporarily agreed but, two months later, wrote from holiday in Italy to say that he had finally decided to resign. ‘Italy seems to have a fatal effect on everyone’s ideas of both love and duty!’ wrote Heath resignedly.16 Sometimes he was more successful. Derick Heathcoat-Amory, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, told Heath late in 1958 that he wanted to retire and ‘spend his declining years in some useful form of service’ (a curious reflection on his estimation of his actual job). Heath persuaded him that it was his duty to soldier on, at least until the next election.17
Another desirable quality for a Chief Whip is to be invariably equable. Here Heath was less than perfect. He always suffered from a short temper and was apt to explode if opposed in any way which he felt pig-headed and unreasonable. ‘He was fratchety as Chief Whip,’ said one not particularly rebellious member. ‘He can be very huffy if you don’t agree with him.’ Humphry Berkeley, a left-wing Tory backbencher, was lunching with a friend in the Carlton Club in 1956, discussing the capital punishment bill which was then being debated in the Commons. Heath joined them and tried to persuade them to accept the compromise proposal supported by the Government, which retained the death penalty but only for four categories of murder. He failed, whereupon, according to Berkeley, he ‘became abusive; he called us soft and then relapsed into a sullen silence, refusing to join us for coffee afterwards…We were shocked at this display of anger and rudeness on the part of the Government Chief Whip.’18 The anecdote is the more striking because Heath’s personal conviction was that the death penalty should be abolished. It was another example of his belief that a Chief Whip could have no views of his own, or at least none that he would own to publicly. It was also uncharacteristic: the explosion of bad temper was not unheard of but, at this stage of his career at least, the sustained sulk was unusual. He must have been in an exceptionally fratchety mood that day.
‘You’ll remember asking last Saturday what I thought about a certain person’s private affairs,’ the veteran Tory politician, Harry Crookshank, wrote mysteriously. He recommended an approach to the Queen’s private secretary.19 It was but one of many such covert communications. Heath constantly had to enquire into the private affairs of one person or another, and usually found the task distasteful. Peter Baker, the member for South Norfolk, was an alcoholic whose businesses had failed badly. He tried to persuade Heath that he was now a reformed character but the Deputy Chief Whip, as Heath then was, insisted he should resign. Baker refused, though promising not to stand at the next election. ‘What is to be done?’ asked the Prime Minister. Nothing, replied Heath, ‘short of guiding his hand to sign an application for the Chiltern Hundreds,* which would have been particularly dangerous as he is in a Nursing Home under the care of a doctor’. Eventually Baker was charged with forgery and sent to prison.20
Another scandal erupted in 1965, when Alec Home was Prime Minister. Anthony Courtney, a Tory MP, had been photographed in Moscow – presumably by the KGB – in flagrante with an attractive Intourist guide. Courtney went to see Heath and found him ‘wholly unsympathetic’ and showing ‘a complete absence of that human quality of personal involvement which to me at any rate is the mark of true leadership towards a colleague in trouble’. He does, indeed, seem to have been unusually disobliging. If Courtney insisted on making a personal statement in the House, Heath said, he could not expect to get any support from the Government. He should go quietly. Heath always found it hard to understand or condone the sexual misdemeanours of others but in most cases he did his best to be sympathetic. On this occasion it seems probable that Courtney had been given a damning report by MI5 and that Heath had been advised to have nothing to do with him.21
‘It was commonly believed’, wrote the future Chairman of the Conservative Party, Edward du Cann, ‘that his four years as Chief Whip had given him a healthy contempt for his fellow members of parliament in the Conservative party.’ Certainly he had little respect for the Crouches and Courtneys of this world but ‘contempt’ is too strong a word to describe his attitude towards the rank and file of the party. His time as Chief Whip did, however, foster a conviction that members were cannon fodder, to be deployed according to the needs of the Government and without much consideration for their personal feelings. When Peter Walker was 22, Heath came to address his constituency party. He told its members that they should not be worried about Walker’s youth: ‘Be assured that when he gets into the House of Commons I shall, as Chief Whip, have no difficulty in guiding him.’ He no doubt meant it as a joke but, like many of his jokes, it misfired: the audience was not particularly amused and Walker was furious. Joke or not, the remark conveyed something of Heath’s true feelings: it was for him to guide, it was the duty of members to be guided. This cast of mind was not to make things easier for him when in due course he became leader of