was a noticeable change of style when Heath took over as Chief Whip. Buchan-Hepburn had devoted what Heath felt to be a disproportionate amount of his time to ensuring that the requisite number of MPs passed through the appropriate lobby. Heath saw the importance of this function but felt that it was still more important to ensure that the Prime Minister and Cabinet were at every point fully aware of the feelings within the party. In his biography John Campbell observed that Heath had delegated less responsibility to his deputy, Martin Redmayne, than Buchan-Hepburn had been willing to grant him. ‘Greater’, wrote Heath in the margin. Up to a point this was true. Redmayne was left in charge of operations on the floor of the House to an extent which Heath had never been. But this says more about Heath’s order of priorities than his opinion of his number two. In his memoirs he praised Redmayne as an ‘excellent deputy’ who did a fine job looking after the daily machinery in the House of Commons, but in an unguarded interview, the text of which survives in his archive, he remarks that, as Chief Whip, he was much more concerned with policy than about ‘chasing people in the House of Commons’. Martin Redmayne, he went on, ‘did all the chasing, which he enjoyed. He was really a military type, he owned a sports shop, and he was really very dim.’23
The Chief Whip was not formally a member of the Cabinet but Heath was present at almost every meeting and increasingly behaved as if he belonged there as of right. He saw this as being a perquisite of his office, not a tribute to him personally. Against Campbell’s statement that Willie Whitelaw had never sat in a Cabinet before 1970, he scrawled ‘Chief Whip’. Under Eden, and later still more under Macmillan, Heath intervened in Cabinet not just to report on the feeling in the party but to make points of policy. In a discussion of the Tory manifesto in the summer of 1959 R. A. Butler urged the inclusion of a pledge to revise the laws relating to betting and gambling. ‘I don’t know about that,’ said Macmillan. ‘We already have the Toby Belch vote. We must not antagonise the Malvolio vote.’ Everyone chuckled dutifully. ‘Then’, remembered Butler, ‘the Chief Whip, ever business-like and forceful, intervened by pointing out that we had committed ourselves to such reforms.’ That settled the matter. Eden appreciated his abilities and valued his advice: ‘I have never known a better equipped Chief Whip,’ he wrote. ‘A ready smile confirmed a firm mind.’24
A majority of fifty-nine meant that the policing of the lobbies, however much Redmayne might have enjoyed it, could be reasonably relaxed. ‘The party is not vociferous about anything,’ Heath told Eden after a meeting of the 1922 Committee in February 1956, ‘neither does it appear to be particularly enthusiastic about any particular course of action, it is quietly awaiting economic events and the budget.’ In his penetrating study of back-bench opinion, Robert Jackson has shown that there was more unrest within the party ranks than Heath’s comments suggest. The fact that the Government was unlikely to be defeated meant that backbenchers allowed themselves greater latitude in promoting personal or constituency points. Most of the issues related to domestic matters: purchase tax, licensing, the coal industry, rent control and government expenditure were all the subject of sometimes acrimonious debate. Between 1955 and 1958, Jackson reckons, there were thirteen revolts on domestic issues and eight on foreign affairs and defence.25 None of these threatened the position of the Government. Apart from the Suez Crisis, the subject on which passions ran highest was the one that had provoked Heath’s fracas with Humphrey Berkeley in the Carlton Club: capital punishment. The ministers were insistent that their compromise proposals must prevail. Heath warned them that there were enough out-and-out abolitionists among the younger Tory members to mean that the Government would probably be defeated. He could not convince the Cabinet that it should modify its views. Loyally, he worked to persuade the recalcitrant backbenchers to withdraw from a cause which he himself had at heart. Sir Thomas Moore claimed that no Whip had tried to influence his vote on the issue, but as he was himself a defender of the death penalty he did not seem likely to reject the party line. Berkeley was only one of many would-be reformists to be approached. In the case of the young MP, Peter Kirk, it is said that Heath even threatened to use the ultimate sanction available to a Chief Whip: to denounce the erring member to his local constituency association. It made no difference; the Government lost by almost exactly the amount that Heath had predicted.26
The imposition of prescription charges late in 1956 provides an illuminating snapshot of the Whips at work. This was an issue on which people felt strongly but not with the passion provoked by capital punishment. Busily, the Whips canvassed opinions and did their sums. ‘Price thinks we should exclude all OAPs.’ ‘P Forth hoped the Whips had taken note of the party’s strong disapproval. This will be very serious.’ John Vaughan-Morgan wanted a preliminary discussion in the 1922 Committee. Philip Remnant ‘is still determined not to vote for the charges’, but, a day later, ‘I think he is weakening a little’. Julian Ridsdale is ‘very shaky and liable to vote against’. John Eden is ‘all worked up, though I don’t think he will oppose actively’. And so it went on. In the end Heath was able to tell the Cabinet that, at the price of a few conciliatory noises, their majority was secure. Nearly always the Whips were successful. On 28 June 1956 the 1922 Committee was almost unanimous in its opposition to an American takeover of Trinidad. On 4 July no Tory voted against it and only one abstained. ‘This was considered a text-book case of brilliant whipping.’27
These were mere storms in a teacup, however, compared with the hurricane that was about to break. In July 1956 Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal. When the issue was first raised in the House of Commons, the Leader of the Opposition, Hugh Gaitskell, supported the Government, provided that the problem was handled through the United Nations. It seemed that a bipartisan approach might be possible, but Heath saw trouble ahead and warned Eden not to count on Labour support. As preparations went ahead for an attack on Egypt and the reoccupation of the Canal Zone, regardless of the United Nations and world opinion, it became clear that not only would Labour oppose such action but that the Tory Party was divided. Initially, Heath thought that this threat was small. Towards the end of August he told the Egypt Committee – the inner group which handled the crisis and which he regularly attended – that he was ‘pretty sure about the party, though there might be some weaker brethren’. To William Clark he said that nobody would revolt and that ‘it won’t cause much bother in parliament because there are no leaders on the Conservative side to cause trouble’. Two or three weeks later the mood had changed. Heath reported that there were three groups: those who would support any action; those who would accept it, but only after reference to the United Nations; and those who were opposed to the use of force. ‘The Chief Whip cannot estimate the strength of this group. It might be large enough to put us in a minority in a division.’28
Though Heath must have suspected what was going on, it was not until almost the end of October that Eden told him of the plot that was being hatched with Israel to circumvent the tortuous negotiations in the United Nations. Israel was to invade Egypt: Britain and France would then intervene to separate the contestants. ‘This is the highest form of statesmanship,’ Eden declared – ‘rather unnervingly’, in the view of his Chief Whip. If Heath was unnerved he concealed it well. His personal position was singularly difficult. He did not share Eden’s conviction that Nasser could be equated with Hitler and that the nationalisation of the Canal was another Munich crisis over which the West could not afford to fail. He believed that an honourable if imperfect solution could be reached through the United Nations. He felt that military intervention without the endorsement of the United Nations would be at the best extremely dangerous, at the worst disastrous. His doubts were evident to a few insiders. According to the Secretary of the Cabinet, Norman Brook, the sceptics in the Cabinet were Butler, Walter Monckton, Macleod, the Earl of Selkirk, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, possibly the Lord Chancellor, Kilmuir and Derrick Heathcoat-Amory and certainly, though strictly speaking he was not a member, Edward Heath.29 Yet he hugged his true opinions to himself. When, fifteen years later, Willie Whitelaw was asked what he believed were Heath’s views on Suez, he replied: