David Kilmuir, described him as ‘the most brilliant Chief Whip of modern times…the most promising of the new generation of Conservatives’. The quiet skill with which he had handled the party had been exemplary: ‘While never showing any weaknesses or forgetting his responsibility to the Government, Heath calmly and gently shepherded the party through a crisis which might have broken it.’ The Chief Whip was the one man of whom he had not heard a word of criticism, wrote the Secretary of State for Scotland, James Stuart. ‘There has been nothing but praise for the fair and impartial manner in which you have handled a most difficult situation.’ Till the time of Suez Heath had been respected and well liked but something of a back-room boy; from 1957 he was clearly a coming man.37
Apart from the credit he personally had gained, there was for Heath one redeeming feature about the crisis. Until the end of 1956 many Tories had continued to believe that Britain, at the centre of a still worldwide empire, could go on playing the role of a great power while isolated from the continent of Europe. Now he believed even the most sceptical must see that Britain’s future lay ‘in our own continent and not in distant lands which our forefathers had coloured pink on the map’. Even Eden, in one of the last memoranda he circulated as Prime Minister, acknowledged that a consequence of the disaster might be ‘to determine us to work more closely with Europe’. He was not to survive to implement such a policy himself. Heath had felt it essential that Eden should go from the moment when, on 20 December, he heard the Prime Minister deny that he had any foreknowledge of Israel’s invasion of Egypt: ‘I felt like burying my head in my hands at the sight of this man I so much admired maintaining this fiction.’ A few hours later he met Norman Brook leaving the Cabinet Room. ‘He’s told me to destroy all the relevant documents,’ Brook said. ‘I must go and get it done.’38 But no hecatomb of incriminating papers could eliminate the evidence, nor great Neptune’s ocean wash the blood from Eden’s hands. It was only a question of how many days or weeks he could survive. On 8 January 1957 he summoned Heath to the Cabinet Room and told him that he was going to resign.
The two obvious successors were R. A. Butler and Harold Macmillan. Heath liked them both and would willingly have served under either, but he believed that Macmillan was better qualified to rebuild the shattered party. More to the point, he knew that the majority of Tories in the country felt the same. Pat Hornsby was only one of many members who reported meetings of constituents at which the scuttle from Suez had been denounced and who had demanded ‘new leaders who would back Britain’. The Tory voters, she claimed, were convinced that Butler was ‘the villain appeaser’. The fact that Macmillan had been the most insistent in demanding that the British and French must withdraw was either unknown or forgotten: Butler was seen as craven-hearted, Christopher Hollis wrote in Punch:
There was a man called Edward Heath
Who looked a gift horse in the teeth.
Ted Heath who, you must understand
Is not the leader of the band,
But is the chap who has to say
What instruments the others play.
He told a bean, who told a bean,
Who told a bean who told the Queen,
We really must have someone subtler
Than Mr Richard Austen Butler.
A proper man, and what is properer
Than take a fellow out of opera
And build him up as large as life
The character of Mac the Knife?39
So far as Heath was concerned there was only one bean involved and he was Michael Adeane, the Queen’s private secretary. Heath told him that, by a substantial majority, the party would prefer Macmillan and that he personally agreed. His was not the decisive voice, but he spoke for the backbenchers and must have carried a lot of weight. It was to Heath that fell the unpleasant task of telling Butler that he was not to be Prime Minister. ‘Look after him, for he’s a very solitary figure just at present, and he relies on you,’ Butler’s private secretary, Ian Bancroft, wrote to urge him. There was no way by which Heath could make palatable the news that, in spite of the confident predictions in almost all the morning papers that Butler would be the next Prime Minister, the Queen had sent for Macmillan. ‘He looked utterly dumbfounded.’40
In his memoirs Heath pays the most fulsome compliments to the new Prime Minister. Macmillan possessed, he says, ‘by far the most constructive mind I have encountered in a lifetime of politics’; he showed ‘a generous spirit and unquenchable desire to help the underdog’; he was ‘more than anyone else, my political mentor and my patron’. This may not have been the whole story. Several people have remarked that Heath was sometimes irritated by Macmillan’s sedulously cultivated insouciance; Kenneth Baker goes so far as to suggest that he disliked him and sometimes made disparaging remarks about him. Nor was Macmillan without reservations in his championship of his Chief Whip. He once told his future biographer Alistair Horne that Heath did not possess the qualities of a prime minister. ‘Hengist and Horsa’, he went on, ‘were very dull people. Now, as you know, they colonised Kent; consequently the people of Kent have ever since been very slightly – well, you know…Ted was an excellent Chief Whip…a first class staff officer, but no army commander.’41
So far as most people could see, however, the relationship was notably harmonious: certainly each man found the other extremely useful, if not indispensable. It was Heath whom Macmillan took with him to dine at the Turf Club on the night after he had taken over. ‘Had any good shooting lately?’ asked a fellow member when the Prime Minister entered the dining room; then, as he left some time later, ‘Oh, by the way, congratulations’. The dinner took place in the course of discussions about the shape of the new Government. Changes were kept to a minimum but some new blood had to be introduced and many hopes were disappointed. ‘It was a most difficult and exhausting task,’ Macmillan wrote in his diary. ‘Without the help of Edward Heath, who was quite admirable, we couldn’t have done it.’ Heath himself was one of the disappointed. He realised that he was bound to stay where he was – ‘The Government is like a regiment,’ he remarked. ‘You can’t change the CO and the adjutant at the same time’ – but he still felt a pang of jealousy when Reginald Maudling was made Paymaster General with a brief to concentrate on Britain’s relationship with Europe. It was the task which he coveted above all others.42
But he had no reason to complain that he was treated with lack of consideration. Heath, an unidentified minister told Andrew Roth early in 1958, ‘is probably the most influential man around the Prime Minister today. The PM consults him about practically everything.’ Should the Prime Minister accept an invitation to dine with the Progress Trust? He should. How should he reply to a rather cheeky letter from the backbencher Martin Lindsay? ‘I have always found that a snub works and does not lead to increased heat.’ Should he visit Northern Ireland? Yes. If he were able to visit Lord Brookeborough at his country home it would be a most enjoyable and worthwhile experience.43 He was the central figure in the preparation of party political broadcasts, was closely involved in the selection or deselection of MPs, and worked with the party chairman on political honours. When the time came to prepare a manifesto for the next election, the Steering Committee charged with drafting it consisted of Butler, Alec Home, Hailsham, Macleod and the Chief Whip; he was equally included in the inner group of Macmillan’s most intimate advisers – Norman Brook, Philip de Zulueta, John Wyndham – who met informally for half an hour several times a week.44
He never hesitated to speak his mind. Early in 1958 the Government found itself inexplicably – in its own mind at least – unpopular. Things came to a head when the Liberal candidate won a by-election in Rochdale