met to consider this disaster. Macleod identified the Liberals as the most dangerous enemy, who must be destroyed. Heath questioned whether they should be treated as enemy. They had much in common with the Conservatives, more so than with Labour. The Tories in the past had largely maintained themselves by absorbing other parties; if they were now to do a deal with the Liberals this would surely again be the final result. It was a line to which he was to revert several times over the next decades. On this occasion he met with a mixed reception. Home supported him; Hailsham strongly backed Macleod; as is usually the case with such debates it grumbled on until the circumstances which had engendered it no longer pertained and the issue became irrelevant.45
It was maintaining the cohesion and loyalty of the party, however, that was his chief preoccupation, and the gauge by which the success of his tenure as Chief Whip would be judged. Many of the stresses within the party related to the disintegration of the empire, which had begun with the granting of independence to India and Pakistan in 1947, had gathered speed after Suez and was now to be accelerated still further by Macmillan. Heath was far from being a dedicated imperialist, but he had to manage a vociferous right wing which bitterly resented the humiliation of Suez and was resolved that no further scuttles should be permitted. The first battlefield was Malta. In this case the proposal was not that Malta should become independent but that it should be wholly integrated with the United Kingdom. Maltese members would sit in the House of Commons; all tariffs or restrictions on movement between the two countries would be abolished. The hard-core Suez Group, supported in this case by many moderates, broke into a clamorous protest. A six-line Whip would be needed to get the proposals through, said John Peyton; William Teeling announced that he and his friends would not merely vote against it in the House but would hold public meetings up and down the country in protest. Heath reported to Alan Lennox-Boyd that the executive of the 1922 Committee foresaw ‘very great trouble in the Party if the proposals for integration were proceeded with’. He calculated that a minimum of forty-eight Tory members would vote against the Government. In the event the Maltese Government declared that it would not take the matter further unless it were offered independence as an alternative to integration. With some relief the Colonial Office dropped this uncomfortably hot potato and the incipient mutiny died away.46
Cyprus provided a more typical battleground. Archbishop Makarios had been exiled in March 1956, but it was obvious to most people that sooner or later he must be allowed to return and that the Greek majority on the island was determined to have him as its leader. Negotiations were under way. The Tory right wing passionately rejected any such solution. Busily the Whips reported to Heath on feelings in the party. Wolrige-Gordon ‘feels that God does not agree with our conduct of the Cyprus negotiations. We will have trouble with him when the debate comes.’ Henry Legge-Bourke was ‘more angry over the Cyprus settlement than he was over Suez’. Cyril Black said that Makarios’s return would ‘provoke an explosion in the House and the country among our own supporters’. The figures were remarkably similar to those on Malta; this time Heath had to report that a minimum of forty-seven Tories were probable rebels. It was Makarios’s insistence on enosis – union with Greece – which particularly offended the disaffected Tories; in the end he was cajoled into abandoning this position and the worst of the bitterness went out of the dispute.47
The most serious threat to Macmillan, however, came over domestic issues. In the autumn of 1957 the Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, insisted on cuts in public expenditure which departmental ministers were not prepared to accept. Macmillan dallied over intervening in the dispute and, when he did so, found that positions were so entrenched that he must expect resignations from one side or the other. Heath told him that Thorneycroft’s intransigence had largely forfeited the support of the party, even those parts of it that were disposed to accept the logic of the Chancellor’s position. The Government could survive the resignation of Thorneycroft and the other Treasury ministers. Macmillan took his advice and left the country on a six-week overseas tour, referring airily as he prepared to board the plane to the ‘little local difficulty’ which the Government was confronting. Heath was right: there was no revolt, nor even serious misgivings. His handling of the crisis had been ‘superb’, wrote Macmillan in his diary; Dorothy Macmillan doubted whether anyone realised ‘the overwhelming regard and affection my husband has for Mr Heath’.48
By now it was evident to most people that Heath would, one day, be a serious contender for the leadership. R. A. Butler, in July 1958, was reporting ‘intense personal rivalries’ between Heath and Macleod. ‘They are the same age and look anxiously to the throne. The Chief Whip’s status has been raised to God Almighty by the PM asking him to every meeting on every subject at every hour of the day and night.’ But divine though his status might have been, Heath was uncomfortably aware that he had enjoyed the role quite long enough for his own good. If his career was to prosper as he hoped it might, it was essential that he should soon be given a department of his own in which he could establish his credentials. The opportunity was not to be long delayed. A debilitating attack of jaundice early in 1959 kept him out of action for a couple of months and led him to take things slowly for a few weeks after that, but by the time Macmillan called a general election for 8 October he was fully recovered. Given the disastrous circumstances in which Macmillan had taken over, and the unpopularity which the party had experienced at the time of the Rochdale by-election, it was remarkable that the Conservatives went into the election as clear favourites. Heath was by no means complacent about his prospects at Bexley. His old adversary, Ashley Bramall, had returned to the fray and the seat, if no longer marginal, was still vulnerable to an adverse swing. Harold Macmillan came to speak for him during the campaign, saying that Heath represented ‘everything that is best in the new progressive, modern Tory party…He stands for the new philosophy and modern thought in the party. You send him back, for he is a good man.’ The Prime Minister undoubtedly meant what he said, and was glad of a chance to say it, but he would hardly have bothered to make the trip to Bexley if it had seemed that the constituency was secure. As it turned out, his efforts were unnecessary. Nationally, the Conservatives increased their popular vote by half a million and gained an overall majority of a hundred. In Bexley Heath’s majority went up to 8,500.49
His last job as Chief Whip was to help Macmillan form a new Government. His own future was quickly settled: he was to succeed Iain Macleod in the critically important and taxing role of Minister of Labour. Mrs Thatcher, as Margaret Roberts had now become, who had at last secured herself a safe seat, wrote to congratulate him and thank him for the telegram he had sent her on polling day. ‘As you once said to me,’ she wrote, ‘even I could not lose Finchley. I am very sorry that you will not now be Chief Whip. I trust that Mr Redmayne will be no harder a taskmaster than you would have been.’50
Heath had wanted the Ministry of Labour, wrote Macmillan, ‘and it was only right, in view of all his services, that he should step into independent ministerial command’. In fact he had wanted the Board of Trade but that had been promised to Maudling. He was well satisfied with the alternative, knowing that his success or failure in the role would be critically important to the economic and social performance of the government. The history of the unions in post-war Britain suggested that this task, though difficult, would not be unmanageable. Walter Monckton in 1951 had set a pattern of conciliation which had been broadly continued by Iain Macleod; the unions for their part had been controlled by moderates who were almost as anxious to avoid confrontation as the ministers with whom they dealt. But there were signs that all might not run so smoothly in the future. On one side the Tory right wing was growing restive: strikes, though still relatively infrequent, were becoming more common. There were calls for the abolition of the closed shop and the political levy, and the introduction of secret balloting. Sir John Laing, a giant of the construction industry, wrote to the Prime Minister demanding a return to the