so strong that the Government might be defeated: ‘I think I ought to put it in writing before he, Ted Heath, succeeds in breaking us up entirely which, though I sincerely trust I am wrong, is in my opinion quite likely.’22 The protests achieved little. Some concessions were made to meet the complaints of the backbenchers, particularly when it came to the onus of proving that any individual exception would not be contrary to the public interest, but Heath was emphatic that the Government must be ‘seen to adhere firmly to the basic purposes of the Bill’. The Prime Minister remained stalwart. ‘I think that your sympathetic handling of the Committee will enable us to hold our party together,’ he wrote to Heath in early April 1964, ‘but the folly of some is almost incurable…I am sure we were right, but we underestimated the reaction and the short-term damage which the sight of a party in disarray would do. But the thing to do is to plug on, and your skill and fortitude will get us through.’ John Stonehouse, whose private bill had originally launched the operation, thought that Heath had gone too far in making concessions, he was ‘a good man fallen among bureaucrats’. Scarcely any Tory member believed that he had gone far enough. The majority in the House of Commons once fell to a single vote. At one point Heath is said to have threatened resignation if the Bill was not fought through on its present basis; he himself denies that he went this far but admits that he was ‘close to resigning’. At all events he got his way. The Bill passed, substantially unaltered. It was, said Heath, ‘one of the most satisfying successes of my ministerial career’.23
It was won at a price. George Hutchinson, his cautiously obsequious biographer who at that time was the party’s director of publicity, wrote that ‘I have never myself heard a Cabinet Minister so much abused by his colleagues, so badly spoken of and so widely condemned in the party as Heath was then.’ Part of this was due to the unpopularity of the policy he was promoting, part to the way in which he did it. What was unfortunate and damaging, wrote Robert Rhodes James, ‘was for Heath to adopt a truculent, and at times abusive, attitude towards those Conservatives who opposed his proposals’. One senior backbencher told Ronald Butt that Heath had been ‘arrogant’ and ‘autocratic’, and when Butt suggested to another ‘normally mild’ Tory MP that Heath might be driven to resignation, ‘he received the surprising reply “Who cares about that?”’ Heath was as dismissive of members of the public as he was of Tory backbenchers. An avalanche of protesting letters arrived at the Board of Trade. The Department prepared four different replies to cover the different approaches of the correspondents: Heath refused to sign any of them. Edward du Cann, who made no secret of the fact that he thought the timing of the Bill ‘tactless and politically stupid’, used to ensure that the ‘many hundreds of letters of complaint’ were directed towards him rather than to Heath, so that he could make sure they were answered. Heath’s devoted pps, Tony Kershaw, saw the damage that his master was doing himself and, as tactfully as he could, urged Heath to mend his ways. Please spend more time in the House, he pleaded. ‘There is a feeling that you are ignoring the backbenchers, because you don’t want to hear their criticisms. I think it is vitally important for you to do this, because if we lose the next election, and if it occurs fairly soon, it could be that you will be blamed for it. At the moment you are indisputably the second man in the Party, and while you must do whatever has to be done for good government, it is right also to preserve your personal position.’24
That personal position had undoubtedly been damaged. And yet at the same time his reputation had been enhanced. ‘It was a very, very long-drawn-out issue,’ recalled the Minister of Education, Edward Boyle, ‘and frankly, if it hadn’t been for Ted Heath’s very great determination and personality, I dread to think what would have happened.’ Jock Bruce-Gardyne and Nigel Lawson, journalists and Tory politicians, agreed that no other Tory minister could have carried it through, indeed ‘it is not easy to think of other contemporary politicians who would not have quailed and drawn back when confronted by the rage of backbenchers and the distaste and hostility of Cabinet colleagues’. It is a curious twist of fate that the attributes that made Heath so unpopular in early 1964 – truculence, obstinacy, indifference to criticism – were suddenly to seem so desirable when the Tories were looking for a new leader a little over a year later. When asked at his seventy-fifth birthday party what, apart from Europe, had been his greatest achievement, Heath said that it was the abolition of RPM. It had opened up competition, he said, and ‘made possible the vast choice and low prices available today’. It had also, though he did not mention it and perhaps never accepted it to be the case, made it more likely that he would become prime minister in 1970.25
Whether the indignation of the small shopkeepers in fact cost the Conservatives many, or any, seats in the election that followed in October 1964 must be a matter for speculation. Certainly it scarcely featured in the campaign – probably because Labour and the Liberals were themselves generally in favour of the legislation and were immensely relieved that the Tories had grasped this nettle instead of leaving it to them. Some rancour, however, may still have lingered. ‘It probably cost us seats at the general election,’ Douglas-Home told the historian Peter Hennessy; ‘it certainly cost the Tories some marginal seats’, considered John Boyd-Carpenter, a minister who had been one of those members of the Cabinet most vociferous in pleading for the deferral of the measure and who saw in Heath’s response the first signs of the ‘inflexibility and unwillingness to listen which he was later to show as Prime Minister’.26 If Douglas-Home and Boyd-Carpenter were right then Heath may indeed have cost the Tories the election. Labour’s overall lead was only four; a handful of disgruntled shopkeepers could have tipped the scale in half a dozen marginal constituencies. The Sunday Express had no doubts on the subject. When the row over RPM was at its height it denounced the damage that Heath was doing to the Party: ‘For this bland, chuckling man is the Tory Jonah. Whatever he touches goes wrong. Wherever he goes there is trouble…He carries chaos in his vest pocket.’ But there were many more consumers in the electorate than there were shopkeepers and though they had less reason to air their views they may also have changed their votes because of the legislation. Heath insisted that the abolition of RPM, far from costing the Tories seats, had been responsible for the gap between the parties being so small. ‘If other departments had thrown off their stale approach in that last year by bringing forward up-to-date proposals,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘we could have won.’ On the whole the weight of opinion is against him, but he may have been right.27
A week before the election R. A. Butler was asked by the journalist George Gale what he thought of Douglas-Home’s praise for the ‘young, dynamic Heath’. ‘That’s interesting,’ said Butler, ‘I think Alec’s a bit bored by him.’ Possibly Butler was just making a little mischief, a pursuit in which he from time to time indulged. There is no other evidence to suggest that Heath was out of favour. He and Maudling were given equal billing in the election period: Maudling being responsible for the daily press conferences and Heath for the television programmes. ‘I can’t thank you enough for all you have done to guide and implement our TV,’ wrote the party chairman. ‘You have been super, under circumstances [which] were bound to be trying and tricky. Thanks a million.’ If Lord Blakenham was being sincere he was in a minority. During the European negotiations Heath had been notably adept at expounding on television the complex issues which were being addressed in Brussels. Remembering this, the party managers had assumed that his skills could easily be translated to the very different arena of the political broadcast. These assumptions proved wrong. His performances were not disastrous but he was stilted and ill at ease. In one broadcast, said the political documentary maker and author Michael Cockerell, he flopped so badly that even a Tory backbencher who appeared with him and who was said ‘to have sounded “like a man in a TV programme about indigestion” was judged to have performed better’. By the time the campaign was halfway over it was obvious that Heath’s authority and drive would have been better suited to the press conferences, while Maudling’s avuncular benevolence would have come through well on television. By then, however, it was too late.28