one of the few positive features of the Tory campaign, Heath judged the party’s approach to the election to be ‘tired and shorn of new ideas’. In fact, given the way the tide had been flowing even a few months before, Douglas-Home did well to hold the swing to 3.5 per cent. Labour’s share actually fell but a substantially increased Liberal vote, achieved mainly at the expense of the Conservatives, was enough to tip the balance and give Harold Wilson’s party a tiny overall majority. Heath was worried about the inroads the Liberals might make into his majority at Bexley and told Lord Blakenham that he wanted to devote ‘as much time as possible to my own constituency’. In the event the Liberals won a little over 6,000 votes and Heath’s majority was almost halved, to 4,589 – comfortable enough, but not so large as to mean that he need have no concerns about the future. If any Tory candidate attributed his own defeat to the abolition of RPM he does not seem to have expressed his views in public; Maudling, who as Chancellor was seen to bear greater responsibility for the economic problems that had bedevilled the Tories’ last year in office, was at least as much damaged as Heath by the election setback.29
The main loser was, of course, Alec Douglas-Home himself. The Tory Party judges failure harshly and, even though the result could have been much worse, an election had been lost. The nature of the defeat was particularly damaging to the former Prime Minister. Harold Wilson had fought a sparkling campaign and had contrived continually to contrast his own personality – dynamic, a man of the people, daring, innovative – with the dusty, tweed-suited, out-of-touch image of the Tory leader. Neither sketch was fair, let alone told the whole story, but there were sufficient grounds for them to give the Tory backbenchers the uneasy feeling that they were being led by the wrong man. That feeling was redoubled when it became clear that Douglas-Home, as Leader of the Opposition in the cockpit of the House of Commons, was no match for the quick-witted and unscrupulous Wilson. More and more members felt that a change was needed: the main factor inhibiting a revolt was doubt as to who the new leader ought to be.
Almost at once Douglas-Home took the first step to resolve that doubt. When parliament reconvened he announced that Maudling was to be shadow Foreign Secretary; Heath would take over as shadow Chancellor. It is unlikely that he intended to convey any clear message by these appointments – it was perfectly sensible to let Maudling widen his experience; indeed, it could well have been a stepping stone to the eventual leadership. The result was, however, that Maudling played a relatively unobtrusive role over the next nine months, while Heath was in the firing line with every opportunity to attract the attention of his party and the general public. He took his chance by launching a ferocious attack on Labour’s budget and the Finance Bill that followed. In so doing he immensely raised the morale of the Opposition, enraged the Government and frequently outmanoeuvred and confounded the Labour Chancellor, Jim Callaghan. Knox Cunningham, an Ulster Unionist MP, regularly briefed Macmillan on what was going on in the House of Commons. Early in April 1965 he reported: ‘Ted Heath made a first class speech in the budget debate. Our side were greatly pleased and at times the Government supporters looked glum’; a month or so later, ‘Ted Heath made a truly excellent speech and got under the Chancellor’s skin in the opening stages. It was a first rate performance’; at the beginning of July the Chief Whip announced a three-line whip for the whole of the following week. ‘Such was the morale of the party that not a voice was raised in protest.’
Heath asked nothing of the backbenchers which he did not give himself. Night after night at midnight or later he would go over to John Cope and Mark Schreiber, the two young men who were in attendance in case some information was called for, and say ‘I don’t think there’ll be much more happening tonight. You boys had better go off to your night clubs.’ They would instead totter off to bed; he would as often as not stay on in the House for several more hours. Sometimes he expected too much even of the most willing assistant. Leaving the House of Commons at 6.15 a.m., he turned to Peter Walker and said: ‘I’ll see you at 8.30, and you might prepare me a brief on Clauses 23 and 24.’ ‘He was somewhat shocked by my response!’ said Walker dryly. His determination, assiduity and endless resourcefulness impressed many of those who had hitherto taken it for granted that Maudling was the heir apparent. Stratton Mills, a moderate Unionist MP, told Maudling’s biographer: ‘After seeing Ted I was much more impressed by his style and approach, his energy…If Reggie had been handling that Finance Bill it would have been totally different. Callaghan ended up demoralised.’ The government was equally struck by his performance. In a censure debate on home loans Dick Crossman noted in his diary that Heath ‘made an extremely powerful oration, accusing us of welching on our pledges and deceiving the public. What was I to reply? What he said was quite true.’30
Yet, however ferocious his onslaught, he was scrupulous in sticking to the truth. Once, in the debate on the Finance Bill, a Tory backbencher made use of what Heath felt to be false statistics. Angrily he said to Peter Walker: ‘If we cannot oppose bad legislation without being dishonest we shouldn’t oppose it at all.’ In the Lobby afterwards he berated the startled member for his sharp practice (unsurprisingly, the member in question was prominent in the campaign to unseat Heath as leader of the party a few years later). He also sometimes disconcerted the right wing of his party by accepting Labour propositions which they would have rejected either from conviction or for the sake of scoring points in opposition. When Callaghan introduced a capital gains tax Heath accepted that, at a modest level, such a tax might be useful ‘if it enabled people to keep more of their earnings and also removed any sense of injustice’. Enoch Powell, who thought the whole idea ‘economic and political nonsense’, was outraged by what he saw as misguided liberalism.31
As if waging a full-scale war in the House of Commons was not enough, Heath had also been made responsible for the whole apparatus of policy planning. As chairman of the Advisory Committee on Policy (ACP) he took over from Butler the task of rethinking the principles on which Tory government should be grounded. The probability that Wilson, with his exiguous majority, would call a general election in the near future meant that the process could not be as thorough as Heath would have liked, but whatever the outcome of such an election might be, he intended that the work should carry on until the party had been truly modernised. Thirty-six policy groups were set up and most of their reports were ready by the summer of 1965. Heath was determined that the operation should remain under his individual control: he enjoyed, said John Ramsden, the Conservative Party historian, ‘a more personal monopoly of authority in the party than any other leader since Neville Chamberlain’.32 He brooked no interference. Maudling telephoned Brendon Sewill in the Conservative Research Department and asked to see the papers. Sewill agreed but then consulted Heath. ‘Don’t give them to that bloody man, he’ll only take credit for them,’ was the disobliging reply. Sewill was forced to prevaricate and go into hiding in case Maudling arrived in his office and demanded to read the reports.33
To the more traditional Tories such an enterprise seemed dangerously radical. Lady Douglas-Home was quoted in the Daily Mail as deploring the emergence of a ‘shiny, bright new party’ in which nobody would recognise the true Conservatives. William Anstruther-Gray, successor to Morrison as chairman of the 1922 Committee, announced at a meeting in Central Office that ‘he didn’t understand what all this talk of policy was’. It seemed to him to be ‘quite unnecessary and deeply disturbing to the party’. William Whitelaw, who had recently been appointed Opposition Chief Whip, was not so averse to the idea of reform but he too felt the exercise was ‘nothing but disaster’. He spoke, however, as somebody whose main preoccupations were to keep the party loyal to Douglas-Home and Douglas-Home prepared to continue to lead the party. Those objectives, he believed, were being undermined by the activities of the ACP: ‘There is no doubt that as the policy groups continued and Ted Heath dominated to the extent he did, many people who had not known him before, came to believe that they wanted another Leader.’34
Shortly after the general election Tony Kershaw reported to Heath that there seemed to be no pressure for a quick change of leadership. This, he remarked, was just as