‘I feel there is a little too much tendency to tell the Socialists that they are really only Liberals or bound to become Liberals.’18 Throughout his life Heath believed that any Socialist open to reason was really only Liberal, and that any Liberal was close to the Conservative – or at least his own branch of Conservatism. He was constantly disillusioned by the discovery that most Socialists, indeed most Conservatives, were not open to reason and refused to join him on the common ground where he was rationally ensconced. Each time he believed that such obduracy could not be repeated, only to be disappointed once more when the next occasion arose.
Appeasement was the issue on which he found himself most starkly at variance with orthodox Conservative policy. As late as 1937, Heath – assuming the fascist leaders to be as much susceptible to reason as any Socialist or Liberal – considered that war could and should be avoided. ‘I don’t agree with you on pacifism,’ his friend Tickner told him. ‘It fails. The Socialist parties in Germany and Austria adopted it.’19 Within a few months he had been convinced that Tickner was right. He was appalled by Chamberlain’s abandonment of the Czechs at Munich and in October 1938 proposed the motion ‘that this House deplores the Government’s policy of Peace without Honour’. The motion was carried, with support from many Conservatives as well as Socialists. A fortnight later a by-election became necessary in Oxford. Heath put his name forward as a possible candidate, pointing out as his principal qualification that he was opposed to the Munich agreement and would therefore be a better Foreign Secretary than the present incumbent, Lord Halifax. Unsurprisingly, the Oxford Conservatives preferred the almost equally youthful but more orthodox Quintin Hogg. The Master of Balliol, Sandy Lindsay, then announced that he would stand as an Independent Progressive candidate in the by-election. Although Lindsay was a prominent Socialist, Heath had no hesitation in joining Jenkins and Healey in canvassing for his cause. Heath much later told Basil Liddell Hart, the military historian and strategist, that a speech Liddell Hart had made to the OUCA had been the decisive factor in convincing him that he must canvass against the official Conservative candidate (Liddell Hart responded by saying that Heath was the one man who might induce him to support a Conservative government). He cannot have taken much convincing; even if his performances in the Union had not made his views unambiguously clear, his loyalty to Lindsay both as an individual and as Master of Balliol would surely have proved decisive.20
It was the issue of appeasement which won Heath the appointment he most wanted, President of the Union. He had tried the previous year and had been defeated by another Balliol man; thanks to his music scholarship he was able to stay on for a fourth year and try again. In November 1938 he moved: ‘That this House has no confidence in the National Government as at present constituted.’ He won the debate and, the following day, the presidency. Enough of Britain’s most eminent politicians had in their day been President of the Union to ensure that his appointment was widely noticed. He only had one term in which to make his mark but he used it with energy and imagination: reorganising the structure and workings of the society, enlarging its social role and thus its membership, and holding the first-ever dance in its hallowed headquarters. Even more remarkably, perhaps, he introduced these reforms without annoying those traditional elements which, in Oxford perhaps more than anywhere else, can be relied on to rise in rage at any disturbance of their cherished practices. Leo Amery, who had been persuaded to come to Oxford for a debate on conscription, remembered dining with ‘Heath of Balliol, a very nice youth’. A very nice youth would have been the verdict of most of his contemporaries. Isis paid a remarkable tribute to his performance. ‘No president for many years has provided a more interesting series of debates and visitors; no president has done more to re-establish the prestige of the Union not only as a debating society…but as a club…He will not soon be forgotten.’21
One of the more controversial debates while Heath was President was on the motion: ‘That a return to religion is the only solution to our present discontents.’ Heath tried to persuade Bernard Shaw to oppose the motion, failed, and made do with Stephen Spender. He did not speak himself; probably as much because he did not know what he wanted to say as for any other reason. Though the debate was generally deemed a success, he found it thoroughly unsatisfactory. ‘Over sixty people wanted to speak, not six of them were worth hearing,’ he wrote in Isis. The typical undergraduate who spoke in the Union was obsessed by politics: ‘All the superficiality, the shallowness, the sterility of undergraduate thought, were revealed unmercifully as speaker after speaker tried to find something to replace the political clichés with which he can normally get away.’22 The lofty tone of these remarks suggests that Heath thought himself above such trivia, but at that moment in his life he would have found it difficult to express his real views on the subject with any force or clarity. He does seem to have been undergoing something of a spiritual crisis at the time. The following year he indulged himself by writing a diary in what was for him an uncharacteristically introspective vein. ‘The only principles I have ever had firmly implanted have been religious,’ he wrote, ‘but these never had any intellectual backing. I never even realised what the grounds of belief are and how they compare with anything else. The result was that the religious beliefs I had were undermined at Oxford. I felt that they were silly, that I couldn’t defend them against other people. Only now am I beginning to realise their justification. I may be slowly coming through the valley of bewilderment.’23 He had not descended very far into that valley, nor were the heights to which he was to climb of imposing altitude. Heath never thought much about religion. His time at Oxford was almost the only occasion when he found his implicit faith challenged by clever and articulate contemporaries; that threat removed he reverted to the comfortable and unchallenged convictions of his youth. They underpinned but did not notably affect his political beliefs. ‘In all this time in the House of Commons,’ he wrote in 1996, he had found that there were ‘comparatively few issues on which one has to sit back and say, “Well, now, does this correspond with the values of my own faith?”’24
Faith or not, he asked himself more often than was true of most politicians how far his attitude on any given issue corresponded with the moral principles by which he regulated his behaviour. Many of those principles were formulated while he was at Oxford, although it was the travels that he undertook in the vacations that did most to shape his views. In the summer of 1938, with a small group of fellow undergraduates of whom he was by far the most right wing, he went on the invitation of the republican government to visit Catalonia, the last major Spanish province which Franco had not yet overrun. It was an exciting visit. In Barcelona the party was advised to take shelter in the hotel basement since an air-raid was beginning. They decided that the risk was slight and that it would be more interesting to stay above ground and watch events. According to his memoirs, a bomb hit the hotel, skittled down the lift-shaft and killed all those who had taken shelter. Somewhat perplexingly, his version of the event in a book published some twenty years earlier says that the bomb ‘went straight through our hotel, without, however, causing any great damage’. By the time he came to write his memoirs he was not above occasionally gingering up the narrative with somewhat romanticised anecdotes, but it is curious that he should have published two versions of the same incident, apparently so contradictory.25
There were other moments of danger. On the road from Barcelona to Tarragona their car was machine-gunned by one of Franco’s aircraft and they had to crouch in a ditch until the danger had passed. When they reached the British contingent of the International Brigade, Heath met and talked to a young volunteer called Jack Jones. They were to see much more of each other, on different sides this time but in more peaceful surroundings, nearly forty years later when Heath was prime minister and Jones leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU). Though Heath regretted the powerful influence of the Communist Party and recognised that, in a civil war, atrocities were likely to be committed by both sides, he was as satisfied as any of his party that the republican cause was the better one. It was,