party, the Chief Whip exploded: ‘I’m fed up with your bloody consciences. I’m going to get on to your constituency.’ According to Maitland, he did so and was rebuffed. Maitland went public on the ‘extraordinary and unexampled pressures – some of them altogether underhand’, to which he and his fellow rebels had been subjected. That Labour hatchet-man, George Wigg, tried to raise the matter as a breach of parliamentary privilege but the Speaker ruled that ‘the work of the Whips had never been thought to be a matter of privilege’. There were very few occasions during his term of office as Chief Whip that Heath could legitimately be accused of going too far, of straying beyond the boundaries of propriety. That it was the Suez Group who provoked such conduct perhaps reflects his uneasy conscience at having pressed the opponents of intervention to vote for a course of action which he himself felt to be morally wrong and politically inexpedient. He could not publicly condone their behaviour if they rejected his pleas but he could express his true feelings by the added vigour with which he denounced rebels from the other wing. He turned to John Biggs-Davidson, a rabid member of the Suez Group, and told him: ‘You were a Communist before the war and now you are nothing but a bloody Fascist.’ Some years later he was asked if he had really used such words. Heath reflected for a movement. ‘I didn’t say “nothing but”,’ he concluded.33
Whatever his personal views, he could not disguise the fact that a substantial element in the party, both inside and outside parliament, was deeply dissatisfied with the Government’s conduct of the Suez crisis. On the whole he handled such protests with tact and moderation. When Lawrence Turner abstained on a critical vote on the grounds that ‘the present Government has betrayed basic Conservative principles and been disloyal to everything for which the party stands’, Heath replied mildly that he appreciated Turner’s honesty but wished that he had expressed his views a little earlier so as to allow time for ministers to explain their position to him.34 He was disconcerted to find how strongly anti-American even some of the less extreme members had become; there were reports from the smoking room that names were being collected for resolutions calling for the admission of Red China into the United Nations and the nationalisation of the Panama Canal.
Like the after-shocks that follow an earthquake, the Suez crisis continued to plague the Tory Party for the next two or three years. In mid-1957 the Suez Group once more caused trouble when it was proposed to resume paying Canal dues to Egypt. At one point it seemed as if as many as thirty members would abstain, though in the end only eight remained seated ostentatiously in their places. The venom was going out of the campaign, however, and by the end of the year the obdurate hard core who had forfeited the party whip were asking for talks which might lead to their return. Philip de Zulueta, the Prime Minister’s private secretary, consulted Heath. The Chief Whip, de Zulueta reported, ‘thought that you should not be forthcoming about this suggestion. He was anxious that it should still remain cold outside.’ Heath was more forgiving when it came to the tribulations of Nigel Nicolson. Nicolson, a bookish intellectual of markedly liberal views, had never been happy in his constituency of Bournemouth where his stance over Suez had caused great offence. Early in 1957 a mutiny broke out. ‘There is no doubt that the Association has every intention of getting rid of Nigel Nicolson in spite of reasonable pressure from me not to do so,’ Heath told the party chairman. All he would do was discourage those right-wingers who were hungry for a safe seat from taking any action while Nicolson was still the member. Nicolson was duly deselected by his constituency and told the Chief Whip that he felt his situation would be impossible if he did not resign the seat immediately. ‘Don’t believe that for a moment,’ Heath encouraged him. ‘Nobody feels anything but respect for your attitude. You have done well and served the party most creditably.’ Nicolson was moved and delighted: Heath, he told his father, ‘was quite clearly speaking with real conviction, and not as a formal condolence’.35 But a year later came another ‘distressing but amicable interview’. A bill concerning obscene publications was passing through the House of Commons with support from both parties. The publishing house in which Nicolson was a partner, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, chose this moment to publish Nabokov’s Lolita, a brilliantly written yet curiously distasteful masterpiece about the passion felt by a middle-aged man for a pubescent twelve-year-old nymphet. It threatened to cause a scandal, was denounced as corrupting, and, Heath believed, would complicate the passage of the bill. He asked Weidenfeld and Nicolson at least to postpone publication. George Weidenfeld, however, would not hear of it: Lolita duly appeared, caused the anticipated furore and had no noticeable effect on the progress of the bill. When Heath first approached the publishers about the book Nicolson asked him whether he had read it. Yes, said Heath; he had found it ‘rather boring’. Some people have been sickened by Lolita, many were moved, excited or discomposed. Few can have been bored. Heath was genuinely at a loss, unable to see what all the fuss was about. Unlike Lolita and the bill, Nicolson’s parliamentary career perished at the next election.36
Heath was one of the very few people who survived the Suez crisis with their reputation substantially enhanced. It had been a disaster for the Conservative Party, and but for him it would have been a catastrophe. The Lord Chancellor, 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