to whose opinions he paid the greatest heed. In Monnet’s view the way was wide open for British entry: ‘The greatest difficulty was to take the decision which the British Government has taken.’ The right tactic, he urged, was that Britain should accept the Treaty of Rome as it stood and then, having acceded, seek to change things from within. The idea had obvious attractions. Even de Gaulle could hardly have rejected an unconditional application to join and if Britain had become a member in mid-1961 it would have been in time to participate in the formulation of the Common Agricultural Policy instead of being confronted with a system largely devised to meet the needs of French farmers. But though left to himself Heath would probably have proceeded along such lines, he knew that there was no possibility that either the Government or the country would let him do so. Willynilly, he was doomed to fight for the interests of EFTA and the Commonwealth. He told Monnet that Macmillan would never ‘let the substantial domestic opposition which he faced prevent him from carrying out his aim of taking the United Kingdom into the developing European Union’; but in fact Heath knew that such opposition could not be ignored and that his conduct of negotiations in Brussels would have to take account of it.21
When he expounded to the Cabinet the line that he intended to take in his opening statement on 10 October 1961 he said that he would stress that ‘the aims and objectives of the Treaty of Rome were accepted by the Government’. That point made, however, he would ‘deal in some detail with the three major matters – the Commonwealth, agriculture and EFTA – for which satisfactory arrangements would have to be secured if the UK were to join the Community’. If a united Europe had been eager for British accession such an approach would have been reasonable, but given the attitude of the French it guaranteed that there would be, at the very least, endless delays and difficulties, and possibly final failure. He told the Cabinet a fortnight later that the response to his speech had been ‘reasonably favourable’. When speaking at Chatham House he was still more hopeful. Fears among the Six – France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg – that Britain sought only to break up the union, or at least to impede its growth, had, he believed, been finally dispelled by his assurances. ‘The fact is that they do want us there, I believe now, broadly speaking, and we shall know finally one day.’ He would indeed. So far as five of the Six were concerned his optimism was well based, but if he found cause for comfort in the cool hostility of the French he was sadly deluding himself.22
In retrospect it is easy to say that Heath should have fought harder in London to be allowed to decide for himself which items were worth a battle and which were not. As it was he found himself proposing terms which he knew would be unacceptable and in which he did not even believe himself. This was particularly true of the transitional periods which Heath proposed should be allowed before the full rigour of the EEC’s rules affected the Commonwealth exporters. ‘It was no good talking only about a short transitional period,’ he told the secretary general of the Italian Foreign Ministry, Cattani. ‘The Commonwealth system would continue and must be protected from anything which would seriously damage the interests of its members. It would not be possible from the internal political point of view in the UK to accept arrangements which caused such damage.’ Yet, as he admitted in his memoirs, the opening position that he was required to take up was ‘always unrealistic, at times farcically so’. The result was that even Britain’s staunchest allies among the Six wondered whether the will to join was really present; the French were exultant at such clear-cut evidence that the British were not serious in their application.23
Once it became clear that every commodity – from butter, through bananas, to kangaroo meat – was to be the subject of lengthy bargaining, it became obvious that the negotiations would be protracted, tedious and faintly absurd. It was his activities at this period that earned him Private Eye’s mocking nickname of ‘Grocer Heath’. The noble concept which Heath cherished was almost lost in a welter of trivial haggling. Since, after every British offer, the Six had to retreat into conclave to agree on their response, the delays became almost intolerable.
The French rejoiced in this sluggish progress. It was their object to spin matters out so as to ensure that the Common Agricultural Policy would be operational before matters came to an end. Heath might reasonably have despaired at the snail-like advance of the discussions. Instead he remained alert, cheerful and resolute. ‘A less resilient personality than the Lord Privy Seal’, wrote Nora Beloff of the Observer, ‘would have been driven to distraction by the long hours he was to spend pacing in ante-rooms.’ He saw it as his function not only to remain abreast of every detail of the bargaining but to keep up the spirits of the British team. Morale was not always high. Both Eric Roll and Patrick Reilly, a future ambassador in Paris then working in the Foreign Office, believed that the extravagant demands of London, particularly those of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, had made it far more difficult for the other members of the Six to overrule the French.24 Heath himself felt that, after a bold start, the British delegation had disappointed their allies by failing ‘to stand up to the French and to outwit and out-manoeuvre them’. Yet he had been left with so few cards to play that his ability to outwit or out-manoeuvre was very limited. ‘It was a gallant and indefatigable effort,’ wrote George Ball, an American diplomat who was as eager as anyone to see the negotiations succeed, ‘but inevitably mired in technicalities. During the ensuing debate the British purpose became obscure; the political momentum was lost in niggling bargaining.’25
Heath was resolved that the purpose should not become obscure, that the flame should continue to burn. Late every evening in Brussels he would join the journalists in the basement bar of the Metropole Hotel. ‘On these occasions,’ remembered Maitland, ‘he was thoroughly relaxed and totally in control. His mastery of detail was complete and his confidence infectious.’ In London he used every avenue open to him to dispel what he felt to be unhelpful misunderstandings. The Labour Party, which for the most part had switched under Gaitskell’s leadership to opposition to British entry, was beyond his power to influence but he used his old contacts with the trade unions to brief them at regular intervals. Would he be giving a similar report to the House of Commons? asked the trade union leader Frank Cousins. ‘Mr Heath replied that in Parliament he could only give broad outline statements of what had been taking place and could go nowhere near so far as he had at the present meeting.’ The one point that the union leaders made repeatedly was that there should be a specific reference in the Treaty of Rome to the maintenance of full employment. Heath replied that ‘if they were successful in achieving the general aims of the Treaty, full employment would follow naturally’. Not wholly satisfied by this assurance, Cousins returned to the charge and Heath retorted that the trade unions in the Six were happy with the existing formula; the British could hardly insist on more.26
It was the sceptics in his own party who required the most careful handling. Paul Channon, R. A. Butler’s pps, reported to his master that a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee was ‘well-attended and extremely friendly. Members were much impressed by the clarity and knowledge of the Lord Privy Seal.’27 The 1922 Committee proved more critical. At a meeting in June 1961 d’Avigdor-Goldsmid attacked the negotiations on the ground that the interests of the Commonwealth were being neglected while Alfred Wise spoke for EFTA. Was it really necessary to be inside the EEC to influence it? he asked. ‘Has Britain had no influence up-to-date?’ This sally met ‘with a grumble of support’. Kenneth Pickthorn asked a question which preoccupied many members: ‘Can we at any time self-determine ourselves out?’ But though a majority of those who attended needed some convincing, the atmosphere was more one of enquiry than hostility. Opinion on the whole moved in favour of the Government. When a few months later Heath delivered a ‘long and complicated speech’ to the 1922 Committee it had ‘a very favourable reception’.28 Though he won the argument, however, some felt that he was doing himself harm in the process. Robert Rhodes James, at that time a Senior Clerk in the House of Commons, noted that ‘an ominous note of thinly-veiled intellectual contempt for those in his party who opposed the application was sometimes clearly apparent in his speeches…For the first time, one was conscious of a substantial hostility developing towards Heath in some quarters of the Conservative party.’29 ‘Substantial’ is a strong word, probably too strong. No other reports of the period make the same criticism. But when Heath knew that he was right – and he almost always did know