launching major development schemes. Priority, Heath emphasised, must still be given to the depressed areas in North East England and Central Scotland but the population in the South East was going to increase by 3.5 million over the next twenty years and steps must be taken to prepare for this expansion. To some of his colleagues the proposals seemed alarmingly interventionist; the Prime Minister struck a cautionary note when he said the matter ‘required further examination’. Heath himself was undisturbed by charges that he wished to interfere in the economic life of the country in ways which should not be contemplated by a Tory government. Interference, he maintained, was not merely permissible, it was essential. He ‘despairs of the efficiency and enterprise of British industry’, noted the political journalist and academic David Butler after an interview with Heath a few months later, ‘and is in a rather cynical and destructive mood. He is most worried of all about the machinery of government and thirsts after a Gaullist solution.’ For the most part his ideas were well received. Douglas-Home was intent on showing that his was a reformist government, ready to tackle the problems of society and the economy. The new, upgraded Board of Trade was a vital, perhaps the most vital, weapon in this campaign: as the political correspondent Ronald Butt argues, it had been equipped for its role by being given a minister who was distinguished by his hunger for modernisation and who had ‘a devoted personal following among younger Conservatives as well as industry and the City’.14
To one minister in particular the enhanced status of the Board of Trade and Heath’s growing reputation as a determined modernist came as an unpleasant threat. Reginald Maudling at the Treasury resented any intrusion into his territory and made a point of emphasising that he alone retained overall responsibility for economic policy. But no amount of such assertions could alter the fact of Heath’s new prominence. ‘The rise of Heath’, wrote Maudling’s biographer, ‘had a significant effect on Reggie’s chances of winning the leadership…From being the candidate of youth, Reggie was subtly transformed over the next two years into being the quiet life, steady as she goes candidate.’ This coloured their relationship. A Treasury official noted that though ‘on the surface they seemed to be like-minded colleagues, there was always an edge when Ted Heath came into the Chancellor’s office, as he often did, and the temperature dropped’.15 This tension – hostility would be too strong a word – made it inevitable that when Heath pressed for his most conspicuous and controversial piece of modernisation, the Chancellor, though a supporter in principle, in practice argued for caution.
The abolition of resale price maintenance (RPM) – the system by which manufacturers were empowered to fix prices which retailers must charge customers for their products in all their outlets – had theoretically been a Tory objective for many years. The critics of RPM argued that it restricted competition, kept prices high and safeguarded the inefficient or idle shopkeeper; its champions pointed out that it enabled the small neighbourhood shop, an important element in urban or village life, to survive in the face of what would otherwise be irresistible pressure from the supermarkets. The Board of Trade had always been in favour of abolition but had despaired of finding a minister who would have the determination and energy to force it through. The need for reform had been accepted in principle by a series of Conservative, and indeed Labour, governments, but the timing never seemed propitious. Of all the groups convinced that the abolition of RPM would gravely damage their industry, the publishers were the most vociferous; it was hardly surprising, therefore, that while Macmillan was prime minister the issue was not pressed with any great enthusiasm.
Heath too had in the past been opposed to abolition. In 1950 he had told the Bexley Chamber of Commerce: ‘I agree in principle that a manufacturer should have the power to prescribe the retail prices for goods bearing his name.’ Such a provision, he assured the local tobacconists, was necessary ‘to protect employment, industry and the small trader’.16 The issue, however, was not one about which he had thought deeply: he told the tobacconists what he knew they wanted to hear without considering the wider implications. In 1964, when he was responsible for making policy, it was a different matter. When the Labour MP John Stonehouse put down a private member’s bill on the subject, Heath realised that he must act. The war between the supermarkets in which customers were bribed to use one chain or another by gifts of trading stamps had already undermined the principle of RPM; the more he considered it the more obvious it seemed to him that the Government must introduce its own Bill to settle the issue for once and for all. Flying up to Scotland with his pps, Anthony Kershaw, he produced some draft legislation and asked what Kershaw thought of it. ‘It’s fine, but there’ll be the hell of a row!’ Kershaw commented. Heath grunted and said nothing. ‘He wouldn’t reply to that sort of observation – he never would,’ remembered Kershaw, ‘he just docketed it away in his mind…When he’s made up his mind to do something he really is completely inflexible – he takes a long time and he talks to an awful lot of people, but after he’s made it up you might as well talk to yourself.’17 His officials in the Board of Trade were delighted by this unexpected resolution but, like Kershaw, predicted that there would be storms ahead.18 Heath was unperturbed. At the end of 1963 he told the Prime Minister of his intentions. ‘This is very difficult,’ Douglas-Home replied gloomily, but he accepted Heath’s argument that the abolition of RPM would be a bold modernising move that would redound to the credit of the Government and be generally popular with the electorate.19
The first cabinet meeting at which the matter was discussed, in January 1964, showed that Heath was not going to have an easy passage. No one denied that such legislation would, in principle, be desirable; it was the timing that caused concern. The abolition of RPM would alienate an army of small shopkeepers; small shopkeepers were traditionally Tory voters; a general election could not be too far ahead; the Government’s position was already precarious. St Augustine’s celebrated prayer – ‘Give me chastity and continency, but do not give it yet!’ – summed up the position of at least half the Cabinet. Heath would have none of this. ‘The Government had committed themselves to a policy of modernising Britain and promising a more efficient use of resources,’ he reminded his colleagues. ‘This policy would fail to carry conviction if they were to tolerate the continuance of a practice so manifestly at variance with it.’ In the end the Cabinet doubtfully agreed that legislation should be introduced, subject to the exemption of booksellers and, possibly, one or two other categories of retailer. On the main issue of proscribing RPM, said the Prime Minister, ‘the Government intended to act with speed and decision’.20
Delay and indecision naturally followed. The uproar in the Cabinet was as nothing to the explosion of indignation that ensued, when all those Conservative MPs with marginal seats discovered that the small shopkeepers were likely to be turned against them. The Chief Whip, Martin Redmayne, bore the brunt of their resentment. He bullied one recalcitrant MP so ruthlessly that his victim emerged from the Whips’ Office ‘brick-red in the face, his teeth tightly clenched and tears of rage squeezed out from under his eyelids’. Like Heath over the death penalty and Suez, Redmayne had the ill fortune of having to whip up support for a policy which he personally opposed. Unlike most of his colleagues he disliked the principle of abolition as well as deploring the timing. Heath, he complained, ‘showed an almost malevolent lack of interest’ in the problems that the Chief Whip was having with the backbenchers. He made Heath’s task more difficult by urging on the Prime Minister a series of exceptions to the Bill which cumulatively would have fatally weakened it. It was perhaps appropriate that, after the next election, he should have resigned his seat and become, inter alia, a director of Harrods.21
The backbench revolt was at its fiercest in the 1922 Committee. At the first meeting which discussed it it became clear that, while the membership divided more or less fifty-fifty on the merits of the proposal, everyone agreed that the timing was disastrous. The Committee devoted more time to the matter than they had done to any single issue since a particularly turbulent debate on MPs’ pay ten