which cost him his scholarship had been arranged under a scheme by which two debaters from English universities crossed the Atlantic each year to go on a tour of American universities. Heath was to have been accompanied by his Balliol contemporary Hugh Fraser. When war broke out both young men volunteered for military service. Fraser, who had been training as a territorial, was at once called up. Heath was told that he would not be wanted for several months. The way was open, therefore, for him to go as planned to America. Instead of Fraser he was to share the platform with Peter Street, a former treasurer of the Oxford Union.
One Balliol contemporary doubted whether this was a good idea:
Were I you I would go to the war rather than to the USA, because, while the propaganda in America might be a more valuable contribution to Britain, there might be a number of people who would place an uncharitable construction on your absence from this country. After all, it is more important to do what the public think right than what you might think right! That sounds cynical, but it is true in politics. A good war record is of great assistance to a politician…
If ‘going to war’ had been a possible alternative Heath would certainly have taken it but there seemed little point in hanging around awaiting call-up when a far more interesting and potentially valuable way of using the time presented itself. If people chose to suggest that he was in some way running away or shirking his duty then they were welcome to do so. He and Street consulted the Foreign Office, were encouraged to go ahead with the tour and did so with alacrity.5
The Foreign Office did, however, issue one caveat. Public opinion in the United States was in a delicate state and there were many people who would be quick to resent what they might see as an attempt to push them into the war. Two brash students, holding forth about the duty of the Americans to join the British and the French in defence of Poland, might do considerable harm. Any such debate was to be avoided: like Basil in Fawlty Towers, they were not to mention the war. The difficulty about this was that the American students with whom they were to debate thought that the war by far the most interesting topic. The University of Pittsburgh dismissed the twelve possible subjects proposed by the British team and announced that the debate would be on the motion: ‘That the United States should immediately enter the war on the side of the allies.’ When Heath and Street demurred they were told that this was the published motion and that nothing else would be accepted. To refuse to appear would seem both churlish and chicken-hearted, to speak would be to brave the wrath of the Foreign Office and perhaps to provoke an international incident. In dismay, Heath appealed to the British Ambassador, Lord Lothian. Not for nothing was Lothian known as one of the most ingeniously devious of politicians: they should agree to speak, he ruled, but only on condition that one proposed and one opposed the motion. That way nobody could claim that the visitors were trying to manoeuvre America into the war. The fact that the more eloquent and well-briefed of the speakers seemed always to be the one who favoured intervention could in no way be blamed on the British representatives.
Heath did not delude himself that his efforts had any marked impact on American public opinion. The most usual question – not easily answered – was why, if the war was being waged in support of Poland, Britain and France were not also at war with the other aggressor, Russia. They met very little out-and-out pacifism but did not feel that they had done much to shake ‘the final and all-compelling assumption that America must stay out of the war’.6 Some universities were content to abide by the choice of subject made by the visitors. At Brooklyn College the debate turned on what should be done after the war to secure a lasting peace. This was a topic on which Heath had already thought deeply and which had preoccupied him during his recent trip to Europe. In the debate he envisaged various possibilities, not mutually exclusive, but inclined to the view that the best hope was a federal Europe, a ‘United States of Europe…in which states will have to give up some of their national rights…There seems to be a better view for the future if we lean towards a federalism that can be secured either by joining with a small national group and/or big group, because this seems to be the most foolproof sort of thing you can get.’7 It was the first public airing of a view which, though from time to time modified, was to dominate his thinking for the rest of his life.
On his way back to England he mused on the differences between the New World which he had just visited and tired old Europe. America was a new country and ‘though it lacks dignity is filled with pulsating life’. Britain’s rulers, on the other hand, were ‘out of touch, uninspired, content to deal with new problems in an old way. The opposition is just as lifeless and tied to dogmas and formulae of which everyone is heartily sick.’ What was needed was a new breeze which would sweep away ‘stuffiness, dead convention, stultifying distinctions, all those things which paralyse our national and individual life’. But it would not be enough to produce some prophet who would ‘talk in vague generalisations’; he must be able to conjure up visions in other people’s minds, but also ‘to think things through right to the bitter end, a leader who is practical and strong’. Who that leader might be and where he would spring from, he did not surmise. Given the astonishing self-confidence that was already so apparent it would be surprising if, at the back of his mind, he did not cherish a hope that it might one day be him. At the moment the Tory Party seemed a spent force. Could it be revived? Was he right in thinking that his future lay with its left wing rather than with ‘the Liberals, whose practical policy and mode of thought is much more in keeping with my own than those of many Conservatives; or the Socialists, most of whom are from my own “class” and are perhaps more concerned than many Conservatives with domestic problems?’ It was the issue that he had faced when he joined the Conservative Association at Oxford, and he reached the same conclusion. But the question still was how they were ‘to secure greater equality of opportunity and of wealth and abolish class distinction’. The Socialist recipes – confiscation of wealth, high taxation, nationalisation – repelled him: ‘If one has government control and planning it becomes national socialism and political control too often follows.’ But what was the alternative: spending to make work, deficit spending, the American New Deal? Such a policy would be risky but at least it would be positive and would offer the possibility of fruitful advance.8
He knew that such speculation was largely academic. Political activity would be at a low ebb until the end of the war and, anyway, he expected that he would quickly be called up and would have many more immediate preoccupations. His younger brother, John, was already with the infantry in France, yet Heath was kept hanging about. ‘I’m horribly bored,’ he told a Balliol friend some time in the early summer of 1940.
I’ve been waiting now since February…without anything really to do. Each time I’ve heard from them or pressed them I’ve been told I should be wanted in only a couple of weeks, with the result that it was impossible for me to get a temporary job to pass the time. I was called up once actually for the Buffs [John’s regiment] but two days before I had to report I received another notice saying ‘owing to unforeseen circumstances’ my calling-up notice was cancelled…I’m rather anxious to get in and get on with it…There is so much to do and, as ever, so little time to do it. What a struggle it will have to be, but what a magnificent opportunity.9
From Balliol, Lindsay had promised to do what he could to get Heath into military Intelligence, but either his attempt aborted or he forgot about it. When Heath finally came before the Board he found that he had been assigned to the Royal Artillery. He had every hope that he would be commissioned as an officer within a few months, but the basic training that had to be undergone by every gunner lay ahead of him. ‘I don’t think I regret what’s coming,’ he told his diary resignedly. ‘It may well be for the best.’ There would be hardships, of course: uncomfortable clothes, lack of privacy, gruelling hard work, difficult hours, ‘bad food served absolutely revoltingly’, but there would be good things too: fitness, discipline, relief from responsibility for a while. Living cheek-by-jowl with ‘people of whom he knew nothing, unintelligent people, uneducated people, unstimulating and unstimulatable’, was the thing that frightened him most. Yet he recognised that ‘if I could feel at the end that I knew them and what they expected from life it would be a good thing’. He prayed that there would be at least a few men ‘reasonably like people I’m accustomed to’; but at the same time he told himself that he should welcome the chance to escape from his background and the class with