Whatever his secretary might have felt about Heath, the editor, Humphrey Beevor, looked on him with a jaundiced eye. ‘Politically they were poles apart,’ said another member of the staff, ‘Heath to the right, Beevor to the left. Heath was an army man of steady disposition; Beevor was a navy type, a brilliant man but a man of moods.’ He would fly into a passion over some trivial slip, and delighted in trying to catch Heath out on abstruse theological points – not a difficult task, since, though Heath soon mastered the technical jargon which beset religious reporting, his bent for philosophy remained obstinately under-developed. But though Beevor had little enthusiasm for his thrusting young sub-editor he was quite content to let him pursue his political interests in his spare time. When eventually the Board considered the matter, it was minuted that, though they too had no objection, they were concerned lest his activities as a would-be member of parliament took up an undue amount of his energies. They had some grounds for disquiet: one friend complained that, whenever he rang up the Church Times and asked to speak to Heath, he was told that he was out and that ‘Mr Heath’s private movements are unknown to us’. ‘From the frequency of that remark,’ the friend commented, ‘I have gained the notion that the majority of your movements fall into this category!’ Heath was constitutionally incapable of not giving value for money but it was clear to anyone that his heart was not wholly in his work. The Board agreed that he could stay on until he actually became involved in an election, but as early as August 1948 Heath told a friend on the Oxford Appointments Board that he had decided to leave as soon as another possibility offered itself. The trouble was, he said, that he was ‘liable to be sent anywhere at any time. This means that I can never make an engagement and be absolutely certain of keeping it.’17
He wanted an employer who would offer regular hours, who would not be concerned by the fact that he would shortly be fighting an election, who might provide work on a part-time basis even after Heath became an MP and who would offer him new experiences that would be useful in his life as a politician. ‘I must say that I think it will be hard to get what you want,’ wrote his father apprehensively; then, with a return to his habitual cheerfulness: ‘Keep trying. Mummy has a feeling that something is going to turn up for you.’ Heath looked to the City of London and found the solution in Brown Shipley, a small but well-established merchant bank which specialised in financing deals in timber and wool. It was not ideal. The work would involve frequent visits to the north of England, which would provide useful knowledge for the future but would also make more difficult the nursing of his constituency. Worse still, Brown Shipley were only prepared to take him on as a management trainee at a miserable £200 a year and lunch in the staff canteen. This would involve a serious sacrifice. Heath felt it was worth it. The training would last only a few months, after which he could hope for employment as a full-time banker. Brown Shipley seemed delighted to have a potential Tory MP on their staff and were sure that they would be able to accommodate him in some way even if he did win his seat. He took the job, broke the news to a not particularly disappointed Beevor, and began work in the City in October 1949. Far more than at the Church Times, he seemed to fit in right away. ‘All the partners knew him,’ wrote the chairman, Ian Garnett-Orme, in 1970. ‘He was obviously highly intelligent and very interesting…He left a most awfully good impression here. Large numbers of people here went to help him in his election campaign. People don’t do that unless they like a man.’18
That election campaign was now imminent. Heath had been nursing the constituency assiduously and with great success. The Bexley Conservative Association had a membership of only 600 when Heath took over, within a year it had grown to 3,500, by the election it was over 6,000. Every weekend was spent in the constituency. For the work of wooing the voter and making himself a well-known local figure, Heath renounced all the social pleasures that a young man of his age could have expected to enjoy. Even more painful, he sacrificed the raffish sports car in which he had been accustomed to cover the distance between central London and Broadstairs. He loved his glamorous dark-green MG two-seater but reluctantly accepted that it did not create the right impression in a period of stark austerity and traded it in for a more mundane Vauxhall saloon.
The local party agent who insisted on such a change was right in this case, but wrong about much else. Worst of all, he suffered from folie de grandeur, and plotted to replace the chairman and other senior officers of the association by nominees of his own. Heath’s own position was not threatened in the short term but he would never have worked satisfactorily with the agent and would certainly have stood less chance of winning Bexley if no change had been made. He allied himself with the chairman, organised a counter-coup, and was triumphant. The agent resigned a few months later and it became clear that the finances of the local party were in disarray and that the fighting fund, which Heath had largely built up by his own efforts in preparation for the election, had been dissipated. With a general election probably only a year away, Heath found himself with an organisation in tatters and without the money essential to wage a successful campaign.
Things quickly improved. Central Office found an excellent replacement as an agent: Reginald Pye, a former rubber-planter in Sumatra, was hard-working, conscientious and level-headed. Quite as important, he liked Heath, appreciated his qualities and served him with total loyalty through twenty-five years and seven electoral campaigns. A good agent, especially if the MP concerned takes on responsibilities which make it hard to devote as much time as is desirable to the affairs of his constituency, is one of the most necessary elements of political life. From the moment Pye was appointed, Heath never had cause for serious concern about the running of his constituency. He was to prove as assiduous a member as he had been a candidate, but without the safety net of an efficient local organisation no MP can guard against the sort of lapse which leaves a sense of grievance among the constituents and can cost vital votes on election day. It was largely thanks to Pye that Heath was accepted, even by his political opponents, to be a model constituency member. It did not come easily. Though he genuinely enjoyed talking to the young about their ambitions and preoccupations, he lacked social graces and already showed some of the unease in company which was increasingly to mar his public life. ‘The road to Westminster’, he wrote in his memoirs, ‘was not so much a long march as an interminable dinner-dance…I made more speeches, presented more prizes and danced more waltzes than I had ever done in my life.’19 Even for somebody more naturally sociable than Heath it must be a strain to be endlessly jolly while doing things that bore one with people whom one does not find particularly congenial. For Heath it must sometimes have been agonising. The prize was worth the price, but the price was a high one. It did not become smaller with the years. He developed a technique for coasting through social gatherings in overdrive, with fixed smile and a battery of bland banalities, but it never came easily and the self-discipline which kept the carapace in place became progressively more tattered as he grew in consequence and found the demands made on his time and energies ever less tolerable.
His colleagues in Brown Shipley were not the only people from outside the constituency who were ready to come to his help at election time. Among the many responsibilities which he crowded into an already amazingly cluttered life was the Territorial Army. Early in 1947 he was asked to re-form the 2nd Regiment of the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC) – a heavy anti-aircraft regiment. The HAC was the oldest surviving regiment in the British army and the second most senior territorial unit. Heath felt that the Territorial Army was a critically important element of Britain’s defences at a time when the Cold War was setting in and a hot war seemed a serious possibility. He was eager to serve in it and took immense pride in his association with a unit as ancient and distinguished as the HAC. He flung himself into the recruiting of members with all the energy and conviction he had shown in building up the Bexley Conservative Association. It was a time-consuming task: almost every day he had to devote some part of his energies to the affairs of the HAC; every Tuesday night was given up to drill at the HAC’s headquarters in Finsbury; once a year two weeks of his allotted holidays were spent at the annual training camp. For months before camp he would spend much of his exiguous spare time in preparation, while the months after would be devoted to consideration of what had gone right and what wrong. ‘Believe me,’ wrote a colleague in 1948, ‘the success at camp was due to your leadership, inspiration and enthusiasm, and in saying this I am confident that I speak for the whole Regiment.’ That he did speak for the whole regiment was shown by the number of volunteers