must have someone subtler
Than Mr Richard Austen Butler.
A proper man, and what is properer
Than take a fellow out of opera
And build him up as large as life
The character of Mac the Knife?39
So far as Heath was concerned there was only one bean involved and he was Michael Adeane, the Queen’s private secretary. Heath told him that, by a substantial majority, the party would prefer Macmillan and that he personally agreed. His was not the decisive voice, but he spoke for the backbenchers and must have carried a lot of weight. It was to Heath that fell the unpleasant task of telling Butler that he was not to be Prime Minister. ‘Look after him, for he’s a very solitary figure just at present, and he relies on you,’ Butler’s private secretary, Ian Bancroft, wrote to urge him. There was no way by which Heath could make palatable the news that, in spite of the confident predictions in almost all the morning papers that Butler would be the next Prime Minister, the Queen had sent for Macmillan. ‘He looked utterly dumbfounded.’40
In his memoirs Heath pays the most fulsome compliments to the new Prime Minister. Macmillan possessed, he says, ‘by far the most constructive mind I have encountered in a lifetime of politics’; he showed ‘a generous spirit and unquenchable desire to help the underdog’; he was ‘more than anyone else, my political mentor and my patron’. This may not have been the whole story. Several people have remarked that Heath was sometimes irritated by Macmillan’s sedulously cultivated insouciance; Kenneth Baker goes so far as to suggest that he disliked him and sometimes made disparaging remarks about him. Nor was Macmillan without reservations in his championship of his Chief Whip. He once told his future biographer Alistair Horne that Heath did not possess the qualities of a prime minister. ‘Hengist and Horsa’, he went on, ‘were very dull people. Now, as you know, they colonised Kent; consequently the people of Kent have ever since been very slightly – well, you know…Ted was an excellent Chief Whip…a first class staff officer, but no army commander.’41
So far as most people could see, however, the relationship was notably harmonious: certainly each man found the other extremely useful, if not indispensable. It was Heath whom Macmillan took with him to dine at the Turf Club on the night after he had taken over. ‘Had any good shooting lately?’ asked a fellow member when the Prime Minister entered the dining room; then, as he left some time later, ‘Oh, by the way, congratulations’. The dinner took place in the course of discussions about the shape of the new Government. Changes were kept to a minimum but some new blood had to be introduced and many hopes were disappointed. ‘It was a most difficult and exhausting task,’ Macmillan wrote in his diary. ‘Without the help of Edward Heath, who was quite admirable, we couldn’t have done it.’ Heath himself was one of the disappointed. He realised that he was bound to stay where he was – ‘The Government is like a regiment,’ he remarked. ‘You can’t change the CO and the adjutant at the same time’ – but he still felt a pang of jealousy when Reginald Maudling was made Paymaster General with a brief to concentrate on Britain’s relationship with Europe. It was the task which he coveted above all others.42
But he had no reason to complain that he was treated with lack of consideration. Heath, an unidentified minister told Andrew Roth early in 1958, ‘is probably the most influential man around the Prime Minister today. The PM consults him about practically everything.’ Should the Prime Minister accept an invitation to dine with the Progress Trust? He should. How should he reply to a rather cheeky letter from the backbencher Martin Lindsay? ‘I have always found that a snub works and does not lead to increased heat.’ Should he visit Northern Ireland? Yes. If he were able to visit Lord Brookeborough at his country home it would be a most enjoyable and worthwhile experience.43 He was the central figure in the preparation of party political broadcasts, was closely involved in the selection or deselection of MPs, and worked with the party chairman on political honours. When the time came to prepare a manifesto for the next election, the Steering Committee charged with drafting it consisted of Butler, Alec Home, Hailsham, Macleod and the Chief Whip; he was equally included in the inner group of Macmillan’s most intimate advisers – Norman Brook, Philip de Zulueta, John Wyndham – who met informally for half an hour several times a week.44
He never hesitated to speak his mind. Early in 1958 the Government found itself inexplicably – in its own mind at least – unpopular. Things came to a head when the Liberal candidate won a by-election in Rochdale and the Tory was pushed into third place. The Steering Committee met to consider this disaster. Macleod identified the Liberals as the most dangerous enemy, who must be destroyed. Heath questioned whether they should be treated as enemy. They had much in common with the Conservatives, more so than with Labour. The Tories in the past had largely maintained themselves by absorbing other parties; if they were now to do a deal with the Liberals this would surely again be the final result. It was a line to which he was to revert several times over the next decades. On this occasion he met with a mixed reception. Home supported him; Hailsham strongly backed Macleod; as is usually the case with such debates it grumbled on until the circumstances which had engendered it no longer pertained and the issue became irrelevant.45
It was maintaining the cohesion and loyalty of the party, however, that was his chief preoccupation, and the gauge by which the success of his tenure as Chief Whip would be judged. Many of the stresses within the party related to the disintegration of the empire, which had begun with the granting of independence to India and Pakistan in 1947, had gathered speed after Suez and was now to be accelerated still further by Macmillan. Heath was far from being a dedicated imperialist, but he had to manage a vociferous right wing which bitterly resented the humiliation of Suez and was resolved that no further scuttles should be permitted. The first battlefield was Malta. In this case the proposal was not that Malta should become independent but that it should be wholly integrated with the United Kingdom. Maltese members would sit in the House of Commons; all tariffs or restrictions on movement between the two countries would be abolished. The hard-core Suez Group, supported in this case by many moderates, broke into a clamorous protest. A six-line Whip would be needed to get the proposals through, said John Peyton; William Teeling announced that he and his friends would not merely vote against it in the House but would hold public meetings up and down the country in protest. Heath reported to Alan Lennox-Boyd that the executive of the 1922 Committee foresaw ‘very great trouble in the Party if the proposals for integration were proceeded with’. He calculated that a minimum of forty-eight Tory members would vote against the Government. In the event the Maltese Government declared that it would not take the matter further unless it were offered independence as an alternative to integration. With some relief the Colonial Office dropped this uncomfortably hot potato and the incipient mutiny died away.46
Cyprus provided a more typical battleground. Archbishop Makarios had been exiled in March 1956, but it was obvious to most people that sooner or later he must be allowed to return and that the Greek majority on the island was determined to have him as its leader. Negotiations were under way. The Tory right wing passionately rejected any such solution. Busily the Whips reported to Heath on feelings in the party. Wolrige-Gordon ‘feels that God does not agree with our conduct of the Cyprus negotiations. We will have trouble with him when the debate comes.’ Henry Legge-Bourke was ‘more angry over the Cyprus settlement than he was over Suez’. Cyril Black said that Makarios’s return would ‘provoke an explosion in the House and the country among our own supporters’. The figures were remarkably similar to those on Malta; this time Heath had to report that a minimum of forty-seven Tories were probable rebels. It was Makarios’s insistence on enosis – union with Greece – which particularly offended the disaffected Tories; in the end he was cajoled into abandoning this position and the worst of the bitterness went out of the dispute.47
The most serious threat to Macmillan, however, came over domestic issues. In the autumn of 1957 the Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, insisted on cuts in public expenditure which departmental ministers were not prepared to accept. Macmillan dallied over intervening in the dispute and, when he did so, found that positions were so entrenched that he must expect resignations from one side or the other. Heath told him that Thorneycroft’s intransigence had largely forfeited the support