he wrote in Isis. The typical undergraduate who spoke in the Union was obsessed by politics: ‘All the superficiality, the shallowness, the sterility of undergraduate thought, were revealed unmercifully as speaker after speaker tried to find something to replace the political clichés with which he can normally get away.’22 The lofty tone of these remarks suggests that Heath thought himself above such trivia, but at that moment in his life he would have found it difficult to express his real views on the subject with any force or clarity. He does seem to have been undergoing something of a spiritual crisis at the time. The following year he indulged himself by writing a diary in what was for him an uncharacteristically introspective vein. ‘The only principles I have ever had firmly implanted have been religious,’ he wrote, ‘but these never had any intellectual backing. I never even realised what the grounds of belief are and how they compare with anything else. The result was that the religious beliefs I had were undermined at Oxford. I felt that they were silly, that I couldn’t defend them against other people. Only now am I beginning to realise their justification. I may be slowly coming through the valley of bewilderment.’23 He had not descended very far into that valley, nor were the heights to which he was to climb of imposing altitude. Heath never thought much about religion. His time at Oxford was almost the only occasion when he found his implicit faith challenged by clever and articulate contemporaries; that threat removed he reverted to the comfortable and unchallenged convictions of his youth. They underpinned but did not notably affect his political beliefs. ‘In all this time in the House of Commons,’ he wrote in 1996, he had found that there were ‘comparatively few issues on which one has to sit back and say, “Well, now, does this correspond with the values of my own faith?”’24
Faith or not, he asked himself more often than was true of most politicians how far his attitude on any given issue corresponded with the moral principles by which he regulated his behaviour. Many of those principles were formulated while he was at Oxford, although it was the travels that he undertook in the vacations that did most to shape his views. In the summer of 1938, with a small group of fellow undergraduates of whom he was by far the most right wing, he went on the invitation of the republican government to visit Catalonia, the last major Spanish province which Franco had not yet overrun. It was an exciting visit. In Barcelona the party was advised to take shelter in the hotel basement since an air-raid was beginning. They decided that the risk was slight and that it would be more interesting to stay above ground and watch events. According to his memoirs, a bomb hit the hotel, skittled down the lift-shaft and killed all those who had taken shelter. Somewhat perplexingly, his version of the event in a book published some twenty years earlier says that the bomb ‘went straight through our hotel, without, however, causing any great damage’. By the time he came to write his memoirs he was not above occasionally gingering up the narrative with somewhat romanticised anecdotes, but it is curious that he should have published two versions of the same incident, apparently so contradictory.25
There were other moments of danger. On the road from Barcelona to Tarragona their car was machine-gunned by one of Franco’s aircraft and they had to crouch in a ditch until the danger had passed. When they reached the British contingent of the International Brigade, Heath met and talked to a young volunteer called Jack Jones. They were to see much more of each other, on different sides this time but in more peaceful surroundings, nearly forty years later when Heath was prime minister and Jones leader of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU). Though Heath regretted the powerful influence of the Communist Party and recognised that, in a civil war, atrocities were likely to be committed by both sides, he was as satisfied as any of his party that the republican cause was the better one. It was, as he saw it, a battle between legitimate government and militaristic fascism; the republican government was ‘introducing progressive social reforms and encouraging a bracing democratic atmosphere’; Franco was providing ‘a convenient testing bed for the hardware of the Nazi war machine’. Heath returned to Britain resolved to canvass for the republican cause, even though he accepted that it was probably lost. He was moreover convinced that the Spanish civil war was merely the preamble to a greater European war for which Britain must urgently prepare.26
He had had few illusions about this since the summer of 1937 when he had spent two months in Germany working on his German. In his biography, John Campbell writes that Heath ‘never learned a second language’. In his copy of the book Heath wrote against this remark ‘Wrong!’ He does, indeed, seem to have spoken German with some fluency at this time. He read it too; he claimed that Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks had given him a unique insight into the German character: ‘What a superb book it is,’ he told Professor Winckler, in whose home in Bavaria he spent several weeks as a paying guest.27 But he was not a natural linguist, and by the time he found himself negotiating with German politicians over Britain’s entry into Europe he would have found it impossible to sustain a serious conversation in their language. To his surprise, he was invited to attend a Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg and found himself within a few feet of Hitler and meeting the other Nazi leaders at a cocktail party: Göring, ‘bulky and genial’; Goebbels, ‘small, pale and insignificant’, and Himmler, ‘I shall never forget how drooping and sloppy Himmler’s hand was when he offered it to me’. He was horrified by the ferociously nationalistic zeal which permeated the whole affair: ‘I was utterly convinced now that a conflict was inevitable, and that it was one for which we must prepare immediately if we were to save Europe from the evil domination of National Socialism.’28
He went back to Germany in August 1939. His companion was Madron Seligman, a Balliol contemporary who was, and would remain, his closest friend. Seligman was Jewish, educated at Harrow and from a family of rich aluminium manufacturers. A fine sportsman and a lover of music, Seligman could have made himself at home in any sector of Balliol society. For a time, remembered Roy Jenkins, he had links with the ‘Rugbeian pi group’ which went in for ‘low living, social concern and high moral tone’. Though Heath avoided association with any clique, this was a group with which he too had much in common. He and Seligman became, if not inseparable, then at least intimate to a degree which Heath was never to permit himself with any other friend. The two discussed where they should spend their last months of liberty before embarking on their respective careers. Seligman favoured Spain. Heath acquiesced and filled in a visa application. To the question why he had visited Spain the previous year he wrote: ‘To observe the Civil War’; to ‘What is the purpose of your present visit’, he wrote: ‘To observe the peace.’ Perhaps the Spanish authorities found this unduly flippant; perhaps they disapproved of his republican sympathies; the visa was refused. Instead, the two set out for a tour of Danzig and Poland, travelling by way of Germany. Seligman’s Jewish blood, Heath told Winckler, provided the couple with ‘many amusing moments’. The words were curiously chosen: it was less than a year since the pogroms of Kristallnacht and since then the plight of the German Jews had inexorably worsened. Seligman was protected by his British passport, but if they had got their timing wrong and war had broken out while they were still in Germany he would have been in great danger. Even as it was it must have been always unpleasant and sometimes distressing. The English were not well liked in Germany in 1939 and an Englishman of Jewish appearance was doubly unwelcome.29
They travelled to suit Heath’s budget rather than Seligman’s, which meant that discomfort was added to their other woes. The train from Berlin to Danzig was filled with drunken Austrians and they had to try to sleep in the luggage rack: when they had a meal with the consul next day, according to Seligman, Heath was half asleep and ‘didn’t utter a word the whole way through lunch except to say how bad the food was’. By the time they reached Warsaw it was obvious that war was imminent; they were sped on their way and hitch-hiked towards the frontier with the Polish army as it moved up to defend its country. Once in Germany things were still worse; the – far more formidable – German army was moving the other way and they had to battle against the tide. Suspicion of foreigners, particularly English-speaking foreigners, was even worse than it had been on the way out and several times they thought they were on the point of being arrested or beaten up. Eventually they arrived at Paris and called at the Embassy, to be told: ‘Unless you get out now you will never get out at all!’ The advice was perhaps unduly alarmist but the situation was indeed dire: Heath got back to Dover a week before war broke out.30
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