The intrigue to keep Heath
Patrick Cosgrave
The last week has seen a series of moves by two different sets of people to help Mr Heath retain his leadership of the Conservative party; and it is important to examine their motives and credentials, as well as to put in context the bewilderingly successive moves of the last ten days or so in the new struggle for the Tory; leadership.
Mr Heath's critics, though they would have preferred his instant departure, were certainly always prepared to give him time to pack his bags. Any clear statement of the intention to resign would have gained him not merely a period of peace, but encomia as well. His friends — broadly, those who could not be certain of any serious political future without him — have sought grimly merely to postpone the evil hour. Certainly, they are prepared privately to agree with the general consensus that "Ted cannot lead at the next general election," but their deeper prayer is that, if the indignation of the party can be contained, and if members back at Westminster can be persuaded to forget for a" moment the brutal truth publicly stated by Mr Neil Marten — that two out of three Tory oters disliked the leader — Mr Heath might, after all, stage a comeback. Delay, in their minds, is designed to enable them to blunt anger, hold on to privilege, and hope that something will turn up for their man.
Their feelings overlap with the second group — those who, like Mr Bernard Levin and Mr Peregrine Worsthorne, have lately discovered some quality of heroism in Mr Heath, and believe that, an economic catastrophe next year having proved him right, he may yet be swept back into office at the behest of a grateful people. Somewhere between the two groups drift those who — like Mr John Peyton — believe that those who are trying to get Mr Heath out fast are behaving in so ungentlemanly a fashion that all gentlemen ought to rally around Ted, if only to defy intrigue. Almost none of the strands of either argument — or of ,the subsidiary arguments, like the particularly ludicrous one that Mr Heath "told the truth" during the last campaign and will therefore be ultimately rewarded for it—nor a combination of these strands, bears even the slightest weight. Let us take the argument of the "gentlemen" first. Though politics is often a matter of decorum, it is certainly not a particularly gentlemanly business. Even if it were, however, Mr Heath has been the least gentlemanly, the least considerate, the least well-behaved leader of any political party in recent years. His bullying is and has been notorious, even among those devoted to him, and his choler has frequently known no bounds. From telephon
ing poor Sir Desmond Plummer in Tokyo because a traffic jam in Witehall delayed the progress of his motor car to a grand party in No. 10 to upbraiding an unfortunate. policeman during a similar occurrence when he was on the way to Heathrow to take flight for a Commonwealth conference in Ottawa, he has never been marked for his good manners.
More seriously, his whole time as Prime Minister has been marked either by the exclusion from office of those who disagreed with him or, at least, by deferment of their just claims. Mr Nicholas Scott finally made it to junior office in spite of opposition to Mr Heath's policy of selling arms to South Africa, and Mr Teddy Taylor was forgiven a resignation over the EEC — but they were rare exceptions. Mr du Cann, whose claim to office were greater than those of many whom Mr
Heath brought forward from obscurity, was totally excluded. Indeed, if there is any kind of dearth of talent at the top of the Tory Party it can, in large measure, be put down to Mr . Heath's preference for yes-men. For these reasons I can find nothing of the sweet of pathetic or distinguished about Mr Heath in his most humiliating hour so far. What the Tory Party has '1,6 ask itself is whether, if the reign of this leader is prolonged, they will get anything new from him; or whether his contempt for the party he leads — usually expressed by the prefix 'bloody' — will merely be increased thereby?
Most absurd of all the pro-Heath myths now being manufactured, however, is the one that suggests he told, during the campaign, so profound a truth about the national condition that the brilliance of his insight will in time inevitably be recognised. This is the most patent rubbish, especially when accompanied by a suggestion that he also had some of the answers. During the campaign Mr Heath said we were facing a horrendous national crisis-so did the other two parties. He said he would create a national government, but could name no single figure of substance who would join it. He said he would take appropriate measures to meet it, but could not mention one. Indeed, through the statutory incomes policy philosphy which proved disastrous when he was in office was played down in the manifesto, it was still there. It had to be muted because Sir Keith Joseph had already told the truth at Preston, the truth being that the last Tory government was. unbelievably profligate in spending money it had not got, and that habit became the principal cause of the national inflation. • • Mention of Sir Keith — and of his Leith and Birmingham speeches as well as that at Preston, all of which seem designed to contribute to the re-appraisal of policy and philosophy which everybody in the Tory Party now agrees must be made — brings me to the
crucial and agonising problem: what is Conservatism? And where should a Conservatibe Party stand? Whoever leads the party towards the next election must be able to preside over the process of finding answers to these questions, whether left-wing, or rightwing, or middle-of-the-road answers. How could it, with the remotest degree or credibility, be Mr Heath? True, some say that a lame duck leader would be best for this. But, if one accepted the honesty of such a suggestion — and I do not, being convinced that Mr Heath's Praetorian Guard offer the suggestion as a means of prolonging his stay as leader, with a view to prolonging it indefinitely — it could not but be judged puerile. Is he, for example, to preside over yet another U-turn? And what fun will the Labour Party not make of that? No: the only answer is to make a fresh start. How, however, is the deed to be done? Here one must again revert to the "gentlemanly' argument. Many in the Conservative PartY honourably held, last February, that it would be better if Mr Heath departed, but few uttered that judgement: he was well treated by his followers then; better, certainly, than his record .deserved. If there is a brutish element abroad now, it comes from the clash of spades as Mr Heath digs in. It is still scarcely conceivable that he will do so, that he will squat down in Smith Square again, that he will be a cricketer who refuses to 'walk', even after being bowled out thrice in four balls. It will then be up to Conservative backbenchers to act as forcefully as they did in 1922, when the committee of that name was founded and when Stanley Baldwin, in imperishable words, gave marching orders to a far greater man than Mr Heath, but one who was still ruining the Conservative Party, Lloyd George. If such a drastic course is necessary, then the fault will not lie with those who have clearly said a new 'leader is required, but with the mulishness of the existing leader and his supporters. The commonest of political diseases is the illusion of indispensability, and Mr Heath has it in full measure.
Most distressingly, his disease manifests itself in a choice between the available candidates, when to make such a choice is a dangerous thing for any outgoing leader to do. Mr Heath has told his friends, and his friends have told others, that he feels he has to stick it out because of the danger of a right-wing coup in the party consequent on his departure. In the circumstances that cannot'mean a fear that Mr Enoch Powell, his old adversary, would b,e called by acclaim to the leadership: Mr Powell is not even, these days, a Conservative. It can only mean that Mr Heath and his allies are set against the succession of Sir Keith Joseph whose views are, usually inaccurately, described as right-wing. Now, one charge that cannot be made against Sir Keith is that of any variety of disloyalty during the years when Mr Heath was Prime Minister. Mr Heath is thus clearlY striving to punish him for the Preston speech, which argued that the economic policy of the Heath government had been wrong. Thus we see again the old, old Heath, bent on the exclusion of all that differs from him in understanding, and the castigation of it. Now, almost nobody, of whatever wing in the party, would deny the truth of the proposition that, in the difficult re-appraisal that lies ahead, the ideas, the vision and the understanding of Sir Keith will constitute an indispensable and central element. Such a view would be held, I think, even by those who think Sir Keith unfitted to be leader of the party, and it would certainly be held by some of the most enthusiastic suPporters of Mr Whitelaw. Which way the partY yet inclines between the two men nobody can say, but both will be vital elements in its future balance. To endeavour to count one of them out in the interests of clinging to a tattered standard or, if that standard is swept away t° try to ensure that it will not be replaced by one any cleaner, is contemptible, and may prove to be the most damaging thing Mr Heath has yet done to the Conservative Party.
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