Read more: Edward Heath—alone at the top
During my time running Edward Heath’s office, he and I had just two conversations of substance on the subject of European integration.
The first took place very shortly after I entered his employ. I told him I thought John Major had been very sensible to negotiate opt-outs from both the single currency and the social protocol of the Maastricht Treaty. It was a brief and unpleasant exchange. “Sometimes people just have to be told what to do,” he snapped, when I told him I thought the social protocol was misguidedly anti-competitive and unnecessarily intrusive. The second occasion came when he summarily sacked and replaced me because I had been selected as a parliamentary candidate and had publicly stated my strong personal opposition to the UK ever joining the euro. I also said the entire experiment would end in disaster: an even greater heresy.
After the vote to leave the European Union on 23rd June last year, my old friend Gyles Brandreth, a writer and former Tory MP, said to me how fortunate it was that Heath had not lived to see the day—because it would surely have killed him, just a fortnight shy of his century. When I recounted this comment at a meeting at Westminster, the former MEP Tom Spencer disagreed: Heath would have rallied and fought against Brexit until his dying breath.
If, by some miracle of longevity, Heath were still amongst us today, contemplating the choice the nation will face on 8th June, what conclusion might he reach? Would anyone care, when so much water has passed under the bridge in his party, and elsewhere, since he was PM?
In the 1975 referendum, 85 per cent of Conservative voters supported our membership of the then European Economic Community. Heath, who had been evicted from the party leadership by Thatcher earlier that same year and still enjoyed a greater following than she did in the country, was instrumental in persuading them to endorse the decision he had driven single-mindedly through Parliament just four years earlier. In 2016, only 42 per cent of Conservative voters supported David Cameron’s contention that we should remain in the EU—neatly half the previous proportion and quite something, if you consider the millions of natural Tories who had run into the arms of UKIP at that time.
Brexit is no end in itself. Soft, hard or anywhere in-between, it’s what you do with it that counts. To older hands, it seems ironic that a referendum should prove to be the making of a potential Tory landslide, when that first ever national referendum was a constitutional innovation crafted purely by the Labour Party, to paper over its own cracks. In 1975 the heroine of the Brexiteers, Margaret Thatcher, endeavouring to establish herself as party leader, was determined to maintain opposition to the referendum as a matter of principle, as shadow cabinet papers from the time reveal. In the House of Commons, she defended the primacy of Parliament in taking major decisions affecting the future direction of the nation and quoted Clement Attlee (in a quotation whose original authorship is commonly misattributed to her), describing the referendum as “a splendid weapon for demagogues and dictators.” How times change.
When Michael Heseltine’s biographer Julian Critchley stood down as an MP in 1997, he let it be known that he would not be voting for his local Tory candidate in Ludlow, Chris Gill, whose opposition to European integration had been sufficiently dogged for John Major to withdraw the party whip from him for a time. Heath was asked on television whether he agreed with Critchley. With a degree of deftness and diplomacy that all too often eluded him, Heath said he simply hoped Gill would come round to a better way of thinking. During his long years in the wilderness, Heath’s Tory candidates were Christopher Tugendhat, then Peter Brooke in Westminster or Rob Key in Salisbury, so supporting his party in general elections was never a problem. In the European elections of 1989, however, can he really have put his cross in the box in support of Thatcher’s campaign against a “Diet of Brussels”?
Heath was amongst the first to realise that such vivid Eurosceptical rhetoric would ultimately jeopardise UK membership of the EU. He was usually more Nostradamus than Cassandra in his predicting, but, as a man ever willing to feed on any scraps of vindication that came his way, he might at least feel now that he did call it correctly with his bleak pessimism. He wouldn’t be very impressed with talk of a “soft” Brexit. Despite claims to the contrary, he always recognised—and publicly acknowledged and endorsed—European unity as a connately political project, not as a principally economic or trading arrangement. Single Market membership alone would be anathema. Perhaps he would give Tim Farron a sly iota of support, but I suspect he would do what most other Tory Remainers are doing, namely to accept that the big decision—the invoking of Article 50—has already taken place and then to vote for the mantra of “strong and stable leadership” at a challenging time for the nation.
However grudging that support might be, I like to think Theresa May and her team would welcome it, because it’s broad support, not deep, that delivers majorities at elections, but, then, I retain an eccentric suspicion that the original "Iron Lady" herself (at least when in her pomp) might have surprised everyone by being a reluctant Remainer—not just in light of all those pro-European speeches she used to make back in the day, but also because the thought of forsaking forever her much-loved pastime of biffing up other Heads of Government at a European Council would horrify her. “Surrender? Give up? Walk away?” I can hear her declaring. “You quit if you want to. The lady is not for quitting. We fight on. We fight on to win. I am not frit.” Well, perhaps not, but it’s a thought…
Michael McManus is the author of Edward Heath: A Singular Life" (Elliott & Thompson)
During my time running Edward Heath’s office, he and I had just two conversations of substance on the subject of European integration.
The first took place very shortly after I entered his employ. I told him I thought John Major had been very sensible to negotiate opt-outs from both the single currency and the social protocol of the Maastricht Treaty. It was a brief and unpleasant exchange. “Sometimes people just have to be told what to do,” he snapped, when I told him I thought the social protocol was misguidedly anti-competitive and unnecessarily intrusive. The second occasion came when he summarily sacked and replaced me because I had been selected as a parliamentary candidate and had publicly stated my strong personal opposition to the UK ever joining the euro. I also said the entire experiment would end in disaster: an even greater heresy.
After the vote to leave the European Union on 23rd June last year, my old friend Gyles Brandreth, a writer and former Tory MP, said to me how fortunate it was that Heath had not lived to see the day—because it would surely have killed him, just a fortnight shy of his century. When I recounted this comment at a meeting at Westminster, the former MEP Tom Spencer disagreed: Heath would have rallied and fought against Brexit until his dying breath.
If, by some miracle of longevity, Heath were still amongst us today, contemplating the choice the nation will face on 8th June, what conclusion might he reach? Would anyone care, when so much water has passed under the bridge in his party, and elsewhere, since he was PM?
In the 1975 referendum, 85 per cent of Conservative voters supported our membership of the then European Economic Community. Heath, who had been evicted from the party leadership by Thatcher earlier that same year and still enjoyed a greater following than she did in the country, was instrumental in persuading them to endorse the decision he had driven single-mindedly through Parliament just four years earlier. In 2016, only 42 per cent of Conservative voters supported David Cameron’s contention that we should remain in the EU—neatly half the previous proportion and quite something, if you consider the millions of natural Tories who had run into the arms of UKIP at that time.
Brexit is no end in itself. Soft, hard or anywhere in-between, it’s what you do with it that counts. To older hands, it seems ironic that a referendum should prove to be the making of a potential Tory landslide, when that first ever national referendum was a constitutional innovation crafted purely by the Labour Party, to paper over its own cracks. In 1975 the heroine of the Brexiteers, Margaret Thatcher, endeavouring to establish herself as party leader, was determined to maintain opposition to the referendum as a matter of principle, as shadow cabinet papers from the time reveal. In the House of Commons, she defended the primacy of Parliament in taking major decisions affecting the future direction of the nation and quoted Clement Attlee (in a quotation whose original authorship is commonly misattributed to her), describing the referendum as “a splendid weapon for demagogues and dictators.” How times change.
When Michael Heseltine’s biographer Julian Critchley stood down as an MP in 1997, he let it be known that he would not be voting for his local Tory candidate in Ludlow, Chris Gill, whose opposition to European integration had been sufficiently dogged for John Major to withdraw the party whip from him for a time. Heath was asked on television whether he agreed with Critchley. With a degree of deftness and diplomacy that all too often eluded him, Heath said he simply hoped Gill would come round to a better way of thinking. During his long years in the wilderness, Heath’s Tory candidates were Christopher Tugendhat, then Peter Brooke in Westminster or Rob Key in Salisbury, so supporting his party in general elections was never a problem. In the European elections of 1989, however, can he really have put his cross in the box in support of Thatcher’s campaign against a “Diet of Brussels”?
Heath was amongst the first to realise that such vivid Eurosceptical rhetoric would ultimately jeopardise UK membership of the EU. He was usually more Nostradamus than Cassandra in his predicting, but, as a man ever willing to feed on any scraps of vindication that came his way, he might at least feel now that he did call it correctly with his bleak pessimism. He wouldn’t be very impressed with talk of a “soft” Brexit. Despite claims to the contrary, he always recognised—and publicly acknowledged and endorsed—European unity as a connately political project, not as a principally economic or trading arrangement. Single Market membership alone would be anathema. Perhaps he would give Tim Farron a sly iota of support, but I suspect he would do what most other Tory Remainers are doing, namely to accept that the big decision—the invoking of Article 50—has already taken place and then to vote for the mantra of “strong and stable leadership” at a challenging time for the nation.
However grudging that support might be, I like to think Theresa May and her team would welcome it, because it’s broad support, not deep, that delivers majorities at elections, but, then, I retain an eccentric suspicion that the original "Iron Lady" herself (at least when in her pomp) might have surprised everyone by being a reluctant Remainer—not just in light of all those pro-European speeches she used to make back in the day, but also because the thought of forsaking forever her much-loved pastime of biffing up other Heads of Government at a European Council would horrify her. “Surrender? Give up? Walk away?” I can hear her declaring. “You quit if you want to. The lady is not for quitting. We fight on. We fight on to win. I am not frit.” Well, perhaps not, but it’s a thought…
Michael McManus is the author of Edward Heath: A Singular Life" (Elliott & Thompson)
