Born loser
Ferdinand Mount
Conservative Dissidents: Dissent within the Parliamentary Conservative Party (1970-1974) Philip Norton (Temple smith 210) Dr Norton states his thesis nice and baldly. Rebellions inside the Tory Party increased during the Parliament of 1970-74, and 'this increase was due to the actions and leadership style adopted by the Prime Minister'. M. r Heath, we are told, was stubborn and inflexible. Unlike his predecessors, he refused to drop or even to modify proposals Which aroused hostility within the party. He would not listen to backbenchers and paid little attention to the normal channels of communication, the Chief Whip and the Chairman of the 1922 Committee. He reshuffled as little as possible and when he did he promoted only yes-men. He dished out few honours. The consequences were that more and more Conservative MPs were Willing to carry their disagreement with government policy to the length of voting against it, and when Mr Heath lost two gen eral in 1974, the party lost no time in getting rid of him. Plenty of disgruntled Conservatives have argued like this before and Dr Norton frankly states that he is one such. But he backs up his contention with an awful array of academic instruments and draws not only on voting records but also on newspaper reports and interviews and correspondence with Tory MPs. By these means he builds up a kind of neo-Namierite picture of the Tory rebels, which is of lasting value and interest. Dr Norton is a somewhat stodgy writer, prone to quote from his own earlier works, but his collation of statistical evidence and verbal recollection is fascinating and, on the whole, reliable, in that the memories of MPs can be checked against Hansard and against the increasingly authoritative reports of party meetings in a way that the recollections of British ministers, as yet, cannot. All the same, it is as well to beware of books which begin: 'For testing the association between two variables, we have primarily employed the Yule's Q test. of association. Thus, for testing the associatiobn between variables x and y, Yule's 0 = . . . Yule's 0 may well be a handy test for assessing to what extent being against the Common Market is associated with being over fifty years old or with being in favour of strict immigration control. The danger is that the researcher becomes absorbed in the minutiae of such tests and fails sufficiently to explore his main argument. You cannot see the wood for the Yule logs. That, I think, is what has happened here. Dr Norton's subject is dissent. What matters to him is how many MPs voted against a Bill. And his criterion of success for a Prime Minister is an absence of rebellion. He rarely considers why the Bill was put forward and whether it might not have been worth risking a measure of dissent to get the Bill through. The absence of any general overview gives the book a cockeyed look and in the end makes Dr Norton's thesis seem distinctly wobbly, as well as being unfair to Mr Heath (the reviewer writes as a specialist in that field). We are instructed to admire Churchill and Macmillan as party managers. They would never have got themselves into such a pickle; they would simply have given the younger rebels harmless jobs to keep them out of mischief and handed out a few peerages to the older ones who had grown peevish waiting for preferment. The Macmillan Cabinet did not dare to introduce a Bill to abolish resale price maintenance. Mr Heath did, despite huge opposition from government backbenchers. But was not Mr Heath right to abolish this gross restraint upon competition? Can anyone seriously claim that any other British government since the war has done anything nearly as effective to keep prices down? Similarly, without Mr Heath's tenacity, it is extremely dubious whether Britain would now be inside the EEC. If this was an end worth gaining, it was an end worth fighting for.
Mr Heath may be a rude and autocratic man. But did his manners really hinder him from achieving the results he sought? Did the style of his leadership detract from the substance? The rebellions over the Common Market were huge; they were bound to be; the imperial wing of the party would not die quietly. But the rebellions over the Industry Bill and the U-turn on the economy — actions which were in direct contravention of the policy on which the party had been elected —were puny. The rebellion against Mr Heath's' introduction of direct rule in Northern Ireland scarcely extended beyond the Ulster Unionists. Yet this toe was a drastic change from traditional Tory policy. Mr Heath can be blamed for these latter actions which provoked very little dissent, but he can scarcely be blamed for renewing sanctions against Rhodesia, which did provoke a lot of Tory dissent. By the time he inherited the policy of sanctions', Britain was enmeshed in a network of international obligations. To have openly breached that network would have given the Smith regime a delusory encouragement. On closer examination, the measures that some Tory MPs did care enough about to vote against were either accidentally dumped in Mr Heath's lap by history or were worth risking a few close shaves in the lobby for. The picture of a lonely autocrat continuously defying his party is vastly exaggerated. In the eyes of his party Mr Heath's only crime was that he lost.
It is absurd to claim that his rudeness was 'an important contributory cause' of his downfall. Sir Alec, after all, has lovely manners and very nearly won an election in which he was expected to be humiliated, instead of losing two elections which need never have been held at all. Yet he was sacked. Mr Heath made a hash of 1974 from beginning to end. He left his party at its lowest level of support in living memory, without the shreds of a policy, disheartened, purged of talent and riven with discord. Though he had possessed the courtesy of Beau Brummell and the gentleness and considerateness of Saint Francis of Assisi, he could not have survived.
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