Political Commentary
'Why Heath fell'
Patrick Cosgrave The fall of the Heath government was a traumatic experience for the Conservative Party; and it is far from clear that, even under new leadership, the longest surviving of all political parties has recovered from the experience. Nor is this a matter of the dissension—over policies and personalities alike—which racked the party from 1972 onwards. Even those few Tories who resolutely opposed Mr Heath from the moment he reversed the major policies on which he was elected in 1970 cannot say with complete confidence that it was simply because he betrayed his promise as well as his promises—or simply because he was a notoriously difficult and dictatorial man— that he fell from power in the way he did. And there are still Conservative members— not all, by any means, starry-eyed admirers of Mr Heath (though there were plenty of those)—who are convinced that his power was destroyed by extraneous forces, determined to bring down a Conservative government—any Conservative government—and replace it by a more pliable Socialist one. It is vital, therefore, for Conservatives to attempt to understand what went wrong; and so they have devoured the last three issues of the Sunday Times, in which Mr Stephen Fay and Mr Hugo Young have offered the first lengthy explanation.
Interest in the affair is not merely academic. Mrs Thatcher and Mr Prior would not have spoken the way they did the other weekend had it not been for the events of late 1973 and early 1974. And the whole approach of the Opposition to the business of winning the next election is deeply influenced, if not altogether dominated, by those events. Like most politicians the Tories are ruled by a reading of their own history. In the same way that the Labour Party's resistance to the idea of coalition grows directly from memories of Ramsay MacDonald, so the view of the Conservative Party of how it ought to present itself to the electorate next time, and of what it might or might not be able to do in office, is shaped and formed by the Heath experience. Naturally Mrs Thatcher is fighting to free her party from its historical memories, for she is an ambitious leader, and determined to set her own stamp on events.
For these reasons the very serious failures of the Sunday Times series need to be exposed and examined. When Mr Fay and Mr Young begin their third article, for example, by saying that 'every rule of party politics suggested that if Ted Heath called an election in January 1974 he would win' they are talking nonsense. As somebody who had opposed Mr Heath for some time, and was convinced that he would not win an election whenever he called it, I was amazed that he was wilful enough to foreshorten his time in office so gratuitously. His own instinct—manifested in his indecision throughout the critical period— not to go to the polls was a surer guide to the possibilities ahead than the urgings of Lord Carrington, Central Office and the great mass of Tory backbenchers—with such rare and intelligent exceptions as Mr Peter Tapsell—who wanted a fight. But there is no need to heed the instincts of a political commentator. Far from it being the case that every rule of politics suggested a Heath victory, the wisest and most intuitive of senior Conservatives feared the worst. Mr Whitelaw—as the Sunday Times mentions—feared an election. So did Lord Home. So did Mr Harold Macmillan. The remarkable thing is not that Mr Heath hesitated; it is that he went at all.
But before looking at what lay behind the instincts of Mr Macmillan, Lord Home and Mr Whitelaw, it is necessary to mention a curious lacuna in the Young-Fay account of events. They observe—rightly—that Lord Carrington and Lord Fraser (at Smith Square) were arguing for an election early on, and getting the legendary Conservative machine into trim. But they do not explore at all the causes of the unbelievable organisational fiasco that was the February campaign. There has never, in the long history of Tory electioneering, been so badly run a show as that; and the piercing cries of beaten candidates and shattered constituency parties after the event indicates how deeply the failure was felt. Certainly, the shambles constitutes more than adequate justification for the current shake-up at Smith Square.
But it is too easy to blame party professionals, however considerable their failure. It is too easy to ascribe—as Mr Young and Mr Fay do—the tactical mistakes made before and during the campaign to exhaustion, tired and strained though Mr Heath and his senior colleagues were by the time of the trial. It is too easy to blame Mr Whitelaw and those who felt like him for failing to force their views on the Prime Minister, and to leave it at that. It is, of course, fair to say—as Mr Young and Mr Fay do—that in the end Mr Heath had nobody to blame but himself. Our political system, after all, reserves one supreme power—the choice of an election date—to the Prime Minister, and if he gets it wrong he cannot complain about the consequences. Moreover, the Conservative Party accords its leader more authority than any comparable democratic party: if the machine fails it is right that he, and not those whom he appointed, should take the kicks. But it is, in my view, in Mr Heath's understanding of just how much power he had within his party, and the way in which he exploited it, that we begin to see the causes of his downfall.
It is agreed by friend and foe alike that no previous Conservative leader dominated his party as thoroughly as Mr Heath did. He did so, not by generating—or even seeking—affection; but by thorough and ruthless organisation. Interestingly, this was never more thorough nor more ruthless than after he had lost the February election; for the object of the operation throughout —from the uneasy days of the late 'sixties and the Powell rebellion—was to preserve Mr Heath, not to win elections.
What Mr Heath did so effectively to his party he sought to do to government—:take the politics out of it. In all the coming and going of those tense days of the fight with the miners one repeated assertion stands out clearly, the insistence of Mr Heath and his closest allies that he was not playing politics, but consulting the national interest. The seeds of this de-politicisation go back a long way. With (it is true) the benefit of hindsight we can now see that, before and in 1970, Mr Heath elevated the muchneeded reform of the governmental system to the status of major policy. Again, in the early days of the incomes policy an attempt was made to write a definition of the national inte'rest into the statute book, something so palpably impossible as to be well-nigh insane. And the extent to which the whole body of politics was castrated can be seen by the way in which, in 1973, Mr Heath marched his troops steadily down the same road to the same battle and the same defeat they had endured in 1972. 'If he doesn't want a confrontation', snorted a disgusted senior Tory early in 1974, 'then it's his business not to have one.'
However, once the election campaign itself came, politics could not be shut out. Elections are always strenuous, and often tiresome; but above all they are about politics. It was very clear, once the campaign began, that Mr Heath could not make up his mind whether he was asking for a doctor's mandate or simply a way out of his troubles. The confusion was instantly observed by the electorate, and they drew the obvious conclusions. But the mistake did not lie simply in an inability to pick the right slogan, or pen the right manifesto (the preparation of the 1974 manifesto was itself an unimaginably chaotic business). Of course, on the most simple level it is perfectly true to say that Mr Heath eventually lost because he too precipitately abandoned principles and policies that could have worked for ones which could not. But the epitaph of the 1970 government that should be engraved on every Tory heart does not consist simply of that conclusion. The real truth, the saddest memorial, is that Mr Heath misunderstood politics; and that he lacked skill.
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