Political Commentary

Not yet in from the cold

Ferdinand Mount

Last Sunday Mrs. Barbara Cartland was 77, according to the Daily Telegraph, or 74, if you believe the Sunday Times. Mr David Hockney was 41, Mr Arthur Ashe was 35 and Mr Heath was 62. A week or so earlier, Mr Heath attended a reception given at New Zealand House for the touring Kiwi cricketers, and was asked by one of the younger tourists whether he was on the staff of New Zealand House. In between these two events, Mr Heath also made a speech at a place called Stocksbridge in support of the Conservative candidate in the Penistone by-election.

The exile has lasted nearly four years now. It is not quite over yet. Ted is not really in from the cold; for there is still no power to warm his hands at, only the dubious flickering shadow of power. Losing the leadership to a junior Cabinet minister, the mere token woman, was powerful enough. Worse still perhaps the daily agony of having nothing to do, the shock of being robbed of occupation at the height of your powers. For an exile like Enoch Powell, back-bench life offers the compensation of letting the mind rove freely over the political waterfront For Asquith, there were country house parties and golfing and flirting with Hons. For Lord Home there is the mayfly upon the Hirsel (or do you shoot Hirsels?) But for Ted Heath there is first and all the time an overwhelming sense of waste as the years slip by. The pleasures of thought and the pleasures of pleasure, even of music, cannot make up for the absence of the fierce and grand satisfaction of exercising power.

For that loss there can be no consolation to someone who is consumed by public life with an almost Napoleonic intensity — although Mr Heath does not see himself with the cold candour which Napoleon saw himself with: `je n'aime pas beaucoup les femmes, ni le jeu, enfin rien; je suis toutA-fait un etre politique.' What was it Napoleon disliked most about St. Helena — the damp winds, the governor's rudeness, the pain in his gut? Being mistaken for one of the officials at New Zealand House would certainly rank with such humiliations. But this is only one of the endless succession of pastimes with which Mr Heath has had to spin out his exile: patting the heads of teenage flautists, presenting the prize to the navigator of the first catamaran to round the Horn backwards, attending conferences of international windbags in the suffocating atmosphere of forgotten spas, sitting in the Great White Train signing his name over and over and over again . . . Is there to be four or five years more of that? No, there are some things too terrible to contemplate.

A decisive move had to be made. Mr Heath has been an outsider by circumstance not by nature. Indeed he is the only postwar Tory leader never to have shown the smallest glimmerings of rebellion before becoming leader. Heath is a good institutional man, a clubbable politician, not a solitary. He takes easily to the disciplines and cameraderie of life in the mess. How else could he have risen so quickly to become Chief Whip?

His declaration at Stocksbridge that he would campaign hard for the party was not painfully wrenched from him; rather the opposite, he was back in the old groove. Ditto with his sharp attack on Mr Callaghan's complacency. This was the old Heath who won the leadership by his 'abrasive' speeches in opposition. And naturally the Tories are delighted because they are all worried sick about how to destroy the Prime Minister's personal popularity. Surely, an elder statesman preaching moderation is just the man to put the boot in.

'I wish Mrs Thatcher and her colleagues every success.' That sentence caused a lot of headscratching. Some more sensitive Tory MPs felt that Mr Heath made it sound as if he was nothing to do with them. Those of us reared on the Women's Institute page of the Yeovil Edition of the Western Gazette however, found no difficulty in interpreting the passage. The tone is indeed familiar: 'our thanks are due to Mrs Thatcher and her colleagues for the excellent sandwiches.' Or 'Mesdames Thatcher, Oppenheim and their colleagues entertained us with an enthralling display of formation dancing. We wish them every success on their gala night at the Margadale Hall in Upton Wassail.' There is undoubtedly an element of unconscious patronage here which does not exclude a genuine loyalty to the Cause. For a proud man who was on the verge of the Cabinet twenty years ago it cannot be easy to enthuse when the inky new boys rise to become prefects, leaving aside the question of That Woman.

But That Woman is precisely the question. It is on the whole unprofitable to speculate on what job, if any, Mr Heath might be given in a future Tory government and what kind of trouble he would create if he got it. Roughly, all that needs to be said is he is not ruled out for any job except that of Chancellor and that what he might do when in office is entirely unpredictable. For the moment, what matters most is how Mr. Heath behaves during the election.

In some Tory quarters — including one or two not a million miles from Mrs Thatcher's office —there appears to be some concern that Mr Heath may blurt out some

thing, perhaps in reaction to a stray question at a campaign press conference, which will show that he is still poles apart from Mrs Thatcher. In fact, the Tories would then be shown to be worse split than before because, instead of being a lone discarded voice, Mr Heath will now be something close to an official spokesman.

His first Commons intervention since the reconciliation — a stubborn defence earlier this week of his own government's ill-fated decision to join the European currency snake in 1972 — was not exactly helpful to a Conservative Party which is trying hard to forget. It was Mr Callaghan who cast this particular fly so neatly; he will no doubt cast others. Mr Heath's obsession with the record of his own•government was visible throughout his Stocksbridge speech. When he insisted on the Conservative Party's 'need to show that it is broadly based and that its sole concern is the welfare of all our fellow citizens', he also claimed that 'this was the purpose of the government over which I presided and in which Mrs Thatcher and many of those now in the opposition front bench were ministers.' That must be taken as. both a reminder and a warning.

The corollary of this danger, it is said, is that having clasped Mr Heath so firmly to her bosom, Mrs Thatcher will be forced to trim to keep him quiet For fear of provoking him into some eve-of-poll gaffe, we are told, she will, perhaps only half consciously, begin to water down the hot stuff which is being lapped up by working class voters. Far from Mr Heath making his peace with Mrs Thatcher, it is she who will be forced to make her peace with him.

All this, I think, presupposes that Heathism is more solid a body of doctrine than it really is. Certainly, Mr Heath does believe in some inconvenient things, but he has believed in other things at other times and

he has believed in somewhat diluted and qualified versions of these things. The abidingly solid element in the equation is Mr

Heath himself. The two facts that everyone knows about him are that he was the last Tory leader and that he has not been cooperating with his successor. Now he says that he will co-operate with her, and most voters will expect the Tory Party to be more effective as a result.

We do not have to assume that he will like her any better or that he has necessarily swallowed any of his disagreements with her over policy. But then most people are not all that clear exactly what those dis agreements are. It is, after all, a bit con fusing to have the confrontationist of 1974 presented as the great conciliator and the man who in October four years ago reduced the Conservative Party to a `surburban rump' (Harold Macmillan's words) presented as the apostle of the Broad Base. All we know for sure is that she turfed him out; he sulked; now he has stopped sulking and has put his shoulder to the wheel, his hand to the plough and his knee to the Prime Minister's groin. Perhaps that is all we need to know.