At least Edward Heath has never been afraid to add
to the misery of the nation
FRANK JOHNSON
0 ne of the papers reported the other day that Sir Edward Heath will leave the Commons at the next election. At the time of writing, the report remains unconfirmed. We must hope that it is untrue. At this criti- cal juncture in our island story, the nation cannot afford to lose from Parliament the Rudest Living Englishman.
The juncture is critical because of the decline of British bad manners. Once they were our glory. My generation was brought up on stirring and inspiring stories about Evelyn Waugh. I am slightly too young to remember it, but in our darkest hour — May, 1940, 60 years ago this very month — his behaviour towards waiters, journalists and other defenceless servants must have inspired a generation. Nowadays, in contrast, one can hardly turn on the television without having to look at and listen to people being polite to one another. That is why viewers now hardly ever talk about Question Time, though apparently the programme still goes out weekly. Who wants to be subjected to, say, Mr Charles Kennedy being decent about asylum-seekers, answering his mild detrac- tors with courtesy? We do not pay our licence fees in order to be exposed to that kind of language in our own homes. If my address was Tunbridge Wells, I would write a stiff letter about it for publication in the Daily Telegraph. Sir Edward comes from a different, more heroic age. In those days our politicians were not afraid to be disagreeable.
I took him to lunch only once. It was a couple of years after Mrs Thatcher became prime minister. As soon as he arrived at the table, I offered him champagne. He grunt- ed, 'What's there to celebrate?' Magnifi- cent. He was all I had hoped for. All anec- dotes about Sir Edward are like that. He is never conventionally nice. He never lets people down.
I once asked Dr David Starkey to lunch at The Spectator. He had become famous by being rude to nearly everyone, especially his fellow panellists on that radio pro- gramme The Moral Maze. One of those Sunday-paper profiles had just described him as the rudest man in Britain. After our lunch, another guest, Mr Simon Hoggart, Guardian parliamentary sketchwriter and a Spectator television critic, complained to me, saying, 'I thought your friend Starkey behaved abominably.'
`What do you mean?' I replied, 'I thought he was perfectly charming.' `Exactly,' Mr Hoggart retorted. 'That's the point I'm making. You do not accept an invitation to lunch on the basis of a reputa- tion for being the rudest man in Britain only to be perfectly charming. It's sheer bad manners. Everyone else present wanted him to be rude. We could then go off and tell stories about his rudeness. No one wants to hear that the legendary David Starkey was perfectly charming.'
Mr Hoggart was of course correct. I remember that during the lunch Dr Starkey harrumphed with contempt and disbelief when I suggested that there was no evi- dence that a certain Tory politician was homosexual, but that was about the extent of his behaving in character.
Sir Edward is another matter. During the February 1974 election, a senior official of his Bexley Sidcup constituency association proudly told him, when he visited the con- stituency, that party workers had by now canvassed the entire constituency at least once. 'Then you'd better go back and can- vass the doubtful wards twice,' he replied. He was always able to sink to the occasion.
It must be emphasised that the constituen- cy official was senior. There is no evidence that Sir Edward has ever been rude to the weak, the junior or those who cannot answer back. In this a rude Briton differs from a rude American, still more from a rude Ger- man, though admittedly Evelyn Waugh was said to be rude to all classes. My observation of them suggests that rude Americans and I haven't worked for years thanks to paternity leave.' Germans tend to confine their rudeness to secretaries, doormen and so on. They are seldom rude to their equals. But Sir Edward spent more than a decade being rude to a prime minister. In a sense it all comes down to self-confidence. In the old days, British public figures were rude because, unlike today's, they did not think that they had to make themselves agreeable and acceptable to everyone. Certainly not to the media. In the Boer war, Lord Kitchener greeted the approach of some British war correspon- dents with a cry of, 'Out of my tent, you scum.' So different from the public relations of our own Mr Blair.
Not that good manners are proof of a lack of self-confidence. There are politicians to whom good manners come naturally — we think of, say, the late Lord Home or Mr John Major. But much of what now passes for good manners among politicians is lack of stomach for conflict. I cannot say whether Mr Blair's good manners arise naturally or are a sign of fear of a fight. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it is only good manners to assume the former. But there seems to be much 'anecdotal evidence' that in private as well as in public he tends to tell nearly everyone what they want to hear. Right-wing visitors to No. 10 are assured of his devotion to capitalism; left-wing visitors are assured that he is an egalitarian too. Everything is subsumed into everything else. We can imagine him assuring President Mugabe that, in a very real sense, Bob 'and I hope I can call you Bob' — Zimbab- we's land reform is very much like our coun- cil-house sales: a way of increasing owner- occupation. President Mugabe: 'Owner- occupation! I like that — especially the occupation.'
But nowadays Mr Mugabe's reception from Sir Edward would have been such as to lead to a severing of diplomatic rela- tiong. No British politician since Sir Edward has been as masterly as he was at conveying contempt. Whether the object of his scorn deserved it is another matter; most Conservatives now think he was wrong about most things. My point is to praise his uningratiating qualities, not his policies.
His political career, if it is drawing to its close, should inspire us all to be ruder to the deserving. I myself shall try harder to be so. I would wish my epitaph to be: fools did not suffer him gladly.
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