European dream that belonged to a different era
Edward Heath’s original vision of a truly unified community was doomed to fail, writes Michael McManus, who ran his private office
‘If Ted were alive,” Gyles Brandreth, the former Conservative MP and minister, told me over coffee last week, “the referendum result would kill him.” He didn’t mean it as a joke. Britain’s membership of the EU was, arguably, the last surviving legacy of Sir Edward Heath’s time as prime minister between 1970 and 1974 – and now it is in the process of being buried.
It may be hard to credit today, when some commentators like to characterise the whole Brexit campaign as a “blue-on-blue” fight, but in Sir Edward’s heyday, the Tories were markedly more pro-European than Labour. Yet as I have been researching a new book to mark the 100th anniversary of Ted Heath’s birth, I have been reminded that the seeds of Conservative divisions on Europe were sown a long time ago.
In his maiden speech as an MP, in June 1950, Heath had stoutly criticised Clement Attlee’s Labour government for its refusal to take part in the founding of the new Europe. A decade later, as Lord Privy Seal in Harold Macmillan’s Tory government, he took the UK to the brink of the European Economic Community, only to have President Charles de Gaulle say a resolute “non” to our accession.
Sir Edward’s proudest – and happiest – moment came on October 28 1971, when MPs voted by a majority of 112 to support a renewed application to join. For his modernising generation of Conservatives that came to the fore in the 1960s and 1970s, the EEC represented two things. First and foremost, it was a successful initiative to supplant war and fragmentation in western Europe with peace and prosperity. Secondly, it was a challenge to Britain, then dubbed the “sick man of Europe”, to pull its socks up.
Margaret Thatcher belonged to the same generation, and when she successfully challenged Heath for the party leadership in 1975, the EEC was a negligible factor. Her rhetoric on Europe in those days was scarcely distinguishable from his. The proEurope mood among Conservatives was at its apogee. She famously wore a “nine-flags” jumper, covering all the then EEC member states, to encourage voters to say Yes in the referendum later that same year.
By the time I joined the Conservative Party in 1987, however, we were in the baneful era of Jacques Delors, president of the European Commission between 1985 and 1995. That was when the Delor-ous clouds of “social Europe” loomed large and caused me – and many other Tories – to become a Euroagnostic. We regarded what we had started calling the European Community as a necessity, but liked it a lot less than we liked Europe itself (by which I meant Mann and Hugo, Beethoven and Schiller).
When I was working at the Department of Employment in the early 1990s, the now-rebranded EU seemed a perpetual, debilitating nuisance. Constantly, we were fending off directives on working hours, paperboys and what Douglas Hurd unforgettably termed the “nooks and crannies” of national life.
Then, in 1995, I was appointed to run the private office of Sir Edward, the epitome of pro-Europeanism. He was 79 and Father (longest-serving member) of the Commons. It almost went catastrophically wrong on day one.
Naively, I told him I thought it was splendid that prime minister John Major had negotiated an opt-out from the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty, because the EU had no legitimate business telling employers how to run their affairs. “Sometimes people need to be told what to do,” Sir Edward responded contemptuously.
That was the first time I experienced the famous Heath “brick wall”. I felt as though I had been transported to another era. He turned his back and walked away, shaking his head.
I survived that bruising start, but in my five years with him the subject of Europe was never far away. Venomous letters would arrive, usually accusing him of treachery to the Queen (whom he unquestioningly adored).
The most frequent allegation was that Sir Edward and his allies had “lied” by pretending the EEC was purely about trade. The principal evidence seemed to be a phrase he had used, asserting that with membership there would be “no erosion of essential national sovereignty”.
I decided to find out the truth. My parents had stored away a big envelope, stuffed full of all the materials from the 1975 referendum campaign. These showed there had been no “great lie”. The Britain in Europe brochure, for instance, delivered to every household in the land, dealt extensively with the political arguments: “Our trade, our jobs, our food, our defence, cannot be wholly within our own control. That is why the argument about sovereignty is a false one… The real test is how we can protect our own interests and exercise British influence in the world.”
And it wasn’t only nasty letters that arrived in Sir Edward’s office. Once a small bag containing 30 pieces of silver – the mark of Judas – was deposited. Effigies of Sir Edward were even burnt at the stake.
He ploughed on regardless, as he had done for 45 years in the Commons. I admired the thickness of his hide as he refused to flinch under this ferocious barrage and I gradually learnt to respect his enthusiasm for Europe. Even if he could not win me round to his point of view, he did persuade me of his integrity. He certainly was no traitor. Indeed, he was fiercely patriotic and, as anyone who heard him mangle a foreign language would attest, quintessentially English.
I grew to understand what had given birth to that dogged zeal in him for Europe. At its simplest, Sir Edward belonged to a different generation from mine. He had firsthand experience of a Nuremberg Nazi rally in 1937, of the Spanish Civil War in 1938, and of combat in the Second World War itself. His greatest fear was of a resurgence of nationalism in Europe and of another ruinous war. European unity was, for him, first and foremost, the necessary key to peace.
This was the predominant view within the Conservative Party from the mid-1950s until the mid-1980s, including most of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. After the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, however, she recognised a new reality and was fearful of a united Germany. But Sir Edward’s needle had got stuck.
He continued to stand proudly in a tradition that he himself (along with his heroes Winston Churchill and Harold Macmillan) had helped to found, but, sadly for him, the passage of time and the rise of Euroscepticism gradually left him stranded as the last great, isolated beacon of Tory pro-Europeanism. While he continued to advocate the deepening of our European links, Mrs Thatcher’s vision became one of widening. In the end, we got both deepening and widening; and it was the rapid influx of EU migrants from eastern and central Europe that proved decisive in the referendum.
Sir Edward’s refusal to adapt his views to palpably changed circumstances made him his own worst enemy – an old man in a hurry, still hoping to see in his lifetime a united Europe that would rival Russia, China, even the United States, on the international stage.
In early 2000, I was interviewed to be the prospective Tory candidate for the parliamentary seat of Watford. The selection committee asked me about the euro. I replied that the single currency was profoundly and dangerously flawed, politically and economically, and I wanted no part of it. I was selected.
Sir Edward was less than amused. Later that year, he sacked me, supposedly because of the dangers of us disagreeing publicly. We remained in occasional touch until, in 2003, I was a co-founder of Vote 2004, the cross-party campaign for a referendum on the proposed European Constitution. He regarded me as having crossed an invisible line, and we did not speak again before he died in July 2005.
If a referendum had been held a decade ago, would steam have been let out of the argument? Hindsight is wonderful thing, but now, a new Tory prime minister – Sir Edward’s seventh successor as party leader – must negotiate a new relationship with Europe. I can already sense a baleful, Heath-shaped incubus glowering over the entire process.
Edward Heath: A Singular Life by Michael McManus is published by Elliott & Thompson (£25). To order your copy for £20, call 0844 871 1514, or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
It was the first time I had experienced the famous Heath ‘brick wall’. He walked away