First Confession Read online

  Third, political leaders have ceased to be as brave as they might in speaking up for what seems to them to be the public good and the national interest. Worrying that their political authority is too fragile to enable them to do this, they conspire to make it more fragile still. This should be one of the lessons that we take – all of us for example who supported the campaign to keep Britain in the European Union – from the Brexit vote. Nigel Farage was turned into King Kong because he was not actively confronted over every fabrication and half-truth over the years of his rise. The right wing of the Conservative Party was allowed to peddle its illusions and delusions about Britain’s future with who knows what consequences.

  What are the qualities that a leader requires to be successful? Are there any lessons to be learned from Farage and Trump, even discounting campaign flirtations with dangerously extreme populism? In the next chapter I will consider the three leaders, all very different, for whom I worked directly, and try to understand what can be learned from them about practical political philosophy and about governing in a democracy.

  6

  Leadership: Heath, Thatcher, Major

  If the highest aim of a captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever.

  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica

  The great man of the age is the one who can put into words the will of his age, tell his age what its will is, and accomplish it … he actualizes his age.

  Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1820)

  I worked closely for the first three leaders of the Conservative Party who were, like me, middle class and, indeed, from towards the bottom end of that complicated social classification. They all went – Heath, Thatcher, Major – to state schools. Before Heath no post-war Conservative leader could possibly describe himself in any sense as middle class, let alone as a scholarship boy or girl or an example of social mobility. Harold Macmillan might demur in his thespian way, occasionally describing himself as though he was ‘in trade’. What he meant was that he was from a family of distinguished publishers.

  This was one of the charming affectations of the Etonian, Grenadier husband of the daughter of the 9th Duke of Devonshire. Talking late with whisky after dinner one night to a small group of Balliol undergraduates, he told us that when he had been interviewed for the scholarship exam to the college, the only question he had been asked was where he had his boots made. We looked around the room at one another’s knockabout shoes and Hush Puppies. Edward Heath’s father was certainly ‘in trade’. When my wife was staying with school friends at their holiday home in Broadstairs in the 1950s and there was any household problem – a blocked lavatory, a window that would not open – the family would contact Ted Heath’s father, who ran a successful small building and maintenance firm. He was by all accounts charming, affable and very proud of his clever son. Ted’s mother was a maid, presumably of the sort known to dukes’ daughters. Heath won a county scholarship from the local grammar school to the same Oxford College that Macmillan had attended long before and where I followed. Margaret Thatcher came from a similar social background. While Heath earned the nickname ‘Grocer’, presumably because of his successful battle to abolish retail price maintenance, she was a real grocer’s daughter, from Grantham in Lincolnshire, an upbringing often used by her to define her identity as a no-nonsense advocate of simple household economics – pennies in, pennies out. Like Heath, she went from a local grammar school to Oxford – Somerville College. John Major came from a very different, rather down-at-heel background, in Brixton with an elderly father who had been a music hall performer before running a declining garden ornaments business. He left school at sixteen and was turned down for his first job as a bus conductor because he was too tall. Through a correspondence course in banking, he eventually found a job in the Standard Chartered Bank. I daresay you could have got long odds from Ladbroke’s in Brixton back in the 1960s on him becoming the youngest and one of the longest-serving Conservative Prime Ministers of the twentieth century. These were my three Conservative leaders and not a grandee among them. Not one of them was groomed for leadership in the chapel or on the sports field of one of our great public schools or in the drawing rooms of a country mansion, though Heath did wartime military service, rising to be a regimental adjutant in the Royal Artillery.

  What lessons about leadership did I take from working for this trio, and how much do leaders change or shape their time? Views differ on this. Marx, who regarded Napoleon as a ‘grotesque’ mediocrity provided with a hero’s role by the class struggle in France, believed that while men (or women) might make their own history they did not do so in circumstances chosen by themselves. Bismarck, who, had he lived a century earlier, would probably have achieved little, was close to Marx, arguing that great leadership was really about ‘listening to the rustle of God’s cloak’ and ‘seizing the hem as He passed across the stage of history’. The size of the stage – think of Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore – affects the scale of what someone can achieve, as do the circumstances which a leader confronts. But whether you believe that women and men can change history, or that they simply navigate its tides, there is a huge appetite for ransacking the lives of the famous to discover how they accomplished what they did and whether there are formulae that others can usefully apply. The counters of bookshops in airport terminals are piled high with books on the subject of leadership which appear to offer a swift passage to the boardroom for all aspiring business-class travellers if only they follow the example of this or that baseball coach or hero of antiquity. Alexander the Great’s Ten Tips for Conquering the World, or alternatively becoming global vice-president of marketing, are thrust forward at every opportunity.

  The military historian John Keegan’s book The Mask of Command: A Study of Generalship had some sage thoughts on how Alexander himself and other generals built success. Some of what Keegan wrote would resonate with contemporary authors of books on leadership, like the football manager Alex Ferguson and the philanthropist and businessman Michael Moritz, who have together written one of the better books in this genre. Keegan would talk down the importance of the more heroic virtues in a nuclear, democratic age without entirely dismissing the value of some brave and muscular assets.

  The two principal pieces of advice I would draw out from, and for, politics are simple: first, to know what you want to do and why you want to do it; and, second, to explain it clearly, preferably in ways that are both understandable and motivating. How many contemporary leaders would have the clarity of mind and expression of the great Duke of Wellington, especially if they had to write out their orders sitting on a horse with shells whistling overhead and exploding all around? Better make it clear that the Coldstream Guards are to go immediately to Hougoumont. In addition, leaders who can weave their aims into a story that connects with people’s experiences, hopes and fears (while grabbing on to the hem of God’s passing cloak) have a considerable gift; it is close to that ability to speak to and for one’s own times about which Hegel wrote. These days this is usually called providing a political narrative. The person in my experience who did this best was Bill Clinton. He would begin his remarks, for instance, with an anecdote about visiting a village in India where electricity had just been installed. He had met there someone who had recently acquired a laptop. He would then muse on the digital divide between countries and people, rich and poor. Concluding, he would offer some smart policy wonkery that could play a part in bridging this division. It was all done humorously, with an easy authority, and it persuaded people.

  A leader who had a similar gift was Helmut Kohl, one of the greatest politicians of the second half of the twentieth century. He benefited from the fact that he was consistently underrated (not least by Margaret Thatcher, who could never have comprehended a work ethic which incorporated so much of what she would have regarded as self-indulgence). Kohl once recounted to me a story which for him encapsulated what would happen in Central and Eastern Europe as communist autocrac
y crumbled like (he said) an old cheese. He had been visited by a senior communist Polish minister just before Pope John Paul II visited his native country. The minister was explaining the security measures taken to prevent euphoria for the Polish Pope dominating the day. He described the number of the police guarding the routes of the papal journey. ‘What,’ Kohl said to the minister, ‘do the policemen do at the end of the day?’ ‘They go home,’ said the minister, ‘and have their supper.’ ‘Who cooks their supper?’ asked Kohl. ‘Their wives of course,’ replied the minister. ‘And then I suppose they go to bed with their wives.’ ‘Yes,’ said the minister. ‘Are those the same wives who were kneeling in the streets as the Pope passed by earlier in the day?’ Kohl had an extraordinary instinct for the spirit of the times. When the possibility of reunification of Germany came, he acted decisively and generously, while others muttered, criticized and tried to play the accountant. Kohl was a great leader, who like some others toppled over when he rather casually assumed that rules were made for others, in his case those regarding party financing.

  The best man I ever worked for, and the finest natural leader, was Peter Carrington. I spent two years as his Political Secretary when he was chairman of the Conservative Party, a job he cordially disliked. Working for him was incomparably the best part of my education, not just about public service, but about how to behave in any position of responsibility. Intelligent, drily witty, self-disciplined, kind, beautifully mannered – all those qualities were still on show years after he had left behind the Foreign Secretaryship and was cantering serenely through his nineties. I recall long and very fast drives in his Jensen through the countryside to some cheerless political meeting (warm white wine, Coronation chicken and a political homily) and his first call when our cavalcade made it home to the accompanying police bodyguards to thank them for their help. He was the best delegator (along with Douglas Hurd) for whom I have worked. They both had the intellectual self-confidence to delegate, were prepared to give the credit (even publicly) when things went right and to take the blame when things went wrong, even when it was not their fault. Consequently, those who worked for them tried very hard to make sure that things did not go off the rails.

  Some readers of this book might, I imagine, assume that I would want to be indulgent towards Ted Heath and his memory and record. He was a middle-class scholarship boy from Balliol like me. His journey there for the first time in a Hillman Minx with his loving and proud parents reminds me of my own arrival at the college with my parents, like Heath the first in my family to go to university. There was then his perceived position – though I am not entirely sure that this is accurate when you look at his whole career – on the left of the Conservative Party, where I have always found my own perch.

  I must also take account of the fact that he made me the Director of the Conservative Party’s Research Department when I was just over thirty. Finally, the great cause of Heath’s life – membership of the European Union – has been of greater importance to me than any other political issue; now bedraggled and fallen in the dust, it always exemplified for me the sense of international co-operation which had seemed to be snuffed out in the West for much of the first grim part of the twentieth century. I have always believed that membership of the EU helped to accommodate the fact that one can be a patriotic British citizen while recognizing the opportunities, obligations and challenges we all have as citizens of the world.

  All that is true. But I came to think of him as too often selfish, tiresome and even sometimes boorish: a collection of gifts which did not include as many as are usually important to a successful political leader. Chivalry was certainly not his strongest suit. Perhaps I would have liked him more and better if some of the virtues on show for the first sixty years of his life had been on more public display later. The penultimate paragraph in Philip Ziegler’s clear-eyed but on the whole complimentary authorized biography of Heath notes that ‘he was a great man, but his blemishes, though by far less considerable, were quite as conspicuous as his virtues, and it is too often by his blemishes that he is remembered.’

  Any Balliol man is bound to wonder why Heath made it to 10 Downing Street, but not his Balliol contemporaries Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins, both like him presidents of the college Junior Common Room. They had at least as broad a hinterland as the musician and sailor Edward Heath: in Healey’s case, languages, literature and music; in Jenkins’s, history and a well-earned reputation as a serious biographer. It is fair to say that they also had one advantage denied to Heath. They were both married. Their wives were intelligent, good-looking women with, in due course, considerable careers of their own. This must have helped to keep Healey and Jenkins in touch with the world and, if my own marriage is typical, assured them of the sort of advice about their appearance, behaviour and opinions which they might not have received or been keen to receive from others.

  Moreover, Healey and Jenkins had some political gifts that were not in Heath’s kitbag. They both spoke very well – Healey with the old bruiser’s gift for the joke that kills, Jenkins showing the value of a nicely turned sentence in advancing a cool and rational argument. Healey’s rough allure was probably an acquired taste. Certainly it was one I came to appreciate myself – that extraordinary mixture he had of Renaissance and Rabelais. Jenkins, despite a slightly patronizing manner, was capable of charming the birds from the trees, but probably not of attracting a following in a public bar of beer swillers. He once wrote me a letter out of the blue about something I had written which made me go pink with embarrassed vanity as I read it. It was probably a misfortune that he had the dangerous capacity to attract super-loyal disciples. Acolyte entrapment invariably threatens to frustrate the careers of the ambitious.

  Ted Heath of course – this is much to his credit – had true friends, but not I think any starry-eyed acolytes. His friends were dog-loyal, often in the face of rather than because of his behaviour and of the way he displayed loyalty to them. Another man would have given Francis Pym the credit he deserved for determinedly pressing the case for allowing a free vote on the initial EU legislation. Another might have stood aside earlier to let Whitelaw or Prior contest the party leadership in 1975. His best and closest friends in politics would, I suspect, have sympathized mightily with what Ziegler wrote at the end of his biography. Hurd, Prior, Whitelaw, Carrington – they all, and others, crawled over broken glass for him. They thought him, rightly, a man of the greatest integrity, with an unshakeable commitment to public service. But I can imagine them now rolling their eyes – small, rather despairing smiles playing across their lips – as they sought to explain away another of Ted’s gallery of bloody-minded solecisms. The fact that these men were his friends speaks to his credit; whether the way he treated those closest to him does so is more doubtful.

  In comparison with Healey and Jenkins, Heath – with what Douglas Hurd has called his Easter Island face – was all too often solitary, gruff, angular and strangely inarticulate (except perhaps in his later and even ruder years), revelling in his own charmlessness and also perhaps in the surprising extent to which others seemed to revel in it as well. My first encounter with Ted’s limited emotional intelligence (to be kind) came when I went with my fellow speech writer, the playwright Ronnie Millar, to Heath’s chambers in Albany, Piccadilly, to write a party-political broadcast for the leader to deliver on the radio. We were summoned for 10.30 on a Saturday morning. Heath appeared in a vast kimono-style dressing grown about an hour later, like a character from a Savoy opera. No apology, just a brusque ‘Right, care and compassion this morning, I believe’, outlining the theme he wanted to address. At about one o’clock his housekeeper came in with a tray bearing a half-bottle of Chablis and a lobster salad. He began wolfing the meal down, eventually looking up over the napkin tucked into his kimono to ask, ‘Have you chaps eaten yet?’ ‘No,’ we replied, enthusiasm mounting. ‘You must be jolly hungry then,’ he replied, munching and sipping on. Was this a joke? If it was, as jokes go I would not
have given it a pass. All of us remembered similar behaviour over the years, sometimes accompanied by much shoulder-shaking laughter. All who ever worked for her know that Margaret Thatcher would, in any similar circumstances, have had to be dragged back from the kitchen, where she would have been making sandwiches whether you wanted them or not.

  Now it may be that this sort of thing does not matter. We are only talking about food. Perhaps such small kindnesses have no part in leadership. The great man or woman has too much important strategic thinking to do to bother about social niceties with the staff. I simply do not buy this. Looking after those around you, noticing them, seeming to care about them (or actually doing so), treating them as far as possible as equally human if not as equals, is a fundamental aspect of leadership.

  What was it then – certainly not much in the way of lovability – that fired Heath (or others for that matter) into orbit, catching for a brief moment the rays of the sun before burning out in the infinite dark? Was it and is it simply luck? Was Ted Heath Prime Minister mainly because he was lucky? Did he subsequently fail simply because he was massively, disproportionately unlucky? How much did his inability to speak for and to the age matter?

  Heath’s career certainly bears the imprint of good fortune as he rose to the top, and then the luck turned dramatically. He had been a new MP with the ‘One Nation’ generation of young former soldiers like Iain Macleod and Enoch Powell. He was not as clever as them; he did not dazzle. But he made a career for himself in an arena where dazzling is not required, is even frowned upon: he became a government whip and moved up from one adjutant’s post to another, in the days when backbenchers were expected to be loyal and usually were. This was, one should not forget, a long time ago. He rapidly became Chief Whip, adept at counting the bodies and slipping the occasional warning in the ears of the potentially mutinous and an inducement or two in those of the ambitious. By the time of Suez, the most disastrous foreign-policy debacle in Britain until the Iraq War and the Brexit referendum, he was Chief Whip, doing the business for a beleaguered government and like Harold Macmillan avoiding blame for a disaster on which his personal views remained (probably necessarily) impenetrably opaque. There is no question that he had a good invasion and a good retreat, helping to keep the government and the parliamentary party together. Macmillan – ‘first in, first out’ – not surprisingly gave him afterwards ministerial jobs at the Ministry of Labour and then as Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s No. 2 at the Foreign Office.