I moved into lodgings in the constituency. Indeed, Dartford became my home in every sense. The families I lived with fussed over me and could not have been kinder, their natural good nature undoubtedly supplemented by the fact that they were ardent Tories. The Millers also took me under their wing. After evening meetings I would regularly go back to their house to unwind over a cup of coffee. While I was still working and living in Colchester I would stay at their house at weekends. It was a cheerful household in which everyone seemed to be determined to enjoy themselves after the worst of the wartime stringencies were over. We regularly went out to political and non-political functions, and the ladies made an extra effort to wear something smart. John Miller’s father — a widower — lived with the family and was a great friend to me: whenever there was a party he would send me a pink carnation as a buttonhole.
I also used to drive out to the neighbouring North Kent constituencies: the four Associations — Dartford, Bexley Heath (where Ted Heath was the candidate), Chislehurst (Pat Hornsby-Smith) and Gravesend (John Lowe) — worked closely together and had a joint President in Morris Wheeler. From time to time he would bring us all together at his large house, ‘Franks’, at Horton Kirby.
Of the four constituencies, Dartford at that time was by far the least winnable, and therefore doubtless in the eyes of its neighbours — though not Dartford’s — the least important. But there is always good political sense in linking safe or at least winnable constituencies on the one hand with hopeless cases on the other. If an active organization can be built up in the latter there is a good chance of drawing away your opponents’ party workers from the political territory you need to hold. This was one of the services which Central Office expected of us to help Ted Heath in the winnable seat of Bexley.
It was thus that I met Ted. He was already the candidate for Bexley, and Central Office asked me to speak in the constituency. By now Ted was an established figure. He had fought in the war, ending up as a Lieutenant-Colonel; his political experience went back to the late 1930s when he had supported an anti-Munich candidate in the Oxford by-election; and he had won the respect of Central Office and the four Associations. When we met I was struck by his crisp and logical approach — he always seemed to have a list of four aims, or five methods of attack. Though friendly with his constituency workers, he was always very much the man in charge, ‘the candidate’, or ‘the Member’, and this made him seem, even when at his most affable, somewhat aloof and alone.
Pat Hornsby-Smith, his next-door neighbour at Chislehurst, could not have been a greater contrast. She was a fiery, vivacious redhead and perhaps the star woman politician of the time. She had brought the Tory Conference to its feet with a rousing right-wing speech in 1946, and was always ready to lend a hand to other young colleagues: she spoke all around the country. She and I became great friends, and had long political talks at her informal supper parties.
Well before the 1950 election we were all conscious of a Conservative revival. This was less the result of fundamental rethinking within the Conservative Party than of a strong reaction both among Conservatives and in the country at large against the socialism of the Attlee Government. Aneurin Bevan’s description in July 1948 of Conservatives as ‘lower than vermin’ gave young Tories like me a great opportunity to demonstrate their allegiance in the long English tradition of ironic self-deprecation. We went around wearing ‘vermin’ badges — a little blue rat. A whole hierarchy was established, so that those who recruited ten new party members wore badges identifying them as ‘vile vermin’; if you recruited twenty you were ‘very vile vermin’. There was a Chief Rat, who lived somewhere in Twickenham.
Of Clement Attlee, however, I was an admirer. He was a serious man and a patriot. Quite contrary to the general tendency of politicians in the 1990s, he was all substance and no show. His was a genuinely radical and reforming government. The 1945 Labour manifesto was in fact a very left-wing document. That is clearer now than it was then. Straight after the war much of the talk of planning and state control echoed wartime rhetoric, and so its full implications were not grasped. In fact, it was a root and branch assault on business, capitalism and the market. It took as its essential intellectual assumption that ‘it is doubtful whether we have ever, except in war, used the whole of our productive capacity. This must be corrected.’ The state was regarded as uniquely competent to judge where resources should and should not be employed in the national interest. It was not solely or even primarily on social grounds that nationalization, controls and planning were advanced, but on economic grounds. Harmful monopolies were seen as occurring only in the private sector. So nationalization of iron and steel was justified on the argument that ‘only if public ownership replaces private monopoly can the industry become efficient’. Most radical of all, perhaps, was the Labour Party’s attitude to land, where it was made clear that compulsory purchase by local authorities was only the beginning of a wider programme, for ‘Labour believes in land nationalization and will work towards it.’
As regards the specific promises of the Labour manifesto, the Labour Government had been remarkably bold in giving them effect. No one could have questioned Labour’s record in implementing socialism. Rather, it was the economic consequences of socialism — devaluation and a return of inflation — which were the obvious targets for attack. Very heavy public spending had kept the standard rate of income tax almost at wartime levels — nine shillings in the pound. Far from being dismantled, wartime controls had if anything been extended — for example rationing was extended to bread in 1946 and even potatoes a year later. It was therefore possible to fight the 1950 election campaign on precisely the kind of issues which are most dangerous for a sitting government — and ones with which I personally felt most at ease — that is, a combination of high ideological themes with more down to earth ‘bread and butter’ matters.
The 1950 Conservative manifesto was a cleverly crafted document which combined a devastating indictment of socialism in theory and in practice with a prudent list of specific pledges to reverse it. It stressed the effects of inflation, the evidence of economic mismanagement and waste and bureaucracy. I was particularly pleased with its robust statement on foreign affairs, which noted:
Socialism abroad has been proved to be the weakest obstacle to communism and in many countries of Eastern Europe has gone down before it. We are not prepared to regard those ancient states and nations which have already fallen beneath the Soviet yoke as lost for ever.
But Conservatives were careful not to promise an immediate end to rationing, large-scale reversal of nationalization, or anything too controversial on social security or the Health Service; and there was a positively cloying reference to the trade union ‘movement’, which was described as ‘essential to the proper working of our economy and of our industrial life’. All of us knew that the three areas on which we were likely to be most vulnerable were unemployment (where the voters remembered the high unemployment of the thirties, but not that it had risen under the second Labour Government and fallen under the National Government), the Welfare State (which many people thought we wanted to dismantle) and alleged ‘war-mongering’ (where there was a danger that the Labour Government’s robust line would make Churchill’s Cold War rhetoric seem extreme rather than prescient, as it was). I found myself dealing with all these questions at public meetings in the course of the 1950 and 1951 campaigns.