When politics is in your blood, every circumstance seems to lead you back to it. Whether pondering Dicey, poring over the intricacies of tax law or discussing current issues with other members of the Inns of Court Conservative Society, political questions insisted on taking centre stage in my imagination. So when in December 1954 I heard that there was a vacancy for the Conservative candidature in Orpington — which of course, being next to my old constituency of Dartford, I knew, and which was not too far from London — I telephoned Central Office and asked to have my name put forward. I was interviewed and placed on the short-list. Sitting just outside the selection meeting with Denis, I heard Donald Sumner, the local candidate (and Association Chairman), advancing in his speech the decisive argument that in Orpington what they really needed was ‘a Member who really knows what is going on in the constituency — who knows the state of the roads in Locksbottom’. Denis and I roared with laughter. But Donald Sumner got the seat.
I was naturally disappointed by the decision, because Orpington would have been an ideal constituency for me. It seemed extremely unlikely now that a similarly suitable seat would become available before what looked liked an increasingly imminent general election. So I wrote to John Hare to say that I would now ‘continue at the Bar with no further thought of a parliamentary career for many years’. Knowing me better than I knew myself perhaps, he wrote back urging me at least to reconsider if a winnable seat in Kent became available. But I was adamant, though I made it clear that I would always be available to speak in constituencies and would of course be active in the general election campaign.
Although I was in general a loyal Conservative, I had felt for some time that the Government could have moved further and faster in dismantling socialism and installing free-enterprise policies. But it had not been easy for them to persuade popular opinion — or indeed themselves — that a somewhat stronger brew would be palatable. In fact, by 1955 a good deal of modest progress had been made as regards the removal of controls and, even more modestly, returning nationalized industries to the private sector. The rationing of food had finally been brought to an end. Large steps had been taken towards restoring the convertibility of the currency. Iron and steel nationalization had been halted and a start made in selling road haulage. Above all, the proportion of GNP taken by the state had been reduced steadily in the years from 1951. And there was one development of great importance for the future: the breaking of the BBC’s monopoly of broadcasting and the beginning of commercial television.
SUEZ AND AFTER
Conservative thinking about policy matters was also becoming more self-confident and more radical. This can be illustrated by a comparison between the two most influential publications produced by the Party over these years — One Nation (October 1950) and Change is our Ally (May 1954). Both were written by an overlapping group of remarkably gifted young Members of Parliament, including Enoch Powell, Angus Maude, Robert Carr and (One Nation only) Ted Heath and Iain Macleod. Admittedly, One Nation dealt with social policy which, particularly at a time when it was clear that a Conservative government would have to rein back on public expenditure, was a tricky topic. But still the relative blandness of that document — which emphasized (soundly enough, of course) Conservative commitment to a ‘safety net’ of benefits securing a living standard below which none must fall, and to Anthony Eden’s notion of the strengthening of the weak rather than the weakening of the strong — suggested a defensive exercise and indeed a defensive mentality.
Change is our Ally is a far more exciting document which, when I re-read it in the late 1980s, I found to contain very much the same analysis as that we had adopted since I became Party Leader. It began by tracing the growth of collectivism in the British economy between the wars. It then boldly attacked the notion that the planning of the Second World War economy could appropriately be extended into peacetime. It even pointed out — what everyone knew to be true, but what for years after the war went largely unsaid — that the wartime system of planning had been inefficient, wasteful and bureaucratic, however necessary in the emergency the nation faced at the time. The follies and absurdities of the economic plan, with its detailed predictions and quantified targets, were further exposed by retrospective comparisons between the assumptions made in Lord Beveridge’s unofficial study Full Employment in a Free Society, published in 1944, and the situation a decade later. It was all admirably commonsensical. What the authors of Change is our Ally, and indeed those of the following year’s Conservative manifesto, did not do — and I certainly claim no credit for thinking at the time that they should have done — was to propose the root and branch dismantling of collectivism in industry or fundamental reform in the Welfare State. But in the mid–1950s the Conservative Party was at least playing with a consistent free market analysis which would, in due course and given the opportunities of government, have led to free market policies. This, however, was not how matters were to develop.
In April 1955 Churchill resigned as Prime Minister to be succeeded by Anthony Eden, and there was in quick succession a snap general election, a new Conservative Government, the débâcle of Suez and the arrival at No. 10 of Harold Macmillan, the wizard of change.
During the general election campaign of May 1955 I spoke in a number of constituencies. But for me it was generally a dull affair. Once you have been a candidate everything else palls. Moreover, there was very little doubt of the outcome on this occasion. Sure enough, the Conservatives won an overall majority of fifty-eight. But the Eden administration’s political honeymoon turned out to be a short one. It quickly appeared that Rab Butler’s pre-election Budget had been too loose, and there followed a much tighter emergency Budget in October, which badly damaged Butler’s reputation — he was replaced as Chancellor by Harold Macmillan six months later — and seriously dented the Government’s. But it was, of course, to be foreign affairs which would be Eden’s real undoing.
The background to the Suez crisis of July to November 1956 has been much discussed. At the time the general feeling, at least among Conservatives, was that Britain was a great power which should not be pushed around by Nasser’s Egypt and that the latter needed to be taught a lesson, not least pour encourager les autres. Many of the details, for example the degree of collusion between Britain and France on the one hand and Israel on the other, were not available to the wider public at the time. To us, therefore, it appeared almost incomprehensible that first Anthony Nutting and then my old friend Edward Boyle should resign from the Government in protest at the intervention. Now their actions are more understandable, though even all these years later I could not endorse them.
The balance of interest and principle in the Suez affair is not a simple one. I had no qualms about Britain’s right to respond to Nasser’s illegal seizure of an international waterway — if only action had been taken quickly and decisively. Over the summer, however, we were outmanoeuvred by a clever dictator into a position where our interests could only be protected by bending our legal principles. Among the many reasons for criticizing the Anglo-French-Israeli collusion is that it was bound to tarnish our case when it became known, as it assuredly would and did. At the same time, Suez was the last occasion when the European powers might have withstood and brought down a Third World dictator who had shown no interest in international agreements, except where he could profit from them. Nasser’s victory at Suez had among its fruits the overthrow of the pro-Western regime in Iraq, the Egyptian occupation of the Yemen, and the encirclement of Israel which led to the Six Day War — and the bills were still coming in when I left office.