Edward Heath has said that were he to begin his political career again he would not join the Conservative party. He did not say why, but as I hold the same view, I shall try to explain.
I joined the party because I had nothing else to do. I had left Shrewsbury School and was waiting to be called up. I hung around my parents' house in Swiss Cottage and went to the pictures, twice a day. I must have expressed an interest in politics, for my mother saw to it that I joined the Hampstead Young Conservatives ("Such nice girls") which met in College Crescent every Tuesday.
My father and mother were Conservatives. Father had risen from the Bristol respectable working class to become a Harley Street neurologist. A scholarship boy, his political views had remained those of his Redland-based family. My mother was born in a labourer's cottage in Shropshire, one of six children of a church-going family. In those days members of the church voted Tory; the Welsh underclass were methodists and voted Liberal. In Swiss Cottage we took the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Express. I must have been weaned on John Junor.
In those days the Young Conservatives numbered 250,000; the foot-soldiers of the counter-revolution. Once a year we were visited by Henry Brooke, MP for Hampstead, a speaker of much tedium. At that time I admired Bob Boothby, but that was long before I learnt of his affair with Lady Dorothy.
It was not until I reached Oxford and met Michael Heseltine that I began to take politics seriously. His background was like mine: first generation public school and Oxford. We both wanted a political career. But what party should we join? The Liberals were strong in Oxford and carried a powerful Union vote, but it seemed at the time almost impossible to become a Liberal MP. There was nothing in our backgrounds that made us sympathetic to Attlee's Labour party. That left the Tories who, in Oxford, divided between the nobs (youths with floppy blond hair who spent their time buggering or beagling) and the middle classes with whom we identified. The nobs were reactionaries, worshipping at the shrine of Sir Waldron Smithers; we, on the other hand, were supporters of Rab Butler, Harold Macmillan and the One Nation Group.
There was no road to Damascus, no intellectual conversion. We were Tories of the moderate kind, and when I was first elected for Rochester in 1959, and Michael for Tavistock in 1966, we held to our original views. In those days the party was Harold Macmillan's, who owed his advancement to Churchill, as in turn did Eden, and later, Ted Heath. The party had accepted the Beveridge report and the need for full employment. It began on the road which would lead Heath to join Europe in 1973. We were internationalists and in favour of a marginal redistribution of wealth. I cannot speak for Michael, but I certainly never changed my outlook during 31 years at Westminster, representing first Rochester and then Aldershot.
In my years as a Tory MP I noticed with growing alarm the advance of the Tory Right. There was an undercurrent of obscurantism over Europe and "the wind of change." Macmillan was hated by a minority of his party who considered him "pink." Heath's sexuality was always being called into question by the estate agents who began to make up the majority of the parliamentary party. Under Margaret Thatcher, a Manchester Liberal whose intellectual attitude consisted of something borrowed, Milton Friedman, and nothing blue, stamped her mark upon the Tory party. Compassion became a dirty word, and she was fanatically anti-German. It was not long before she became what the Welsh call "funny" and was finally deposed by her cabinet to universal relief.
It was left to John Major to ride the whirlwind. A decent man, incapable of leadership, he faced a revolt from the Eurosceptics in the party. He made a silly mistake in putting his leadership on the line, thus permitting the Faustian John Redwood to poll some 80 votes, and giving the country the impression of a party divided. Major won in 1992 because he was not Thatcher; he lost in 1997 because he had to defend 18 years of Tory rule. I retired from parliament in 1997, which was just as well. I could not have borne a rump of 165 Tories ("the youngest are the worst"-Heseltine) who ignored the claims of Ken Clarke to lead the party in favour of a colourless 36-year-old right-winger, whose attitude towards Europe was less than enthusiastic.
Since 1959 the wheel has come full circle. What was an internationalist party has become a nationalist one. The middle ground on which elections are won and lost has been surrendered to Tony Blair. According to the latest polls, only 24 per cent of the electorate support the Tories and only 2 per cent back William Hague. Not since 1905-06 have we been in such a lamentable position.
Macmillan told the newly elected in 1959 that the task of the MP was to filter out the unpleasant views of our constituents; today, thanks to Margaret, the Tory MP is expected to amplify them. Hague's decision to extend the franchise to elect the party leader beyond the 1922 Committee to include any Tom, Dick or Harry prepared to pay ?15 to become a member of his local association is populist and self-serving. The rank and file invariably support the leader of the day and, given defeat at the election in 2002, Hague will need all the help he can get.
Friends who are still in the House tell me how much I would hate it, had not sickness compelled my retirement. Little wonder that Michael never turns up, and Ken Clarke is conspicuously absent. I am now 67. I shall remain a member of Tory Mainstream and the Conservative Group for Europe, but were I 20 years old, sitting on the staircase at Pembroke College, the Tory party would not be for me. The trouble is I could not join New Labour, and the Lib-Dems seem futile. Perhaps I would eschew politics, join Merrill Lynch and make money.
