Unexpected Triumph

OUTSIDE No. 10 Downing Street, a crowd of 1,500 Londoners waited expectantly behind lines of blue-suited bobbies. A blue Rover limousine braked to a stop; surging through the police lines, the crowd cheered. Edward ("Ted") Heath, 53, who normally masks his emotions, broke into a triumphant smile. Then, as the crowd fell silent, Britain's new Prime Minister spoke from the steps of 10 Downing Street. Invoking the liberal and unifying concept of Benjamin Disraeli, founder of the modern Conservative Party, Heath said: "To govern is to serve. Our purpose is not to divide but to unite, and where there are difficulties, to bring about reconciliation and to create one nation."

As is the British custom, moving vans arrived at No. 10 with almost indecent haste to cart away the household possessions of defeated Harold Wilson and his wife Mary. Shortly before Heath went in the front door, the Wilsons left swiftly through the back exit. Said Wilson: "She never thought of it as home." In fact, the Wilsons had no real home. Until they found new digs, Heath graciously offered them the use of Chequers, the prime ministerial weekend estate, 40 miles northwest of London.

In one of the great electoral upsets in modern British history, Ted Heath's underdog Conservatives had won a 43-seat margin over the greatly favored Labor Party. The outcome confounded bookmaker, poll taker and political pundit alike. A few days before the election, London's bookies, who are among the world's biggest odds makers, had been giving bets at 6 to 1 on Wilson's triumph. The Gallup and Marplan polls predicted that Labor would win a popular majority of as much as 8.7%, which would have resulted in a 150-seat majority in Commons. One opinion sampling showed that 67% of the population were convinced that Wilson would win. British sociologists wrote reasoned dissertations suggesting that Wilson had created an enduring Socialist majority, and many Britons went along with the idea.

Small Turnout

They were all wrong. When the very first election results trickled into London last week, the computers at once flashed the prediction of a Tory triumph. As the night wore on, district after district reported an average 5% swing to the Conservatives. The next day, as Heath drove to Buckingham Palace, kissed the hand of Queen Elizabeth II and accepted her commission to form a government, the British nation appeared stunned by what it had wrought. "Heath has done a Truman," declared the Guardian, recalling the former President's 1948 upset of Thomas E. Dewey.

What on earth had happened? For one thing, the mood of the country proved to be markedly different from the findings of most analysts. The Tory cause was aided by two fears that haunt Britain's lower and middle classes: the rising cost of living and the specter of racial tension, a theme vehemently exploited by Tory Rightist Enoch Powell (see box, page 21). But the most important factor was the drop in the electoral turnout, which was the lowest in postwar history; small turnouts almost invariably hurt Labor and favor the better-organized and more strongly motivated Tories.

One reason for the large stay-at-home count was the apathy induced by the pollsters' confident declarations that Wilson had the election in the bag. Said Deputy Tory Leader Reginald Maudling: "We have delivered a right and a left to Mr. Wilson and Dr. Gallup." The British press agreed. "We have all been the dupes of the polls," wrote the London Evening Standard's George Gale. Added the Evening News: "The polls will not have much impact for many years to come." Many pollsters admitted that they had failed to take sufficient note of the possibility of low turnout. Said Pollster Louis Harris: "There is just no excuse for us at all."

Harold Wilson would concur. A careful sampler of the public mood, he had based the greatest test of his political life on the polls' indications of a swing in British public opinion. Only one year ago, Wilson had been written off in British politics almost as completely as Lyndon Johnson had been in the U.S. Beset by a lagging economy, ridiculed for his handling of the comic Anguilla crisis, and denounced for backing down on his plans for union reform. Wilson seemed to have no future. His party trailed the Tories by as much as 26.8% in the opinion polls. But then he engineered an incredible comeback. His earlier draconian economic measures, while causing great complaints because of wage and price freezes, devaluation and crushing taxes, began to pay off. Britain's perennial balance-of-payments deficit turned into a healthy surplus that was twice as large as the amount promised by Chancellor of the Exchequer Roy Jenkins. Wilson then allowed some economic plums to drop to pleased Britons, including wage hikes and an end of the ban on carrying more than -L- 50 abroad. He shelved his controversial plan to reform Britain's squabbling unions.

Suddenly his political standing began to rise sharply. Since his five-year term would expire in May 1971, Wilson began to think about holding elections soon, while things were going well. When his ratings overtook the Tories' in the mid-May polls, he overcame the caution of some advisers, who suggested waiting until October. Gambling that the tide would continue to run in his favor, Wilson, who sought to become the first Prime Minister in 100 years to lead his party to three successive electoral triumphs, called the election for June. It is a month seldom considered for elections, since Britons are then normally preoccupied with the joys of early summer. This year the preoccupation promised to be especially intense because Britain's world-champion soccer team would be defending its title in Mexico City.

Wilson tried to make a virtue out ot Britain's relaxed mood. Apparently convinced that the country was moving toward a presidential system of image politics, he breezed through the countryside in search of maximum crowd exposure, a dependable showman who concentrated on radiating reassurance while ducking most of the issues. Somewhat slyly taking credit for the unusually fine June weather, Wilson would confide to listeners: "I have been trying to arrange for the sun to stay out for a few days."

For the austere Ted Heath, nothing seemed to go right. Ill at ease in crowds and bone-dry in manner, he made such an unfavorable impression among reporters who followed him that they began referring to him as "poor Ted Heath" while calculating the size of Wilson's victory. Late in the campaign, Heath made a painful effort to unbend a little, but even that sometimes backfired. When TV cameramen swarmed out of a campaign bus to snap Heath in the extraordinary act of kissing a child, a sudden downpour sent everyone running for cover. "If I had any doubts before," muttered one newsman, "now I know: Harold Wilson is God."

When Heath tried to generate some favorable publicity by going sailing in his yacht, he ran it aground. When reporters asked about the attractive woman he had taken along, Heath, who is Britain's first bachelor Prime Minister since Arthur Balfour in 1902, archly dismissed questions of a possible romance. "Absolute nonsense," said Heath. "She's a friend of the navigator's." When photographers asked him to pose drinking beer with the boys in the pub, Heath replied: "No, thanks. I've got whisky in the plane." Journalists found his electioneering style dreary compared with Wilson. "Covering Heath," complained one reporter, "is like covering El Salvador in the World Cup matches."

For all his unspectacular ways, however, Ted Heath had shrewdly anticipated an early election. Last January he called his Shadow Cabinet into a closed session at suburban Croydon's Selsdon Park Hotel, where he and his colleagues batted out a new party platform. At that time Heath, who is an excellent administrator, declared that the party organization should be geared up for a possible June election. It was. The Tories are nothing if not good managers and good disciplinarians. In every department of Abbey House, their central office in Westminster's Smith Square, methods and systems were tightened. Throughout the regions, new party managers were appointed, printing presses checked, lists of halls and booking arrangements updated, and local voluntary workers enlisted. Parliamentary candidates' lists were completed and biographies prepared for immediate distribution whenever an election would be announced. Thus, when Harold Wilson jumped to an early election date, the Conservative organization was far better prepared than his own party.

Freeze and Squeeze

Moreover, Ted Heath began to score with the issues. He took personal charge of the campaign, insisted that the party concentrate on prices and taxes. Some ranking Tories disagreed. Attacking Wilson on the economy, they argued, would be hitting him where he was strongest. Wilson was indeed making much of Britain's ability to pay its own way at last. On his forays into the countryside, he often began with a proud boast that Britain was no longer facing the world with cap in hand.

Doggedly, Heath kept to his own path, convinced that housewives were heeding his message. If Labor came back to power, he cried, its tax policies would guarantee more inflation. "We would have a 3-shilling loaf, a shilling bus fare and a shilling telephone call, and we would have to pay for them out of a 10-shilling pound," he declared. In Leicester, he evoked the specter of "the poor, the penniless and the housewives" facing across-the-board price boosts--milk up twopence a pint, jam up 8 pence a pound, sausage up 9 pence, coal up -L-2 10 shillings a ton.

Heath expanded the "shopping-basket campaign," as Tories now called it, to warn that the whole nation might again have trouble making ends meet. Wilson's "sunshine economy" could not last, he warned. If Labor was elected, there would be another "freeze and squeeze" on wages and profits. "That's life with Labor. Four years squeeze and four months sunshine," Heath told crowds. Not on speaking terms with his rival, he zeroed in on Harold Wilson's credibility. Time and again he appealed to "those who despise the slick trick, the easy promise" to turn the Labor rascals out. Heath even raised the fear that Wilson, who devalued the pound in 1967, might be forced to do so again.

Events seemed to justify Heath's doomsaying. The four-day national newspaper strike in early June and a slowdown by doctors unsettled the la bor scene. More important, the trade figures for May, made public only three days before the election, showed a sharp dip of $74 million, shaking voters' confidence in Wilson's assurances about the economy's strength.

In the campaign's closing week, the Harris poll showed Labor's winning mar gin declining from 7% to 2%, but the Gallup and Marplan polls both showed a continued rise in Labor's edge. Only one sampling, which was conducted by the Opinion Research Center poll, predicted a Tory victory -- but only by a bare margin of 1%. Heath shrugged off all the surveys, insisting that the To ries would win. "The only poll that counts is the one on June 18," he said.

Call to Dad On election night, Heath arrived early at the local Tory headquarters in his constituency of Bexley, in Kent. Shortly after 6, he began placing phone calls to Tory election agents around the coun- try. As he sipped his tea and spoke qui etly on the phone, some of the half a dozen friends in the room noticed Heath's eyes take on a sudden light.

The news from the constituencies was the first tip-off that he was on his way to a victory: the smooth Tory machine had turned out a very big vote.

By 6:30 p.m., Heath was smiling broadly and talking with enthusiasm. "That was the moment," a friend recalls. Someone started cautiously laying out half a dozen bottles of champagne. Four hours later, Heath was sitting in the bar of the Crook Log Hotel when television brought him the evening's first return: a 4% swing to the Tories in Guildford. Heath marched happily out of the bar and drove a mile to the town's Territorial Army drill hall, where the votes were being counted. Inside the hall, Bexley's mayor grabbed Heath's hand and pumped it in congratulation: a 7% swing to the Tories had just been announced. Suddenly Heath's grin --the one his critics have for so long derided as empty--assumed a pronounced confidence.

For the rest of the night and into the wee hours, Heath watched the returns with friends back at Bexley's Tory offices. His election agent produced a bottle of Glen Livet Scotch, and the party perked up. Shortly after 2 a.m., Heath phoned his 81-year-old father in Broadstairs, Kent. The old gentleman, his youngish wife Mary perched on his knee, was already celebrating. "Things seem to be going well," reported the son. Said the father: "Good luck. I hope it keeps going on like this."

It did. The Tories gained 75 seats for an overall parliamentary majority of 30. In the new House of Commons, they will have 330 seats v. 287 for the Laborites. Among the Conservative victors was Sir Winston Churchill's 29-year-old grandson and namesake, who won a seat at Stretford, Lancashire, in his second try for public office. Among the Laborite losers was the irrepressible George Brown, deputy party leader and former Foreign Secretary, who lost the Belper constituency he had held for 25 years. Another casualty was the tiny Liberal Party, which lost seven of its 13 seats in Parliament.

The victory was a personal triumph for Edward Richard George Heath, whose working-class background clashes sharply with the traditions of the blue-blood-dominated Conservative Party. The son of a master carpenter, Heath is a rarity among Tory Prime Ministers: a man who is not a product of one of Britain's select public schools. Heath did, however, attend Oxford's Balliol College, on an organ scholarship. Some acquaintances claim that they can still detect a trace of cockney in his acquired upper-class accent. "His vowels betray him," says a fellow Tory, who recalls that some party members would mimic Heath's peculiar accent behind his back.

Amateur Mayfair psychiatrists delight in speculating about the personality of the working-class boy who turned himself into the archetype of the perfect Tory gentleman: sleek, immaculately tailored, slightly haughty and terribly self-contained. He is, some Tories claim, simply too good to be true. One acquaintance traces Heath's transformation back to Balliol: "When Ted went to Oxford, it was during the terribly class-conscious Britain of the '30s. He knew at Oxford that if he wanted to get ahead, he'd have to adjust. Ted shucked his working-class accent, clothes and whole life style for that of the upper class. It was a conscious, cynical decision, and I think he regrets it today." Still, Heath never pulled up his roots; he not only kept in close touch with his family but never hesitated to take his new-found political friends down to his home in Kent.

Heath has difficulty in establishing warm and easy human relationships. Even his closest friends acknowledge that he is a distant man. Says one: "He's subordinated absolutely everything except old friendships to his career. He was unsure of himself at Oxford. He's be come even more uptight since he became his party's leader. He doesn't want to get indebted to anyone." One ranking Tory notes that he has never been invited to dine privately with Heath or even to have a drink with him. When friends have pointed out that being a bachelor could impede his political career, Heath has re plied: "A man who got married in order to be a better Prime Minister would be neither a good Prime Minister nor a good husband."

Common Market Mission "In his music," says a man who has watched Heath closely, "Ted experiences the emotional involvement he simply can't get in personal relationships."

Heath might have chosen a musical career if he had not gone off to war (he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the army). Although his organ playing has been more publicized, those who have heard him consider his piano playing more accomplished. He contributed toward the organ at Balliol College, and still likes to return to play it. Says one acquaintance: "I've seen Ted's eyes glaze when he's talking with even the most attractive woman. The only time he really lights up is when he's conversing with someone bright about music."

In 1950, Heath won a seat in the House of Commons by a mere 133 votes. A few years later, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan chose him as a junior minister and confidant because he felt that Heath knew more than anyone else about the party's affairs in Commons. During Britain's first unsuccessful negotiations to enter the Common Market, Heath led the delegation; later he became President of the Board of Trade, a Cabinet-level post. When Sir Alec Douglas-Home stepped aside as leader of the Opposition after his 1964 loss to Harold Wilson, Heath saw his opportunity. "Ted's camp left nothing to chance," said one Tory. "Everybody was canvassed--everybody. Nothing was left undone. They treated it like a war and they were determined to win." At the party conference in 1965, Heath was chosen leader in order to bolster the Tories' strength against Wilson's Laborites.

As Heath plunged into the task of forming his government, much of Britain and a good part of the outside world celebrated his victory. On the strength of his election, the British stock market made its largest one-day surge on record--a rise of 23.8 on the Financial Times index. The value of the pound climbed sharply. Congratulations flooded into No. 10. The Western Europeans were optimistic because they believed that Heath would press harder to bring Britain into the Common Market. The Australians were delighted because he had pledged that he would retain a defense force east of Suez, if only a token battalion or two in Malaysia and

Singapore. The Israelis were happy because they expect stronger support from the Tories, and the white regimes in southern Africa were jubilant because the Tories are committed to making a last try for a peace settlement with the Rhodesian rebels and to selling weapons to the South Africans.

Washington was hopeful that the change of government would restore the close cooperation of the U.S.-British "special relationship." Excited by the developing upset, President Nixon stayed up much of the election night following the returns. Momentarily forgetting the five-hour time difference, he put in a call to Ambassador Walter Annenberg, who was awakened in his London residence at 5:29 a.m. The President was chuckling over the plight of the British pollsters who had called the election wrong. Said Nixon: "Well, Walter, what a surprise!" Annenberg did his groggy best to make sense of the still incomplete election returns, but finally had to terminate the conversation with the apology that he had been up most of the night watching the race before he at last gave in to fatigue.

Political analysts will study the returns with great interest, if only because this is the first national election in which Britain's 18-year-olds have voted. Eighteen-to 24-year-olds, who had never previously voted in a general election, constitute fully 20% of the British electorate. While the 18-to 20-year-olds did not show any perceptible ideological bent, they did indicate a rather massive sense of noninvolvement in the political process. Out of 2.8 million in the under-21 bracket, 1,000,000 did not even bother to register.

Upper Crust

Within 48 hours after his victory, Heath announced the appointment of a 17-member Cabinet that will assume day-to-day control over Britain's affairs of state. For the most part, the men around Heath will be the quintessence of the Tory upper crust--prosperous, gregarious, hard-working and expert. The major appointments:

FOREIGN SECRETARY: Sir Alec DouglasHome, 66, former Prime Minister and one of the party's grand old men. Sir Alec has remained at the center of Tory policymaking since stepping down from leadership in 1965, and as Foreign Secretary will place heavy emphasis on re-establishing British prestige abroad.

HOME SECRETARY: Reginald Maudling, 53, the Tories' Deputy Leader for the past five years and a merchant banker. A veteran member of Tory Cabinets (former Colonial Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer), Maudling came close to beating Heath for party leadership in 1965, but is now his friend. A relaxed, easygoing man, he must cope with two of the toughest domestic problems, law-and-order and race.

CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER: Iain

Macleod, 56, a brainy career politician who has served as Heath's Shadow Chancellor and for the past three years has been head of the Tory task force charged with drafting tax reformed Highly able, Macleod takes on the punishing task of running the economy while seriously handicapped by arthritis. LORD CHANCELLOR: Quintin Hogg, 62, who becomes Britain's chief law officer and leader of the House of Lords. A political grandstander and heir to a peerage, Hogg renounced his coronet to run for Commons in 1963, but with his new post has accepted a life peerage.

MINISTER FOR SOCIAL SERVICES: Sir Keith

Joseph, 52, who is a hard-line right-winger of Powellite laissez-faire persuasion. Though his specialty is business, he has been switched to this sensitive field, where his declared intention to cut government spending severely will likely make him a controversial figure.

Ted Heath is not the man to charge in and start dismantling the Labor-built welfare state. But his Cabinet appointments indicate an appreciable rightward shift under Tory government: probably revamping of Britain's confiscatory income tax and more indirect taxes, less government participation in industry, some opening of government-owned sectors to private capital, belt-tightening in the social services, tougher attitudes on trade-union reform and law-and-order.

Criteria of Excellence

Heath's immediate foreign policy task will be the negotiations that start next week on Britain's application to join the Common Market. Among his domestic concerns, Heath will face the challenge of healing Britain's race problem while the racist oratory of Enoch Powell echoes in his ears. Some Britons believe that the country's race tension will subside as immigrants become more anglicized and bettereducated. Many sociologists are convinced, however, that the crisis will gather for the next decade or two as the sons of ill-educated colored immigrants graduate from British schools and start to compete with whites for higher-paying jobs. "The crux of the matter is whether we can provide jobs for those educated under the British system," says Heath. "The present immigrants have jobs now. But their children will expect something very much better than what their fathers have."

Heath betrays no illusions about the greatly diminished influence of his country in the world today, but he is disturbed by the lack of dynamism and sense of purpose in Britain's national life. "We had a similar problem in the '20s and '30s," he says. "It's a question of leadership. Even Winston couldn't change the situation at that time. You must somehow be able to exert a proper influence without the stimulus of crisis. Crises only produce panic." Heath believes that if Britain does not produce more men who are willing to lead the kind of country they live in today, it will pay dearly in lost reputation and self-respect. By avowing that he and his party can inspire such leaders, he has set the criteria by which his own leadership will be judged.

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