the heathman ‐ an interview with john campbell

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The Heathman ‐ aninterview with JohnCampbellAnthony Seldon aa Institute of Contemporary British HistoryPublished online: 25 Jun 2008.

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INTERVIEWS

The Heathman - An Interview withJohn Campbell

ANTHONY SELDON

In an earlier interview (Contemporary Record, Volume 1: Number 2) AnthonySeldon questioned John Campbell about his biographies of Lloyd George, F.E.Smith, Roy Jenkins and Aneurin Bevan. Here the subject of the interview isCampbell's latest biography on Ted Heath.

SELDON: HOW did you come to settle on Edward Heath?

CAMPBELL: I must give the usual answer that he was there. I had alreadywritten four political biographies. I was, I suppose, getting type-cast intopolitical biography. I needed another fairly commercial subject that Icould get a reasonable advance on. He was a big, interesting subject, butrelatively unknown with very little written about him. The publisherswere originally not interested unless I had papers or co-operation. I hadsuggested it to Cape at one point and they were not interested, but thensuddenly it did seem worth doing, even without co-operation, given thatno one else was doing him and hardly anyone else had written even aboutthe Heath government. The more I thought about it the more I must havecome to see it as an obvious and a worthwhile subject. I do not think that Imeant to write such a big book as I have done. It would perhaps have beenbetter to write a short interpretative book, rather than a big, heavyweightone. In some ways it was a bit too soon to write that. On the other hand itwas worth doing while all of his colleagues were still alive and able to talk.

SELDON: We talked, in our earlier interview about the earlier fourbiographies. What had you learnt from the writing of those that youapplied to Heath, or did you begin with a tabula rasai

Anthony Seldon, Institute of Contemporary British History. The interview took place on 24August 1993.

Contemporary Record , Vol. 7, No. 3, Winter 1993, pp. 578-593PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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THE HEATHMAN - AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN CAMPBELL 579

CAMPBELL: I begin every time thinking that I have done this before andthat I now know how to do it. I find that in practice each book is differentand they do not work out in the same way, so one ends up unpicking a lotof preconceptions about how one organises it. I also thought that - andthis point is more technical - this was the first book I started on a wordprocessor and I thought, ha ha!, I can do this one differently by sticking allof the bits, all the notes, together, and assembling it bit by bit, and it willall come together. I found that it did not work out like that!

SELDON: But you set out to write a longer, more profound, book than onJenkins?

CAMPBELL: Oh yes, very definitely. The Jenkins was a quick, one-yearcommission. It was always going to be short. Obviously Heath is still acurrently-active politician, but Jenkins, at that stage, was the leader ofthe SDP and was seriously bidding to be Prime Minister. It was a morefrankly sympathetic book. It was not quite a campaign biography,although it was made to seem like that as it came out just at the same timeas the 1983 general election. It was a better book than that, but it wasalways a short, sympathetic biography of a current politician, whereaswith Heath, even though still active, his prime ministership was 20 yearsago and it seemed like not exactly a historical work but certainlycontemporary history, something in the reasonably-distant past.

SELDON: I would now like to look at the actual construction of the book.How did you proceed? Did you begin with the early life or did youapproach all targets at the same time?

CAMPBELL: I tried several different approaches simultaneously and gotinto something of a mess. I normally do start at the beginning and workthrough. As I recall, one of the problems with this book was that I quicklydiscovered that I was taking too long on the early life and I must stop thisand get on to the heart of the book, so I did leave quite a lot of theresearch and came back to it later. I actually wrote it largely in chrono-logical order, though I left some bits that I got stuck with, and there aretwo thematic chapters in the middle of the Prime Ministership, 'ThePrime Minister and his Office' and 'The Prime Minister and his Party',which I got stuck on and came back to and wrote again at the end. Some ofthe other bits, on Northern Ireland and on the 1965 leadership election, Ialso came back to at the end. I was beginning to learn that if I was stuck onsomething it was really better to go on to something else, and if I cameback to that bit a year later I would find that the problem would haveevaporated.

SELDON: The book took you longer to write than any of your other fourbooks?

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580 CONTEMPORARY RECORD

CAMPBELL: I am not sure that it took any longer than F.E. Smith, actually.F.E. Smith took a very long time. I know it took longer to come outbecause the Jenkins book was conceived, commissioned and deliveredbetween the delivery and publication of Smith, so that must mean Smithwas delivered by 1981, so that is probably five years. With Heath I wasdoing other work at the same time. I edited a book on the Second WorldWar and I also edited a series of short biographies, which has sincepacked up, and I was also looking after the family. My wife is the mainbreadwinner, so I am the one who collects the children from school and isin charge during school holidays, so that I have not been working full-time on Heath, even though it is the principal thing that I have been doingover these six years.

SELDON: Since your Bevan was published in 1987, it has been yournumber one project. Did you suceed in conducting your research mostlyfirst?

CAMPBELL: Yes, I did. It has taken so long that I forget! I think I didlargely, but I also came to the point where I thought that it could go on forever and I must get started. I topped up quite a lot as I was writing towardsthe end, when it was really taking longer than it should have done and Iwas having to research bits of it as I went along just to get it finished, but Idid do most of the interviewing early on, which I now think was a clearmistake. If I was doing that sort of book again I might talk to a few closeassociates to get flavour first, but I think it would be more useful to go andtalk to people when I have already got a draft of the book there and Iknow precisely the questions that it would be useful to ask, rather thanthe general questions that I did ask. I could have got more precise andmore pointed anecdotes, I think, if I had done it that way round. Severalpeople said that I could go and talk to them again, but my experience ofinterviewing is that it is exceedingly time-consuming for the fairly sparseamount of new or interesting material that I got out of it. It might havebeen worth going back and asking a few additional questions, but I reallydid not have time, I just had to rush on and get the book done.

SELDON: Did you find that the use of the word processor, to which youreferred earlier, was actually a great benefit, or were you still using cardindexes?

CAMPBELL: I was still using pieces of paper, really. I spent a lot of timetrying to put it all on files in categories on disc so that I could assembleeach chapter. I would collect notes and store them in where I thought theywould come in my structure of chapters and then I hoped that I would just

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be able to slot the stuff into the narrative when I came to it, but it did notreally work like that, even when I had got the new material on machine. Ifound it more useful having it on paper and working from, not even a cardindex, but pieces of A4 paper, for the most part.

SELDON: The decision to allow roughly 300 pages up to 1970,300 pages upto 1974, the end of the Premiership, and then 200, was that a decision thatevolved, or was it taken in the beginning?

CAMPBELL: No, I think I would have to say that it evolved. I have anumber of embarrassing pieces of paper on which I planned out how longeach section should be and of course each section was then far longer thanI had planned. I think probably the proportions are as I imagined, exceptI suppose the final section grew as I went on longer. The story continuedto evolve. Obviously the Gulf War had not happened when I started thebook and that added length to the book as I went on; the fall of MrsThatcher and the succession of John Major changed it slightly. Thatsection perhaps got a bit bigger. When it came to editing it had ratherexpected the publishers to want more cutting of the final section, but infact they were really keen on the Thatcher period; they thought that theHeath-Thatcher relationship would sell the book, so they did not wantthat cut. I do not think that there was any one part of the book that was cutin particular. It was an even longer typescript when I delivered it, but itwas trimmed by cutting out detail all the way through, rather than anyparticular section.

SELDON: Which were the easiest parts to write, and why?

CAMPBELL: Probably the 1950s bits because they are a familiar, well-ploughed area, in which Heath's own contribution was relatively minor. Icould include almost everything there was to say about Heath, but againsta familiar background; there was not the problem of trying to organise anenormous quantity of material that there was with the prime minister-ship. The problem with a Prime Minister is that he is responsible foreverything. I had written previously about Bevan as Minister of Health orJenkins as Chancellor of the Exchequer, where I could concentrate on theparticular problems of that minister in that office. Writing about a PrimeMinister you have to cover everything, so it is necessarily a big book. Yetthere is still a lot that is not in it. I consciously did not go deeply intodefence policy and security: MI5; MI6. It is pretty thin on all sorts ofaspects of what happened in the Heath government, in spite of having alot of very general chapters. One could criticise the fact that I havechapters on Mrs Thatcher and education, Keith Joseph and the DHSS,which are not directly biographical, but they are part of the history of the

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Heath government and I felt that they were partly the story that ought tobe there. In themselves they are all quite briefly treated; Mrs Thatcherand education takes four pages. But they add up. In some ways, thosechapters were not hard to write, one was just writing a little essay aboutan aspect of the Heath government, researching as best I could almostentirely from existing secondary material, supplemented by some inter-views. I suppose what I found most difficult were the economic chapterswhich are central and most important, though that is not an area in whichI feel confident in my own judgments about monetarism and inflation. Icould only draw what I hope is a fair line between the various contendingpoints of view.

SELDON: On the Prime Ministerial section of the book you deal with onearea purely thematically on foreign policy, 'Special Relationships'. Whatwas your thinking behind that decision?

CAMPBELL: Just that it seemed the best way to do it. Most of the story ofthe government is economic policy and industrial relations, and that is thecontinuing story that develops from year to year. The foreign policy wasperfectly comprehensively contained in a chapter at the beginning. Theonly thing that is not there is some of the European story, the 1973Copenhagen summit and the Middle East war, which comes in with theoil crisis at the end. That was a bit awkward, but what got left out had togo in at the end. Many of my original chapters were conflated. I originallyhad 50 short chapters which came down to 30 longer ones, so some of mychapter headings have gone and others have been thrown together. It wasvery successfully done by the editor, rather against my protests, but therewas a fourth European chapter which was rather left out on its own -1 amnot quite sure where it came in in the end. I think it is probably in 'Oil andCoal'. You could not have all that going into the foreign policy chapter.Most of the foreign policy material went well at the beginning, even thethings that happened in 1972-73 went all right in to that chapter, I think.Heath's relationship with the Commonwealth, for instance, primarilycomes in the 1971 Commonwealth conference; but the 1973 conferencecould be dealt with at the same time because it did not really affect otherevents. I had got Rhodesia out of the way early; I do not think there was aprinciple in that, it just worked - at least I hope it worked. The reader cansee foreign policy as the background against which the domestic events ofthe government are played out in the foreground.

SELDON: The reliance on newspapers: did you trawl through all of TheTimes and then selectively into other newspapers?

CAMPBELL: Largely, yes. I principally used The Times, partly because it is

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certainly was very much more of a paper of record than any other, butalso because it has the index, which does make it easier as a starting-point. Ideally I would have spent more time trawling all the other papersas well. The other one I used pretty thoroughly was The Economist - leansee that I perhaps used The Times and The Economist too much andothers not enough, but I think that they were probably the two mostinfluential at the time. I have always said it would be very useful forColindale, or someone, to keep a bound, or microfilm, edition of all thenewspapers, day-by-day, instead of having to go through The Times andThe Mail and The Mirror individually. If one could just look up 12 June1973 and get all the newspapers side-by-side for that day, I think thatwould be an enormous help to historians.

SELDON: So with The Times, did you just go straight through all of it,taking out bits into different sections of your filing system, or did you gosystematically through the index?

CAMPBELL: I used the index. I think that for the earlier years I went prettycomprehensively through the index, through the 1950s, but by the 1960swhen Heath was Leader of the Opposition he was in every day and youcould not do that, but I picked up what looked the most interesting andimportant. Then I knew when something particular had happened andcould look at the coverage elsewhere. I used The Times quite a lot as basicnarrative, partly to get an eye-witness account of things and to get acontemporary voice describing events, which I think is important.

SELDON: Looking at unpublished papers, the PRO material available youfelt was not of consequence . . . .

CAMPBELL: Well, it only became available at the very end. When I startedin 1987-88 the papers were only available for Heath's time as Chief Whip.There may have been the odd remark from the Chief Whip written onother papers but there are not Chief Whip papers as such, and you wouldneed a lot of trawling to find those. By the time I had finished I could havegot his papers as Minister of Labour, but that was only going to be a veryshort chapter anyway. If they had been available at the time I wasresearching that chapter, I would have used them. By the time they wereavailable I had written it and I was not going to reopen it. I had no reasonto think that there would be anything sensational and new that I must get.What I should have done from a source point of view was to go and seewhat I could get out of the Nixon papers in Washington, which is whatClive Ponting did rather successfully with the Johnson papers whenwriting about the Wilson Government. I was conscious that I really ought

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to get to Washington to see what I could find from the Nixon end, but Inever did.

SELDON: That would have been the next question: the Nixon and Fordpapers, papers of trade unions, the Conservative Party, and privateindividuals' papers.

CAMPBELL: The Conservative Party papers I was not allowed to see. Itseems that some people are given access more easily than others. Thereseems to be conflicting testimony on whether they are open or not. Iasked and was refused. Other people's papers: I did not try tradeunionists, I must admit; I used the Labour Party's press cuttings, whichwere better organised than the Tory Party's, before they went toManchester and were still at Walworth Road, which was useful.

SELDON: And European papers?

CAMPBELL: No, I did not. The book may seem to have taken a long timebut I was very conscious that I had not time to do everything that I couldhave done. The 1960s and 1970s coincided with such an explosion ofreally very good contemporary history in the form of journalism. Thenewspapers were finding out and reporting a very great deal more than inthe 1950s, when there was very little in the newspapers at all. There is notvery much new in people's recollections, and if there is it is probablydistorted, whereas there is a great deal of speculation and analysis andleaks in the contemporary newspapers which does provide a very fullcontemporary record. It may not always be accurate, one has to becareful with it, but it is contemporary material, not hindsight. I feel verystrongly about this. I reject the criticism of people like Hugo Young whoprefer the oral evidence of interviews conducted years later.

SELDON: Who did you find the most perceptive journalists and who doyou think were feeding their own stories?

CAMPBELL: I tended to quote people who were saying quotable things. Alot of the time I highlighted what William Rees-Mogg was saying in TheTimes which he would be embarrassed by now, and The Economist thesame. One of my central points is that Heath was supported, encouragedand urged on by the conventional wisdom of the time, the pundits and thepress, many of whom were exactly the same individuals who tore into himvery quickly afterwards.

SELDON: Could you tell a Rees-Mogg leader in The Times?

CAMPBELL: I think that I probably could. I think that the major porten-tous declarations of political and economic morality, if not actually

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written by Rees-Mogg, certainly had the Rees-Mogg stamp on them.Thundering about unemployment being politically, socially, morallyunacceptable is not something that would have been written by somethird-string leader writer; that had the stamp of the editor on it.

SELDON: HOW did you rate some of the other journalists at the time, likeHugo Young, Sam Brittan, Peter Jay, David Watt, Alan Watkins, PeterJenkins, T. E. Utley, Colin Welch?

CAMPBELL: David Watt was good. Alan Watkins rather surprised me.Peter Jenkins was good. Colin Welch not at all - 1 was not aware of him. Iwas rather surprised at how often I found myself quoting Alan Watkins,who I think was a lot better in those days than he has been more recently.I think David Watt was good. George Hutchinson was quite well-informed in the 1970s - obviously he was quite close to Heath. Again,ideally I would have talked more to the journalists themselves and gotmore idea of what their actual relationships were. Some I know werefriendly with Heath - Alastair Burnet was editor of The Economist andhad the ear of Downing Street to an extent at this time. Ian Trethowenwas not writing at the time, he was at the BBC, but he was still friendlywith Heath. I quote journalists where I find them and I quote them partlyfor literary reasons, as much as purely content reasons, if it is good vividstuff to express a point more dramatically and graphically than I couldexpress it myself. I quote where people are quotable as much as anythingelse.

SELDON: To look finally in this section at what you write at the beginningof your acknowledgements: 'this is not an authorised biography, neitheris it exactly unauthorised'. Now that is rather a tantalising sentence. Whatexactly do you mean by that?

CAMPBELL: Well, it is unauthorised in the sense that Heath helped me notat all, but he knew that it was happening. He did not stop friends andcolleagues talking to me as he could have done. One or two people Iasked to interview said that they must ask Ted and then they came backand agreed to talk to me. He took a rather lofty attitude to the wholething, as he has been saying since it was published: 'People are entitled towrite books if they want!', but he had absolutely no input into it at all. Iwas bit flattering in the introduction saying that it is the ideal relationshipbetween a biographer and a living subject because I was not sure how hewould react and I wanted to ensure that he did not see it as a hostile book.I wanted to thank him and make him look as if he had been more co-operative than he had been. In fact, he was not at all co-operative, but, tobe fair, he was not uncooperative. He just ignored me.

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SELDON: Would it have been a better book or a different book if his long-delayed memoirs had been published, because then you would have hadHeath on Heath?

CAMPBELL: I suppose it would have been a different book. I doubtwhether it would have been a better book because I would probably havebeen having to contradict him the whole time or go behind what he wassaying or expand. I think it would probably have distracted me from justseeing him fresh, as it were.

SELDON: What was your vantage point on Ted Heath? You talk in theintroduction about writing after the blight of Thatcherism, whichindicates a certain political judgment. It also indicates a certain time-perspective. Who exactly is the John Campbell who is there sifting theevidence and making the judgments, or are you outside time and politics?

CAMPBELL: No, I am not outside time and politics. Politically I am aLiberal Democrat. I wrote the Roy Jenkins book as an avowed supporter.You could say I have tended to make all my subjects into socialdemocrats. I started as a Lloyd George Liberal with my first book beingabout Lloyd George. I almost managed to make F.E. Smith and NyeBevan into social democrats in some respects. I always tend to think thatif I am a good biographer it may be because I do take on some of thecolouring of the person that I write about. I become able to see the worldfairly sympathetically from that point of view, though not uncritically so.I am always reminded of that story of Lord Derby in the First World Warof whom Lloyd George said he was a cushion who retained the impressionof the last person who sat on him; and I feel sometimes that this actually isa strength in a biographer, that I do take on something of the world viewof the person I am writing about from a basically liberal perspective of myown.

SELDON: Looking at your earlier four subjects, given the passage of timesince you wrote those books, which would you most be inclined to rewritebits of or judgments in?

CAMPBELL: I do not think I would rewrite any of them. Once they aredone, they are done. I have thought of reissuing, or updating, RoyJenkins. Had Roy Jenkins returned in some way, if there had been a hungparliament in the last election and he had re-emerged as foreign secretaryin a coalition, I could have done it but would not really have wanted to. Itis there and done and finished. Nye Bevan is about to be reissued. F.E.Smith has been too, but I have not changed anything in either of them.

SELDON: Your perspective is very much, as you say, that of an anti-

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Thatcherite, and yet another perspective on Ted Heath would be that hefailed to get to grips with many of the fundamental weaknesses of thiscountry that governments abroad did in the 1970s and 1980s in aThatcherite manner.

CAMPBELL: I think it is a question of time and the climate in which Heathwas operating. In the early 1970s he was in some ways ahead of his timeand he deserves credit for having seen the problems perhaps earlier thanpublic opinion or the general political consensus did. In the early 1970sthey were not soluble in the way that Mrs Thatcher solved them in the1980s; the trade union question is the obvious case in point. Mrs Thatcheris given credit for having stood up to and tackled the trade union powerwhich Heath was defeated by, but it was only when the unions hadalready defeated the Wilson government and the Heath government andthen the Callaghan government that they were then ripe to be taken onand tackled by Mrs Thatcher. She was responding to 15 years of the abuseof union power; Heath was in the middle of it when they were at theirmost powerful and most popular. Similarly with unemployment. A figureof one million unemployed was regarded as simply unacceptable in theearly 1970s. Mrs Thatcher got away with allowing it to rise to levels thatwere insupportable and unimaginable in the early 1970s.

SELDON: You also write that one of the problems with the IndustrialRelations Act was that it was too much of a blunderbuss. Mrs Thatchersucceeded under three successive Secretaries of State because it was donein a piecemeal, ad hoc, targeted way, just like you criticised the IndustryAct of 1972 for trying to do too much within one Act, so there are alsostrategic criticisms of Heath.

CAMPBELL: Yes, I think he tried to do these things in an insensitive way. Ithink that Mrs Thatcher and her Secretaries of State learned from theexperience of the Heath government and I think the whole Heathexperience was a learning curve for the country and the party. He wastrying to tackle some of the problems within the post-war consensus. Hethought that it could be done mainly by changing attitudes rather than, asyou say, by well-targeted, particular reforms. He wanted to reform toomuch but too little at the same time.

SELDON: You see him very much as a man who has been underestimated,as someone who history has been unkind to and who is now beingrehabilitated. My question is really whether he took the wrong decisionsand put them over in the wrong way by being too dismissive of the marketand making the state too corporatist.

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CAMPBELL: That was the wisdom of hindsight, I would say. I do not thinkthat Heath necessarily took the wrong decisions. I think part of what I amtrying to argue is that he took the only decisions that were possible for agovernment in the early 1970s to take, that he had to operate within apolitical climate where what became Thatcherism was still regarded asquite cranky and unacceptable. The number of Tory backbenchers,Powellites rather than Thatcherites, who supported the market to thatextent, who wanted to try and curb the money supply and all the rest, wastiny. The monetarists were very few and very disregarded. There is onephrase from the 1973 Conservative conference where Powell wasdescribed by The Economist as being: 'on his honest money kick againand no one pays much attention to that'. I think the intellectual climate,the understanding of inflation specifically, changed as a result of Heath'sexperience in 1972-74. During the 1970s a new understanding took holdwhich was not therein 1972; it was not being urged on him either by hisofficials in the Treasury or by financial journalists in Fleet Street for themost part, even people like Sam Brittan and Peter Jay who were in theforefront of the converted in 1974 were not arguing the monetarist case in1973.

SELDON: One of the points that you praise Ted Heath for was hisanticipation of some of those things that became successful under MrsThatcher, yet you were also very disparaging about Mrs Thatcher, so thisis the paradox I am trying to get you to confront. Is your politicaljudgment conflicting with your historical judgment?

CAMPBELL: I do not think so. I think my view of Mrs Thatcher is that shedid some necessary things but did them with an unnecessary socialdivisiveness. The whole philosophy of Thatcherism I dislike and regard asdestructive. I think Heath wanted to achieve some of the benefits of themarket and a greater efficiency in government, in business and in thenationalised industries, more competition, but within the existing con-sensus without allowing unemployment to run away, without dismantlingimportant parts of the welfare network. He did talk of targeting welfaremuch more but in practice he took for granted continuing expansion in allthese areas. He thought that this could all be provided by more efficientand successful running of the economy, but his whole aim was inclusiveand consensual rather than Mrs Thatcher's exclusiveness. Heath was notin the business of dismantling established institutions, he just wanted tomake them work more efficiently, which he felt, with common sense andgoodwill, and all sorts of rather vague changes of attitude ought to be ableto work better. In that respect he was a generation older than MrsThatcher, he was part of the post-war consensus, which she was much

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more hostile to. She wanted to dismantle it but he wanted to make itwork. Unfortunately his manner made him appear much more abrasiveand confrontational than he intended.

SELDON: Your suggestion, oft repeated, for example on page 390, wasthat he was almost hijacked by market forces in 1970 against his betterjudgment; was that a judgment that came to you over the course of theresearch or was that something that you had felt from the outset?

CAMPBELL: No, I think it came through the research, through discoveringthe continuity of his attitudes through the 1950s and early 1960s, when hewas trade minister under Alec Douglas-Home, for instance. He was agreat believer in regional policy always. The competitive, free-markettalk was the opportunism of opposition. It was necessary to strike adifferent sort of rhetoric from the Labour government, which forcedHeath and Macleod into talking a more free-market language than theymeant or intended to act upon.

SELDON: The Industry Act was, as you say, more interventionist thananything that Labour had passed, and with highly elaborate incomespolicy and with higher social spending than Labour had put forward, theHeath government came to look, it has been suggested, very much aLabour government.

CAMPBELL: I do not know about a Labour government. I think Heathwould see it as operating within a consensus, as doing the things that anygovernment had to do but a Conservative one would do more effectivelyand efficiently than a Labour government. It was very unideological, butI think he was doing, with the support of most of the Conservative Partyand the Conservative press it should be said, what any government wasexpected to do to bring down unemployment, and get the economymoving. He was persuaded in 1969 or 1970 that the economy neededmore competition, more free-market stimulus. When that was not work-ing in 1971, when unemployment was going up, it became, as The Timeswould say, politically, morally, economically and every other way,imperative to switch to something that did work.

SELDON: But had public opinion, had the force of intellectual opinion andhad ultimately the fear of revolution not been there, he might have donedifferent things?

CAMPBELL: Yes. I think what I have tried to explain is how, within theclimate of the time, he delivered what seemed the almost inescapable

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thing to do. The fear of civil disorder arising from high unemploymentwas very real. It was also seen to be political suicide for the Conserva-tives.

SELDON: Fine. Let us leave it on that point and let us move on and look atsome of the criticisms raised of the book. Overall the book has been veryhighly praised and indeed is, without question, the best and the mostdetailed account of the years in question, so let us look at some of thequestions. Some people, like the Lords Jenkins and Hailsham said thebook was too long. Do you plead guilty?

CAMPBELL: I suppose so, but rather reluctantly and only partly. I thinkreviewers always think that books are too long because, from a reviewingpoint of view, one is not paid any more to read through long books thanshort ones. I think, however, readers quite like long books. I do not thinkthat any of the parts of this book are in themselves too long. It may seem along book but it is a long career to deal with seriously. In fact, almostevery element of it is very superficially covered. One is constantlysimplifying and abbreviating, even in what seems a book of this length. Itseems long because it is one fat volume, perhaps. Alistair Home'sMacmillan, if you put the two volumes together, would be a great deallonger. Michael Foot's Nye Bevan would be enormously long.

SELDON: A sceptic might say that Foot's Bevan is too long, but thatHome's Macmillan was talking about a premiership for roughly twice thelength and that he did have the papers.

CAMPBELL: Right. But in Heath's premiership twice as much happened.Heath had a very intense three years when a hell of a lot happened. I hadto deal with things like Northern Ireland, I think, because that govern-ment probably spent more time on Northern Ireland than on any otherissue. I only have two chapters on Northern Ireland, but I think they arequite important chapters if part of the point is to be a history of thegovernment. I think that is one reason for the length of the book, and partof my excuse for the length of the book is that there has been virtually nohistory of that government, and I think it was worth trying to write ahistory of the Heath government. Whether the earlier or the later parts ofthe book are too long I do not know. There is a longish chapter on the firstattempt to get into the Common Market in 1961-63, which has beenwritten about elsewhere; my account of it is largely second-hand, and yetI think that from the point of view of someone wanting to read aboutthem, the biography of Heath is where they would expect to find a goodshort account of those negotiations. I hope that 20 pages, which is in truthpretty short as an account of that subject is not too long in the context of a

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biography. These chapters add up, I suppose, to a longish book. I thinkthere may be too much on the Thatcher period after 1975, but biographi-cally I think that is an interesting period because Heath actually becomesmuch more himself. You can get closer to the man and his feelings in thatperiod than you can in any earlier period and also, although he was only adiscarded backbencher, his commentary on the Thatcher years is animportant one, so I do not regret the 150 pages on that period. I woulddefend all the parts of the book. I regret perhaps if the whole seems to betoo long, but I think it reads all right. I think the parts break down.

SELDON: Did your writing about Lloyd George after his premiership insome sense give you a particular interest and perspective on a formerpremier out of power.

CAMPBELL: As it happened I was writing on Lloyd George out of power inthe mid-1970s, which is precisely the period when Heath was first out ofoffice. I remember joking at the time about the 'Grocer in the Wilder-ness'. I think the germ of the Heath book was perhaps there in the early1970s - unconsciously perhaps. Yes, I must say that when I got to thatsection of the book I felt I was on home ground. Dealing with a man whois not responsible for anything and is just making speeches and commentson other events is obviously much more linear and easier to comprehendthan a Prime Minister who is responsible for everything, so I think that Ienjoyed writing that section; that was the easiest section to write.

SELDON: Hugo Young's criticism in The Guardian about oral history Ithink we have dealt with, but he did pick you up on a point about money, Ithink on pages 255-6, where you said the Conservative Party has a way oflooking after its leaders. Is that one of those areas where you feel that youcannot know about everything?

CAMPBELL: It is one of those areas which I know I am not very good atinvestigating, quite honestly. I think maybe a different sort of historian orjournalist could dig. In so far as journalists have they do not seem to havecome up with anything much. That expresses my impression that hismoney was handled for him to some extent, but I have not got chapter andverse on that, so I am just saying what I understand to be the case.

SELDON: Heath himself in the Sunday Telegraph (4 July 1993) in a ratherungenerous piece says that he does not think a whole lot of yourbiography. Did you read that with sorrow or amusement?

CAMPBELL: Amusement really, because so many people who have knownhim say that he ought to consider himself fortunate to have had a kinderbiography than he probably deserves. If he cannot recognise it I hope that

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his friends will tell him that he ought to be pleased. It was a very sillyinterview that, altogether.

SELDON: You were unsurprised by what he said?

CAMPBELL: I was unsurprised, but amazed that he went quite so far,saying that I could not know anything about it because I was only 22 whenhe became Prime Minister, and his particular criticisms of things he said Igot wrong when he pretends he has not read the book. Obviously he hasto some extent because he picks me up on particular things that he says Ihave got wrong. On the other hand, in the particular example he cites todo with the date when he took up sailing, it is he who has got it wrong: hecompletely misreads what I said. I was amazed at the degree of his refusalto accept any criticism of his government at all. He makes himself lookquite ridiculous by talking about all their achievements and not acceptingin any respect that their government was disappointing. I am trying toexplain, sympathetically, why the result of his government was disap-pointing, why he did things with the best of intentions and why he wasunlucky in all sorts of ways. The fact that he is still determined to see hisgovernment as a resounding success is rather staggering.

SELDON: Is it because he does not accept or understand the extenuatingcircumstances, which you repeat throughout the prime ministerial sec-tions of the book, about the OPEC crisis, about the Nixon shock in 1971,about the militancy in the trade union movement, the unfortunatecoincidence of his premiership with all these with economic recession atthe same time, deflecting him from his carefully thought-out path? Doeshe simply not accept that there were these extenuating factors or that hedid not somehow prove the man of the hour to meet them?

CAMPBELL: In the very first year or two after his fall he did argue thatthere had been great difficulties with soaring commodity prices and theWorld Bank and all the rest of it. He did make a point of showing thattumultuous events had blown him off-course. It is only since the per-ceived success of Mrs Thatcher, I think, that he has found it impossible toadmit to failure. He cannot bear to have his failure contrasted with hersuccess, so he has to insist that he was a success as well, whereas I thinkthat in the 1970s before Mrs Thatcher came in, during the Callaghanperiod, he was quite prepared to argue that there was a great crisis comingwhich he had foreseen, that the Wilson-Callaghan government was goingto be no more than a temporary interlude after which he would be calledback again to deal with the crisis. I think he was wrongfooted by MrsThatcher seeming to magic the crisis away. I think he could not come toterms with the fact that she was able to solve, in some respects at least,

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some of the problems that had defeated him and I think that altered hisperspective. I think he is very difficult to understand and I would notclaim that I have altogether succeeded in doing it.

SELDON: Well, John Campbell, you have written easily one of the mostauthoritative, meticulous and scholarly biographies to appear in the lastten years and I am very grateful for the interview and for the frank and fullway that you have looked at the questions raised. Thank you very muchindeed.

Books by John Campbell

Lloyd George: The Goat in the Wilderness (London: Cape, 1977)Roy Jenkins: A Biography (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983)F.E, Smith: The First Earl of Birkenhead (London: Cape, 1983)Nye Bevan and the Mirage of British Socialism (London: Weidenfeld &Nicholson, 1987)(ed.), The Experience of World War II (London: Harrap, 1989)Edward Heath: A Biography (London: Cape, 1993)

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the heathman ‐ an interview with john campbell

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