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To Parliament. Unlike most Conservative candidates, Heath had no outside income. Staking his savings on an election that was still three years distant, he built one of the country's strongest Tory organizations, canvassed every house in town, held special meetings for professional people who are normally the backbone of the party—and played the national anthem on the piano. His name helped: to most Britons even today, the Ted Heath (no kin) is a bandleader, and young voters occasionally attended his rallies under the impression that there would be dancing. In the 1950 election Heath squeaked in by 133 votes. By assiduous nursing he carried Bexley by 1,639 votes the following year; in 1959 his margin was 8,633, a swing of 20,000 votes in 15 years.
After his election to Parliament, "Teddy" Heath trimmed a syllable from his first name and several inches from his haircut. With help from a Savile Row tailor, the spruce new member for Bexley looked the very image of the up-and-coming New Conservative.
Smart Whip. Within a year of his election he was promoted to assistant whip, one of a band of Commons corporals charged with enforcing party discipline. Most ambitious young politicians shun the role, since whips are so heavily burdened with party duties that they have little chance to make their mark in the House, Heath leaped at the job, which he saw as a unique opportunity to master the subtle inner mechanisms of Parliament and party. Thanks to a natural and sometimes ruthless flair for handling men and anticipating trouble, he rose rapidly through the whips' ranks until, in 1955, he was elected chief whip.
When he had been in that post less than a year, Ted Heath's reputation was put to the test in the ordeal of the Suez crisis. For weeks a top-to-bottom split in Tory ranks threatened to topple the government. In night after night of impassioned debate, Ted Heath's plump, pink face bobbed up wherever, as one M.P. says, "there was a soul to be saved." Convinced that it was too perilous a time for a general election, he averted that disaster almost singlehanded.
Finally, when Eden's illness made his resignation inevitable, it fell to Chief Whip Heath to summon the twelve other party whips to his office at 12 Downing Street and, in effect, pick a new Prime Minister. Recalls one participant in the meeting: "Round and round we went, talking for hours — all except Ted. He listened." After listening almost all night, Heath was able to assure party chieftains that the rank and file would wholeheartedly support one man : Harold Macmillan.
The Grass Roots. The new Prime Minister, who by then dined almost nightly with Heath, made him Minister of Labor in 1959. when his government was step ping hard on inflationary pay raises. After only nine months at Labor, he was summoned by Macmillan and entrusted with the momentous job of getting Britain into Europe. He was appointed Lord Privy Seal, was also appointed to serve as Foreign Office spokesman in the Commons, since Foreign Secretary Lord Home sits in the