Alan Watkins: The shadow chancellor laughed till he cried. Ted had tried to be funny

"I know him," Heath said. "He hates me."

Sir Peter said, without a great deal of conviction, that he was sure I did nothing of the kind. I added my own voice to the same effect. Still, like any proper Sunday journalist, I made my excuses and left, not of course the party, but Heath's immediate vicinity.

I first met him in the Cambridge Union in the mid-1950s, when he was Deputy Chief Whip. Suez and its aftermath, when as Chief Whip he was deservedly given the credit for holding the Tories together, still lay ahead. The motion was: This House Fears the Crack of the Party Whip. Heath spoke against, but on the winning side. What I remember was a curious androgynous quality and his habit of heaving his shoulders when he laughed, which was often. No one thought of him as a meritocrat: he was an Oxford man who had enjoyed a "good war" and fitted quite smoothly into the Conservative party of the 1950s. It seemed to me that the almost wilful awkwardness came along later.

In 1965 I was writing the political column in The Spectator, which was then edited by Iain Macleod, who had returned to the back benches after refusing to join Alec Douglas-Home's cabinet. Since then there had been a change of government. Even before that, politics had been dominated by Harold Wilson, as they continued to be throughout the 1960s and beyond. What the Tories wanted as a successor to Douglas-Home was someone as like Wilson as possible: much as their descendants today, or a good number of them, want someone like Tony Blair, who occupies the same weather-making position as Wilson did in his own time.

The natural candidate to succeed Douglas-Home was Reginald Maudling. The smell of corruption did not then cling to him. Rather, he was said to be lazy. And in the 1963 contest he had been nowhere in the betting. Nor, for that matter, had Macleod, whose political fortunes had not revived later on in the short time he had spent on the back benches and as an editor. Maudling, however, was the favourite in 1965.

Though Macleod knew Maudling better, he favoured Heath. He did not try to influence what I wrote in any way at all. After Maudling had unexpectedly lost to Heath in this, the Tories' first, election - "That was a turn-up for the book," he remarked to me in his customary affable manner - I rushed back to the Spectator office to tell Macleod who, oddly perhaps, had decided to spend the afternoon there. Far from being grateful, he looked alarmed and even a little angry, and said that he hoped I had "not been telling Reggie" anything of what he had been saying about Ted. As he had not confided anything at all to me about the contest which had just ended, I was able to provide him with complete reassurance on this point.

It soon became evident that Heath was proving a grievous disappointment to his followers. He was not being "abrasive", the then fashionable quality which he was thought to possess and for which he had originally been chosen. On the contrary: he was distinctly on the timid side, and Wilson was knocking him about the ring at will. When I wrote as much, Macleod would remark:

"Must you really say that about Ted? Well, if you must, I suppose you must."

Winning the 1970 election was as great an achievement as entering Europe, for the one could not have been managed without the other. But all had not gone well before. In the 1965-69 period there was a ritual as unchanging as anything in the D'Oyly Carte Opera. This was Heath doing his Phoenix-from-the-Ashes act at the party conference. He was, the papers would tell us, under attack. His leadership was being questioned and his position was in doubt. He would then make a speech or, rather, two speeches by the seaside - for, imitating Wilson, he had taken to speaking twice at the conference - and would duly receive two prearranged standing ovations. The papers would then report that Heath was out of danger, was even master of his party - until it was time for a re-enactment of the whole performance.

On one such occasion (I had then moved to the New Statesman) the producer of The World This Weekend, the great Andrew Boyle, sent me to interview Heath on the Saturday before the conference, for transmission on the Sunday. He was staying at his father's bungalow in Broadstairs. On the Friday he had been blacked out of Sir (as he then wasn't) David Frost's programme when some electrician had pulled the plug in one of those trade union disputes which were then as commonplace as bombs are today.

With the cumbersome, Reith-like BBC microphone having been set up under the flying ducks, I said to an already apprehensive Heath that I was sorry about the previous night, which I was, and that I hoped he would be able to say to his Sunday listeners what he had been prevented from saying to his viewers on the Friday.

"That was a most insulting remark," Heath said.

"Why?" I said. "I don't see how it could possibly have been insulting."

"Oh yes it could. The clear implication was that the entire programme had been rigged."

"I don't think it was the implication at all, but if I've offended you, I'm sorry."

"It was the only possible implication."

The interview was usable but dull. Afterwards Heath took me down to the harbour to see his boat, a much more modest vessel than the Morning Cloud which came later. He guided me to a nearby pub and pressed me to a glass of his own special reserve malt whisky, which both as a drink and as a subject for conversation I have always found tedious. He was certainly being amiable. Even so, I was still puzzled, even a little upset, at his accusation of insult.

I still saw Macleod occasionally for lunch. He was by this time Heath's shadow chancellor. He commented on one of his leader's recent speeches which had contained numerous points.

"Eight bloody points. And the audience is praying for the last one to come along. If it had been me, I'd have made a whole speech about point four, which was the only decent one he had."

I told him about Heath's recent accusation of me. I had not seen him so cheerful since George Brown had fallen down drunk. He had to put a handkerchief to his eyes.

"Oh dear," he said, "poor old Ted. Typical, though. You see... you don't understand... Ted thought he was making a joke."