The first Tory leader to be elected was Edward Heath in July 1965 when Sir Alec Douglas-Home stepped down. Under the rules at the time, voting was confined to Conservative MPs. Edward Heath and Reginald Maudling were the two leading candidates with Enoch Powell a poor third. In recent weeks some have said that Heath was ahead from the start, making him the only front-runner since 1955 who has gone on to win. That was not the case. Alistair Lexden, the Conservative Party’s official historian, has made clear what actually happened.
A definitive account of the 1965 Tory leadership election was provided by one of the Party’s leading academic historians, the late Professor John Ramsden, in his authoritative work The Winds of Change: Macmillan to Heath (Longman,1996) based on records in the Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian Library.
Ramsden writes, ‘Maudling was favourite: he had had wider ministerial experience, and his supporters could not be accused of pushing Sir Alec out [a charge levelled against Heath]: a Daily Express poll suggested that the public preferred Maudling to Heath by 44 per cent to 28 per cent with a similar lead among Tory voters’.
As for the actual electorate in this contest, ‘for Prime Minister most MPs would probably have preferred Maudling, but since it was a Leader of the Opposition that was needed they opted for Heath’s more abrasive manner’.
Maudling thought he would coast to victory, fighting a campaign that was ‘over-confident and half-hearted’. Much duplicity was practised by the wily electors. 45 MPs promised their votes to both candidates.