Ted Heath deserves to be remembered for more than his blemishes

Spectator

19-07-2025

For anyone born as I was, in the seventies, Edward Heath – who died 20 years ago this week – was a frequent presence in the news, and not always for the best of reasons. He was the silver-haired, curmudgeonly ex-prime minister nursing an implacable rage against his successor Margaret Thatcher, the cabinet colleague who'd ousted, then eclipsed him. Against her monetarist policies he railed, perhaps justly, though in a way that seemed at times bitingly personal.
On global issues, with which he much concerned himself, Heath often appeared to be defending the indefensible. The tyrant Saddam Hussein he described as an 'astute person, a clever person'; he was openly against Western intervention in Bosnia, and came close to being a no-bones apologist for a brutal communist regime in China with whom he had, it was said, opaque business links. A confirmed bachelor, seemingly asexual, Heath cut an isolated figure, fuming in the wilderness, all too often reviled by the party he'd once led. How had this man ever become prime minister?
The picture he painted of himself, it turned out, didn't do him justice, because to know something of Edward Heath, his beliefs and their formation, is to gain increasing respect for him. Heath had once seemed the great hope of conservatism, the Balliol-educated son of a Kent builder who would lead the party away from its stuffy, class-ridden image and make it fit for the modern age. The Mirror called him 'a new kind of Tory leader…who has fought his way to the top by guts, ability and political skill.' The Panorama programme pushed him as 'the man for those Conservatives who think the party needs a 'tiger in its tank.'' Even Marcia Williams, political secretary to opponent Harold Wilson, gushed about Heath's 'clean and shining silver hair, well-tended and suntanned face, immaculate blue suit and tie.' Yesterday's man once looked like tomorrow's saviour.
There seem, in fact, to have been two distinct Edward Heaths – before and after he became party leader. In his Oxford days, he'd been President of the Oxford Union and head of the Conservative Association, attracting plaudits wherever he went. He'd visited Spain during the Civil War and travelled widely in Germany, attending a Nazi rally. There he saw Hitler speak and met Goebbels, Goering and Himmler, returning from the experience an ardent anti-appeaser.
As artillery officer in the Second World War, he'd fought bravely through France and the low countries, described by one admiring major as 'the most capable officer I met in any department during the four years in which I had command.' In 1946, Heath attended the Nuremberg Trials, and became, ever after, a convinced Europhile: 'My generation did not have the option of living in the past; we had to work for the future…Only by working together right across our continent had we any hope of creating a society which would uphold the true values of European civilisation.' Finally, as PM, he got his wish, taking us into Europe on New Year's Day 1973. Many, seeing the wholesale dismantling of that legacy, will surely continue to feel that he was right.
Certainly, he had legions of admirers in his early days. Elected as MP for Bexley in 1950, he was promoted under Eden a few years later, becoming, in Lord Chancellor David Kilmuir's description, 'the most brilliant Chief Whip of modern times…the most promising of the new generation of Conservatives.' Even Tony Benn rolled over for Heath: 'How you manage to combine such a friendly manner,' he wrote, 'with such an iron discipline is a source of respectful amazement to us all.' With his classical conducting and his yachting – the latter of which he excelled at, winning two international cups – Heath had real hinterland too. 'He changed the scale of my thinking,' said one colleague who worked for him. 'He is what I would like to be.'
But it was as leader and then PM that his limitations became clear. 'Gone,' as minister Ian Gilmour put it, 'was the genial, human and successful Chief Whip and in his place…was a brusque and dour leader of the party.' In speeches, Heath was leaden and uninspiring, forever torturing the House with turgid, fact-laden addresses. His honesty and integrity were acknowledged, but party members sniped about his social background (his voice was almost comically posh and plodding, though the 'ow' sounds gave him away).
They also speculated darkly and ad nauseam about his 'confirmed bachelor' status ('The voters of Aldershot,' wrote Julian Critchley, 'evidently much preferred dull wives to no wives at all.') Curt and brusque, with a deadpan humour too subtle for many and an intolerance of dissent, Heath made needless enemies among MPs and party members. What stands out, though, is the loyalty and affection many close colleagues went on feeling towards this awkward, bloody-minded man. 'I don't know what it is – it's a mystery to me,' said Willie Whitelaw. 'I only know I trust him more than I've ever trusted anyone.'
Having won a surprise election victory in 1970, Heath, a meticulous planner, arrived with the boldest of intentions, speaking of 'a change so radical, a revolution so quiet and yet so total that it will go far beyond the programme for a Parliament.' Yet his free-market, non-interventionist aims quickly hit the rocks. Soon he was bailing out companies and, amidst an endless barrage of walkouts and work-to-rules, caving into union demands like the best of them. Following two miners' strikes, a compulsory 'three-day week' to conserve energy, and an eye-watering five 'states of emergency' in four years, Heath went to the country in 1974, losing by a wafer to Harold Wilson. When he lost another election later that year, it was clear to everyone except Heath himself that it was time for change.
Enter Margaret Thatcher, and the Great Sulk began. At conference after conference, Heath lambasted her policies, all attempts at a rapprochement scotched by him. He denounced her to the press as a 'traitor' and at one public event, presented with a chocolate image of her face, reportedly picked up a knife and stabbed it into splinters, to the glee of onlooking hacks. In an open letter to the Times, his biographer and onetime acolyte George Hutchinson laid into him: 'You are already estranged from a number of old friends…You are in danger of losing the goodwill and respect of the party.' Heath, as so often, sailed on regardless. Yet as he did so, his real achievements – taking us into Europe, the abolition of Resale Price Maintenance – seemed to recede on the horizon.
Heath may now be the forgotten man – widely considered a failed prelude to Thatcherism – yet this is unjust. What the electorate could embrace in the eighties – after a decade of industrial woe, an IMF bail-out and the Winter of Discontent – was miles on from what they'd have swallowed a decade before. As Ian Gilmour put it: 'To attack Ted Heath for not having behaved like Margaret Thatcher is little more sensible than to say that the First World War could have been won more cheaply by using the methods of the second.'
Meanwhile, his term in office has lessons for today's bunch of leaders. Kemi Badenoch, in her great policy-purdah, might recall Heath's rigorous planning and lofty aims for national renewal – all torpedoed, within weeks, by the intransigence of actual, unforeseen events. Keir Starmer could reflect on the words of Enoch Powell (probably Heath's deadliest foe) about the perils of abandoning core policies: 'Does my right hon. Friend not know that it is fatal for any Government or party or person to seek to govern in direct opposition to the principles on which they were entrusted with the right to govern?'
As for Heath himself, he deserves, perhaps, more credit than he's customarily given. The smouldering resentment of his later years too often undermined what was at times a formidable, even inspirational career. As Labour MP Denis Macshane pointed out, he had, by the end of it all, 'made and lived more history than any other British politician in active service.' The last word, though, surely goes to Philip Ziegler, his official biographer: 'He was a great man, but his blemishes, though by far less considerable, were quite as conspicuous as his virtues, and it is too often by his blemishes that he is remembered.'