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Sir Edward Richard George "Ted" Heath, KG, MBE (9 July 1916 – 17 July 2005) was a British Conservative politician, who served one term as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974 and the Leader of the Conservative Party from 1965 to 1975. Heath's accession marked a change in the leadership of the Conservative Party from aristocratic figures such as Harold Macmillan and the former Earl of Home, to the meritocratic Heath and Margaret Thatcher, his successor. Publicly
noted for his enthusiasms for classical and church music and for
sailing, his shoulder-shaking laughter and confirmed bachelor status,
as a statesman he is remembered as the prime minister who took Britain
into the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973. His premiership was also marked by an escalation of The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the industrial disputes of the early 1970s. Edward (or "Teddy" as he was known as a young man) Heath was born the son of a carpenter and a maid from Broadstairs in Kent. His father was later a successful small businessman. He was educated at Chatham House Grammar School in Ramsgate and in 1935 with the aid of a county scholarship he went up to study at Balliol College, Oxford. A talented musician, he won the college's Organ scholarshipin his first term (he had previously tried for the organ scholarships at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and Keble College, Oxford) which enabled him to stay at the University for a fourth year; he eventually graduated with a Second Class Honours BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 1939. In later life Heath's peculiar accent - with its "strangulated" vowel sounds - was satirised by the Monty Python's Flying Circus in the audio sketch "Teach Yourself Heath" (originally recorded for their 1972 LP Monty Python's Previous Record but not released at the time). Heath's
biographer John Campbell speculates that his speech, unlike that of his
father and younger brother, who both spoke with Kent accents, must have
undergone "drastic alteration on encountering Oxford". While
at university Heath became active in Conservative politics. However, on
the key political issue of the day, foreign policy, he opposed the
Conservative-dominated government of the day ever more openly. His
first Paper Speech (i.e. a major speech listed on the order paper along with the visiting guest speakers) at the Oxford Union, in Michaelmas 1936, was in opposition to the appeasement of Germany by returning her colonies, confiscated after the First World War. In June 1937 he was elected President of the Oxford University Conservative Association as a pro-Spanish-Republican candidate, in opposition to the pro-Franco John Stokes (later a Conservative MP). In 1937-8 he was also chairman of the national Federation of University Conservative Associations,
and in the same year (his third at University) he was Secretary then
Librarian of the Oxford Union. At the end of the year, however, he was
defeated for the Presidency of the Oxford Union by another Balliol
candidate, Alan Wood, on the issue of whether the Chamberlain
government should give way to a left-wing Popular Front. On this
occasion Heath supported the government. In his final year Heath was President of Balliol College Junior Common Room, an office held in subsequent years by his near-contemporaries Denis Healey and Roy Jenkins, and as such was invited to support the Master of Balliol Alexander Lindsay, who stood as an anti-appeasement 'Independent Progressive' candidate against the official Conservative candidate, Quintin Hogg, in the Oxford by-election, 1938. Heath, who had himself applied to be the Conservative candidate for the by-election, accused
the government in an October Union Debate of "turning all four cheeks"
to Hitler, and was elected as President of the Oxford Union in November
1938, sponsored by Balliol, after winning the Presidential Debate that
"This House has No Confidence in the National Government as presently
constituted". He was thus President in Hilary Term 1939; the visiting Leo Amery described him in his diaries as "a pleasant youth". As
an undergraduate, Heath travelled widely in Europe. His opposition to
appeasement was nourished by his witnessing first-hand a Nazi Party Nuremberg Rally in 1937, where he met top Nazis Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler at an SS cocktail party. He later described Himmler as "the most evil man I have ever met". In 1938 he visited Barcelona, then under attack from Spanish Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. In the summer of 1939 he again travelled across Germany, returning to England just before the declaration of war. Heath spent the winter of 1939-40 on a debating tour of the United States before being called up, and early in 1941 was commissioned in the Royal Artillery. During World War II he initially served with heavy anti-aircraft guns around Liverpool (which suffered heavy German bombing in May 1941) and by early 1942 was regimental adjutant, with the rank of Captain. Later, now a Major commanding a battery of his own, he provided artillery support in the North-West Europe Campaign of 1944-1945. He
later remarked that, although he did not personally kill anybody, as
the British forces advanced, he saw the devastation caused by his unit's
artillery bombardments. In September 1945 he commanded a firing squad to
execute a Polish soldier convicted of rape and murder, a fact that he
did not reveal until his memoirs were published in 1998. After
demobilisation as a Lieutenant-colonel in August 1946 Heath joined the Honourable Artillery Company, in which he remained active throughout the 1950s, rising to Commanding officer of
the Second Battalion; a portrait of him in full dress uniform still
hangs in the HAC's Long Room. In April 1971, as Prime Minister, he wore
his lieutenant-colonel's insignia to inspect troops. Before the war Heath had won a scholarship to Gray's Inn and
had begun making preparations for a career at the Bar, but after the
war he instead passed top into the Civil Service. He then became a civil servant in
the Ministry of Civil Aviation (he was disappointed not to be posted to
the Treasury, but declined an offer to join the Foreign Office, fearing
that foreign postings might prevent him from entering politics). He
resigned in November 1947 after his adoption as the prospective
parliamentary candidate for Bexley. After working as Editor of the Church Times from 1948 to 1949, Heath worked as a management trainee at the merchant bankers Brown, Shipley & Co. until his election as Member of Parliament (MP) for Bexley in the February 1950 general election. In the election he defeated an old contemporary from the Oxford Union, Ashley Bramall, with a majority of 133 votes. Heath made his maiden speech in the House of Commons on 26 June 1950, in which he appealed to the Labour Government to participate in the Schuman Plan. As MP for Bexley, he gave enthusiastic speeches in support of the young, unknown candidate for neighbouring Dartford, Margaret Roberts, soon to become Margaret Thatcher.
In February 1951, Heath was appointed as an Opposition Whip by Winston Churchill. He remained in the Whip's Office after the Conservatives won the 1951 general election, rising rapidly to Joint Deputy Chief Whip, Deputy Chief Whip and, in December 1955, Government Chief Whip under Anthony Eden. Because of the convention that Whips do not speak in Parliament, Heath managed to keep out of the controversy over the Suez Crisis. On the announcement of Anthony Eden's
resignation, Heath submitted a report on the opinions of the
Conservative MPs regarding Eden's possible successors. This report
favoured Harold Macmillan and was instrumental in eventually securing
Macmillan the premiership in January 1957. Macmillan later appointed
Heath Minister of Labour after the successful October 1959 election. In
1960 Macmillan appointed Heath Lord Privy Seal with responsibility for the negotiations to secure the UK's first attempt to join the Common Market (as the European Community was
then called). After extensive negotiations, involving detailed
agreements about the UK's agricultural trade with Commonwealth
countries such as New Zealand, British entry was vetoed by the French
President, Charles de Gaulle,
at a press conference in January 1963. After this setback, a major
humiliation for Macmillan's foreign policy, Heath was not a contender
for the party leadership on Macmillan's retirement in October 1963.
Under Prime Minister Sir Alec Douglas-Home he was President of the Board of Trade and Secretary of State for Industry, Trade and Regional Development, and oversaw the abolition of retail price controls. After the Conservative Party lost the general election of 1964,
the defeated Douglas-Home changed the party leadership rules to allow
for an MP ballot vote, and then resigned. The following year Heath –
who was Shadow Chancellor at the time, and had recently won favourable
publicity for leading the fight against Labour's Finance Bill –
unexpectedly won the party's leadership contest, gaining 150 votes to Reginald Maudling's 133 and Enoch Powell's 15. Heath became the Tories' youngest leader and retained office after the party's defeat in the general election of 1966. Heath sacked Enoch Powell from the Shadow Cabinet in April 1968, shortly after Powell made his "Rivers of Blood" speech which criticised the recent mass immigration of Commonwealth immigrants
to the United Kingdom and predicted dire consequences if such
immigration continued. Heath never spoke to Powell again. Powell had
not notified Conservative Central Office of his intention to deliver the speech, and this was put forward as one reason for his dismissal. When
Powell died on 8 February 1998, Heath was asked for his reaction, but
he simply told the media: "I won't be making a statement." With
another general election approaching in 1970 a Conservative policy
document emerged from the Selsdon Park Hotel that, according to some
historians, offered
monetarist and free-market oriented policies as solutions to the
country's unemployment and inflation problems. Heath stated that the
Selsdon weekend only reaffirmed policies that had actually been
evolving since he became leader of the Conservative Party. The prime
minister, Harold Wilson, thought the document a vote-loser and dubbed it Selsdon Man in order to portray it as reactionary. But Heath's Conservative Party won the general election of 1970. The new cabinet included Margaret Thatcher (Education and Science), William Whitelaw (Leader of the House of Commons) and the former prime minister Alec Douglas-Home (Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs). Heath's
time in office was as difficult as that of all British prime ministers
in the 1970s. The government suffered an early blow with the death of Chancellor of the Exchequer Iain Macleod on 20 July 1970; his replacement was Anthony Barber.
Heath's planned economic policy changes (including a significant shift
from direct to indirect taxation) remained largely unimplemented: the
Selsdon policy document was more or less abandoned as unemployment
increased considerably by 1972 (the so-called "U-Turn"). From this
point the economy was inflated in an attempt to bring unemployment
down, the so-called "Barber Boom". Heath attempted to rein in the increasingly militant trade union movement,
which had so far managed to stop attempts to curb their power by legal
means. His Industrial Relations Act set up a special court under the
judge Lord Donaldson, whose imprisonment of striking dockworkers was a
public relations disaster that the Thatcher Government of the 1980s
would take pains to avoid repeating (relying instead on confiscating
the assets of unions found to have broken new anti-strike laws).
Heath's attempt to confront trade union power resulted in a political
battle, hobbled as the government was by inflation and high
unemployment. Especially damaging to the government's credibility were
the two miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974, the latter of which resulted
in much of the country's industry working a Three-Day Week in an attempt to conserve energy. The National Union of Mineworkers won
its case but the energy shortages and the resulting breakdown of
domestic consensus contributed to the eventual downfall of his
government. Heath's government did not curtail welfare spending, though at one point the squeeze in the education budget resulted in Margaret Thatcher, then Secretary of State for Education and Science,
acting on the late Iain Macleod's wishes, ending the provision of free
school milk from 8 to 11 year olds (the preceding Labour Government
having removed it from secondary schools three years before) for which
the tabloid press christened her "Thatcher the Milk Snatcher". She did however succeed in blocking Macleod's other posthumous Education policy of abolishing the Open University recently founded by the preceding Labour Government. Heath's government's 1972 Local Government Act changed
the boundaries of England's counties and created "Metropolitan
Counties" around the major cities (e.g. Merseyside around Liverpool):
this caused significant public anger. However, Heath did not divide
England into regions, choosing instead to await the report of the
Crowther Commission on the constitution; the ten Government Office Regions were eventually set up by the Major government in 1994. The decimalisation of British coinage, begun under the previous Labour Government, was completed eight months after he came to power. He established the Central Policy Review Staff in February 1971. Heath governed during a bloody period in the history of the Northern Ireland Troubles. On Bloody Sunday in 1972 14 unarmed men were killed by British soldiers during an illegal march in Derry.
In 2003 he gave evidence to the Saville Inquiry and stated that he had
never sanctioned unlawful lethal force in Northern Ireland. In July
1972 he permitted his Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, to hold unofficial talks in London with a Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) delegation by Seán Mac Stiofáin.
In the aftermath of these unsuccessful talks the Heath government
pushed for a peaceful settlement with the democratic political parties. The 1973 Sunningdale Agreement was strongly repudiated by many Unionists and the Ulster Unionist Party withdrew its MPs at Westminster from the Conservative whip. Heath was targeted by the IRA for introducing internment in Northern Ireland. In December 1974 the Balcombe Street ASU threw a bomb onto the first-floor balcony of his home in Wilton Street, Belgravia, where it exploded. Heath had been conducting a Christmas carol concert in his constituency at Broadstairs, Kent, and
arrived home 10 minutes after the bomb exploded. No one was injured in
the attack but a landscape portrait painted by Winston Churchill —
given to Heath as a present — was damaged. Heath tried to bolster his government by calling a general election for
28 February 1974. The result of the election was inconclusive with no
party gaining an overall majority in the House of Commons. Heath began
negotiations with Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party but, when these failed, he resigned as Prime Minister on 4 March 1974, and was replaced by Harold Wilson's
minority Labour government, eventually confirmed, though with a tiny
majority, in a second election in October of the same year. The Centre for Policy Studies,
a Conservative group closely involved with the 1970 Selsdon document,
began to formulate a new monetarist and free-market policy, initially
led by Sir Keith Joseph. Although Margaret Thatcher was associated with the CPS she was initially seen as a potential moderate go-between by Heath's lieutenant James Prior.
Heath
came to be seen as a liability by many Conservative MPs, party
activists and newspaper editors. He resolved to remain Conservative
leader and at first it appeared that by calling on the loyalty of his
front bench colleagues he might prevail. At the time the Conservative
leadership rules allowed for an election to fill a vacancy but
contained no provision for a sitting leader to either seek a fresh
mandate or be challenged. In
late 1974 Heath came under tremendous pressure to concede a review of
the rules and agreed to establish a commission to propose changes and
to seek re-election. There was no clear challenger after Enoch Powell had left the party and Sir Keith Joseph had
ruled himself out after controversial statements implying that the
working classes should be encouraged to use more birth control. However
Joseph's close friend and ally Margaret Thatcher, who believed an
adherent to CPS philosophy should stand, joined the leadership contest
in his place alongside the outsider Hugh Fraser. Aided by Airey Neave's campaigning amongst back-bench MPs – whose earlier approach to William Whitelaw had been rebuffed out of loyalty to Heath – she emerged as the only serious challenger. The
new rules permitted new candidates to enter the ballot in a second
round of voting should the first be inconclusive, so Thatcher's
challenge was considered by some to be that of a stalking horse.
Neave deliberately understated Thatcher's support in order to attract
wavering votes from MPs who were keen to see Heath replaced even though
they did not necessarily want Thatcher to replace him. On
4 February 1975, Thatcher defeated Heath in the first ballot by 130 votes
to 119, with Fraser coming in a distant third with 16 votes. This was
not a big enough margin to give Thatcher the 15% majority necessary to
win on the first ballot, but having finished in second place Heath
immediately withdrew from the second ballot. His favoured candidate, William Whitelaw, lost to Thatcher in the second vote one week later (Thatcher 146, Whitelaw 79, Howe 19, Prior 19, Peyton 11). When
Thatcher visited Heath the day after her election as leader, accounts
differ as to whether or not she offered him a place in her shadow
cabinet – by some accounts she was detained for coffee by a colleague
so that the waiting press would not realise how brief the meeting had
been. Heath
stated that he had already informed her that he did not want a place
and that the purpose of her visit was to seek his advice as to how to
handle the press. Nonetheless after the 1979 general election he was offered, and declined, the post of British Ambassador to the United States. Heath
for many years persisted in criticism of the party's new ideological
direction. At the time of his defeat he was still popular with rank and
file Conservative members and was warmly applauded at the 1975 Party
Conference. He continued as a central figure on the left of the party
and, at the 1981 Conservative Party conference, openly criticised the
government's economic policies. He campaigned in the 1975 referendum in
which Britain voted to remain part of the EEC and remained active on
the international stage, serving on the Brandt Commission investigation
into developmental issues, particularly on North-South projects. In 1990 he flew to Baghdad to attempt to negotiate the release of British aircraft passengers taken hostage when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. After Black Wednesday in 1992 he stated in the House of Commons that government should build a fund of reserves to counter currency speculators. In the 1960s Heath had lived at a flat in the Albany, off Piccadilly; at the unexpected end of his premiership he took the flat of a Conservative MP Tim Kitson for some months. In February 1985 Heath moved to Salisbury, where he resided until his death over 20 years later. In 1987 he was nominated in the election for the Chancellorship of the University of Oxford but came third, behind Roy Jenkins and Lord Blake. Heath continued to serve as a back bench MP for the London constituency of Old Bexley and Sidcup and was, from 1992, the longest-serving MP ("Father of the House") and the oldest British MP. As Father of the House he oversaw the election of two Speakers of the Commons, Betty Boothroyd and Michael Martin. Heath was created a Knight of the Garter on 23rd April 1992. He retired from Parliament before the 2001 general election. Parliament broke with precedent by commissioning a bust of Heath while he was still alive. The 1993 bronze work, by Martin Jennings, was moved to the Members' Lobby in 2002. In August 2003, at the age of 87, Heath suffered a pulmonary embolism while on holiday in Salzburg, Austria.
He never fully recovered, and owing to his declining health and
mobility made very few public appearances in the final two years of his
life. His final ever public appearance was at the unveiling of a set of
gates to Winston Churchill at St Paul's Cathedral on 30 November 2004. Heath paid tribute to James Callaghan when
he died on 26 March 2005 saying that "James Callaghan was a major
fixture in the political life of this country during his long and
varied career." When in opposition he never hesitated to put firmly his
party's case. When in office he took a smoother approach towards his
supporters and opponents alike. "Although he left the House of Commons
in 1987 he continued to follow political life and it was always a
pleasure to meet with him. We have lost a major figure from our
political landscape". This was his last public statement. Heath died from pneumonia on
the evening of 17 July 2005, at the age of 89. He was cremated on 25
July 2005 at a funeral service attended by fifteen hundred people. As a
tribute, the day after his death the BBC Parliament channel showed the BBC coverage of the 1970 election. A memorial service was held for Heath in Westminster Abbey on 8 November 2005 which was attended by two thousand people. Three days later his ashes were interred in Salisbury Cathedral. In
January 2006, it was announced that Heath had left £5 million in
his will, most of it to a charitable foundation to conserve his
eighteenth-century house, Arundells, next to Salisbury Cathedral. As he had no descendants, he left only two legacies: £20,000 to his brother's widow, and £2500 to his housekeeper. |