BIOGRAPHY: Edward Heath: The Authorised BiographyBy Philip Ziegler, Harper Press, 654pp. £25
POOR OLD Ted Heath. Eclipsed by Harold Wilson in British politics during the height of his career, he was then humiliatingly overshadowed by Margaret Thatcher in the Conservative party after his fall from power, and now he lies rather forgotten.
Meanwhile, in Ireland, he is always associated with the disastrous early years of the Northern Ireland Troubles. Heath’s period as UK Prime Minister, 1970-74, was indeed an appalling one in the North, as the Falls Curfew was followed by internment and then Bloody Sunday, and as hundreds of people were killed in the burning conflict.
Heath had no great interest in Northern Ireland as such, and Philip Ziegler suggests in this impressive biography that “he totally failed to grasp the realities of Ulster politics”. Unsurprisingly angered by the IRA (who in turn tried to kill him), he also found unionists infuriating.
Yet this well-written, enjoyable book contains evidence that Heath’s approach to the North was not without its merits. What had to be understood, he suggested to Northern Ireland, “is that you are two communities that have got to live together”; in this, and his preference for power-sharing, he pre-echoed the eventual compromise which emerged years later.
For Heath’s objective in the North was a settlement “acceptable to majority opinion in Northern Ireland and at the same time to a great body of moderate Catholic opinion on both sides of the border”. And if Ted Heath was Prime Minister at the time of internment and Bloody Sunday, we should also recall that he was in the same job at the time of Sunningdale. The seeds of the lengthy conflict, but also of its resolution, were planted during his time in Downing Street in the early 1970s.
And Heath’s relations with Dublin could have been worse. He seemed early on to sense that Jack Lynch’s protestations against internment were well-founded, and he got on tolerably well with Liam Cosgrave.
In any case, it would be narrow to see this important politician only through Irish lenses and Ziegler’s book – based on unrestricted access to the Heath archive – presents a rounded and ultimately rather poignant portrait of a cold and flawed man.
Born in 1916 into a lower-middle-class family, Ted Heath won a scholarship to grammar school and then moved to Balliol College, Oxford before entering a life in politics. He was always ambitious, and he was clearly a difficult man. Lacking social grace or a capacity for intimacy, he could be repeatedly rude. “Gratitude was not one of his more marked characteristics”, as Ziegler puts it here, and “if there was a way of making things difficult for himself, Heath would surely find it”.
“Why do people hate me so much?” Heath asked a Conservative colleague in 1974. His short-tempered treatment of people and his emotional coldness provide some answer, and his personality cost him politically. In Ziegler’s words: “Whatever they might think about his policies or his achievements as prime minister, the voters had reservations about him as a human being.” The journalist Peter Jenkins is quoted here as saying that “even when he laughed, he had the appearance of a man imitating laughter”.
But his personal qualities could also be lit more favourably. He showed bravery as a soldier in the second World War, was cultured in music, and his opposition to frivolity had its attractive dimension. Heath “genuinely disdained cheap popularity and eschewed anything that might be interpreted as an attempt to win favour by pretending to be something other than what he was”.
The central obsession of his life was politics. Pro-European, and on the left of the Conservative Party, it was ideology as well as personality that divided him so sharply from Thatcher. And some of his views might seem eminently acceptable to people beyond the Tory party. He held that 1970s Israeli intransigence made the Middle Eastern context unnecessarily difficult; and he was admirably committed to identifying and addressing the problem of global poverty and injustice. Heath possessed convictions and, even in the eyes of as deep an ideological opponent as Tony Benn, he “had integrity”.
How good a politician was he? Jeffrey Archer described him as “the worst communicator the job has ever seen”. (For his part, Heath was proud to declare that he had never read Archer’s novels.) And Ziegler suggests that Heath’s obsession with trivial details obscured his vision of more important matters.
As he was not inclined to treat women sufficiently seriously, it was supremely ironic that Margaret Thatcher proved his ultimate nemesis, and the two of them endured years of unreconciled enmity. Heath thought Thatcher inferior to him as a politician and remained convinced that he, rather than she, should have continued to lead the party and the country. One of Ziegler’s later chapters is aptly entitled ‘The Long Sulk’, and this captures the essence of Heath’s later years.
Indeed, the decades between his 1970s fall from power and his death in 2005 were rather sad, lonely ones, and saw him increasingly withdrawing from public life.
But this fine biography makes clear that, for all his flaws, Heath deserves to be remembered as a significant and far from always misguided politician.
Richard English is Professor of Politics at Queen's University, Belfast. His books include Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland(2006), and Terrorism: How to Respond,published in paperback by Oxford University Press in 2010
