The PM who loved Rod Stewart and dyed his hair strawberry blonde
BOOK OF THE WEEK EDWARD HEATH: A SINGULAR LIFE by Michael McManus (elliott & Thompson £25) A new biography reveals some VERY unexpected facts about Ted Heath . . . he even had a sense of humour!
ANYONE picking up this book thinking they are about to read a po-faced plod through the highs and lows of Edward Heath’s career is in for a shock. On the first page, Michael McManus writes that he hopes to capture all of Heath’s characteristics and foibles — including his ‘idiosyncratic sense of humour’.
The fact that Heath had a sense of humour at all will come as news to most people, but McManus goes much further than that. He’s firmly convinced that Heath not only had a funny bone, but also — again, contrary to general belief — a sexual identity (of which more later).
Almost half a century after holding power and 11 years after his death, Heath remains perhaps the most unfathomable of all British prime ministers.
What went on behind those beady eyes and those swagged chins? Was he really as charmless as legend suggests? Certainly, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest this was the case.
When Heath was prime minister, his parliamentary private secretary (PPS) once implored him to be nicer to his MPs. Why didn’t he go and have a drink with them sometime, for instance?
Two days later, the PPS was delighted to see Heath deep in conversation with a senior backbencher in the House of Commons smoking room.
Inching closer to eavesdrop on what they were talking about, the man’s heart plummeted as he heard Heath say: ‘That was a bloody awful speech you made in the debate today.’
Yet there was plainly a very different Heath: a lonely, vulnerable man who could only express his emotions while he was playing music.
WHEN he was in the army during World War II, Heath was greatly liked and respected by his men. He was held in similarly high esteem by his staff. As another parliamentary private secretary said of him: ‘He was never underhand.’
But in any social gathering, he was likely to prove astonishingly hard work. His fellow Tory MP Jim Prior once attended a lunch at which his wife had the misfortune to sit next to Heath. During the entire meal, Heath never uttered a word. ‘He seemed incapable of radiating any warmth at all,’ noted Prior.
As Heath rose through the Tory ranks in the Fifties, several of his colleagues thought it would be a good idea to introduce him to suitable young women in the hope that sparks might fly.
In retrospect, of course, it’s hard to imagine a more doom-laden exercise than this. A fellow MP even took along one of ‘my most dazzling and charm-laden girlfriends’ — a woman ‘ready to make any sacrifice in the interest of the party’.
She sat down on a sofa next to Heath and started engaging in flirty conversation — whereupon he promptly jumped to his feet, plumped the cushion he had just been sitting on and fled to the far end of the room.
At the time, Heath was thought to stand no chance of ever becoming Tory leader unless he found himself a wife.
But he proved all his doubters wrong in 1965 when — still resolutely single — he became the youngest party leader since Disraeli. What makes his ascent all the more unusual is that he had little relish for the day-to-day gossip and bloodletting of politics.
He was also a robotically boring public speaker, with no feel for language. Even his most famous quote turns out to be have been the result of a mistake. In 1973, Heath said the behaviour of the multinational company Lonrho showed ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. In fact, his speech referred to ‘an unacceptable facet of capitalism’, but Heath, too vain to wear reading glasses, misread the words.
He didn’t last long as PM, of course — just four turbulent years.
Thereafter he became a colossal grump, never wasting an opportunity to loose off a rocket in the direction of his successor, Margaret Thatcher.
But even in the depths of his grumpiness, Heath could still kick up his heels in unexpected fashion.
On one occasion, he asked his secretary to get him tickets to see Rod Stewart. On another, he expressed a keen desire to go to the West End revival of Oklahoma!
Far from becoming less vain as he grew older, Heath became ever more so. When he was in his mid-60s, he took to tinting his hair an alarming shade of strawberry blonde, before his staff — treading very carefully — persuaded him to go back to his normal ‘Dulux Brilliant White’.
HAIR was clearly a touchy subject to Heath — and one that brought out his sensitive side. He once heard a rumour that he’d claimed the Tory MP Michael Fabricant wore a wig. Heath immediately went up to Fabricant in the Commons and told him: ‘I do hope you know I would never dream of making an impertinent and personal comment either to your face, or behind your back.’
Michael McManus helped Heath write his memoirs and was also his private secretary. As he makes plain, this is not intended to be a conventional biography. Rather, by yoking together his own and other people’s recollections of Heath, he’s tried to find out what made him tick.
The Heath that emerges from this consistently insightful, briskly paced, even-handed and unexpectedly entertaining book is an acutely shy man whose bluff exterior hid a fundamental lack of confidence.
As for his sexuality, McManus — quite rightly, I suspect — has no truck with the idea that Heath was sexless, arguing that to dub anyone totally asexual is ‘to deny them their very human identity’.
His suspicion is that Heath was a deeply closeted gay man who didn’t have much of a libido and almost certainly never had sexual relations with anyone.
By the time I reached the end, something quite unexpected had happened: I found myself agreeing that Heath did, indeed, have a sense of humour — even if you had to squint pretty hard to find it. I even found myself warming to Heath in all his bottled-up awkwardness.
But then, it’s hard to be entirely resistant to anyone who, on being asked why Mrs Thatcher had taken so violently against him, shook his jowls ruminatively, before declaring: ‘I cannot say. I am not a doctor.’