Tributes to respected ‘Thatcherism’ journalist Tony Heath, 96

A HIGHLY respected Welsh journalist who coined the term “Thatcherism” has died at the age of 96.

Tony Heath wrote for a variety of newspapers and journals, including the Guardian, Independent, Observer, New Statesman, New Society and Private Eye.

Writing for Tribune magazine in August 1973 as its education correspondent, he was the first person to use the term “Thatcherism”, pointing out its shortcomings as a political philosophy.

Tony wrote: “It will be argued that teachers are members of a profession which must not be influenced by political considerations. With the blight of Thatcherism spreading across the land that is a luxury that only the complacent can afford.”

The son of a pit foreman, he was born in Tredegar and went to the local school.

He was called up for Second World War service, and took part in the D-Day landings.

In April 1945, Tony was serving with the 13th/18th Royal Hussars Armoured Corps on the outskirts of Bremen when the Sherman tank he was in took a direct hit from a German tank.

He managed to bail out but saw his best friend, Eddie Moulding, trapped and burned to death. His hearing was permanently damaged and for the rest of his life he suffered nightmares about what he had witnessed.

After the war he met Dorothea Smither (née Hill), a widow with two sons, in London. She was then working as a fashion model. They married in 1954 and settled in Reigate, Surrey, and in the 1960s Tony was elected as a Labour member of Surrey County Council.

In 1974 they moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog, where Tony resumed his career as a journalist.

In an obituary for the Guardian, his son, Stephen Heath, wrote: “My father never formally retired and his byline continued to appear in various publications when he was into his 80s. Dorothea died in 2012, and Tony spent the last nine years of his life in a residential home in Hay-on-Wye.”

Blaenau Gwent Labour MS Alun Davies said: “Tony was such a lovely guy. I visited him a number of times in Hay-on-Wye. The piece he wrote in the Observer about the incident in the tank in 1945 remains one of the best and most moving descriptions of war that I have read.”