Theakston K. After Number 10. Former Prime Ministers in British Politics

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later pigeon-holed when the party returned to ofﬁce. Douglas-Home was

revered in the wider Conservative party and so reassured party traditionalists.

As the mantle of elder statesman slipped onto his shoulders, ‘his appear-

ance at each year’s party conference’, comments Douglas Hurd, ‘was greeted

with tumultuous applause, in which guilt mingled with affection.’

‘I shall go on for as long as I am wanted’, he said in an interview two

months before the 1970 general election. ‘I don’t put any term to that.

Then I shall have other things to do.’ The widespread assumption that the

Conservatives would lose that election led to secret plans being hatched

by senior ﬁgures to bring back Douglas-Home as a temporary stand-in

or caretaker leader to block an Enoch Powell take-over of the party in the

aftermath of Heath being forced out after another general election defeat.

However, when Heath unexpectedly won, Douglas-Home returned to the

job he had ﬁrst done ten years earlier and became Foreign Secretary. He

wanted the job and, given his status and experience, it would have been

difﬁcult to deny him it. Maudling might have had a claim to that ofﬁce but

became Home Secretary instead, his coolness towards Europe perhaps being

an additional consideration for Heath. There seems to have been an expec-

tation that after 12 or 18 months or so Douglas-Home would retire and

hand over to someone else, but he stayed in post throughout the life of the

government, apparently rebufﬁng an attempt in 1973 to persuade him to

move to the Scottish Ofﬁce.

Aged 67 in 1970 Douglas-Home was the oldest and most experienced

member of Heath’s Cabinet. He seemed more at home and more assured

in the Foreign Ofﬁce than he had ever done at Number 10. While Heath

prioritised and pursued his European ambitions, Douglas-Home concen-

trated more on relations with the United States (he was highly regarded

in Washington DC and got on well with Nixon and Kissinger), on East-

West relations, on the Commonwealth, and on Rhodesia. He was a strong,

respected and relatively independent ﬁgure at the Foreign Ofﬁce, but only

rarely intervened on other policy issues, though in 1972 he argued pri-

vately to Heath we should ‘start to push’ the people of Northern Ireland

towards a united Ireland, fearing otherwise London might be stuck with

directly governing the province permanently. Although not passionately

pro-European he supported EEC entry, believing there was no realistic alter-

native if Britain were to remain a major power, and chaired the Cabinet’s

European Policy Committee. He was content to play second ﬁddle to Heath

on the strategy and gave a free hand to Geoffrey Rippon on the detailed

entry negotiations.

He was a tough’ Cold Warrior’, concerned about the

communist threat and believing the Russians would always take advantage

of Western weakness, and in 1971 ordered the expulsion from Britain of

105 Soviet ‘diplomats’ and spies. Relations with Moscow subsequently

recovered after a rocky spell and Douglas-Home made an ofﬁcial visit there

at the end of 1973.

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The Douglas-Home/Heath relationship has been described as ‘cordial and

effective’. Heath later wrote in his memoirs he was ‘served loyally and

supremely well by Alec Douglas-Home as Foreign Secretary’. There were few

issues on which they differed. At the time of the 1971 India-Pakistan war

Heath was more concerned to improve British relations with India while

Douglas-Home agreed more with the Americans in supporting Pakistan and

seeing India as the aggressor. Later Heath wanted a European response to

the Yom Kippur War while his Foreign Secretary sought to keep in step

with the Americans but the government fell before this incipient rift could

develop into a big problem.

Dealing with issues such as arms sales to South Africa and Rhodesia

involved trying to balance pressures from the right of the Tory and liberal

opinion at home and in the Commonwealth. Douglas-Home’s personal

sympathies were often more with the former group, and he was anxious to

keep the lid on any right-wing explosions or rebellions. He got off to a bad

start with a poor performance in the Commons when announcing the

resumption of arms sales to South Africa in 1970, and there was a furore in

the Commonwealth. In 1966 he had argued that ‘majority rule in Rhodesia

today or tomorrow would bring collapse and ruin’, and he felt Wilson’s

insistence on ‘no independence before majority rule’ was a ‘terrible mis-

take’, but worked hard to resolve the problem, holding talks in Rhodesia

with Ian Smith, leader of the white rebel UDI regime there, and hammering

out a settlement. However, the details of that agreement and the timetable

envisaged for the eventual transition to majority rule – estimates varied

from ten to 100 years – meant it would never be acceptable to the black

African population, as the Pearce Commission soon discovered to Home’s

disappointment. The situation there was too far gone for Douglas-Home’s

preferred ‘[African] foot in the door … second best … take it gradually’

approach to stand a realistic chance of working.

Douglas-Home had decided to bow out and leave the Commons at

the end of the 1970 parliament (which could have run up to June 1975)

but when Heath called a snap election in February 1974 (a decision he

opposed), he fought his seat again and, following the Conservatives’ defeat,

became shadow Foreign Secretary. On 22 March 1974 he announced he

would not be seeking re-election and so left the Commons when parlia-

ment was dissolved again and Wilson called another election in October

1974. In November he became the ﬁrst former prime minister to go to the

House of Lords with a life peerage (a baronage), as Lord Home of the Hirsel.

He had given up an ancient hereditary title, as the Fourteenth Earl of Home,

to become prime minister, being known 1963–74 as Sir Alec Douglas-Home

because he had been awarded the Order of the Thistle in 1962. He later said

he would not have dreamt of renouncing his title in 1963 if he had had to

give it up for his family forever, and if his son had not been able to resume

the title if he wished to do so.

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Home chaired the committee set up in November 1974 which came up

with a way for the party to challenge and remove unpopular Conservative

leaders who would not go of their own volition. The new provision for

annual contests and for the winner to have a 15 per cent margin of all

those entitled to vote provided the mechanism by which ﬁrst Heath and

later Thatcher were brought down. The new rules were sometimes called

‘Alec’s revenge’. Labour leader Harold Wilson had told an adviser in March

1974 that Home, and especially Lady Home, wanted Heath out from the

leadership – ‘He is like me’, Wilson claimed. ‘He wants revenge.’ But, for

Home, ever the loyal servant of the Conservative Party, it was politics, not

personal. Home was loyal to Heath but recognised that, as a general elec-

tion loser and after the failure of his government, ‘the Party will not have

Ted’.

Home thought Heath did not handle his own eviction from power and

political afterlife well: ‘it’s such a waste’, he commented in 1988, ‘I always

liked him very much … He mucked it all up. You must not allow yourself

to have a vendetta, particularly with a woman.’ As Dutton says, Home

‘quickly rallied’ to Mrs Thatcher once she became leader. She once gushed

he was ‘the wisest man I have ever met’ and, inexperienced herself in

foreign affairs when she became opposition leader, she frequently turned to

him for advice and views on international issues. She appointed him to

chair a Conservative Party committee on reform of the House of Lords,

whose report in 1978 recommended a part-elected upper house to act as a

stronger constitutional safeguard. Nothing came of it after the Conserv-

atives returned to power. As a committed devolutionist, he was unhappy

with Thatcher’s handling of the issue and backpedalling, which provoked

some frontbench resignations in 1976, but in February 1979 he made a

controversial intervention in the run-up to the referendum on Scottish

devolution with a speech urging voters to reject Labour’s proposals and

vote ‘no’ in the interests of producing better legislation ‘to get the matter

right’. The speech is credited with helping to swing votes in a close result

but the promised ‘better bill’ did not materialise after the Conservatives

took ofﬁce. Home, says Thorpe, was ‘unrepentant, but his enthusiasm for

Thatcher cooled somewhat in the aftermath of the 1979 election’.

In 1976 he had published his autobiography, The Way The Wind Blows, a

slight and anecdotal book that yielded more insights into the author’s

character and country interests than his political career. It sold rather well.

R.A. Butler mocked it as ‘this book on ﬁshing’. But as Dutton says about his

memoirs, ‘they are far removed from the turgid exercises in self-justiﬁcation

offered by many of Home’s political contemporaries’. In Letters to a Grandson

(1983) he combined a brief survey of British foreign policy with personal

reﬂections on diplomacy and foreign affairs, particularly about dealing with

the Russians. Border Reﬂections (1979) ‘reveals his passion for wildlife’, notes

Dutton, ‘particularly killing it’.

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Home regularly attended and was active in the House of Lords, speaking

particularly on foreign policy. His last major speech was in December 1989

when he spoke against prosecuting war criminals resident in Britain, but

as the years went on he spent more and more time in Scotland in con-

tented retirement. He remained the wise elder statesman ﬁgure – kept in

the picture by Number 10 during the 1982 Falklands War and by Foreign

Secretary Douglas Hurd during the ﬁrst Gulf War 1990–91, continuing to

take an interest in politics – but gradually faded from view.

In September 1990 Home’s wife died and a couple of months later he had

a stroke from which he made a slow recovery. He never went to London

again, living for the last ﬁve years of his life as a semi-invalid at the Hirsel.

He died, aged 92, of bronchopneumonia on 9 October 1995.

‘Few former prime ministers were so untarnished by fame, loyal to their

successors or oblivious to station as Alec Home’, was Richard Thorpe’s

verdict. Ted Heath told the story of the high-level British turnout for

De Gaulle’s funeral service at Notre Dame in 1970, a group including

the Prince of Wales, the serving PM (Heath) and Anthony Eden, Harold

Macmillan, and Harold Wilson. Would Home like to come too? ‘Oh, I

don’t think so, thank you’, he replied, ‘With all those former prime minis-

ters you don’t need your Foreign Secretary.’ ‘But you are a former prime

minister yourself’, replied Heath. ‘So, I am’, laughed Home. ‘I’d quite

forgotten.’

Home’s reputation rests more on what he did before and after he became

prime minister rather than on anything he did as prime minister. None of

his successors in Number 10 have (to date) gone back into government.

That he was able to do so was because of his private and public character,

his age and health when he left the premiership, and circumstances. Had

he had a longer stint in Number 10 (and the 1964 defeat was narrow) he

may not have wanted nor been able to stay in frontbench politics after

ﬁnally leaving the premiership, though the when and how he would have

left might have been important factors. If Heath had lost in 1970 and Labour

remained in power, he may have been too old to return to ofﬁce when the

Tories next formed a government and might then have just gone quietly to

the House of Lords. There was, in other words, nothing inevitable about

Home’s political afterlife as a former prime minister. That he was an under-

stated and underestimated ﬁgure probably helped rather than hindered

him in his rise to the very top and in playing a useful continuing role after

his short time there.

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Heath to Callaghan

Edward Heath (left ofﬁce 4 March 1974)

In the 11 months between resigning as prime minister on 4 March 1974

and standing down as leader of the Conservative Party on 4 February 1975,

Edward Heath was the political equivalent of those cartoon characters

who run off the edge of a cliff but do not realise there is nothing between

their feet and the ground except a thousand feet of thin air. Although

he was determined to carry on, he was not going to be able to defy the laws

of gravity and escape the fate of other unsuccessful premiers and party

leaders.

Heath was described as being in a ‘rather catatonic state’ after losing

ofﬁce in 1974, but he soon recovered his self-belief and resilience, or, as his

enemies would say, his arrogance and stubbornness. This year was his

annus horriblis, in which he lost the premiership and two general elections,

was challenged for the party leadership, and had his yacht, Morning Cloud

III, sunk in a storm. He had nowhere to live after leaving Number 10 – he

had given up his Albany apartment in 1970 – and for a few months camped

out in his parliamentary private secretary’s small ﬂat overlooking Vauxhall

Bridge. He then moved to a house in Belgravia at which the IRA launched a

bomb attack just before Christmas. To cap it all he was throughout this

period suffering from a thyroid deﬁciency, probably affecting him from late

1973 onwards, but not diagnosed until 1975. The illness adversely affected

his energy, temper and judgement.

Heath had been prime minister for just 44 months (1970–74). His pre-

miership ended in failure, frustration and electoral defeat against a back-

ground of economic crisis and industrial conﬂict. Calling and losing a

general election in February 1974, 15 months before he needed to, fuelled

doubts about his political judgment and electoral appeal. When the

outcome was a hung parliament, his trying and failing to stay in power by

seeking to form a coalition with the Liberals – their insistence on electoral

reform was an insurmountable stumbling block – gave the impression he

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was a bad loser, seeking to cling to ofﬁce. There was growing unhappiness

among Tory MPs with his leadership: immediately after the February elec-

tion around 100 (a third of the party) were reported as wanting him to step

down sooner or later. He had been an abrasive, confrontational and polar-

ising prime minister, and the switch in the second general election of 1974

(held in October) to calling for a coalition government of national unity

failed to convince the voters. While Labour squeaked back with only a tiny

majority, the Conservatives fell further back, losing 20 more seats and

1.3 million votes, compared with February. Having now lost three of the

four general elections he had fought as party leader, it was obvious to

virtually everyone except Heath himself that he was an electoral liability

and would have to go.

As one of his close Number 10 aides, Douglas Hurd, recalled, his decision

to stay on as party leader after the October 1974 defeat ‘made no sense,

even to his friends … He could then have stepped down with dignity.

Instead he resisted in futile deﬁance.’

The party had no formal mechanism

to remove an incumbent leader and, in the face of pressure from the back-

bench 1922 Committee, Heath was forced to invite Alec Douglas-Home to

chair a committee to propose new rules that would create the opportunity

to challenge and remove him. Had Heath resigned voluntarily, the likeli-

hood is that one of his supporters such as Willie Whitelaw or Jim Prior

would have succeeded to the Tory leadership. But his intransigence meant

they held back and the conditions were created under which demoralised

and desperate backbenchers turned to an outsider like Mrs Thatcher –

whom Heath himself did not take seriously – whose challenge was expected

only to damage or dislodge him and open up the leadership contest to

other more heavyweight candidates. Some Tories wanted simply to be rid

of Heath; others wanted a change of ideological direction. Heath’s cam-

paign was shambolic while Thatcher’s was run with rat-like cunning. The

result was that, having outpolled him on the ﬁrst ballot (by 130 to 119

votes – upon which he immediately resigned), she built up such a momen-

tum that she proved uncatchable.

After his eviction from the leadership in 1975, when he was 58 years old,

Heath spent another 26 years in the House of Commons, becoming Father

of the House in 1992 and the oldest-sitting MP, and ﬁnally leaving parlia-

ment in 2001 when he was almost 85. This record of House of Commons

service after being prime minister was longer than anyone else, exceeding

Lloyd George’s 22 years in the Commons after Number 10 and Balfour’s

16 years as an MP after losing the premiership. More than half of Heath’s

total time as an MP – he was ﬁrst elected in 1950 – was clocked up after he

lost his posts of national and then party leadership. He remained a regular

Commons attender, prominent in the front-row seat below the gangway

that Churchill had occupied, and developing into a better, more relaxed

and funnier speaker, and one whom MPs would rush to listen to, after his

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overthrow than he had been before, and he remained active in his Bexley

and Sidcup constituency. The Spectator named him ‘parliamentarian of the

year’ in 1988. He never considered going to the House of Lords. ‘Delightful

place’, he once said of it. ‘Charming people. With whom I’ve absolutely

nothing in common.’ Moving to ‘the other place’ would have signalled

he accepted his political career was over, and he would not do that. More-

over, he could never have accepted an honour from his hated supplanter,

Thatcher.

Wilson had offered to nominate him for a CH in 1974, but he

had refused. He ﬁnally accepted the Order of the Garter and became

Sir Edward Heath only in 1992, which was after two prime ministers who

left Number 10 after him – Wilson and Callaghan – had become KGs, as

well as two of his own Cabinet ministers – Lords Carrington and Hailsham.

By tradition former prime ministers from the time of Lloyd George onwards

are commemorated with a stained glass window with their coat of arms at

Chequers; for many years there was a space reserved for Heath but – perhaps

again reluctant to acknowledge he would not be back – his window was not

ﬁnally installed until 1994, 20 years after he left ofﬁce.

Heath showed he was still capable of constructive political work in

his role in the ‘yes’ campaign in the 1975 Common Market referendum

and later on the Brandt Commission on international development issues.

Douglas Hurd described the referendum campaign as ‘the last happy epi-

sode in Heath’s political career’. Mrs Thatcher took a back seat, and he was

the leading Conservative pro-EEC campaigner, speaking with passion and

conviction up and down the country, and being credited with playing a

key role in the ‘yes’ victory. He was invited to serve on the Brandt Com-

mission in 1977 and – though he had up till then showed little interest

in the Third World – quickly emerged as one of its dominant members,

helping to pull its (1980) report on ‘North-South’ problems together. He

mastered the issues with impressive thoroughness and found the call for

international governmental action to tackle the problems of the world’s

poor to be a good stick with which to beat the neo-liberal free-marketeers

in power in Britain and the USA. Heath joined in a backbench revolt

against cuts in the aid budget in 1984 and attacked the decision to pull out

of UNESCO.

But his root-and-branch, highly vocal and personalised criticisms of his

successor and her government, sustained through her tenure, and beyond,

left him increasingly isolated in his own party and were self-defeating,

costing him any inﬂuence he may have been able to exert as an elder

statesman and party grandee. Critics talked about ‘the longest sulk in par-

liamentary history’. But Heath seemed to see himself more as a ‘prophet in

the wilderness’, like Churchill in the 1930s. ‘Unlike previous prime minis-

ters – but like Thatcher herself after 1990 – he did not retire gracefully’, says

Dennis Kavanagh. ‘He was Mr Angry rather than a digniﬁed elder states-

man.’

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Heath wrote in his memoirs that had Whitelaw been elected Tory leader

in succession to him he was sure he could have served under him, as

Douglas-Home had under Heath himself. ‘It was long the custom’, he

argued, citing the 20th century precedents, ‘that former leaders wishing to

remain in politics should be immediately offered a top position.’ ‘That tra-

dition’, he continued, with a swipe at an unnamed Thatcher, ‘was later

abandoned.’ He claimed that at the end of 1974 Airey Neave, who later

became Mrs Thatcher’s campaign manager, pressed him to resign, saying

he was in a position to guarantee he would be given ‘a top job’ in the

Shadow Cabinet or in a Conservative government. But Heath rejected any

covert deal.

‘They are absolutely mad to get rid of me, absolutely mad’, Heath had

declared when his MPs gave him the political thumbs down, adding ‘I’m in

reserve.’ He did not think he was politically dead and was determined to

stay in parliament. ‘You never know what might happen in politics’, he

told an interviewer in 1977. Campbell describes him in the late-1970s as

‘conﬁdent that one way or another he would soon be recalled to the

country’s, if not necessarily the party’s colours’. He gave short shrift to sug-

gestions he might take up a European job in Brussels or stand for election

to the European Parliament. If there had been an SDP breakthrough in the

early 1980s he would probably have been willing to go into a coalition gov-

ernment with Roy Jenkins. He would have done so as a middle ground

Tory – he was never tempted into joining the SDP.

‘Heath’s resentment against Thatcher prevented him from playing a

useful political role during the rest of his life’, says Douglas Hurd. At gen-

eral elections he always campaigned vigorously for the Conservative Party,

but disagreed strongly with the policies and philosophy of her government,

calling her monetarist economic policy ‘catastrophic’, and attacking other

policies and initiatives virtually across the board: on rising unemployment,

industry, privatisation, the trade unions, local government, the poll tax,

the health service, Europe, and what he called ‘kowtow[ing] to the United

States’. As the party changed around him, he fumed about ‘unappealing

representatives’ and ‘right-wing whipper-snappers’ on the Tory back-

benches, with their ‘hardline’ views. When he denounced Thatcher’s Bruges

speech, he was booed at the party conference and faced placards reading

‘Judas Heath’. He complained about the distortion of his record and of

attempts to write him out of Tory party history. He regarded the Thatcher

era as an ‘aberration’ from the true Conservative tradition represented by

him and his predecessors, and saw John Major in the 1990s as a return to

that tradition though, as John Campbell noted, on all the big issues of the

1992 election (taxation, investment in public services, devolution, Europe)

his views were closer to Labour’s than to the government’s. He did not dis-

guise his contempt for the ‘neurotic paranoia’ and the ‘kamikaze politics’ of

the Eurosceptics, whom he thought Major wrong to seek to appease and

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gave too much away to. He turned against Major after Britain left the ERM.

By 1997, says Dennis Kavanagh, Heath was almost a crossbencher, support-

ing Labour’s policies on the minimum wage and on devolution.

Even an admirer like Douglas Hurd thought Heath’s ‘personal feeling

against the woman who had ousted him from political leadership was dom-

inant’. He seemed to harbour a deep and undying resentment, to be ‘con-

sumed by pique and petulance’, as Campbell puts it, to be graceless,

unforgiving and jealous – unwilling to give any credit for or even to recog-

nise her successes. Her supporters liked to rub it in that, unlike him, she

beat the NUM, did not ‘U-turn’, and won general elections. He phoned his

ofﬁce when she fell from power and said: ‘Rejoice, rejoice, rejoice’. The

gloves came off after she left Number 10: in extraordinary public attacks in

1991 he denounced her ‘lies’ and ‘falsehoods’ about Europe, talked about

her ‘ghastly legacy’, and hit out at her ‘little mind’.

In November 1978 Heath had publicly stated he would never challenge

Mrs Thatcher for the leadership. He remained – as he had always been

– rather unapproachable and prickly. He had always been a political loner.

He did not attempt to build up or lead a Heathite faction in the party or

to organise, plot or cabal against Mrs Thatcher, which made it easier to

dismiss him and his views. His former supporters and associates – the

‘Heathmen’ – made their accommodations with Thatcher and Thatcherism.

Some tried to mend bridges and reconcile him to the new leader, but to

their dismay and frustration he brushed these attempts aside. Whitelaw

would have preferred him to ‘get out of politics altogether’ and thought the

stance he took was bad for him and for the party. When Carrington told

Heath he ought to have gone round ‘being a good loser, kissing Margaret

on every possible opportunity and saying what a splendid woman she was’,

Heath exploded: ‘Why on earth? I do not think she is any good. I am much

better and ought still to be there.’ Heath still held a strong position in the

Conservative Party and the Shadow Cabinet and with the public in 1975

– opinion polls usually showed him well ahead of Thatcher as a preferred

prime minister. Had he had played what Campbell calls the part of the

‘loyal but worried elder statesman’, he would have made it more difﬁcult

for her to marginalise and exclude him, and he would have been better

able to help check or moderate her policies, or even to help dispose of her

when she was at her most unpopular (in 1980–81). He was almost his own

worst enemy.

Mrs Thatcher felt the need to say during the 1975 leadership contest that

she would like Heath in her team ‘if he wanted it – and I should like him to

want it’. She privately hoped he would not take up the offer. But he made

clear he did not want to serve in her Shadow Cabinet and was annoyed

at leaks she had offered him a place and that he had refused it. In 1979

he seemed to advertise his availability for the post of Foreign Secretary

and was reported as disappointed when he was left in the cold and Lord

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Carrington got the job. It was never possible to imagine Heath serving in a

Thatcher Cabinet. That would have meant accepting the verdict of 1975,

showing support for her leadership and working closely with her. If the

result had been close in 1979, she might have been constrained to bring

him back, but her comfortable majority meant she could ﬁrmly shut the

door. As a deliberate insult, two weeks after the general election, that fur-

ther poisoned their relationship, it was made known that Heath had been

offered but had refused the post of ambassador to the USA. A less suitable

post for the country’s leading pro-European could hardly be imagined. He

later said he was ‘not cut out to be a postman’. Thatcher intended a sen-

tence of political transportation or exile to remove him from the way.

Unwanted and frustrated at home, Heath travelled extensively and enjoyed

clocking up the air miles in the role of globetrotting international elder

statesman. Douglas Hurd thought ‘his taste in foreign leaders became

somewhat bizarre’ while John Campbell argued his internationalist ideal-

ism co-existed with a growing sense of weary realpolitik. As a young man in

the 1930s he had accused Chamberlain of ‘turning all four cheeks at once’

to the dictators and ridiculed his foreign policy as ‘if at ﬁrst you don’t

concede, ﬂy, ﬂy, ﬂy again’. But as a former prime minister, he laid himself

open to similar criticism. He could be, as one obituary put it, ‘insensitive to

democratic demands and insufﬁciently wary of authoritarian regimes’. He

would have preferred a negotiated settlement to the Falklands crisis and a

‘way out’ for General Galtieri’s Argentine junta. He made regular trips to

China, where the communist authorities carefully cultivated him; he con-

demned the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 but still came across as

something of an apologist for the Beijing dictators. He went to Cuba and

got on well with Fidel Castro. He opposed the 1990–91 Gulf War and his

suggestion that Saddam Hussein be offered concessions as part of a nego-

tiated settlement produced newspaper headlines denouncing him as an

appeaser. He embarrassed the government – ministers criticised him for

meddling and sending the wrong signals to Saddam – by ﬂying off to

Baghdad on a mercy mission to negotiate the release of 33 British citizens

trapped in Iraq after the invasion of Kuwait and regarded as ‘hostages’.

Heath told Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait but Tories of all stripes

were angered by his intervention in the crisis. Later he supported the non-

intervention policy of the Major government towards the Balkans conﬂict,

scornfully dismissing what he called the ‘something must be done’ response

to the ethnic cleansing and mass murders there.

Heath never married and for all his busyness, friendships and worldwide

contacts was fundamentally a self-sufﬁcient and solitary person. But con-

solation – and more – for his political frustrations came from his many

non-political interests and enthusiasms. A serious international yachtsman,

he captained Britain’s Admiral’s Cup ocean-racing team in 1979 and con-

tinued sailing until 1986, when he was 70. He took on many conducting

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