When I heard he'd died, I had that brief, disconcerting feeling you get when you learn such news of someone you hadn't thought had still been alive.
I think that's because he was a quintessentially 1970s figure (although he was an MP throughout the Thatcher years, not leaving the Commons until 1992).
He stood out as an authentic working-class Liberal.
He was also that other rare thing: a prominent politician with a Lancashire accent. Why aren't there more of them? (I mean genuine Lancastrian - not the subtly different Manchester.) The only other one I can think of was Rhodes Boyson.
Some odd conjunctions and non sequiturs in the BBC obituary:
despite being a Liberal, he... was firmly anti-establishment
while he was all for having a nuclear deterrent, he was strongly against unions having a closed-shop arrangement...
Showing posts with label 1970s. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 1970s. Show all posts
Saturday, 4 September 2010
Friday, 18 June 2010
Edward Heath and Jeremy Thorpe
According to Reuters (in a book review today), "the 1980s are back in vogue". Not at Sauti Ndogo HQ they're not, as I'm more interested in the 1970s.
Philip Ziegler's authorized biography of Edward Heath has just been published. An excellent review by Robert Harris describes it as "the most damning official biography of a British prime minister ever written".
I met Heath in 1975 or 1976 when he came to speak to my school's political debating society and about half-a-dozen of us had dinner with him afterwards. Curiously, I remember very little about the evening. The only thing I recall him talking about at the dinner table was a (no doubt well-worn) anecdote about the IRA bomb attack on his house (in December 1974 - he was not at home at the time).
Harris sums him up well: "Britain has had some odd characters as its prime minister, but few, as Ziegler makes plain in this elegant, compelling and devastating study, were quite as odd as Ted Heath."
Next week will see the 31st anniversary of a day I remember well: the acquittal on a charge of conspiracy to murder of another oddball 1970s character: Jeremy Thorpe.
Among the oddities of that scandal (such a good one, it spoilt us for the future) were Thorpe's three unlikely co-defendants (including one John Le Mesurier - part-owner of a South Wales carpet shop, not the Dad's Army star).
Philip Ziegler's authorized biography of Edward Heath has just been published. An excellent review by Robert Harris describes it as "the most damning official biography of a British prime minister ever written".
I met Heath in 1975 or 1976 when he came to speak to my school's political debating society and about half-a-dozen of us had dinner with him afterwards. Curiously, I remember very little about the evening. The only thing I recall him talking about at the dinner table was a (no doubt well-worn) anecdote about the IRA bomb attack on his house (in December 1974 - he was not at home at the time).
Harris sums him up well: "Britain has had some odd characters as its prime minister, but few, as Ziegler makes plain in this elegant, compelling and devastating study, were quite as odd as Ted Heath."
Next week will see the 31st anniversary of a day I remember well: the acquittal on a charge of conspiracy to murder of another oddball 1970s character: Jeremy Thorpe.
Among the oddities of that scandal (such a good one, it spoilt us for the future) were Thorpe's three unlikely co-defendants (including one John Le Mesurier - part-owner of a South Wales carpet shop, not the Dad's Army star).
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