Sir Edward Richard George Heath (9 July 1916 – 17 July 2005) was a British statesman who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1970 to 1974 and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1965 to 1975. Heath also served for 51 years as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1950 to 2001. Outside politics, Heath was a yachtsman, a musician, and an author.
Heath was born in Broadstairs, Kent to a chambermaid and a carpenter. He became a leader within student politics whilst studying PPE at Balliol College, Oxford. During World War II, Heath served as an officer in the Royal Artillery. He worked briefly in the Civil Service, but resigned to stand for Parliament, and was elected for Bexley at the 1950 election. He was promoted to become Chief Whip by Anthony Eden in 1955, and served in the cabinet of Harold Macmillan as Minister of Labour and Lord Privy Seal and that of Alec Douglas-Home as President of the Board of Trade. After the Conservatives were defeated at the 1964 election, Heath was elected to succeed Douglas-Home as party leader in 1965, becoming Leader of the Opposition. Although he led the Conservatives to a landslide defeat to Labour's Harold Wilson at the 1966 election, Heath remained in the leadership, and at the 1970 election led his party to an unexpected victory.
During his time as prime minister, Heath oversaw the decimalisation of British coinage in 1971, and a sweeping reform of local government in 1972. He also successfully negotiated British entry into the European Economic Community (EEC). However, his premiership also coincided with heightened violence during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, in response to which he imposed direct rule and approved internment without trial. Unofficial talks with Provisional Irish Republican Army delegates broke down, as did the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973, which led the MPs of the Ulster Unionist Party to resign the Conservative whip. Heath's attempts to deregulate the economy, to reform British trade unionism with the unpopular Industrial Relations Act, and to transition from direct to indirect taxation, such as with the introduction of value-added tax in 1973, were undermined by a miners' strike at the start of 1974 that severely damaged the Government. In response, Heath introduced a Three-Day Week to conserve energy and called an election for February 1974 in an attempt to obtain a mandate to face down the miners' wage demands. Instead, the result was a hung parliament, with the Conservatives losing their majority. Despite receiving fewer votes, the Labour Party had four more seats than the Conservatives, and Heath resigned as Prime Minister on 4 March after talks with the Liberal Party to form a coalition government were unsuccessful.
After losing a second successive election to Wilson in October 1974, Heath's leadership of the party was challenged by his former Education Secretary, Margaret Thatcher. On 4 February 1975, she unexpectedly outpolled him in the first round of votes. Heath withdrew from the race and returned to the backbenches. Although he campaigned with Thatcher for the successful "yes" side of the 1975 referendum on British membership in the EEC, Heath would become an embittered critic during her time as prime minister, speaking and writing against the policies of Thatcherism. Following the 1992 election, he became Father of the House, until his retirement from the Commons in 2001. Heath died in 2005, aged 89. He has been described by the BBC as "the first working-class meritocrat" to become Conservative leader in "the party's modern history" and "a One Nation Tory in the Disraeli tradition who rejected the laissez-faire capitalism that Thatcher would enthusiastically endorse."
Edward Richard George Heath was born at 54 Albion Road, Broadstairs, Kent, on 9 July 1916, the son of William George Heath, a carpenter who built airframes for Vickers during the First World War, and was subsequently employed as a builder and Edith Anne Heath (née Pantony), a lady's maid. His father was later a successful small businessman after taking over a building and decorating firm. Heath's paternal grandfather had run a small dairy business, and when that failed worked as a porter at Broadstairs Station on the Southern Railway. Edward was four years old when his younger brother, John, was born; there was no question that Edward was the "favoured brother". Heath was known as "Teddy" as a young man. He was educated at Chatham House Grammar School in Ramsgate, and in 1935 with the aid of a county scholarship he went up to study at Balliol College, Oxford.
In later years, Heath's peculiar accent, with its "strangulated" vowel sounds, combined with his non-Standard pronunciation of "l" as "w" and "out" as "eout", was satirised by Monty Python in the audio sketch "Teach Yourself Heath" (released on a 7" flexi-disc single included with initial copies of their 1972 LP Monty Python's Previous Record). Heath's biographer John Campbell speculates that his speech, unlike that of his father and younger brother, who both spoke with Kent accents, must have undergone "drastic alteration on encountering Oxford", although retaining elements of Kent speech.
A talented musician, Heath won the college's organ scholarship in his first term (he had previously tried for the organ scholarships at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and Keble College, Oxford) which enabled him to stay at the university for a fourth year; he eventually graduated with a Second Class Honours BA in Philosophy, politics and economics in 1939.
While at university Heath became active in Conservative Party politics. On the key political issue of the day, foreign policy, he opposed the Conservative-dominated government of the day ever more openly. His first Paper Speech (i.e. a major speech listed on the Order Paper along with the visiting guest speakers) at the Oxford Union, in 1936, was in opposition to the appeasement of Germany by returning her colonies, confiscated during the First World War.
In June 1937 Heath was elected President of the Oxford University Conservative Association as a pro-Spanish Republic candidate, in opposition to the pro-Franco John Stokes (himself later a Conservative MP). In 1937–38 Heath was chairman of the national Federation of University Conservative Associations, and in the same year (his third at university) he was Secretary and then Librarian of the Oxford Union. At the end of the year he was defeated for the Presidency of the Oxford Union by another Balliol candidate, Alan Wood, on the issue of whether the Chamberlain government should give way to a left-wing Popular Front. On that occasion, Heath supported the government.
In his final year Heath was the president of Balliol College's Junior Common Room, an office held in subsequent years by his near-contemporaries Denis Healey, who would become a lifelong friend and political rival and Roy Jenkins, and as such was invited to support the Master of Balliol Alexander Lindsay, who stood as an anti-appeasement 'Independent Progressive' candidate against the official Conservative candidate, Quintin Hogg, in the 1938 Oxford by-election.
Heath, who had himself applied to be the Conservative candidate for the by-election, accused the government in an October Union Debate of "turning all four cheeks" to Adolf Hitler, and was elected as President of the Oxford Union in November 1938, sponsored by Balliol, after winning the Presidential Debate that "This House has No Confidence in the National Government as presently constituted". He was thus President in Hilary term 1939; the visiting Leo Amery described him in his diaries as "a pleasant youth".
As an undergraduate, Heath travelled widely in Europe. His opposition to appeasement was nourished by his witnessing first-hand a Nuremberg rally in 1937, where he met leading Nazis Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler at an SS cocktail party. He later described Himmler as "the most evil man I have ever met". He was in Germany for two months to learn German but did not keep up any fluency in the language in later life. In 1938 he visited Barcelona, then under attack from Spanish Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. On one occasion a car in which he was travelling came under machine-gun fire, while on another a bomb hit his hotel whilst he was observing an air raid from outside. In the summer of 1939, accompanied by his Jewish friend Madron Seligman, he travelled to Danzig and Poland. They made the return journey by hitchhiking and rail across Germany through mobilising troops, returning to Britain just before the declaration of war.