Edward Heath
Edward Heath was prime minister of the United Kingdom from June 1970 to March 1974, the grammar-school boy from Broadstairs, the carpenter's son, the first Conservative leader chosen by a vote of MPs, the organist, the yachtsman who won the Sydney to Hobart race in his first year as prime minister. He was the man who took Britain into the European Economic Community on 1 January 1973, the thing he had wanted since he had watched Nuremberg as an undergraduate and negotiated for as Macmillan's minister in 1961-63 until de Gaulle said no. The government that had come in on the Selsdon programme of free markets and no lame ducks nationalised Rolls-Royce within a year and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders within two, the U-turn that Thatcher's people never forgave. It had the Industrial Relations Act of 1971 that the unions defied, the miners' strike of 1972 that the flying pickets won at Saltley gate. There were the decimal currency, the Barber boom and the statutory incomes policy. There was Bloody Sunday in Derry in January 1972 and the direct rule of Northern Ireland from March that ended fifty years of Stormont, and the Sunningdale agreement of December 1973 for power-sharing that lasted five months. There were the oil shock, the second miners' strike, the three-day week of January 1974 with the lights off, and the election he called on the question of who governs Britain, to which the country answered, by four seats, not you. He was born in Broadstairs in 1916, won an organ scholarship to Balliol, was president of the Oxford Union and campaigned against Chamberlain in the Oxford by-election of 1938. He served in the artillery through the war and commanded a firing squad. He entered parliament for Bexley in 1950, was chief whip in the Suez year, and the minister who abolished resale price maintenance in 1964 against his own party. He became leader in 1965 against Maudling. He lost the two elections of 1974 and the leadership to Thatcher in February 1975. He spent the thirty years after in what the papers called the longest sulk in history, on the back benches below the gangway, voting against her, going to see Saddam to bring out hostages in 1990, calling the Maastricht rebels names, and conducting orchestras. He was Father of the House from 1992 to 2001, was knighted, and never married. He died at Salisbury in July 2005 in the house in the cathedral close, which is a museum. The entry into Europe that was his monument was undone eleven years later by a referendum his party called.
- Lived: 1916 CE – 2005 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: prime minister, politician
