Memories of Heath

By Tim King

Date: 20/07/05

The death on Sunday (17 July) of Edward Heath, the British prime minister who took his country into the common market, awakened in me three memories about his attitudes to Europe. The first of these memories was of looking at documents in the Public Record Office in London dating from the early 1960s. At that time Heath was the Foreign Office minister in charge of handling negotiations for membership - a bid that was blocked by the then French president Charles De Gaulle. When subsequently, in January 1972, Heath signed the treaty of accession ("the proudest moment of my life"), it was the achievement of a dream for which Heath had personally striven for much of his political life. In his maiden speech in the House of Commons, he had spoken out in support of the Schuman Plan.

My second memory is of a seminar in London in 1994, at which various witnesses discussed the first two years of the Heath government. Robert Armstrong, who at the time had been the civil servant in his private office, recalled Heath's reaction to the vote in the House of Commons on 28 October 1971 in favour of joining the European Community. Heath and a few of his friends withdrew to his private sitting room at No 10 Downing Street where the prime minister sat at his clavichord and played the First Prelude from Book 1 of Johann Sebastian Bach's Well Tempered Clavier. It was a deliberate assertion of a shared European cultural heritage - of Britain's part in it and of Germany's. This, from a man who had seen the rallies in Nüremberg and had fought with distinction in the Second World War.

My third memory is of Ted Heath himself, when he came to the city of Bath one afternoon during the general election campaign of 1992, in support of the city's then member of parliament Chris Patten.

Heath made a royal progress, full of incident, down the main shopping street of Bath. He met a former secretary. He was heckled by a beggar, shouting, "Oi, Ted! What ya gonna do for the homeless?" Then, bizarrely, outside the Roman Baths, he was accosted by some French teenagers who wanted to be photographed with him (he was, after all, an international superstar). They clung to his arms, while he stuck his hands deeper into his coat pockets. Then he turned to one and asked, in an exquisitely bad French accent, "Parlez-vous français?"

There was something about this campaigning ritual that was a throw-back to an earlier age, to the days when Patten had worked in Heath's research department. By 1992, the tide had already turned in the Conservative Party against Heath's strand of pro-Europeanism. Although Margaret Thatcher had been toppled, the anti-European elements in the party grew bolder and stronger. In the succeeding political generations on the centre-right, the blood-line ran dry of those who knew Europe and valued the European Union. Patten failed to win re-election. In the lifetime of the succeeding parliament, John Major was outnumbered and undermined, and Kenneth Clarke was isolated.

As Heath's encounter with the French teenagers showed, he was never a European in the relaxed easy way in which Tony Blair can be. For all that he travelled extensively in Europe, Heath remained an Englishman through and through, a product of his class and time. And yet, no doubt because of the formative experience of the 1930s and 1940s, his commitment to the European Community was deeply rooted. It was something for which he was prepared to take political risks. He was of a different political age.

Author looks back on the life and the attitudes to Europe of Edward Heath, the British Prime Minister who took his country into the Common Market. Heath died on 17 July 2005.