Almost a great man

Of those prime ministers whom the old grammar schools escalator propelled from the bottom to the top of British society since the second world war, Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher were in many ways the most alike. Wilson, that classic greasy-pole climber, tactically brilliant, strategically trivial; Major, decent, straightforward, a good man lifted to power on the shoulders of his many friends as a healer who could unite: both these are types, the one less admirable than the other, but familiar to history. Heath and Thatcher are much odder, more dangerous and more remarkable. It is an extraordinary tribute to the modern Conservative Party that both chose it as the instrument through which to try to deliver their radical visions — as it is to the party that it chose them. In return, both nearly broke the party while doing what they believed they had to do.

It is impossible to read Philip Ziegler’s brilliant and timely book without renewed astonishment at the energy and scale of the change Heath wanted. From his earliest days, child of what he would always describe as a working-class family, he saw himself (as did his mother) as destined to be an instrument of history. The direction in which he wanted to move that history had astonishingly consistent principles from the start. Hatred of class; belief that every problem had a rational solution and that he could find it; contempt for what he saw as the incompetence and staleness of much of the way in which Britain was run, especially British industry; fear that the energy and scale of the US and other continental powers would leave a fragmented Europe on the sidelines — all this is there in the boy and the young Balliol organ scholar. We await Charles Moore on Thatcher, but I shall be astonished if there are not similar drivers in that story too.