Edward Heath may have been one of the most unsuccessful prime ministers in British history, having presided during his four-year term (1970–1974) over shortages, power cuts, a three-day week and hyperinflation, with nothing much to boast about except getting Britain into the European Common Market (admittedly an historic achievement); but this did not prevent him being a power-crazed egotist of astonishing conceit. He may have been of modest social origins, the son of a maid and of a builder in Broadstairs, Kent, but he was convinced nevertheless of his own superiority to practically everybody and of his pre-ordained destiny to be an unchallenged leader. It was indicative of his character that he was an admirer of such tyrants as Fidel Castro, Marshal Tito, and Mao Tse Tung, the last of whom flattered him in return with a gift of two infertile pandas during a visit he paid to Beijing in the last year of his premiership.
In 1976, a couple of years after losing the 1974 election on the issue ‘Who governs Britain?’, at which the people decided it should be almost anyone but him, Heath published a book called Music: A Joy for Life which I reviewed in this magazine at the time. It was, I thought, evidence of his early addiction to power that the two musical skills that the young Heath had chosen to master were playing the organ and conducting orchestras, both suggesting not so much team spirit as an urge to dominate. And Heath also described in the book how, after winning the crucial vote in the House of Commons that enabled Britain to join Europe, he took his exhausted team of helpers back to Number 10 to celebrate and, instead of letting them make merry, got them all to sit down and listen reverentially while he played Bach on his Steinway grand.
Heath was hardly a great conductor; he was wooden and mechanical in his gestures and incapable of emotional interaction with his players. Passing through Paris in the late 1970s, I read in a newspaper that Heath had conducted a concert with the European Youth Orchestra at Fontainebleau the night before. ‘M. Heath a massacré Mozart,’ read the headline. But Heath was so sure of his brilliance as a conductor that his gift to Pope Paul VI during an official visit to Rome as prime minister had been a recording of himself conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. This hardly matched the Pope’s gift to him, which had been beautifully bound facsimiles of all the music of Palestrina from the Vatican library. How had the Pope reacted to his gift? I asked the Prime Minister with genuine bemusement when I met him at a reception that evening at the British Embassy. ‘He said he had seen me conducting on television,’ replied Heath, heaving with laughter. ‘I didn’t know that popes watched television!’
The feelings of self-importance that stayed with Heath throughout the long wilderness years in which he burned with resentment of the woman who had replaced him as leader of the Conservative party reached their natural dénouement when, after his death in 2005, his will revealed that he had left his house, Arundells, in Salisbury Close opposite the Cathedral, to serve as a museum to his life and career. With it came an endowment of £5 million to preserve the house and its contents and to open it to the public for guided tours. In America ex-presidents have libraries as memorials, but there is no equivalent tradition for former British prime ministers. Chartwell, Sir Winston Churchill’s old home in Kent, is preserved as a memorial to him, as is Hughenden Manor in Buckinghamshire to Benjamin Disraeli. But these houses were opened to the public by the National Trust and not as a result of any desire for self-aggrandisement by the statesmen concerned. William Gladstone’s home at Hawarden Castle in Flintshire is still a private house belonging to his descendant.
It may be rather sad, but at the same time it is sort of right that Heath’s dying stab at immortality should have been thwarted. Arundells has now been closed to the public and, if the Charity Commission agrees, will be put up for sale. Heath’s personal art collection, which includes paintings by Churchill, and his sailing and musical memorabilia will be dispersed. Visitors will no longer be given (in the words of its former curator) ‘a completely new perspective on the owner, changing and enhancing their view of his personality, and what he achieved in his long and varied career’. Announcing their decision, the trustees of the Sir Edward Heath Charitable Foundation said it had ‘always been foreseen that visitor numbers would decline as memories of Sir Edward Heath receded into history’.
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