Edward Heath

"I’m looking for history presented in an exciting way. I think writing history about people is a good way of making it palatable. We are all spoilt nowadays, we want everything to be easily digestible and most of these biographies are just that. The authors have taken trouble to appeal to a particular audience. I worked for Ted Heath for nearly eight years so I knew him well and I admired him and I liked him, so that is why I selected this book. I also know Philip Ziegler quite well, so I was interested to see what he made of Ted Heath who really isn’t an easy subject, because he has the reputation of being bad-tempered and churlish. But there was another side to him that doesn’t usually come out and I think Philip has brought that out quite successfully. The other side was that he had a strong sense of humour – he made people laugh. He was very generous in certain ways. He was generous with his time and people enjoyed working for him. He had a certain magnetism and people were attracted to him. Other people were repelled and that’s the problem. Because he was brusque. If you were a lady sitting next to him at dinner at some big Tory dinner you couldn’t be sure that he would actually converse with you. He might just stare at his plate or eat his supper without giving you much of a conversation. When I worked for him this was one of our problems. We had to encourage him to be nice and forthcoming and chatty which didn’t come easily to him because he was by nature rather reserved. He wasn’t, no. He behaved worse to her than she did to him. He thought it was wrong of her to put herself forward in 1975. Not because she was a woman, but because he thought she wasn’t up to the job and he never changed his mind."