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“... his heroine Mrs Thatcher – ‘I am so sorry Nigel didn’t get into Haileybury’ – than like Edward Heath. His leadership skills are confined, in fact, to the rather rudimentary ‘Follow me, men’ injunctions of the new subaltern. For those of a deferential and hero-worshipping temperament the invitation is no doubt attractive, but for the ...”

“... and it goes places and it will never, I promise you, get stuck in the mud’) and reveals that Edward Heath was probably the first leader of his party to have fitted carpets. White Heat contains a comprehensive collection of George Brown stories, although the best one remains the incident when the worse-for-wear foreign secretary was rejected by a ...”

“... inconceivable that any Israeli government is going to grant the Palestinians a state. As the late Edward Said warned us, the Oslo Accords were a Palestinian Treaty of Versailles. Actually, they are much worse than that. So the disintegration of the Middle East that began after the First World War continues. Whether Iraq will be divided into three ...”

“... The same could not be said of the two alternatives for the Premiership, Neville Chamberlain and Edward Halifax. ‘I was never meant to be a War Minister,’ Chamberlain told his sisters in October 1939, whereas Winston was ‘enjoying every moment of the war’. As for Lord Halifax, no shrinking violet in political argument, the thought of being a war ...”

“... Powell offered members and voters a politically potent vision of a Conservative patria in a way Edward Heath never did. At many points during the last 150 years, Tory backbenchers and members have been frustrated by the inability of their leaders to provide the inspirational direction they crave, though they have often struggled to define what that ...”

“... are evidence, not just of intellectual mediocrity, but of wilful stupidity, as when she depicts Edward Heath as having proposed ‘the most radical form of socialism ever contemplated by an elected British government’ or asserts that ‘welfare benefits, distributed with little or no consideration of their effects on behaviour, encouraged ...”

“... world. In the secret services – just like Oxbridge colleges – it appears this didn’t apply. Edward Heath describes MI5 operatives as the sort of men who would follow people on the Underground because they were reading the Daily Mirror. Lords Carver, Beloff and Dacre – establishment figures, with hardly a pale pink political opinion between the ...”

“... was very different, although economic expertise was no panacea for success: both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath were far more aware of the economic problems of their time than Eden was of those in his. Yet neither was able to do much to solve them. Eden’s life spanned the years between the heyday of Britain’s imperial grandeur and her ...”

“... with the likes of Stephen Tennant, and as a crusty old thing being welcomed at Downing Street by Edward Heath and the Queen Mother for a 70th-birthday ...”

“... and maintaining a broadly progressive tax system. (Something similar happened in Britain under Edward Heath.) He acted like this because he felt he had little choice: the organised pressure ready to resist change appeared much too strong. It was only during the Carter years – and to some extent the Callaghan years in Britain – that this pressure ...”

“... if not respect, then recognition – especially from the City and Tory Establishment: it was Edward Heath who stigmatised Lonrho as ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’. Rowland has never made any secret of his antipathy towards Conor Cruise O’Brien and William Keegan, two of the Observer’s best writers. Both had testified to the Monopolies ...”

“... often they did not return. Trimble’s political career began with the prorogation of Stormont by Edward Heath on 24 March 1972 – ‘I am,’ he says, ‘the product of the destruction of Stormont’ – but it was fuelled by grief and anger along the way. Grief especially at the murder by the IRA of his close friend and colleague in the Queen’s ...”

“... a snap election is never risk-free: those called in 1923 and 1974 rebounded on Stanley Baldwin and Edward Heath (though the first snap election of the 20th century, in 1900, delivered a huge majority for the Conservatives). This one too may not deliver all she hopes: it’s possible that the Liberal Democrats will do well, and that some of the more ...”

“... wider xenophobia. But of course it wasn’t just the press. Few prime ministers in the years since Edward Heath signed us into the EEC have found it either natural or politically expedient to enthuse about Europe. I grew tired of hearing Major and then Blair insisting that we were ‘at the heart of Europe’ when we hadn’t joined the euro or signed up ...”

“... in Rothschilds before rising through the ranks of the Gaullist administration. A year later, Edward Heath succeeded Wilson, heading a Conservative government in a time of decolonisation. Unlike any other British prime minister of the postwar epoch, Heath was overwhelmingly oriented to Europe, where he had fought ...”