Edward Heath

"In January 1972, although the jobless total adjusted for seasonal factors remained below one million, the unadjusted overall total exceeded that. The Commons had to be suspended during the Prime Minister's Questions following Labour's furious protests. This in itself did not shake Ted, but he utterly despised and detested the pre-war Conservative governments, who had tolerated between two and three million unemployed. It was therefore no surprise in which direction Ted decided our economic policy should go when he now had to choose between tolerating a continued high level of unemployment, in the hope that this would keep some control over wage claims and inflation – or trying to run the economy with a higher level of output and growth, and seeking some other means of control over wage and price increases. The high unemployment route was counter to everything Ted believed in and had hoped to achieve for Britain."

"Progress in these policies can only be brought about if a considerable degree of consensus exists within our country. I have heard some doubt expressed as to what consensus means... Consensus means deliberately setting out to achieve the widest possible measure of agreement about our national policies, in this particular case about our economic activities, in the pursuit of a better standard of living for our people and a happier and more prosperous country. If there be any doubt about the desirability of working towards such a consensus let us recognize that every successful industrialized country in the modern world has been working on such a basis."

"Please don't applaud. It may irritate your neighbour."

"Monetarism is dead and the alien doctrines of Friedman and Hayek remain only to be buried."

"We have had eight years of consistent and persistent attacks on those four years in government - and on me, personally, but that does not matter - by people who were collectively responsible for those four years."

"He is not mad in the least. He's a very astute person, a clever person."

"It is bad because it is a negation of democracy … Worst of all is the imposition by parliamentary diktat of a change of responsible party in London government. There cannot be any justification for that. It immediately lays the Conservative Party open to the charge of the greatest gerrymandering in the last 150 years of British history."

"It was the most enthralling episode in my life"

"I don't think that modesty is the outstanding characteristic of contemporary politics, do you?""

"I think Churchill would be appalled at the Thatcher government."

"Whatever the lady does is wrong. I do not know of a single right decision taken by her."

"There's a lot of people I've encouraged and helped to get into the House of Commons. Looking at them now, I'm not so sure it was a wise thing to do."

"For all Mr. Gorbachev's policies, is he prepared to see the break-up of the Soviet empire? I do not think so for one moment."

"Peter Sissons: The single currency, a United States of Europe, was all that in your mind when you took Britain in? Edward Heath: Of course, yes."

"Rejoice! Rejoice!"

"This is the new imperialism, and I am against the new imperialism. It is not our job to go throwing our forces around the world and saying 'This is an evil man and so on'."

"I am sure that entering the exchange rate mechanism was absolutely right and is still right. I regret that we did not do so five years earlier, but that is history. Economic monetary union must come as soon as possible, and with it the single currency. Industry wants the single currency, and we must pay attention to the requests and demands of industry."

"Do you know what Margaret Thatcher did in her first Budget? Introduced VAT on yachts! It somewhat ruined my retirement."

"A tragedy for the party. He's got no ideas, no experience and no hope."

"You'll lose."

"Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone."

"The incredible sulk."

"It was abundantly apparent at the end of that meeting that the strike was political, because I remember McGahey, who'd been rather curt in his answers... I remember Ted [Heath] saying to him, "What is it you want, Mr McGahey?" He said something to the effect, "I want to see the end of your government!""

"He has a deep contempt for Britain, the British people and parliamentary democracy. He is trying to climb back to power via the Treaty of Rome, and put Britain under government from Brussels for ever. In 1970 Mr Heath solemnly promised that he would not take Britain into the Common Market without the full-hearted consent of the British people. He broke his pledged word then, and he now says he will not accept a 'No' vote on Thursday. Heath promised more jobs and higher living standards inside the EEC. These promises were all broken, and he now tells us we are so poor we cannot come out; beggars can't be choosers. That is false, too. Heath's leadership has been a total disaster for the British people. The Tory Party threw him out."

"Mrs Thatcher made...the most rumbustious rampaging, right-wing speech that I've heard from the Government Front Bench in the whole of my life. Afterwards I saw Ted Heath and told him, "I've never heard a speech like that in all my years in Parliament." He said, "Neither have I." "I suppose this really was what Selsdon was all about." "Oh, there never was a Selsdon policy," Heath replied. "It was invented by Harold Wilson. Look at our 1970 manifesto; it wasn't there at all." ... I said I had some sympathy with Thatcher – with her dislike of the wishy-washy centre of British politics. He gave me such a frosty look that I daresay I had touched a raw nerve."

"The lengthy Watergate Scandal, which eventually led to the fall of Nixon in 1974, helped cause a crisis of confidence in American leadership. Moreover, Western disunity was seen in Western European unwillingness to respond in NATO to America’s global commitments as well as growing French alienation from the USA. Edward Heath, British Prime Minister from 1970 to 1974, was determined not to be branded as the American spokesman in Europe, was not eager for close co-operation with Nixon, and argued that membership in the European Community represented a welcome alternative to the USA. Britain was also faced from 1974 by a political upheaval stemming from a coalminers’ strike, and then by a more general crisis as high inflation and trade union power contributed to an acute sense of malaise and weakness. The idea of Britain playing a role in resisting Communist expansion and activity outside Western Europe and the North Atlantic appeared increasingly incredible. Nationalist violence in Northern Ireland placed a new strain on the British military."

"[T]here was among ordinary Tories in the country a more generalised mood of mounting frustration at the failure of successive Conservative Governments to halt or reverse what seemed a relentless one-way slide to socialism. Not only in the management of the economy but in almost every sphere of domestic and foreign policy – immigration, comprehensive schools, trade unions, Northern Ireland, Rhodesia – Heath had appeared almost deliberately to affront the party's traditional supporters while appeasing their tribal enemies. Strikes, crime, revolting students, pornography, terrorism, inflation eating away at their savings, even decimalisation, all stoked in saloon bars, golf clubs and the columns of the Daily Telegraph a rising anger that the country was going to the dogs while the Tory Government was not resisting but rather speeding the process. By the time Heath lost the February 1974 election an ugly mood had built up in the Tory party which lacked only heavyweight leadership to weld together the two elements – the political backlash and the economic analysis – to form a potent combination which ultimately became known as Thatcherism."

"Heath...was passionately committed on the merits of the issue. He waged an extremely effective campaign, and my respect for him, already considerable at the beginning, went steadily up as it progressed. Yet he was always a difficult morsel to digest. He never tried to be awkward, but there was a certain inherent awkwardness about his character and indeed his physique. He stood resolutely there, as impervious to the waves and as reliable in his beam as a great lighthouse, but sometimes blocking the way. But he was never negligible. ... [H]e was dependable and powerful."

"No Prime Minister, either before or since, could compare with Ted Heath in the efforts he made to establish a spirit of camaraderie with trade unions and to offer an attractive package which might satisfy large numbers of work people. At the outset I thought he represented the hard face of the Tory party but over the years he revealed the human face of Toryism, at least to the trade union leaders who met him frequently. It is doubtful whether the public gained that view of him, partly because, as he himself admitted at one of the Downing Street meetings, he was a bad communicator. Amazingly, he gained more personal respect from union leaders than they seemed to have for Harold Wilson, or even Jim Callaghan."

"Ted had the respect of trade-union people until just before the Chequers breakdown. Why? His infinite capacity for listening, and his manifest sincerity of purpose. Trade-union people know when they are dealing with an honest man and a straight man. They saw this in him. They thought the breakdown was due not to him but to the pressure from his Cabinet: that he was being imposed upon by the hard-faced men in the Cabinet. Therefore they came to think no progress could be made."

"Heath was known for his ability and energy, which marked him out for a leading role in the British Conservative Party. I liked him above all for his human qualities and his convictions. On the need for Britain to take part in the building of Europe he had not faltered since his maiden speech in 1950; nor did he in the future."

"[T]he Conservative Opposition under Ted Heath decided to support the Labour Government's legislation [the Race Relations Bill]. Later, when Enoch Powell spoke in Birmingham in April [1968], saying, “Like the Roman, I see the River Tiber flowing with much blood”, Heath removed him from the Shadow Cabinet. This was to Heath's immense credit because public opinion was wholly with Enoch Powell and many Conservative activists saw Powell as the saviour of the nation. Heath thought the whole tone of the speech was incompatible with the Conservative Party's attitude to race relations and demonstrated to me for the first time the decisiveness and principle which I later learnt to respect."

"I was interested in being present for its first, and I trust only, performance."

"In excluding me from the shadow cabinet, Margaret Thatcher has chosen what I believe to be the only wholly honest solution and one which I accept and welcome."

"The historic role of the Conservative Party is to use the leverage of its political and diplomatic skills to create a fresh balance between the different elements within the state at those times when, for one reason or another, their imbalance threatens to disrupt the orderly development of society."

"They have made a grave mistake choosing that woman."

"Benn, Shore and Foot were like the three witches in Macbeth ... In some darkened room of Transport House, on the very left of the building, they are busy boiling their own witches' brew. A dash of distortion here, an element of exaggeration there, all of course to be taken with a pinch of salt. And as they brew their myths, they delight in creating hubble, bubble, toil and trouble... [Benn] is probably the biggest bureaucrat and the wildest spendthrift that this country has ever known. But let us recognize the facts. Benn, Shore and Foot are using the Europe issue to brew up toil and trouble inside the Labour Party for their own ends ... If there was a "No" vote in the referendum, we would find ourselves pulling out of Europe straight into the welcoming arms of the wild men of Labour's left."

"[If Britain withdrew from the EEC] the wild men of the left would certainly try to build a barrier against the outside world. But they would be confronted by such powerful economic gales that they would be forced to build the barriers higher and higher until they had finally built an economic Berlin wall around Britain. Within that wall would be a socialist state running a siege economy."

"[If Britain withdrew from the EEC] it would be a new and different D-Day for Britain—Disaster Day. Of course, this is what the wild men of the left, Mr Benn, Mr Shore and Mr Foot actually want. They thrive on a diet of disaster...they are aching for the go-ahead to build an economic Berlin wall around Britain. And within that British Berlin wall, there would be a socialist State running a siege economy."

"We would find ourselves pulling out of the European Community straight into the arms of the wild men of the left. The whole country would be plagued with Foot and Benn disease ... The left are not really all that interested in the Common Market. What they want is for Britain to break her treaty obligations and pull out of the Community so that they could impose their own extreme socialist state in Britain."

"I regard Mr Benn as a menace to the country. He was guilty of sabotage last year when he rejected an offer of Community help with the readjustment necessary due to steel plant closures in Wales."

"You mustn't expect prime ministers to enjoy themselves. If they do, they mustn't show it – the population would be horrified."

"The Pax Americana has gone the way of the Pax Britannica ... The implication for us in Europe is twofold. First, we shall no longer be able to enjoy the luxury of urging the Americans to put right anything of which we disapprove anywhere in the world and then of criticizing them for the way they do it; and secondly, we shall have to undertake a proper share of the burden of Western defence if American support for the Western Alliance is to be sustained. That share can be underpinned only by a strong and expanding European economy."

"I am sometimes accused of being oversensitive about unemployment. I do not believe that that is possible, certainly not for anyone who lived through the 1930s and saw the political consequences of high unemployment throughout Western Europe and what happened in 1939."

"The opponents of EEC membership inside the Labour Party know how much more difficult it would be to foist their brand of left-wing socialism on the British people if we remain part of a Community based on the principles of free enterprise and the mixed economy. We in the Conservative Party must vigorously oppose this ominous development."

"What I have in common with the right hon. Member for Cardiff, South-East (Mr. Callaghan) is that, undeniably, our generation came into Parliament because we were determined to prevent what happened in the 1930s from occurring again and to prevent a breakdown in the social structure and the political institutions that led to the rise of authoritarianism in Europe and finally to the Second World War. That was our determination, and for 25 years, from 1950 to 1975, the people we represented had a better standard of living, bigger and better homes, better education, a better Health Service, better roads and better transport and were able to enjoy holidays such as they had not envisaged before."

"We are now faced with massive unemployment, on a scale certainly at the level of the 1930s and to become greater. The improvement in housing, education and the standard of living has stopped. To all of us, that is a matter of the greatest possible regret... One of our intentions after the 1930s was to ensure that the Conservative Party was never again considered to be the party of unemployment. I ask my hon. Friends to think seriously about that in our present circumstances."

"To return to the question of strategy... The Falkland Islands are unlikely to cause a major explosion."

"The time has come to speak out. Britain is now locked in a vicious spiralling interest rates... The net result of completing the vicious circle is that prices have increased, the rate of inflation has gone up, the money supply has increased, unemployment has gone up, the rate of bankruptcies has increased, the industrial base has been further eroded, the Government's borrowing requirement has increased and as a result there is more pressure to raise interest rates yet again, to be followed inevitably by the same vicious circle. It is this that must be broken."

"The end of the negotiations is a blow to the cause of the wider European unity for which we have been striving. We are a part of Europe, by geography, history, culture, tradition and civilization … There have been times in the history of Europe when it has been only too plain how European we are; and there have been many millions of people who have been grateful for it. I say to my colleagues: they should have no fear. We in Britain are not going to turn out backs on the mainland of Europe or the countries of the Community."