Political Commentary
A new life of the PM
Hugh Macpherson
There never was much doubt as to what would be the hard selling point of Andrew Roth's new biography of the Prime Minister*. In June a diary item, which appeared in the Sunday Times through the usual channels, told us that two biographies were on the way, one by Mr Roth, one by Miss Margaret Laing, and that "both try to answer the intriguing question: why has Heath never married?". Miss Laing, the item said, "asked Heath straight out" and "got a frosty silence for an answer." Her conclusions apparently are "more romantic" than Mr Roth's, involving a sad jilting and a photograph by the bed for thirteen years. The political world must wait breathless with anticipation for another month before Miss Laing's magnum opus reveals such essential information.
Mr Roth took a more transatlantic view of his self-appointed task, according to the diary piece, and engaged an American psychiatrist "to examine the evidence — family background, boyhood and so on — and to write a speculative psychoanalysis of the Prime Minister and his love life — or lack of it." Medical science, alas, gave way to the majesty of the Law and "he could not get it past the libel lawyer and had to cut a lot of it out and change the rest."
Not daunted by this unfortunate professional clash Mr Roth pressed on and a month after the Sunday Times diary piece another paragraph appeared in the Guardian Miscellany column. This time it revealed that Mr Roth had unearthed Mr Heath's "secret war diary" being the regimental war diary of the 107th Heavy Anti-Aircraft Regiment. Apparently Mr Roth was the only biographer who "twigged" the fact that the adjutant of the regiment had to keep this record and "dug it out of the public records". The diary item records that Mr Heath's response was "horrified" and that he exclaimed: "He can't do that, can he?" The Miscellany item continued:
The diary is a very army kind of document, generally a fairly cold account of the regiment's movements. It does, though, reveal a quiet and guarded passion when Heath describes the move into Antwerp, in September 1944. Heath's regiment was the first in, after the tanks; from the hints he drops, it is clear that the troops were given a rapturous welcome. The villagers on the route gave their favours freely. Roth has also pieced an account of the troops' first night in Antwerp; the story captures the Heath character brilliantly. He arranged a dance, found a hall and a band and invited the local people, and then retired for the evening to work on his own in his office.
*Heath and the Heathmen, Andrew Roth (Routledge and Kegan Paul £2.25) From all this one could expect to find a new Pepys, or at least a Boswell in the regimental records of the 107th Heavies.
The diary item from which the "hints" apparently dropped about villagers giving freely of their favours reads as follows: The column received a tremendous welcome all along the route, being the first t(roo)ps to pass along the road after the tanks of (the) 11(th) Arm(oure)d Div(ivision). The route rec(onnaissan)ce parties were in several cases the first British t(roo)ps to enter villages — which they captured! There were many instances of D(ispatch) R(ider)s being pressed to take prisoners giving themselves up. And so the reg(imen)t moved into harbour (bivouac) that night decorated with flags and flowers and laden with fruit, before moving into Antwerp the next day, the first British t(roo)ps to enter the city after the tanks and some 48 h(our)s ahead of the infantry.
The next paragraph which speaks of the young Captain Heath not taking advantage of the "large numbers of young women grateful to their 'liberators' "is apparently speculation on the part of Mr Roth and the bit about Capt. Heath retiring to work after the dance had started the "musings" of one Major Harrington.
It may seem somewhat laborious to make these points but there is no other way to exhibit the cheap sensationalist approach to a major political figure from such an able journalist as Mr Roth. There is much in his biography which is useful in summarising the career of Mr Heath mainly from news cuttings. What is of no value are the breathless little items which would have been considered too gauche for the pages of True Romance.
So we are informed that Mrs Heath wistfully remarked that "you can't imagine Teddy kissing a girl"; that he didn't share in the "girl-chasing at Oxford"; that he has "never regarded women as objects of sexual gratification" (pace the charming Mrs Roth); how a Tory lady persuaded him to put his arm around her shoulder but his mind turned to VAT (which could be as much a comment on the lady as the PM); that he "avoided contact with ATS girls attached to the regiment"; and became furious when a fellow MP tried to fix him up with a "double date."
My response to all this is: so what? (It appears in this marvellously sexually liberated age the one liberty that is denied anyone is not to be particularly interested in sex if, indeed, that is Mr Heath's view which I simply do not know. At any rate using Mr Roth's biographical technique one could soon paint another picture. For example when he says that in company with Mr John Rodgers Mr Heath moved along the Cote d'Azur, and Mr Rodgers admired the "nubile figures of girl swimmers" but this had "little attraction" to the Bexleyman, then I can produce direct evidence to the contrary.
When Mr Heath became leader of the Opposition in 1965 he went to the Ude d'Azur and stayed in a villa on the Cap de Nice. I was staying close by at the home of an extremely attractive French girl whom I had not long married but, unfortunately, subsequently mislaid. Whilst still a student she freelanced for the Beaverbrook paper the Evening Citizen in Glasgow so she popped in to see Mr Heath, straight out of the sea, clad only in a bikini. He gave her a drink, pen and paper. They then chatted happily for a while, she wrote a piece, and he dropped a note to the editor saying how much he had enjoyed meeting her. Did Mr Roth's psychiatrist take this into account? Can it be that the Tory ladies are the wrong nationality or wearing the wrong clothes as they earnestly fight for the eiderdown in No. 10? (Like GBS, having now ascertained the principles of Tory women I will henceforth only argue about the terms.) Surely the only relevant reason for prying into the personal life of any contemporary politician is if his private life affects his work. It is fair enough to be concerned if a man, possessing the power to start a nuclear war, is an alcoholic or has a history of mental instability. Whether he chooses to be married, single or has a string of girlfriends is simply nobody's business.
It is to be hoped that such an amiable and gifted man as Andrew Roth turns to more useful biographical pursuits and leaves the mush to the coven of lady journalists who specialise in this kind of thing. If not we are liable to have a biography of a great PM which speaks of the fact that he only appeared to have relationships with one woman, drank brandy at breakfast, had an unfortunate relationship with his father, possessed an artistic temperament, loved dressing in fancy clothes, and once publicly spurned the leading sex symbol in the world, Mlle Brigitte BardotThat would be Sir Winston Churchill.
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