Word: heaths
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Call to Dad On election night, Heath arrived early at the local Tory headquarters in his constituency of Bexley, in Kent. Shortly after 6, he began placing phone calls to Tory election agents around the coun- try. As he sipped his tea and spoke qui etly on the phone, some of the half a dozen friends in the room noticed Heath's eyes take on a sudden light...
...Heath was smiling broadly and talking with enthusiasm. "That was the moment," a friend recalls. Someone started cautiously laying out half a dozen bottles of champagne. Four hours later, Heath was sitting in the bar of the Crook Log Hotel when television brought him the evening's first return: a 4% swing to the Tories in Guildford. Heath marched happily out of the bar and drove a mile to the town's Territorial Army drill hall, where the votes were being counted. Inside the hall, Bexley's mayor grabbed Heath's hand and pumped it in congratulation: a 7% swing...
...rest of the night and into the wee hours, Heath watched the returns with friends back at Bexley's Tory offices. His election agent produced a bottle of Glen Livet Scotch, and the party perked up. Shortly after 2 a.m., Heath phoned his 81-year-old father in Broadstairs, Kent. The old gentleman, his youngish wife Mary perched on his knee, was already celebrating. "Things seem to be going well," reported the son. Said the father: "Good luck. I hope it keeps going on like this...
...victory was a personal triumph for Edward Richard George Heath, whose working-class background clashes sharply with the traditions of the blue-blood-dominated Conservative Party. The son of a master carpenter, Heath is a rarity among Tory Prime Ministers: a man who is not a product of one of Britain's select public schools. Heath did, however, attend Oxford's Balliol College, on an organ scholarship. Some acquaintances claim that they can still detect a trace of cockney in his acquired upper-class accent. "His vowels betray him," says a fellow Tory, who recalls that some party members would...
Amateur Mayfair psychiatrists delight in speculating about the personality of the working-class boy who turned himself into the archetype of the perfect Tory gentleman: sleek, immaculately tailored, slightly haughty and terribly self-contained. He is, some Tories claim, simply too good to be true. One acquaintance traces Heath's transformation back to Balliol: "When Ted went to Oxford, it was during the terribly class-conscious Britain of the '30s. He knew at Oxford that if he wanted to get ahead, he'd have to adjust. Ted shucked his working-class accent, clothes and whole life style for that...