IN THE week that’s in it — with the ongoing analysis of the Saville Report — I decided to get myself a copy of Edward: — The Authorised Biography by Philip Ziegler (HarperPress).
Heath — who was once described as appearing like a shiver looking for a spine to run down — was the man in charge on Bloody Sunday.
Not only did he sanction the Paras being in Derry, he had also instructed the Royal Navy to have an aircraft carrier standing off the coast of Derry.
How he was actually going to deploy the attack aircraft against unarmed civil rights demonstrators has never fully been explained.
It was probably the North’s bad luck that Heath should have been re-elected (surprisingly) in 1970. To Harold Wilson, the unionists were anathema.
The Labour Prime Minister had won by a majority of four in 1964, in the days when all 12 Ulster Unionists took the Conservative Whip.Wilson made no bones about deploring their very existence in the Commons.
Nothing in later years persuaded him to change his mind. Heath was different. He was a disaster not just for the North of Ireland, but for Britain as well.
This was partly due to the fact that he was such a strange man. According to this authorised biography, Heath, in the first half of his life, was totally different to the man he ended up as.
As a student, as a soldier and as a chief whip under Macmillan and Eden he was popular and gregarious.
But round about his 40s he seems to have changed into a chilly, rude, boorish man — which could have been tolerated had he not been such a dysfunctional politician.
Aside from Bloody Sunday, Heath presided over internment — these two events, more than any others, kickstarted the Troubles.
In Britain, Heath fared little better. Confrontations with the miners, the introduction of the three-day week, his election strategies — all were a result of the Prime Minister’s stubborn, arrogant style of leadership.
Britain has had some very strange politicians, some very odd Prime Ministers.
But Philip Ziegler’s biography makes it clear that Heath was one of the oddest of all. It was just the North of Ireland’s bad luck that he came along just at the time when an enlightened reformist could have steered the Six Counties away from the disastrous path that resulted in decades of mayhem and violence.