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Showing posts with label Edward Heath. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Edward Heath. Show all posts
As Edmund Crispin he wrote a far too short series of detective novels and short stories about Gervase Fen, Oxford Professor of English Language and Literature.
Anyone who reads his novels (and I can thoroughly recommend them for being clever, witty and often laugh-out-loud funny as well as highly literary) must realize that BM/EC was thoroughly conservative in his outlook. As it happens he was also a Conservative in his political support though not always in tune with the party. David Whittle points out that, unlike many of his friends, such as Kingsley Amis, Montgomery/Crispin never went through a left-wing phase.
Therefore, readers will not be surprised to hear that he was not particularly enamoured with Edward Heath, the bane of all conservative Conservatives. During the last couple of decades of his life he started a number of projects or, at least thought of them, but did not finish them. It was a very sad tale of decline but has to be off-set by the story of his earlier career, which was effervescently successful.
One of the projects (and how one wishes he had completed it) was a novel about two writers who live close to each other, cannot stand each other and are commissioned to write a detective novel together. Because some of the action takes place in a doctor's surgery, the title was going to be What Seems to be the Trouble? and it has the usual Montgomery/Crispin references to his friends
and there is also a savage attack on VAT and on Ted Heath, the Prime Minister for some of the time the book was being written (he is called a 'monomaniac mugwump').A monomaniac mugwump? Absolutely brilliant. I wonder what in particular the monomania was. Somehow I cannot imagine Montgomery/Crispin to be in favour of Britain's entry into the Common Market.
Dr Harshan Kumarasingham, the
Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Potsdam and a past
contributor to the Conservative History Journal, gives his views on Edward
Heath and Philip Ziegler’s biography.
Edward Heath did not emerge, but was elected as leader of the
Conservative Party in 1965. The new
leader was young, experienced, and progressive with strong contacts with the
Parliamentary Party after an effective tenure as Chief Whip. Heath the Grammar school scholarship boy
personified a professional image that was accurately and purposefully
non-patrician. This was the man the
party hoped could beat Harold Wilson at his own game sharing a greater
commonality and image with the electorate than any previous Conservative
leader. Heath could project a ‘modern’
image of someone who had risen through the ranks through ability not nobility. However, expectations of a new age under a
new style of leader were not unanimously idealistic. Heath carried significant pressures as the
new leader of a new era. The Economist reported at the time of
his ascendance as leader a sense of Conservative realism: ‘Mr Heath certainly
carries radical hopes in his baggage.
But in electing him, the Tories have primarily shown their instinct for
power. They picked, by a narrow
majority, the man they reckoned most likely to bullock their way back into
power. They will remain united behind
him just as long as his pursuit of power looks promising.’ The Shadow Cabinet under Heath’s clear
leadership had created a prepared and much publicised programme at Selsdon for
when it returned to power, which seemed to deliver the progressive hopes
envisioned by ‘Rab’ Butler Britain
The rest of the review is here.
