To mark the thirty-forth anniversary of the former Conservative Prime Minister's appearance on Channel 4's After Dark programme, Tom Chidwick chronicles Sir Edward Heath's friendship with the actor and UNICEF ambassador, Peter Ustinov.
On Saturday 10 June 1989, Sir Edward Heath arrived at Channel 4's London studios on Charlotte Street at the foot of the BT Tower, to film the first of two appearances on the late-night political discussion programme, After Dark. A month short of his 73rd birthday and having been out of office for 15 years, the former Prime Ministers was tasked with debating whether the United Kingdom was 'out on a limb' with just five days to go until Britain (and the rest of Europe) went to the polls in the third round of direct elections to the European Parliament.
After Dark - which took the form of an open-ended discussion (beginning at midnight and often running into the early hours) on topics as diverse as official secrets, euthanasia, freemasonry, sex, Winston Churchill, and the Yorkshire Ripper - was designed to counter what Sidney Bernstein, the legendary founder of Granada Television, described as the 'worst words ever uttered on TV: "I'm sorry, that's all we have time for ..."'
In a particularly bad-tempered conversation, even by his own standards, Mr Heath - as he still was before he was made a Knight of the Garter in April 1992 - denied that the Chairman of the Conservative Party wanted him expelled from their ranks and clashed with Richard Perle (Assistant Secretary of Defence in Ronald Reagan's administration) about the future of European integration.
In addition to marking the first time that a former Prime Minister had appeared on 'the sexiest show of the week', this episode of After Dark reunited Heath with fellow European Shirley Williams - who had recently moved to the United States to take up a professorship at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government - and the actor, writer, and UNICEF ambassador, Peter Ustinov CBE.
After the journalist Josef Joffe riled Heath by describing the European Union as a 'Belgian test-tube baby' and comparing Margaret Thatcher to Charles de Gaulle, Heath and Ustinov agreed that the European Community was already a cohesive, social, cultural, and political union. Unbeknown to most except the two men's close friends and perhaps the keenest-eyed viewer, Heath and Ustinov were already firm friends, with Ustinov regularly visiting Arundells, the former Prime Minister's splendid home in the Cathedral Close in Salisbury.
Throughout his long career, Edward Heath was unable to shake his persistent caricature as a cantankerous and painfully rude loner. An artistic bachelor whose ego was almost as sizeable as his ever-expanding girth, Heath possessed the 'tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority' which Herbert Asquith once said characterised his fellow graduates of Balliol College, Oxford. In October 1967, Panorama noted that the then Leader of the Opposition possessed a deep shyness and an aversion to glad-handing and compared Heath to a 'sensitive man in a butcher's shop'.
However, Sir Edward's friends and leagues of godchildren invariably describe the former premier as a warm and good-humoured man, who was incapable of showing the lighter side of his personality to the voting public. However, it has often been said, as Michael Cockerell reported in A Very Singular Man in 1998, that his rudeness - particularly to his fellow parliamentarians who he would congratulate on a 'dreadful speech' - was, in fact, a sign of his affection.
Heath's reputation, particularly at Westminster where plenty of veterans from his latter years in the Commons are still on the green and red benches, is still coloured by what Andy McSmith describes as his 'rudeness, egoism, and relentless capacity for nursing a grievance over an imagined insult'. However, given the outbreak of 'Gotcha' politics in recent years, it is worth remembering Douglas Hurd's assessment that Heath - whose career linked the premierships of Clement Attlee and Tony Blair - abstained from 'flying high into fancy or sinking deep into muckraking'.
After almost a decade of what his close friend Sara Morrison recently described to me as 'bloody idleness', his long-awaited memoirs, The Course of My Life, finally appeared in 1998. This mammoth and pedestrian (but extremely well-indexed!) autobiography concludes with a touching acknowledgement of the 'boundless dedication of many personal friends' but does not feature Heath's After Dark interlocutor and Stephen Fry's predecessor as Britain's favourite 'Renaissance Man'.1
However, their lasting friendship was sustained by their mutual enjoyment of fine wines, conducting, collecting (now) priceless artwork, and ocean yachting. In addition to regular Sunday lunches at Arundells and a memorable late-night supper in London where Ustinov chummed Dave Allen to Heath's flat in Wilton Street, the two met socially at Ustinov's seventieth birthday party in Paris in April 1991, and during Heath's surprise appearance - alongside Angela Lansbury, Petula Clark, and Jackie Stewart of all people - on Ustinov's second This Is Your Life in December 1994.
Each possessing a cosmopolitan collection of friends and drawing lifelong inspiration from the devastation of the entire continent that they witnessed first-hand during service in the Second World War, Heath and Ustinov shared a passionate commitment to Europe. Both believed that, as the 1971 United Kingdom and the European Communities White Paper argued, 'there is no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty', with membership of the Community offering 'a sharing and an enlargement of individual national sovereignties in the general interest'. Well into the 1990s, both maintained that integration was a noble cause with Heath writing, with uncharacteristic elegance, that a 'united, peaceful, and prosperous Europe is demonstrably more than the sum of its historically fissiparous parts'.
While Heath was noticeably less cosmopolitan than his friend - the only son of a French-Russian artist and a German-Russian journalist who possessed German and English passports and was voted the world's 'first global citizen' by Deutsche Welle in 2004 - the former premier shared Ustinov's 'emotional Europeanism'. Invitations to his eightieth birthday party at The Savoy in July 1996 showed Nicholas Garland's cartoon of Heath steering the sailing dinghy of state, adorned with the European flag, across a sea of music.
In his autobiography, Dear Me, Ustinov - who has a half-a-decade younger but died just over a year before him - penned a warm tribute to Heath, noting that he admired him 'not for his politics, with which I have always been in some disagreement (except for his championship of Europe ...) but for his passions'.2 He asserted that his friend was a man of 'extraordinary courage and grip of abstractions' and argued that Heath had been a 'consistent victim of that miserable prejudice which believes that a Prime Minister should be a person without visible talent; that talent in high places is tantamount to a lapse of taste'.
While Heath's irascibility understandably, if not entirely fairly, continues to colour popular perceptions of this frustrating but perversely likeable curmudgeon, this interesting historical tidbit gives us an interesting window into the collection of eclectic but very warm friendships that a most unusual Prime Minister maintained outside of SW1A.
Tom Chidwick is the Manager of the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary, University of London, and is the Co-Director of the Edward Heath Forum - a new academic network to encourage the study of Heath's legacy and the politics of the 1970s.