That is surely true of Heath the politician. One may doubt its truth, though, about Heath the bachelor Prime Minister, whose enigmatic character continues to attract interest. For one thing, there was his unmarried condition, which at the time troubled so many in his party. (As was the case with the younger Pitt, homosexuality was rumoured — wrongly, says Ziegler, who supposes that Heath was simply asexual.) I remember the unimpressed comment made by one of Heath's putative followers at the time: "So we have chosen a virgin to lead us." The notion of a prime minister without a family was uncomfortable to many in those more family-conscious days. Even in today's laxer climate, politicians are usually at pains to display their family arrangements. Bizarre as it might seem today, it is a fact that efforts were made in high Tory circles to provide a wife for Mr Heath. His response was icy.
What remains an unsolved puzzle is the reason for the disagreeable development in the character, or at least the behaviour, of Heath as his career advanced. He had been a bright and popular boy, obvious scholarship material at his grammar school, a well-liked and successful undergraduate at Balliol after a respectable wartime background in the army.
He was President of the Oxford Union, he led a busy social life. He even had a girlfriend back in Kent (or at least a girl who thought of herself as such and wrote most affectionately to him. After he had dropped her she was not replaced.) Later, he was a popular young MP and a successful and admired Chief Whip.
Yet by the time he reached the top, Heath had become a curmudgeon, notorious for his brutally bad manners. These were suffered especially by women unfortunate enough to be seated beside him at dinner (he might not utter a word to them throughout the evening), but also by anyone who could have expected normal courtesy from him.
A long catalogue of snubs and graceless behaviour to colleagues and others accumulated and was much talked about. It was as if, once his huge ambition had been satisfied by high office, he regarded his lofty position as no more than his due, with no debt to anyone else. That sense of entitlement to power (and indeed to any perks and rewards that came with it) went far to explain why his own party fell out of love with him. He believed himself to be irreplaceable. "They are mad to get rid of me," he kept saying after he had been dismissed as Tory leader. The pain was the greater of course because he had been ousted by, horror of horrors, a woman. Hence his pitiful conviction that he would be recalled to power, which eventually gave way to the long, undignified, pathetic sulk which ended his days.
The familiar British argument about class has been invoked. I heard him confidently claim on more than one occasion that he belonged to the working class (although some say that strictly speaking he came from a "lower middle class" background). It has been suggested that his modest origins led to his being wounded by the suburban snobbery of the Tory party at that time, and that these experiences turned him into the ill-tempered boor he became.
Perhaps there is a little in this, although it seems unlikely that Heath himself would have approved of the theory. He seemed easy about his background, often referring to it and making no attempt to disguise it. His Kentish vowels were spared "improvement". More probably the changes in his nature sprang from deep frustrations or disappointments within him. His life seems to have been governed by an urge to control and manage, an urge too frequently thwarted, no doubt. (What distinguished man from animals, he once said, was man's ability to control his environment). Added to that were an overpowering sense of his abilities, an indifference to normal human relations, and unquenchable ambition.
Heath was not the only prime minister of modern times to carry some such mixture of qualities, judging by all that has emerged about Gordon Brown's unhappy record at Number Ten. Two of these misfits, surely, are more than enough.
