Edward Heath: The Authorised Biography by Philip Ziegler

The biggest puzzle about Ted Heath is how such an unattractive man ever became prime minister
Edward Heath biography
Edward Heath campaigning in the 1970 general election, when he became prime minister. Photograph: Corbis Bettmann/CORBIS

Of all the men, and one woman, who have been prime minister since Sir Robert Walpole, we can debate who was the best or the worst, cleverest or stupidest, noblest or basest. After he had written a biography of Gladstone, arguably the greatest, Roy Jenkins thought he could only continue with Churchill, the most extraordinary human being ever to hold the office.

But if there were a supper table game to decide who was the oddest person ever to reach Number 10, it would be no contest: the answer could only be Jenkins's Balliol contemporary, Edward Heath. The puzzle about him is not why he lost three out of the four elections he fought as Conservative leader, or why he was deposed in 1975 by Margaret Thatcher, but how on earth he became prime minister. Philip Ziegler's new life of Heath is characteristically accomplished and thorough, but it has few answers to the mystery of Heath's personality.

No clues are found in the early years. The cosseted carpenter's son from Broadstairs became a scholarship boy at grammar school and Oxford, where he played the organ, turned himself into a passable if unexciting public speaker and became president of the Union. Joining the army in 1940, Heath served creditably as a Royal Artillery officer from Normandy to the Rhine. One startling episode, unmentioned until he published his otherwise numbingly dull memoirs, was when Heath commanded a firing squad which shot a young Polish soldier court-martialled for rape.

After demob and several odd jobs (the most unlikely at the Church Times), Heath was elected MP for Bexley in 1950, appointed a junior whip before the Tories returned to office the following year, and by December 1955 was chief whip. Of all government jobs, this requires firmness and fairness allied to tact and patience and Heath's ascent seems baffling in hindsight. He later became a byword for graceless petulance and sheer rudeness, at dinner "apt to relapse into morose silence or completely ignore the woman next to him and talk across her to the nearest man".

In 1965, for the first time, the Tory party leader was elected by MPs. But they didn't know quite how to handle the election and Heath won almost by default. His relationship with his party was fraught from the start; as Ziegler says, "his loathing for his Conservative opponents was more intense" than any hostility to Labour.

It was another surprise when Heath won the 1970 election. For a year or two, it was plain sailing, until his government hit a political perfect storm (an apter phrase than usual for a man whose private passion was sailing). Unemployment and inflation rose sharply, militant unions challenged the government, violence escalated in Ulster. To have mastered all this would have required political skill of a high order, which Heath rarely displayed. He was preoccupied with joining the Common Market (which even Europhiles must admit involved misrepresentation on his part), and his failings of temperament aggravated every other problem. He tacked this way and that, until wrecked by the fiasco of the three-day week and the mistimed 1974 election. Then came his defeat by Mrs Thatcher and the tragi-ludicrous sulk which lasted the rest of his life.

And a lonely life at that. It was an ironical comment on the permissive society, Bernard Levin wrote at the time in the Observer, that we had had to wait until the 1970s for a prime minister who was a virgin. Levin had forgotten Pitt the Younger and Balfour, both bachelors with no known amorous interests, but he was doubtless right about Heath. There was inevitable muttering that he might be homosexual, but Ziegler concludes that he was simply asexual.

Readable and judicious as it is, the book is not without lapses. "Humphrey Berkeley" is sometimes so spelled and sometimes correctly as "Humphry". And Ziegler has Roy Jenkins resigning from the Labour cabinet in 1975. He in fact resigned from the shadow cabinet in 1972, but returned to government in 1974 until he left in 1976.

Only the most loyal biographer could call Heath a successful politician, an appealing fellow or even an interesting person. Maybe in the end, there is no mystery to this odd man. If Napoleon III, in Bismarck's phrase, was the Sphinx without a riddle, Ted Heath was the enigma without any variations.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft's most recent book is Yo, Blair! (Politico).