Wilson and Heath

I suppose I should have been a lot more politically aware than I was when I was young. My parents were both members of the Young Conservatives before they married. So were my aunt and uncle. But I think the Young Conservatives were more of a middle-class dating service than a training ground for budding politicians or a springboard for grassroots involvement in the Party: neither my parents nor my aunt and uncle showed much interest in active politics after meeting their mates. Their further political involvement seemed to be confined to putting a cross against the Tory candidate on election day.

I vaguely remember Labour's election victory of 1964, when Harold Wilson replaced Alec Douglas-Home as prime minister. Wilson's face and pipe soon became familiar figures on our new black-and-white TV, which opened up a whole new world to us children. Familiar figures, but not loved: my parents grumbled about Wilson and muttered about the unions. Britain was the sick man of Europe, the country was going to the dogs, and there was one strike after another. Wilson's good points seemed to be his holidays in the Scilly Isles and his poet wife.

My parents saw Ted Heath in a more favourable light, but he permanently lost my father's favour when he took the UK into the European Community in 1973. I remember him chiefly for his orchestral conducting and yachting, and Mike Yarwood's Heath and Wilson comedy sketches. And his accession speech to the European Community, which he tried to give in French. His pronunciation was so bad that it made this schoolboy shrink in shame - couldn't his advisers at least have told him that in French you don't pronounce the final consonant of a word?