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unfamiliar, born in a small seaside resort town on the south-eastern coast of England
into a family described by his biographer as ‘the upwardly mobile, socially aspiring
skilled working class just where it merges into the lower middle class’. But unlike Wilson
he was an introvert, inhibited and formal, temperamentally incapable of entertaining
Elizabeth with jokes and dazzling expositions. According to Heath’s own account given
to Elizabeth Longford, their meetings were extremely businesslike:
I believed in telling the Queen everything. There was always an agenda drawn up in agreement with the
private secretary. She had it on a card on the table beside her to make sure that the items were covered, but I
believed in telling her a good deal else of what was going on, which I hadn’t mentioned to the private
secretary, because I knew she would be interested… She talks about her own visits and what she has
observed herself there. Reactions of different people. She gives you a lead… 4
Anything further removed from a conversation, say, between the Queen and Winston
Churchill could hardly have been imagined. Heath was no countryman; he was a good
amateur musician and successful international yachtsman; Elizabeth is interested in
neither. ‘The Queen’, a member of the household said, ‘found Heath hard going.’ Their
only common ground was politics. And on one important issue there was a major
divergence of interests. In Elizabeth’s eyes she has two main roles, complementary and
to her of equal importance: she is Queen of Great Britain and head of the
Commonwealth, both sacred trusts inherited from her father. While Macmillan had been
the first British Prime Minister to attempt to join Europe and the most committed – since
Churchill – to the maintenance of the ‘special relationship’ with the United States which
had so aroused de Gaulle’s suspicion, Heath was the first of Elizabeth’s Prime Ministers
to be a passionate European to the exclusion of all other connections. He had no time
for the Commonwealth and showed it. Elizabeth, according to Campbell, was ‘deeply
unhappy with Heath’s undisguised disrespect for the institution in general and most
African leaders in particular and greatly upset by the rows which disfigured the 1971
Commonwealth conference in Singapore’. The casus belli was the Government’s decision
to resume arms sales to South Africa, provoking a string of African leaders to visit
Britain to denounce the Government’s support of apartheid. Elizabeth’s old friends Julius
Nyerere and Kenneth Kaunda came, threatening to withdraw from the Commonwealth;
Kaunda declared on arrival at Heathrow that he had come to appeal to the British
people over the heads of their Government (and, no doubt, privately to Elizabeth). At a
stormy dinner given by Heath for Kaunda at Downing Street, Heath denounced the
Zambian leader for hypocrisy in condemning Britain while Zambia itself continued to
trade with South Africa. While Heath treated African threats to ‘expel’ Britain from the
Commonwealth with disdain, Elizabeth, although outwardly imperturbable, did not
enjoy the situation. She would, apparently, have liked to have attended the
Commonwealth Heads of Government Conference in Singapore in January 1971, but
Heath would not allow her to go. On 21 January 1972 Heath signed the Accession treaty
marking Britain’s entry into the EEC to take effect from 1 January 1973. In her
Christmas 1972 broadcast just a few days before the critical date, Elizabeth reached out