Putting Blair and Brown in perspective

"In a crowded field, Edward Heath was our worst prime minister". Thus Daniel Hannan's reaction in the Telegraph to Philip Ziegler's official biography of Edward Heath.

Was there ever any doubt? Heath was the epitome of the view expressed by T.S.Eliot in The Cocktail Party:  

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

What astounds me is that neither Zeigler nor Hannan identify the sour anti-Americanism that explains so much of what Heath did, one of the few passions to animate his tepid character.

And this was the toad chosen by the Tory party grandees to lead the party because he was supposedly "good on television". Dear God, he made even the snaggle-toothed Harold Wilson look telegenic. That party deserved to die, but the stench of its decomposition poisoned British politics for decades after Heath's defenestration.