Sir Edward Heath, the former British prime minister who has died aged 89, was at once an exemplar of our democratic age and a dirigiste anachronism.(The Week ...)(Brief Article)(Obituary)

Sir Edward Heath, the former British prime minister who has died aged 89, was at once an exemplar of our democratic age and a dirigiste anachronism. Acarpenter's son, Heath went up to Oxford, served honorably in World War II, and entered politics soon after it. His working-class background, which he preferred to leave behind, nonetheless came in useful in 1950s and '60s Britain--a time of egalitarian ferment--and he became the first Conservative prime minister not to hail from the party's quasi-aristocratic inner circle. His short premiership in the early 1970s comprised a series of catastrophes leavened by mere crises, for Heathian policy, in all things, consisted solely of surrendering to one's ...