A History of England5 Heinä 2025

249. Who governs Britain?

How did Heath end up calling an election on the question of who governed the country? Especially as the choice he seemed to be offering was between him and the minders.

This episode traces the impact of two major shocks, the ending of Bretton Woods in 1971 and the oil shock of 1973, combined with the inflation that followed a last Tory attempt to manufacture a boom from Keynesian economics, that drove Heath to that decision. It also shows how all this led to the unravelling of the postwar consensus, particularly on economic policy, and the emergence of a new, radical current in the Conservative Party seeking to replace the consensus by a new departure in economic thinking.

When Heath, having lost the February 1974 election, lost the next one, in October, too, the pressure against him became irresistible. He called a leadership election for early 1975. The self-destruction of the campaign of the initial darling of the right, Sir Keith Joseph, opened the door to the first possible ascent to leadership of a major British party by a woman. The brilliant election tactics of Airey Neave, ex-intelligence operative, ensured that she achieved it.

Illustration: A Tory leader and his successor: Ted Heath and Margaret Thatcher. Photo from the Guardian, PA Archive/Press Association

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License

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