Common Market: Crossing the Channel

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interfere with his career. He does not smoke, sips a single sherry or Campari before dinner, and occasionally twirls a brandy glass afterward. A bachelor, he lives modestly in a two-room apartment a few paces from Berkeley Square. One of his few indulgences is a sizable stereophonic record collection; though he is fond of art ("I'm afraid the abstracts don't appeal to me"), his most valuable pictures are a pair of landscapes in oil, signed W.S.C., that were a gift from the Old Gentleman who painted them. He occasionally takes a girl out to dinner, but even the inventive British press has hardly ever hinted that Heath has time for romance.

Explains a longtime colleague: "If Macmillan calls Heath from the Prime Minister's country residence at 11 o'clock on a Saturday morning and says 'Can you come to Chequers for the weekend?', he has no ties and he can go." Heath's friends have no doubt that some day Heath hopes to go to Chequers on his own—as Prime Minister. His long-range chances look good.* Many Britons believe that the nation's biggest task in the years ahead will be to strike a firm balance between the conflicting claims of NATO, Europe, the U.S. and the Commonwealth. They see astute, dedicated Heath as the ringmaster. So far, he has always acted under orders, and no one can be sure whether he could go it alone. But Ted Heath has one indispensable prerequisite for leadership—he is a superbly skilled politician.

Organ Tones. He was born July 9, 1916, light-years away from the graceful world that traditionally breeds Tory leaders. His father was a master builder in the sleepy seaside resort of Broadstairs, Kent, where Charles Dickens worked on David Copperfield. "Rather a nobby place," was Dickens' description of Broadstairs, but old friends remember young Heath as rather nobody. While other boys played on the beach, he preferred to read indoors or practice on the battered upright in the Heaths' front room. He grew up in a semidetached, six-room house beside the railway tracks that shudders every time a train passes, and he returns there at every opportunity. Each year, he still organizes and directs a Christmas concert, known as "Our Carol Party" in Broadstairs, that he started in 1936 to raise funds for charity.

Young Heath first showed a flair for music in his early teens, when he was attending a grammar school near Broad-stairs. After six years there, he landed a coveted organ scholarship to Balliol, Oxford's most earnest college and Harold Macmillan's alma mater. Heath played the organ at chapel and conducted the choir. He majored in politics, philosophy and economics, but was torn between the law and music as a profession. In 1940 he joined the Royal Artillery as a private in the ranks, fought through four of the Six: France, Belgium, Holland and Germany. He came out of the war a lieutenant colonel—and a bit of a drifter. He moved from a desk job at the Ministry of Aviation ("not much fun") to the post of news editor of the Anglican Church Times (where he is remembered as a deft headline writer) to trainee executive in a private merchant banking firm.

Through business acquaintances, Heath met some influential Tories who persuaded him that he might be just the man to fight Bexley (pop. 88,781), a Kentish dormitory town adjoining Harold