Which Princess Are You?
I am:
CROWN PRINCESS MATHILDE OF BELGIUM
Like Crown Princess Mathilde, the aristocratic daughter of a count and countess, you are nothing less than poised regardless of the situation. Elegant in both dress and demeanour, you were born to mix in royal circles, where your interests – and aspirations – are a seamless match.
I decided that I’m going to keep my commentaries at DiaryLand.com. If I don’t, the commentaries run the risk of being lost in the shuffle on here. So just keep going to the same place as before – http://mandyroyalty.diaryland.com.
Thanks for your patience!
Sir Edward Heath, Ex-British Prime Minister, Dies (Update2)
July 17 (Bloomberg) — Edward Heath, who brought the U.K. into the European Economic Community as the nation’s prime minister in 1973, died today. He was 89.
Heath “was a man of great integrity and deeply held beliefs from which he never wavered,” Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a statement released by his Downing Street office.
Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who replaced Heath as leader of the Conservative party, described him as “a political giant.” Heath was “in every sense, the first modern Conservative leader,” Thatcher said in a media statement.
Former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke described Heath as “very good company and a very good politician.”
“I am very saddened to hear the news and will miss him greatly,” Clarke told the British Broadcasting Corp.
Michael Heseltine, a former U.K. deputy prime minister, said Heath was “hero of my generation.”
“He was seen as a radical, he was seen as a reformist and he was seen as a break in a sense with perhaps a slightly aristocratic tradition of the Tory party that needed modernizing,” Heseltine said in a BBC interview.
A Conservative member of parliament for 51 years, Heath served as prime minister from 1970 to 1974, between two separate terms in office for Labour’s Harold Wilson. Heath’s lifelong commitment to building the European Union provoked a rift within his own party, alienating Queen Elizabeth II and Thatcher, who ousted him from the party’s leadership in 1975.
`Share Sovereignty’
“It is only right we should share our sovereignty with our European neighbors for the greater benefit of all,” Heath said in his last speech in Parliament in 2001.
Along with German Chancellor Willy Brandt (1913-1992) and French President Georges Pompidou (1911-1974), Heath pushed for Britain to form a political union with its European neighbors and to adopt the common currency, the euro, that began trading in a dozen nations in 1999.
Party leaders since Heath have favored restricting the EU’s role mainly to ensuring free trade in the bloc that now includes 25 nations.
Heath won office by campaigning to limit government subsidies for industry and restrictions on pay and prices, ideas Thatcher saw to fruition. Later, he backtracked on his strategy, giving the Trade & Industry Department more power to direct business in 1972 and granting miners a 27 percent pay increase the next year after war in the Middle East quadrupled oil prices.
“Heath’s domestic program was a failure, his performance as prime minister marked by policy reversals rather than successes,” Hugo Young, a British historian, wrote in his biography of Thatcher called “One of Us.” “He was less an arbiter than the victim of events.”
Maid
Born July 9, 1916, in the English seaside village of Broadstairs, Heath was the son of a carpenter and a parlor maid. He attended the Chatham House Grammar School and won a place at Oxford University’s Balliol College.
At a time when peers were swayed to accept Adolf Hitler’s rise in Germany, Heath was critical of the U.K. Labour Party and Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s reluctance to act against Nazism. In 1937, Heath worked for an anti-appeasement candidate running for Parliament.
Passion
His passion for integrating Britain with the rest of Europe formed during travels to Spain in 1938, when civil war violence bombed him out of his hotel in Barcelona, and to Germany in 1937, where he witnessed the Nazi’s nationalistic Nuremberg rally in the build-up to World War II.
“I can still recall that rally, every moment of it,” Heath told his biographer, Margaret Laing, in 1972. “What struck me was the hysteria of the whole thing.”
Returning to the U.K. from Germany and Poland two days before war was declared in 1939, Heath joined the army and rose to lieutenant colonel in an artillery unit assigned to France. He ordered the execution of a soldier convicted of rape.
After the war, Heath took the civil service exam and achieved the highest score before winning the seat in Parliament for Bexley, southeast of London, in 1950. His first speech to the House of Commons argued for British membership in the European Coal & Steel Community.
Heath’s first government job was as a party whip organizing votes for the leadership in Parliament in 1951, and he became chief whip in 1955. He held together the party’s support for Prime Minister Anthony Eden during the Suez crisis, when Britain, France and Israel attempted to unseat Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1956.
EEC
In 1962, Heath joined the cabinet and took charge of negotiating Britain’s entry into the EEC, a bid that was vetoed the next year by French President Charles de Gaulle. Heath took the Conservative Party leadership in 1965. At 49, he was the youngest Conservative leader since Benjamin Disraeli in 1868 and the first to be elected in a ballot by his peers.
He won the general election in 1970 by surprise, promising “change so radical, a revolution so quiet and so total that it will go far beyond the program of a Parliament.” Arguing that the Labour government had extended Britain’s welfare state too far, Heath pressed to cut taxes and spending and to roll back state subsidies for industry.
As unemployment touched a postwar record of 1 million in 1972, Heath’s government restored subsidies to Upper Clyde Shipbuilders in Scotland and took ownership of Rolls-Royce’s aircraft-engine unit to save it from bankruptcy.
Oil Prices
Oil prices quadrupled to an inflation-adjusted $25 a barrel as Arab nations embargoed oil shipments to protest U.S. support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. In Britain, mine workers demanded higher wages and then an end to overtime work, prompting Heath to order industry onto a three-day work week to conserve energy.
With power-cuts routine and trash uncollected, Heath called an election in February 1974, asking “who governs Britain?” Labour won four more seats in Parliament than the Conservatives, who had more of the popular vote. He failed in attempting to form a coalition with the Liberal Party, then handed power back to Labour’s Wilson.
Wilson won another election called in October that year. By February 1975, Conservatives picked Thatcher over Heath for the party leadership.
Heath’s so-called U-turn in choosing short-term political expediency over the Conservative agenda seared in the party’s consciousness for the next decade. It tipped support toward Thatcher’s more ideological style and away from Heath’s “one nation” leadership, which emphasized responsibility both to workers and managers. Heath never regretted his decision.
`Adjustment of Policy’
“People called it a U-turn, but what it was, was an adjustment of policy to reflect what happened with prices because of the Middle East war,” Heath said in an interview with Bloomberg Television when his autobiography, “The Course of My Life,” was published in 1998.
A bachelor, yachtsman and classical musician, Heath’s relationship with the Queen was “correct but cool,” according to his biographer, John Campbell.
Sarah Bradford, writer of the “Elizabeth” biography of the Queen, termed Heath’s demeanor “introverted and formal” and said his desire for closer European relations was at odds with the monarch’s passion for links with the Commonwealth of nations that grew out of the British Empire.
Abrasive
Abrupt and sometimes abrasive in public, Heath was stabbed in the back of the neck with a lit cigarette outside the Conservative central office in London shortly after winning the 1970 election. In 1973, he called mining magnate Rowland “Tiny” Rowland “the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism” because of his free-wheeling management style that left him open to charges he had bribed African leaders to win work for Lonrho Plc.
Out of power, Heath sniped at Thatcher’s leadership, especially her resistance to European integration. In 1989, he said, “whatever the lady does is wrong — I do not know of a single right decision taken by her.”
When Thatcher was ousted in 1990, his response was “Rejoice, rejoice.”
Heath remained prickly and gruff, refusing a seat in the “outdated” House of Lords and ridiculing the “increasingly impotent Parliament.”
He saved some of his sharpest barbs for fellow Conservatives, calling the appointment of William Hague as party leader in 1997 “a tragedy — he’s got no ideas, no experience and no hope.”
In March 2004, Heath suggested that Conservative leader Michael Howard, then 62, may be too old to win election. Remarks like those drew rebuttals from Thatcher, Hague and others, though popularity wasn’t something Heath courted.
His former cabinet minister Jim Pryor told the British Broadcasting Corp. in 2001, “He wouldn’t feel he was doing his job properly unless he was booed a bit.”
I love the strength of British backbone. The island hasn’t been conquered in thousands of years, and it’s not going to happen now. Britain did not crumble under the Gotha Bombers. Nor did it fall for the Luftwaffe.
I would just like to say that I am extremely proud of Britain in their successful bid to host the Olympics. I would also like to say how terribly sorry I am that such vile acts have today marred the celebration.
My heart goes out to England and all of the innocent people injured or killed in the bombings. This is a disgusting act & I am shocked and completely irate. Please do whatever you can to help the victims. I will be here working to do the same.
Everything said about Camilla – or Charles – can justly be said of Diana. I am not overly thrilled about the latest marriage. It could’ve happened differently, but it didn’t. There isn’t a way to stop it or change it, and for heaven’s sake, Charles needs some peace for once. How long can we go on bashing him? Or Camilla for that matter? Everyone wants Diana’s praises sung, or that there should be no criticism of her at all. So be it. But let’s have that all around! Live and let live.
And please, the next time you want to rant in the guestbook, please remember to read ALL of what I write, so you can at least be accurate in what you talk about.
Royal Diana books are being sold on Amazon.com if anyone is interested. I saw this auction and thought that if there were any Diana fans present here, they might appreciate the heads up. The link is:
