Ted Heath failed grandma's marmalade test

Historical allegations of wrongdoing aside, Ted Heath always struck me as rather an oddity when I was growing up. For a start, he was a Tory. Second, he did that weird heaving shoulders thing when he laughed. Third, he wouldn't let us have any money for a new school - our's had outside boys' toilets. Fourth, he was a Tory (already done that, but they weren't popular round our way, so it goes down twice. Fifth, and most serious, he annoyed by grandma. Having fallen foul of the decimalisation deadline for half-crowns, which meant that she was left with a bag of very heavy metal cribbage counters, she was naturally cautious about the change to decimal currency. As it turned out, her fears were well-founded. Every Friday, she carried out a weekly shop at the local mini-supermarket Buywise. For reasons known only to her, the main focus of concern was the price of marmalade. Pre-decimalisation, the price had been 9d a jar. The conversion table we were supplied with, courtesy of Mr Heath's Government, which foisted the change on a largely unwilling population, showed that this would be 3.75 new pence, rounded up to 4 new pence. But the shop added a gravity defying 1 pence to the price in the weeks immediately following the change, taking the price of a jar to the equivalent of a shilling - 5 new pence. And this, we were told, ran completely contrary to Mr Heath's promise that consumers would not be out of pocket by the change. Marmalade, unlike the Prime Minister, didn't like. And if anymore proof was required, we only had to think back to his election slogan, in which he solemnly promised to 'cut prices at a stroke' if elected. He was, and they weren't, carrying on instead an inexorable rise that led to a failed prices and incomes policy, strikes, power blackouts and a three-day week. Sadly, Heath wasn't the first, or last, politician to make unsustainable promises that we were expected to believe just because they spoke with a plummy voice. Music and yachting might have lifted Heath above the run-of-the-mill hectoring politician, but his string of broken promises, as evidenced by the incontrovertible evidence of the marmalade test, were enough to damn him in our eyes before he lost the '74 election and the eventual leadership of his party to the over-wheening ambition of his former Education Secretary, Margaret Hilda Thatcher. And she couldn't have cared less about how much we were expected to pay for preserves.