[2][3] However, his premiership also coincided with the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, with his approval of internment without trial and subsequent suspension of the Stormont Parliament seeing the imposition of direct British rule.

Unofficial talks with Provisional Irish Republican Army delegates were unsuccessful, as was the Sunningdale Agreement of 1973, which led the MPs of the Ulster Unionist Party to withdraw from the Conservative whip.

Heath also tried to reform British trade unionism with the Industrial Relations Act, and hoped to deregulate the economy and make a transfer from direct to indirect taxation, such as with the introduction of value-added tax in 1973.

Heath has been described by the BBC as "the first working-class meritocrat" to become Conservative leader in "the party's modern history" and "a One Nation Tory in the Disraeli tradition who rejected the laissez-faire capitalism that Thatcher would enthusiastically endorse.

At the end of the year he was defeated for the Presidency of the Oxford Union by another Balliol candidate, Alan Wood, on the issue of whether the Chamberlain government should give way to a left-wing Popular Front.

His opposition to appeasement was nourished by his witnessing first-hand a Nuremberg rally in 1937, where he met leading Nazis Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels, and Heinrich Himmler at an SS cocktail party.

[21] As a temporary major commanding a battery of his own, he provided artillery support during the Allied campaigns in France and Germany in 1944–45, for which he received a mention in despatches on 8 November 1945.

[24] Heath joined the Honourable Artillery Company as a lieutenant-colonel on 1 September 1951,[25] in which he remained active throughout the 1950s, rising to commanding officer of the Second Battalion; a portrait of him in full dress uniform still hangs in the HAC's Long Room.

[28] Heath joined a team under Alison Munro tasked with drawing up a scheme for British airports using some of the many Second World War RAF bases, and was specifically charged with planning the home counties.

Journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft has observed that "Of all government jobs, this requires firmness and fairness allied to tact and patience and Heath's ascent seems baffling in hindsight".

In 1960 Macmillan appointed Heath Lord Privy Seal with responsibility for the negotiations to secure the UK's first attempt to join the European Communities (or Common Market, as it was then more widely known).

After extensive negotiations, involving detailed agreements about the UK's agricultural trade with Commonwealth countries such as New Zealand, British entry was vetoed by the French President, Charles de Gaulle, at a press conference in January 1963 – much to the disappointment of Heath, who was a firm supporter of European common market membership for the United Kingdom.

Soon afterwards Heath telephoned Margaret Thatcher to inform her that he was going to sack Powell from the Shadow cabinet; she recalled that she "really thought that it was better to let things cool down for the present rather than heighten the crisis".

It included a number of provisions for miners and their dependents including the addition of cost of living increments, a basic scheme benefit, an increase from £3 to £6 a week to the benefit "which can be kept if a redundant mineworker finds a new job and enters new employment, because if he did he would probably incur income tax, perhaps National Insurance contributions, travelling expenses and other expenses which might well have exceeded the £3 which he would have been able to draw if he had continued to draw that from the redundant mineworkers payment scheme."

"[91] Scottish nationalism grew as a political force, while the decimalisation of British coinage, begun under the previous Labour government, was completed eight months after Heath came to power.

Heath and the Conservatives were pledged to "full employment" but within a year it became clear that they were losing that battle, as the official unemployment count crept towards 1,000,000 and some newspapers suggested that it was even higher.

[98][99] In October 1973 he placed a British arms embargo on all combatants in the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War, which mostly affected the Israelis by preventing them obtaining spares for their Centurion tanks.

The two nations differed on such major crises as Britain's EC membership, the Nixon economic "shocks" of 1971, the Bangladesh Liberation War, détente with Soviet Union, Kissinger's Year of Europe and the Middle East crisis of 1973.

In 1971, Heath sent MI6 officer Frank Steele to hold talks with the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and find common ground to begin official negotiations.

[102] In July 1972, Heath permitted the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, to hold unofficial talks in London with an IRA delegation by Seán Mac Stíofáin.

Heath began negotiations with Jeremy Thorpe, leader of the Liberal Party, but when these failed, he resigned as prime minister on 4 March 1974, and was replaced by Wilson's minority Labour government, eventually confirmed, though with a tiny majority, in a second election in October.

In the weeks following the second election defeat, Heath came under tremendous pressure to concede a review of the rules and agreed to establish a commission to propose changes and to seek re-election.

There was no clear challenger after Enoch Powell had left the party and Keith Joseph had ruled himself out after controversial statements implying that the working classes should be encouraged to use more birth control.

Joseph's close friend and ally Margaret Thatcher, who believed that an adherent to the philosophy of the Centre for Policy Studies should stand, joined the leadership contest in his place alongside the outsider Hugh Fraser.

Heath maintained business links with several companies including a Saudi think tank, two investment funds and a Chinese freight operator, mainly as an adviser on China or a member of the governing board.

During his premiership, Heath invited musician friends, such as Isaac Stern, Yehudi Menuhin, Clifford Curzon and the Amadeus Quartet, to perform either at Chequers or 10 Downing Street.

While acknowledging that Heath was often assumed by the public to be gay, not least because it is "nowadays ... whispered of any bachelor", he found "no positive evidence" that this was so "except for the faintest unsubstantiated rumour" (the footnote refers to a mention of a "disturbing incident" at the beginning of the Second World War in a 1972 biography by Andrew Roth).

When they asked Heath why he had not supported homosexual law reform (he was either absent from the debates in the 1960s or voted against Lord Arran's first Bill in May 1965), he replied that he had always been in favour but that "the rank and file of the party would never have stood for it."

[172] In November 2016, criminologist Richard Hoskins said that the evidence used against Heath in Operation Conifer, including discredited allegations of satanic ritual abuse, was "preposterous", "fantastical" and gained through the "controversial" practice of recovered-memory therapy.

[173] Operation Conifer was closed in March 2017, having cost a reported £1.5 million over two years, as no corroborating evidence had been found in any of the 42 allegations by 40 individuals (including three different names used by one person).