There was a time when my husband, who often addresses the television, would habitually react to Edward Heath’s appearance on the screen with the greeting ‘Hello, sailor.’ Last week, though, the man who was Sir Edward’s principal private secretary during his time as prime minister, Robert Armstrong, now Lord Armstrong, commented on the posthumous accusations against him. ‘You usually detect some sense of sexuality when you are friends or work closely with them,’ he said of political colleagues. ‘I think he was completely asexual.’
Asexual is an anomalous word, combining a Greek prefix, signifying negation or privation, with an adjective derived from Latin. The word, when it came into use in the 19th century, meant ‘lacking sexual organs’. A derivative, asexualisation, meant ‘castration’ or ‘sterilisation’. It was a popular recourse of the influential eugenics movement.
An advocate of eugenics, much respected at the time, was J.
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