Why I don’t believe that Ted Heath was gay

The moment Edward Heath sat down in the first class seat next to me on the flight from Scotland to London, shook my hand and said ‘Jonathan, it is a pleasure to meet you’ I determined to flirt with him in order to find out whether the rumours that he was gay were true.

I was in my thirties and famous. An undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, I had been lucky, in 1965, to write and sing Everyone’s Gone To The Moon, which sold just under 5 million copies. That same month in that same year Heath had been elected leader of the Conservative Party.

I’ve been fortunate, in my life, to have met many famous people. None, incidentally, as charismatic as Heath’s rival and enemy Margaret Thatcher, but that’s another story.

Rumours about Heath’s sexuality had been rife for decades. He was a bachelor in an era when all bachelors were assumed to be gay.