With the Sunday Times saying in its editorial that Brexit was the first in a catalogue of events that “degraded” the Tories and a period in opposition was now appropriate for the party, and Jeremy Warner in the Daily Telegraph – another once fanatically pro-Brexit newspaper – conceding that “Project Fear was right all along,” Allister Heath, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph, still stands like Canute against the waves.
Of Kwasi Kwarteng’s catastrophic, career-ending handiwork, Heath wrote that it was “the best budget I have ever heard a British chancellor deliver, by a massive margin”. Other monocle-popping pronouncements include: “His premiership is ending in disaster, but I don’t regret backing Boris in 2019,” “Liz Truss is winning [the leadership election] because she promises to fight the failed groupthink ruining Britain” and, barely a year ago, “Keir Starmer is running out of time to prove Labour has any point at all”.
Heath was born in Alsace, France, to what his Wikipedia entry stresses was “a part-British family”. I first became aware of Heath when he came into the orbit of Sir David Barclay – the late Telegraph proprietor – who told me he was “very sound”, which I took to mean he’d found a little helper every bit as batshit crazy as Sir David was.
Heath’s love of Brexit, incidentally, means never having to say he’s sorry: everything that doesn’t turn out quite as he had envisaged he blames on the “Remainer elite”’.
