Sir Edward du Cann was a crook

I blogged about the death of Sir Edward du Cann here. I wanted to add this, which I just read in The Spectator by Charles Moore.

Sir Edward’s longevity proved a problem for me when I was preparing my first volume for the publishers. A paragraph about him (incredibly, he came quite close to being chosen over Mrs Thatcher to challenge Ted Heath in 1974) had to have two versions, one if he were still alive, the other if he weren’t. He lived, so my quotation from William Waldegrave said that Heath’s supporters hoped that Du Cann would challenge because they ‘all knew that he had such a dubious financial record as to make him an easy target’. In the ‘dead’ version, Waldegrave said: ‘all knew that he was a crook’. Those who romanticise the probity of politics in the old days would do well to study Sir Edward’s career.