Ted Heath Is Almost Dead. Hooray!

Order the Champagne. Get those party invitations ready. For Sky News reports that:

Sir Edward Heath... has recently become considerably weaker.

He is now nearing the end of his life.

All I can say is, it's about bloody time.

Once I wanted to create a subdomain for the domain BY-ELECTION.ORG.UK, and so I asked myself 'who is the parliamentarian most likely to die'. The obvious answer was the oldest, Ted Heath.

I created www.bexley.by-election.org.uk and put up a spoof obituary of Sir Edward.

I mentioned this as a joke in an after-dinner speech I was giving, and one of the guests decided it would be a perfect piece of gossip for the London Evening Standard diary column.

They decided not to run the piece, but only after phoning Sir Edward's office to find out his thoughts on the news of his death.

Apparently he didn't take it well. Sir Edward fired off a 'terse' letter to Imperial College (at which I was a student) accusing the site of being a misuse of college facilities and demanding that Imperial have the web site removed immediately.

This placed the college in an invidious position. They had little choice but to institute disciplinary proceedings against me. Not wishing to get chucked out for my free speech in my own time without recourse to college computing facilities, I agreed to remove the web site, and not to republish it 'whilst I remained a student at the college'.

Of course, I'm no longer a student at the college. However were I to publish something calling someone a fat communist-sympathising Liberal Democrat, some former Conservative Prime Ministers might see that as libellous. Of course, there's a saying: you can't libel the dead.

Once Sir Edward dies, I'll submit a Freedom of Information request to the college to see if I can get a copy of his letter of complaint. At the moment the 'parliamentary privilege' exemption probably kills any hope of me getting a copy (if they still have it). But I'm hoping that once the bastard dies they'll be likely to be more open to letting me have a copy.

Of course, Sir Edward has been ill for some time. A friend of mine went to a pro-EU event a year ago, and commented on Sir Edward:

"He didn't seem terribly alive!

When he left it was by his bodyguards lifting him by the arms and kinda dragging him along the floor whilst he sort of eyeballed people with a look that said "who on earth are you lot, where am I, what am I doing out of bed, where am I being taken now"

I believe Sir Edward was a traitor to his country.

I will be glad when he dies.

I look forward to his death.

Update: He's Dead.