London Briefing / Chris Johns: The obituaries for Ted Heath have been full of nice words with just the odd barb: the poor man, like so many others, seems to be getting much more praise than when he was alive.

The people who seem to write political obituaries either knew Heath or seem to have merely culled their material from history books. Either way, Tory grandees or people too young to have known the early 1970s have failed to capture the times. You really needed to have been there.

Heath lost office in 1974 following a bitter battle with trade unions during a "winter of discontent". I can remember my father being around the house more than usual at the time. Like most people, he was on a three-day week as the authorities tried to conserve energy resources - basically coal - in the face of a miners strike.

The weekly shop in those days included as many candles as could be found: power cuts occurred most evenings.

Heath famously called an election asking the question "who governs the country" and got the answer he least expected. It would take another five years of a Labour government in thrall to the unions before Britain was ready to elect someone ready and able to take on the vested interests that were squeezing the life out of the economy.

Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979 having learned the lessons of the last decade, having seen the defeat inflicted on Heath, and almost immediately began plans for a fight to the death with the miners. I witnessed coal stocks at power stations piling up for a long time before any hint of a miners strike became evident.

Conspiracy theorists have long held that Thatcher not only prepared for that fight but also picked it. If any coal is produced in the UK any more it hardly registers in the data.

Heath was the last of a generation of European leaders who became passionate advocates of the European ideal in the wake of personal experience of war. Born during the middle of the first war, "to the sounds of the battle of the Somme", Heath served with distinction in the second. His belief in European integration was driven, like the views of many German and French post-war leaders, by the facts of European conflagration.

He was the only pro-European British politician honest enough to argue that loss of political sovereignty was a necessary part of belonging to the Common Market (as the EU was then called) and was a price well worth paying.

Like most British prime ministers, including the current holder of that office, Heath was essentially economically illiterate. He was the last British prime minister to try to use fiscal policy to ward off recession. Academics have long pondered whether to describe the 1970s as a period of "stop-go": the business cycle in those days seemed to be fitted with only two gears. Actually, a shorter description of the cycle would just have it as "stop".

We learned how to cope with oil shocks from the mistakes made in the wake of the first time OPEC flexed its muscles in 1973. Incredibly, when Heath first became prime minister, exchange rates were still fixed under the Bretton Woods system: in those days you could still take your dollars to Fort Knox and get them exchanged for gold. Richard Nixon soon put paid to that.

Heath will be best remembered for persuading French leader Georges Pompidou to put aside France's long-standing objection to UK entry and for taking Britain into Europe.

In many ways, Britain's debate over Europe only began after entry. The Tory party has been ripped apart by its own internal battles over EU participation and Blair has had to keep his own Europhile instincts in check for fear of getting too far over his electorate.

Heath belonged to the political class that would have participated in the euro from inception and he would not have bothered with the niceties of a referendum.

Back in the 1970s, academics wrote books that fretted about Britain's "deindustrialisation". Nowadays, we celebrate the fact that we don't make anything any more. It means we are not part of "old Europe".

Heath would have been the first to acknowledge how much things can change over relatively short periods of time.

Chris Johns is an investment strategist with Collins Stewart. All opinions are personal.