Many readers and literary analysts have assumed that Widmerpool was drawn from Powell's acquaintances. Powell was circumspect and chose not to confirm any of the suggestions put to him. Candidates include Powell's Eton contemporary Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller (nicknamed "Bullying-Manner"), later ennobled as Lord Dilhorne, who served as Attorney General during the 1950s and Lord Chancellor in the early 1960s. According to Powell, Manningham-Buller was an unattractive figure at school; he was instrumental in the dismissal of a master who sent an inappropriate note to a junior boy, an action reflected in the novels when Widmerpool instigates the sacking of Akworth. Powell's brother-in-law, the Labour peer Lord Longford, believed that he was the model for Widmerpool, a proposition that Powell rejected; Longford had also claimed to be Erridge, another character from the novels. The Labour politician Denis Healey thought that Powell had based Widmerpool on Edward Heath, the British prime minister between 1970 and 1974. It is possible that the episodes relating to Widmerpool's spying career are drawn from the activities of Denis Nowell Pritt, a Labour MP who was expelled from the party for his pro-Soviet stance. Powell's biographer Michael Barber wrote that Cyril Connolly declared his long-standing enemy, the art historian Douglas Cooper, to be a Widmerpool prototype; Cooper's companion John Richardson thought that Connolly was joking.