Michael Heseltine
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George Younger
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Born | Michael Ray Dibdin Heseltine 21 March 1933 Swansea, Wales | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Political party | Non-affiliated (2019–present)[1] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Other political affiliations | Conservative (1951–present)[2] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Spouse |
Anne Williams (m. 1962) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Children | 3, including Annabel | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Alma mater | Pembroke College, Oxford | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Signature | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Military service | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Allegiance | United Kingdom | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Branch/service | British Army | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Years of service | 1959 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Rank | Second lieutenant | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Unit | Welsh Guards | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Michael Ray Dibdin Heseltine, Baron Heseltine,
Heseltine entered the
Heseltine became a vocal critic of Thatcher, mostly because of her
As a key ally of Major, Heseltine was appointed
Heseltine was created a
Early life
Michael Heseltine was born in
Heseltine's mother originated in West Wales, daughter of James Pridmore, a dock labourer who unloaded coal from ships, later hiring others to do so and founding West Glamorgan Collieries Ltd, a short-lived company that briefly worked two small mines on the outskirts of Swansea (1919–1921);[10] his father, also James, worked at the Swansea docks.[10] Due to this heritage Heseltine was later made an honorary member of the Swansea Dockers Club.
Heseltine was brought up in relative luxury at No. 1, Eaton Crescent, Swansea (now No. 5). He told
Oxford
Heseltine campaigned briefly as a volunteer in the October 1951 general election before going up to Pembroke College, Oxford. While there, in frustration at his inability to be elected to the committee of the Oxford University Conservative Association, he founded the breakaway Blue Ribbon Club. Along with undergraduates Guy Arnold, Julian Critchley and Martin Morton he canvassed workers at the gates of the Vickers Shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness.[15] Julian Critchley recounted a story from his student days of how he plotted his future on the back of an envelope, a future that would culminate as Prime Minister in the 1990s. A more detailed apocryphal version has him writing down: 'millionaire 25, cabinet member 35, party leader 45, prime minister 55,'[16] though Heseltine himself disputes this and instead recalls a lack of self-belief.[17] He became a millionaire and was a member of the shadow cabinet from the age of 41, but did not manage to become Party Leader or Prime Minister.
His biographers Michael Crick and Julian Critchley (who was a contemporary of Heseltine's at Brockhurst Prep School) recount how, despite not having an innate gift for public speaking, he became a strong orator through much effort, which included practising his speeches in front of a mirror, listening to tape recordings of speeches by television administrator Charles Hill, and taking voice-coaching lessons from a vicar's wife. (In the 1970s and 1980s, Heseltine's conference speech was often the highlight of the Conservative Party Conference, despite his views being well to the left of the then leader Margaret Thatcher.) He was eventually elected to the Library Committee of the Oxford Union for Hilary (Spring) Term 1953.[18] The Oxford Union minutes record after a debate on 12 February 1953 that "Mr Heseltine should guard against artificial mannerisms of voice and calculated flourishes of self-conscious histrionics; this is only worth saying because he has the makings of a first class speaker".[19]
Heseltine was then elected to the Standing Committee of the Oxford Union for Trinity (summer) Term 1953.
At the end of the Trinity (summer) Term 1954 he was elected
The Union cellars were opened on 30 October 1954, and Heseltine persuaded the visiting
Business career
Early business career
Heseltine began articles at Peat Marwick & Mitchell in January 1955.[29] Whilst training as an accountant, he also built up a property business in the London property boom of the late 1950s. He and his Oxford roommate Ian Josephs had each inherited around £1,000 (around £23,000 at 2016 prices).[30][31] They formed a property company called "Michian" (after their first names) and with the aid of a mortgage bought a 13-year lease on the so-called Thurston Court Hotel at 39 Clanricarde Gardens (near Notting Hill) for £3,750. They evicted the existing tenants so that Josephs' father could renovate the property and let out the rooms for a total rent of around £30 per week. A year later, they were able to sell the property at a profit, doubling their capital to £4,000.[30]
With the aid of a £23,000 mortgage, Heseltine and Josephs now bought a group of five adjacent houses for £27,000 in Inverness Terrace, Bayswater. They arranged for some medical students to decorate and remodel the property into a 45-bedroom boarding house, which they called the "New Court Hotel". Heseltine would sometimes cook breakfast himself, although he rejects tales that he would get up early to mix margarine in with the butter. Many of the tenants were American servicemen who, he later recorded, were for the most part respectful but sometimes rowdy at weekends.[32]
Edward Heath, then a government whip whom he had met at the Oxford Union, was his referee when he applied for the Conservative Party Parliamentary Candidates' List in October 1956.[33] Heseltine bought his first Jaguar, second hand and cheap because of the rise in the price of petrol owing to the Suez Crisis, for £1,750 in December 1956, upgrading to newer and more expensive models in future years.[34]
New Court Hotel was sold in 1957.[35] At this point Heseltine went into business with another Oxford friend, Clive Labovitch, who brought out Opportunities for Graduates that year. Heseltine arranged for this to be distributed free, expanded from 40 pages to a 169-page hardback book, to final year students at all British universities, paid for by advertising.[36] Heseltine ended his partnership with Josephs and with the aid of a £4,500 investment by Heseltine's mother (following the death of his father in 1957) he and Labovitch were able to buy a group of houses at 29–31 Tregunter Road (south of Earl's Court), adding two more in neighbouring Cathcart Road.[37]
National service
Heseltine had transferred his articles to a partner at a smaller firm of accountants located off
Heseltine later wrote that he admired the military, for his father had been a
Heseltine spent nine weeks in the ranks as a Guardsman[e] before being sent for three months of officer training at Mons Officer Cadet School, Aldershot, alongside men from other regiments. He was a capable cadet, reaching the rank of Junior Under-Officer and graduating with an A-Grade, but he was not awarded the Sword of Honour or promoted to the rank of Senior Under-Officer, as it was felt his age had given him an unfair advantage over younger cadets.[40] Throughout his training he had been troubled by an old ankle sprain, but he declined the offer of a medical discharge.[41] He was commissioned as a Second lieutenant on 11 June 1959.[40]
Heseltine was granted leave to contest the general election in October that year; according to Ian Josephs this had been his plan from the start.
Business career: expansion and near disaster
By now the property boom was in full swing. Heseltine and Labovitch established first one, then a group of companies under the name "Bastion Properties".[44] Heseltine later recorded that he and Labovitch bought at least three properties in W1 and W2 which they were able to sell at a profit before they had completed[f] the original purchases. They also built eight small houses in Queensborough Mews, Bayswater.[36] They bought a 58-year lease on a block of seven properties at Stafford Terrace, off Kensington High Street, which they converted into flats[45] and built houses for Stepney Borough Council.[46] Bastion also planned to build an estate of up to 126 houses[g] at Tenterden, Kent, which failed to sell. In order to attract other buyers to the empty estate Heseltine had to accept an offer of £4,000 for the first house, which had been valued at £7,250.[46] The estate was beset with repair problems until after Heseltine's election to Parliament.[47]
Heseltine and Labovitch also founded the magazine publishing company Cornmarket, and brought out Directory of Opportunities for School Leavers and Directory of Opportunities for Qualified Men, which earned a steady income from advertising. Canadian, French and German versions were also launched, although these were less profitable.[36] In late 1959, using £10,000 of a £30,000 profit on selling a freehold site off Regents Park, they acquired the famous (but unprofitable) magazine Man About Town whose title was shortened to About Town then simply Town.[48] In 1962, they paid £10,000 for Topic, a weekly newspaper that had been launched the previous year by a group of entrepreneurs including the Prime Minister's son Maurice Macmillan, and which was now owned by Norman Mascall (a pyramid scheme fraudster of the era). By then the economic climate was too difficult, and like many publishers they found that there is limited appetite for weekly papers in the UK. Topic ceased publication at the end of 1962, but its journalists later became The Sunday Times Insight Team.[49]
Heseltine became managing director of Bow Group Publications in 1960, mainly looking after advertising and circulation for its Crossbow magazine (he does not seem to have written any articles or pamphlets himself). He contemplated suing The Observer for a limerick mocking his dress sense (spelling "Bow" as "Beau") for implying him to be homosexual, but was talked out of it. He remained a director until 1965.[50]
Bastion Properties was in trouble because of building costs and an unsatisfactory building manager.[46] After rapid expansion, Heseltine's businesses were badly hit by the Selwyn Lloyd financial squeeze of 1961[h] and, still not yet thirty years old, he eventually owed £250,000 (around £4.5 million at 2016 prices).[31] He states he was lent a badly needed £85,000 in December 1962 by a bank manager who retired the same day. He avoided bankruptcy by such tactics as paying bills only when threatened with legal action, although he eventually settled all his debts. It was during this stressful period of his life that he took up gardening as a serious hobby.[51] Later, during the 1990s, Heseltine committed a minor gaffe when he joked in a speech about how he had strung creditors along.[52]
Between 1960 and 1964, Heseltine also worked as a part-time interviewer for ITV, very likely, in Crick's view, to maintain his public profile as an aspiring politician.[53]
Formation of Haymarket
Despite Heseltine's later insistence on management controls in government departments which he ran, Cornmarket was a highly disorganised company, with little in the way of accounting or business plans and cheques and invoices often going astray. One of its most lucrative ventures, the Graduates Appointments Register (albums of anonymous graduate
Lindsay Masters, who had joined the Heseltine-Labovitch publishing business as an advertising manager in spring 1958, and Simon Tindall, who had joined in his early twenties as an advertising salesman while Heseltine had been doing his National Service, played an increasingly large role in managing the company.[55] Masters kept a tight grip on the selling of advertising space, banning boozy lunches and setting targets for calling of clients, followed by chase-up calls, whilst keeping a public league table of salesmens' success rates; these were relatively innovative techniques at the time.[56]
By 1964, Cornmarket owed a great deal of money to their printers, Hazell Watson & Viney, which was then merging with the
Haymarket grows
From the autumn of 1964, Haymarket set out aggressively to acquire magazines, approaching them from the list in the media directory BRAD. They acquired small, modestly profitable magazines for tape recorder and camera, and camping and caravan, enthusiasts, and using a loan from BPC bought a series of leisure and medical publications for £250,000 from a Canadian publisher, in competition with Thomson Group.[59]
In 1965 Heseltine's businesses had a turnover of around £700,000 per annum, and employed around 50 staff. Although the Opportunities for Graduates series continued to generate profits, Town magazine continued to lose money, hampered by the cost of printing (much more expensive at that time than nowadays) and by Heseltine's reluctance, for political reasons, to include pictures of nude girls or cartoons disrespectful of the Royal Family.[60]
Haymarket launched a bid for the British Institute of Management's magazine The Manager, again in competition with Thomson Group, in late 1965. It was envisaged that Haymarket would take a 25% stake, as would the Financial Times and The Economist, of both of which Crowther was also chairman. Over the weekend Heseltine, inspired by how Donald Stokes had once won a Scandinavian bus contract for British Leyland by building a model bus, had a team led by Labovitch prepare a 96-page mock copy of what they envisaged, mostly using text cut from The Economist. Robert Heller was brought in as the first editor of what became Management Today – Heseltine initially irritated him by taking him to lunch at the Carlton Club and talking of his political aspirations, but Heller soon recognised that Labovitch was the front man whose job was to impress those who needed to be impressed, and Heseltine was "the dynamic and real entrepreneurial brain". The first edition came out in April 1966, just after Heseltine's election to Parliament. Haymarket went on to publish similar magazines for Marketing, Personnel Management and Computing Institutes.[61]
Labovitch left Haymarket at the end of 1965. Heseltine stated he spent three days trying to persuade him to stay. Labovitch wanted to establish himself as a successful educational and careers publisher, and may well have been pushed by his then wife, the socialist journalist Penny Perrick, who disliked Heseltine both personally (as best man at their wedding he had, she said, welcomed various business figures in his speech as if he were at a board meeting) and politically and whom he had refused to include on the Haymarket board. Labovitch was a generator of ideas but he lacked Heseltine's business skills. Although he took his profitable Directories with him, he had to sell them back to Haymarket when his business failed in 1973, causing him to attempt suicide. Heseltine offered him a position as consultant to Haymarket.[62] The two former partners remained on friendly terms until Labovitch's death in 1994.[63][64]
Very few staff left with Labovitch. Lindsay Masters stayed behind, very likely in the knowledge that he might soon be running the company as Heseltine's political career took off.[63] However, Heseltine continued as managing director of Haymarket even after being elected to Parliament in March 1966, and based himself at the company offices near Oxford Circus rather than in the House of Commons.[65] Heseltine's Oxford friend Julian Critchley was editor of Town for around a year from 1966 until he was sacked by Masters, ending his friendship with Heseltine who had shrunk from delivering the blow himself.[60]
Further growth
In April 1967, Heseltine persuaded BPC to inject a further £150,000 into Haymarket, increasing its ownership stake to 60%, whilst Heseltine and other directors retained smaller shareholdings. Haymarket doubled their magazine portfolio by taking over the management of twenty of BPC's magazines (many of which had been acquired by BPC in lieu of bad debts by other publishers), including Autosport. However, they were now effectively a subsidiary of BPC; Heseltine, Masters and Tindall could potentially be outvoted or even sacked by the four BPC directors on the board. BPC installed a new financial controller who installed cost and cashflow management for the first time, and insisted on finally closing Town magazine at the end of 1967.[66] Town had never made a profit, but Heseltine writes that its quality was instrumental in establishing Haymarket's reputation as a publishing house.[48] Around that time, Management Today became Haymarket's first big success.[67] A BPC manager recorded that Heseltine kept the initiative at board meetings by "poker-faced nit-picking" about the quality and timing of BPC's printing, rather than by employing what came to be considered his usual "I will transform the world" rhetoric.[68][69]
In 1968, there were rumours that BPC was planning to sack Heseltine.
As part of his ongoing campaign to buy titles off other publishers, Heseltine noticed a magazine called The Accountant which was easily paid for by vast amounts of advertising. Robert Heller produced a dummy edition of a Haymarket version, modelled on the Daily Telegraph, which became
Buoyed by the success of Management Today, Campaign and Accountancy Age, Haymarket made pre-tax profits of £3,000 in 1968, £136,000 in 1969 and £265,000 in 1970.[73] Heseltine resigned as managing director of Haymarket on his promotion to principal opposition spokesman on transport in 1969, although he continued as chairman of the board until he became a minister in 1970, at which point he resigned from the board altogether, whilst remaining a major shareholder.[65]
1970s: Heseltine takes ownership of Haymarket
In 1970, Heseltine turned down the chance to invest £25,000 in the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi when it was set up (his former employee Maurice Saatchi said that he had learned a great deal from Heseltine's aggressive techniques of acquiring magazine titles, and from publicity in Campaign magazine), believing wrongly that it was against the code for ministers to make such an investment. Lindsay Masters did invest, but was eventually bought out by the Saatchi brothers; Heseltine later believed that he and Masters together could have made another fortune if they had reinforced one another with large shareholdings in Saatchi and Saatchi.[74]
With Heseltine a government minister from June 1970, Haymarket was being run by Masters and Tindall, who had secured another coup by publishing Computing for the British Computing Society. BPC was in financial trouble in 1971, and Heseltine, Masters and Tindall assembled a consortium of
Heseltine acted as a consultant to Haymarket during his period out of government office between 1974 and 1979.
After 1997: return to business
By 1997, when his career as a Cabinet minister ended, Haymarket was making an annual profit of over £10m and employing around 1,000 people. Heseltine resumed management of the company after Masters' retirement in 1999.[85] Haymarket has seen reduced profitability in the UK since 1999, but has expanded further into foreign markets (for example India). It has also laboured under heavy borrowings of over £100 million to buy back Masters' and Tindall's large minority shareholdings, which have been reduced to some extent by the sale of properties. Heseltine has now retired from day-to-day management, handing over to his son Rupert.[86]
Heseltine's ownership of Haymarket has made him a large personal fortune. As of 2013 he was ranked 311th in The Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated wealth, including shareholdings held by members of his immediate family, of £264 million.[87]
Electoral history and Parliamentary career
Gower 1959 and Coventry 1964
Heseltine contested the safe Labour seat of Gower at the October 1959 general election.[88] He had been the only applicant for the Conservative (technically, Conservative and National Liberal)[j] candidacy. He would at times attend Labour meetings and attempt to heckle the speakers,[34] including Aneurin Bevan and the Labour candidate Ifor Davies, whom he kept trying to challenge to a debate. He obtained plenty of publicity in the local paper and obtained a swing to the Conservatives slightly better than the national average.[89]
In 1961, Heseltine was one of 29 applicants—of whom half were interviewed—for the Conservative candidacy in the marginal constituency of Coventry North. He clinched the selection after bringing his fiancée Anne Williams to the meeting. He got on well with the incumbent Labour member Maurice Edelman (whose daughter was a friend of Anne Heseltine, as she became in 1962) and they met for dinner sometimes during the campaign.[90] Many of his Oxford contemporaries had already entered Parliament, but, to his disappointment, in the 1964 general election he was defeated by 3,530 votes.[91] The swing to Labour was slightly less than the national average.[90]
Selection for Tavistock
In March 1965, Heseltine applied to be candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Tavistock in Devon, where the incumbent MP had announced his retirement two months earlier.[92] Of the 51 applicants, 14 were considered, six of whom had local connections. Heseltine reached the final short list of three, the others being a dairy farmer in a senior position at the Milk Marketing Board (thought to be the favourite), and a local authority lawyer, who later recalled that on the train down from London Heseltine kept jumping out at every stop to check that his magazines were on display at the station newsagents. Heseltine had already spent several days driving round talking to locals and had ordered a year's worth of back copies of Tavistock's two weekly papers. Such effort is nowadays common in Parliamentary selections but was unusual at the time. He was selected by a clear majority of the Tavistock Conservative Association's Finance and General Purposes Committee (which contained between 100 and 120 people).[93]
Heseltine was picked in part as a young, dynamic candidate who could face the challenge of the resurgent
Trouble then arose at his adoption by a full general meeting of the Conservative Association, which should have been a formality. Criticism arose that a person with farming links should have been chosen, for the bikini-clad girls on the cover of Town magazine, which were considered risqué at the time, and for jokes in the magazine at the expense of the Royal Family. He was selected after a stirring speech to around 540 assembled members of the local Conservative Association on Friday 26 March 1965.[93][92] Crick believes that this is a rare example in politics of a single speech determining a career. Only 27 members supported an amendment to refer the matter back to the selection committee and 14 opposed Heseltine's adoption altogether. Thereafter his name stopped appearing as "publisher" on his magazines. He had to learn about farming, an important issue in the seat, about which he knew almost nothing.[93]
MP for Tavistock: 1966–74
In the March 1966 general election both the Conservative leader Edward Heath and Liberal leader Jo Grimond spoke at Tavistock. Heseltine stressed his agreement with Liberal principles and fought extremely hard, achieving a small swing to the Conservatives, bucking the national trend.[94] He was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Tavistock.[92]
Heseltine's liberal stance on race issues and his opposition to hanging (he felt it was barbaric and not an effective deterrent, although he later expressed openness to the idea of hanging terrorists) was unpopular with many of his constituents, as was his continued unease with agricultural issues, and his dressing as a city businessman in pale grey suits, kipper ties and driving a Jaguar. Despite the huge demands on his time as both an MP and running Haymarket Press, and the distance of the seat from London, he remained relatively active at constituency casework at weekends and during the late summer recess, touring rural areas in a caravan and using a small tape recorder (relatively new technology at the time) to dictate answers to constituents' problems in front of them.[95]
As soon as Heseltine was elected in March 1966, the seat of Tavistock was recommended for abolition by the
In the event, the implementation of the Boundary Review was postponed for partisan reasons until after the next general election by Home Secretary James Callaghan (on the pretext of waiting until after the Redcliffe-Maud Report on local government reorganisation). Heseltine therefore defended Tavistock at the 1970 general election, achieving a better than average swing to the Conservatives.[96]
MP for Henley: 1974–2001
Heseltine, by now a junior minister in the Heath government, was now forced to apply for a new candidacy, often in competition with other sitting Conservative MPs whose seats were also due for abolition. He applied for
In 1972, Edward Heath attempted to persuade Heseltine, a strong supporter of his, to challenge Powellite MP Ronald Bell for the Conservative nomination for the new seat of Beaconsfield.[98] Heseltine wrote that he was "tempted" to enter the lists at Beaconsfield, but did not actually do so.[99] Crick writes that he reached the final shortlist of four against Bell, before being "apparently persuaded" to withdraw.[97] Bell's campaign within the local Conservative ranks was masterminded by Hugh Simmonds, chairman of the Young Conservatives, and he narrowly won.[98]
Heseltine was one of 180 applicants for the safe Conservative seat of
Heseltine was MP for Henley from February 1974 until his retirement from the House of Commons in 2001.[100]
Career under Heath: 1966–74
Opposition front bencher: 1967–70
In 1967, Peter Walker invited Heseltine to be opposition spokesman on transport (not a Shadow Cabinet-level position, but reporting to Walker), after he had arranged a successful speaking tour of the West Country for him. Heseltine's duties included opposing Barbara Castle's 1967 Transport Bill (which eventually became the Transport Act 1968).[101] Heseltine led opposition to the parts of the bill which nationalised small bus companies into the National Bus Company (UK) and set up Passenger transport executives (PTEs) in major urban areas. He criticised Castle for wanting to give PTEs the right to manufacture or produce anything necessary for their function, which as she pointed out was almost word-for-word identical to a clause in the Conservatives' Transport Act 1962. In 1968 Margaret Thatcher became Heseltine's boss for a year; he found her "embarrassingly rude".[102] Unusually for the time, he employed a full-time researcher, Eileen Strathnaver.[65]
Heath allowed his shadow ministers more leeway than would be normal nowadays. Heseltine was one of a group of 15 Conservative MPs to vote against the
Heseltine was promoted to principal opposition spokesman on transport in November 1969, although unlike his predecessors Thatcher and Walker, he was not a member of the Shadow Cabinet. He went on a six-week tour of India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and the US to study how their docks were run, in readiness for Labour's planned 1970 Docks Bill (which in the event was cancelled because of that year's general election).[65]
Minister: 1970-4
Transport and Local Government
Following the Conservative victory in the
After four months Transport was absorbed into the new "monster ministry" of the
Aerospace
In April 1972 Heseltine was promoted to be Minister for Aerospace, a Minister of State rather than a Cabinet minister but effectively running his own department within the Department of Trade and Industry, another of Heath's new mega ministries. The department had been given major new powers by the 1972 Industry Act. Later in the year Peter Walker was appointed Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, making him Heseltine's boss once again. Heseltine appointed Cecil Parkinson, whom he had met on an accountancy course in the mid-1950s, as his Parliamentary Private Secretary, ostensibly on the grounds that he knew even less about aerospace than he did. Parkinson was impressed by Heseltine's vigour and his insistence that civil servants produce results for him quickly, later writing in his memoirs (1992) "in his constructive and deliberate unreasonableness he reminds me in many ways of Mrs Thatcher". Heseltine arguably did not make aerospace policy any more interventionist than it already was.[106]
One of Heseltine's main jobs was to sell
Heseltine was a key mover in the setting up of the European Space Agency (ESA) in 1973. He cancelled the British Geostationary Technological satellite and handed back the grant to the Treasury. He was less successful in persuading colleagues to centralise British space expenditure, which was split between the DTI, Defence, the Post Office and the Science Research Council – his attempt to get Margaret Thatcher, Secretary of State for Education and Science, to give up control of the latter, soured their relations. He also favoured pan European cooperation on civil aviation.[108]
Heseltine had almost daily dealings with the industrialist Arnold Weinstock, Head of GEC – as transport minister Heseltine had once summoned him in to the ministry to ask why the electronic signs on the motorway, built by GEC, did not work properly. By May 1973, Weinstock was thought by Cecil King to have a very low opinion of Heseltine, but this later improved and they became friends. Heseltine had started almost from nothing, but Haymarket had only succeeded when bought out by the big conglomerate BPC. This may explain his corporatism, in Crick's view, although unlike Jim Prior or Heath, Heseltine had never shown much interest in involving trade unions.[109]
During this period, Heseltine's opponent
Hovertrain
Early in 1973, rumours began to circulate that the Tracked Hovercraft (known as the "Hovertrain"), a planned 300 mph floating train on which work had begun in 1967, was to be cancelled. On 12 February 1973, Heseltine gave a written answer on Peter Walker's behalf to a written question from Labour MP David Stoddart, that a further injection of government money was still "under consideration". However, two days later Heseltine appeared before the Select Committee, and revealed that the government had already decided to pull the plug on the Hovertrain on 29 January. Airey Neave believed Heseltine had been lying and urged Stoddart to pursue the matter. The Hovertrain incident came to be regarded as the worst example of lying to the House of Commons since the Profumo affair a decade earlier, and Heseltine survived because full details only emerged during the Parliamentary summer recess.[111]
The committee's report in September accused Heseltine of having given an "untrue" answer on 12 February. Heseltine immediately gave a press conference (7 September 1973) in which he denied that he had lied. On the orders of Chief Whip Francis Pym he apologised to the House of Commons on 16 October 1973 for having made a statement which was open to "more than one interpretation". Heseltine said that his statement that further investment was "under consideration" was not just the normal euphemism for a decision that had not yet been announced, but was actually technically true, as at that time he was still talking to Hawker Siddeley and British Rail about buying part of the Hovertrain business. The row deflected attention from the committee's anger at the cancellation decision. Neave's real target, in the view of Heseltine's PPS Cecil Parkinson, was Heath, whom Neave detested and later helped to topple as party leader in 1975, but he and Sir Harry Legge-Bourke, both of whom had distinguished war records, also deplored Heseltine's cutting short of his National Service and his brashness and new money.[111]
Heath does not appear to have been overly bothered about the cancellation of Hovertrain, but was bothered about the mooted third London Airport at Maplin Sands on the Essex Coast, which was seen as a major prestige project along with the Channel Tunnel which was begun at this time. The Bill was threatened by a revolt of Tory backbenchers whose seats were affected, and Heath gave Heseltine a dressing down for his lack of energy in promoting it.[112]
Assessments
Heseltine was not popular with his ministerial peers at this time. A story was told of how ministers had volunteered him to be the one "taken hostage by terrorists" in a mooted training exercise. Nonetheless, Heseltine emerged from the Heath government with an enhanced reputation. He had avoided the worst crises of that government: the two miners' strikes, incomes policy, industrial relations policy and Northern Ireland, as well as any direct involvement in British entry into the EEC.[113] Heseltine's career under Heath's ministry saw him associated with local government reorganisation, prestige projects, Europe and state aid to industries, themes which would recur throughout his career. He had attained a higher public profile than many Cabinet ministers, and by 1974 he was being seriously tipped as a future Prime Minister.[114]
Heseltine was promoted to the Shadow Cabinet in June 1974 as Industry spokesman. If the Conservatives had won either of the general elections in 1974 (February or October) he would almost certainly have joined the Cabinet. He was shadowing Tony Benn, who planned a major expansion of public ownership through the National Enterprise Board. In the summer of 1974, Heseltine put together a team of over 20 Conservative MPs, each a specialist in a particular industry, to campaign against Benn's plans.[115]
1975 leadership election
Heseltine had lost faith in Heath over the second miners' strike and over Heath's personal abrasiveness (Heath had apparently once told him to his face that he was too openly ambitious); his patron Peter Walker had also come to have similar doubts about Heath. Ten days before the October 1974 election, at which Heseltine bucked the national swing by increasing his majority at Henley, he urged Heath to consider his position by the end of the year.[116]
It is unclear how Heseltine voted in the first ballot of the
Heseltine toyed with standing himself for the second ballot (in Crick's view his vote would very likely have been derisory), but voted for Whitelaw. Thatcher, whom Heseltine like many others had initially regarded as something of a joke candidate, defeated Whitelaw and became party leader.[116]
Career under Thatcher: 1975–86
Opposition: 1975-9
Heseltine did not work easily with women as senior colleagues, as was shown by the difficulty experienced by Elinor Goodman in obtaining promotion from secretary to journalist at Campaign, and his reluctance to let Josephine Hart sit on the Haymarket Board.[119] Heseltine fully expected to be sacked from the Shadow Cabinet by the new leader (as Peter Walker was at this time), but was retained, in part because Thatcher was impressed by his fierce opposition to Benn's Industry Bill, and partly because a senior figure, possibly Geoffrey Howe, argued for his retention.[120]
Heseltine first emerged as a platform orator at the Conservative National Council in March 1975, and then at the autumn conferences in 1975 and 1976 (where he likened Labour to a one-legged army marching "Left, left, left"). He dictated his speech ideas beforehand to his scriptwriters, who had to discard a good deal of unintelligible material. His reputation was derived not from any factual content or argument, but from the force and brio of his delivery – it was said of him that he could "find the party's clitoris". There was talk of his being appointed Party Chairman (in charge of the party organisation and of campaigning across the country) in place of Peter Thorneycroft.[121]
In the summer of 1975, Heseltine persuaded the Shadow Cabinet not to oppose the Labour Government's bailout of British Leyland because of the risk to marginal seats (including some Cowley workers in northern wards of his own Henley seat). Industry Secretary Tony Benn thought Heseltine intellectually shallow (describing one of his speeches as "an awful old flop" and another as "another flayling attack") but admired his ability to make headlines in opposition.[122]
The infamous mace incident took place on 27 May 1976 during the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Bill, a measure whose passage had already lasted a year and seen 58 Committee sessions. The Speaker had ruled the bill to be hybrid, as it excluded one shipbuilding company (although there was dispute as to whether the company in question actually was a shipbuilder). All interested parties were therefore entitled to put their case to a special select committee. An earlier vote in favour of the Speaker's ruling had been tied, and defeated after the Speaker had been obliged by convention to use his casting vote against his own ruling. The Labour Government now moved to suspend the normal Parliamentary standing order to allow the bill to proceed as normal. This time the Conservatives expected the Speaker to use his casting vote against the government's motion to suspend the standing order. Instead the Labour motion was carried, after a Labour whip broke his pair. Amid riotous scenes of Labour left-wingers singing The Red Flag Heseltine picked up the Mace, the symbol of Parliament's authority, until Jim Prior grabbed it off him. Accounts of exactly what happened vary but it seems likely that he was mockingly offering it to the Labour benches, not, as some alleged, "brandishing" it – an illusion caused by Prior pulling his other arm down. Thatcher was furious. Speaker Thomas suspended the sitting and made Heseltine wait until next day to apologise so that tempers could cool. Heseltine was faced with calls for his resignation from the Shadow Cabinet; he thought it would play well with the public, but in Crick's view it helped to cement a reputation for impulsiveness and poor judgement.[123]
In autumn 1976 Heseltine was reshuffled, against his will, to the job of Shadow Environment Secretary. He was particularly cross at having to give up the job of Shadow Industry Secretary to John Biffen. He accepted on condition that he would not have to take the Environment job when the Conservatives returned to office. As Benn had given way to Eric Varley there was no longer such a need for aggressive campaigning on Industry, and Thatcher, who had herself been Shadow Environment Secretary in 1974, wanted campaigning on council house sales (Heseltine offered up to 50% discounts for tenants who bought their homes) and reform of the rates, and thought his predecessor Timothy Raison ineffective.[124][125]
Secretary of State for the Environment 1979–83
Appointment and political stance
Thatcher was impressed by Heseltine's campaigning and love of headlines during the
During the macroeconomic disputes of the early 1980s, Heseltine was sometimes associated with the Cabinet "wets" (
Heseltine favoured privatisation of state owned industries, a novel idea in 1979 as the Conservatives were initially only proposing to denationalise the industries nationalised by Labour in the 1970s.[128]
Despite his initial reluctance to take on the job, Heseltine later described it as "four of the happiest years of my life". He passed the
Administering the department
The Permanent Under-Secretary at the Environment Department, Sir John Garlick, described Heseltine's arrival as a change from "a very conservative Labour Secretary of State [Peter Shore] to a very radical Conservative Secretary of State". On his first day Heseltine took him out to lunch at the Connaught and drew up a list of what he wanted to accomplish in office (the list appears in Heseltine's book Where There's A Will, and was returned to him at the end of his time at the Environment). Only a quarter of Heseltine's agenda consisted of manifesto commitments and other political goals; the rest of it consisted of administrative and organisational changes. Peter Hennessy observed that Heseltine was more interested in the nuts and bolts of Whitehall reform than any minister since David Lloyd George. Heseltine was quite ruthless about moving civil servants with whom he was dissatisfied, but nonetheless staff thought he had mellowed somewhat since the early 1970s, and was more relaxed and fun to work with. His permanent secretaries Sir John Garlick and Sir George Moseley thought highly of him. He preferred to reach decisions through informal discussion rather than wading through paperwork. He instituted Peter Walker's custom of morning "prayer" meetings (ministers and PPSs with no civil servants present), now common in Whitehall but an innovation at the time.[130]
The department had a budget of £14 billion a year and employed 52,000 people. The Conservatives were pledged to cut 100,000 off the 730,000 strong civil service. On the advice of his junior minister Lord Bellwin, a former leader of Leeds City Council, Heseltine ordered that nobody was to be hired without his personal approval.[131]
Heseltine instituted an internal audit system called "MINIS" ("management information system for ministers"), ironically, in Crick's view, as Heseltine's own company Haymarket had often been chaotically organised. Peter Hennessy likened it to "a
Council house sales
Heseltine was a convert to the sale of council houses, a policy pioneered by some Conservative local authorities, e.g. Birmingham. He also favoured the policy of giving away houses, a policy first mooted from the backbenches by Peter Walker in the mid-1970s, not least as some local authorities were spending more on maintenance than they were recouping in rents. Thatcher, who was concerned at the reaction from those who had made financial sacrifices to buy their homes, was initially sceptical. After taking office Heseltine issued a circular enabling councils, if they chose, to sell houses at 30% discount and to offer 100% mortgages. The Housing Act 1980 enacting Right to Buy was delayed by a Lords amendment and did not reach the statute book until the end of 1980. Some councils were slow in processing applications (one even threatened to house "problem" families next door to those who bought) and Heseltine made an example of Norwich by setting up a DOE sales office there; Norwich council took him to court and lost. At the time Heseltine permitted councils to use up to 75% of sales receipts for renovating the housing stock, and was angry in later years when this was cut back by the Treasury. Heseltine also insisted on the doubling of rents to encourage buying.[128]
During the 1980s over a million council houses, around 20% of the stock, were sold, and by 1987 Labour had dropped their opposition to the Right to Buy. This was an enormous social change, doing much to increase Conservative support amongst new homeowners and which Heseltine often cites as one of his major achievements.[133] Heseltine noted that, "no single piece of legislation has enabled the transfer of so much capital wealth from the state to the people." He said that the 'right to buy' policy had two main objectives: to give people what they had wanted, and to reverse the trend of ever-increasing dominance of the State over the life of the individual. He said: "There is in this country a deeply ingrained desire for home ownership. The Government believe that this spirit should be fostered. It reflects the wishes of the people, ensures the wide spread of wealth through society, encourages a personal desire to improve and modernize one's own home, enables parents to accrue wealth for their children and stimulates the attitudes of independence and self-reliance that are the bedrock of a free society."[134] Many of the homes sold were "street properties" rather than flats, which arguably helped to ghettoise the remaining council tenants on run-down inner city estates. In fact, in Crick's view, he deserves only limited credit; it had been a Conservative commitment since 1974, and much of the detailed work was done by his juniors Hugh Rossi (in opposition) and John Stanley (in government).[133]
Local government finance
In 1979 the Conservatives were strongly represented in local government, as a result of the unpopularity of the outgoing Labour government. Four of the five council associations were Conservative-controlled. Heseltine was able to persuade them to rein in their spending by 1% each year. Whereas previously overspending councils had received extra rate support grants from Whitehall, after six months Heseltine announced a list of fourteen overspending councils who were to have their grant cut, most of them inner London councils and only one of them, Hammersmith & Fulham, Conservative controlled. The move appeared blatantly political as many of the other 114 overspenders were Conservative councils. Council leaders who came to appeal to Heseltine were often humiliated by being interrogated about their budget, to demonstrate their lack of detailed knowledge, before the council treasurer was allowed to speak.[135]
From 1980 to 1981 relations with local government became increasingly confrontational, as Labour made large gains in local elections, with a new generation of council leaders such as Ken Livingstone in London and David Blunkett in Sheffield seeking to generate employment through their councils. Council spending now began to rise again, largely as a result of increases by the GLC, Merseyside and West Midlands councils; whereas Labour votes tended to be poorer and eligible for rate rebates, the burden of higher spending tended to fall on businesses and middle class homeowners. Although councils had already suffered deep cuts under Labour in the 1970s, Heseltine was under pressure from Thatcher and from Conservative MPs and newspapers to cut more. Heseltine's initial suggestion, that councils who wanted to increase the rates be forced to submit to re-election, was rejected by the Cabinet, in favour of a proposal that such increases be put to referendum (in Coventry, voters had recently voted by over 7:1 for spending cuts rather than a supplementary rate increase). This proposal in turn was attacked by Conservative backbenchers, both as an infringement of council freedom and a risky precedent for national taxation, both in the Environment Committee and in the debate on a bill which Heseltine introduced and had to withdraw. Heseltine then banned supplementary rates and imposed stiffer sanctions on overspending councils.[136]
Thatcher's 1974 pledge to abolish the rates and replace them with a new form of local government funding was still in force. However, the 1979 manifesto made clear that income tax cuts took priority over rates reform. Thatcher also blocked the upward revaluation of property rating values in 1982. A review of rates reform was begun in 1981, in which his junior minister Tom King personally spoke to every single backbench Conservative MP to canvass opinion about the various options. A Green Paper was produced in December 1981, recommending that no single alternative to the rates suggested itself. Thatcher wrote "I will not tolerate failure in this area" in the margin of the report and in the summer of 1982 a new committee was set up under Willie Whitelaw, only to come to much the same conclusion (The eventual solution, a "poll tax", was rejected both by the Green Paper and by Whitelaw's committee).[137]
Heseltine resisted demands by Leon Brittan, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury with whom he already enjoyed a somewhat antagonistic relationship, that central government have power to cap the spending of local authorities. He argued that the worst offenders were the large metropolitan counties (which, ironically, he had helped to create a decade earlier) and that the simplest solution was simply to abolish them. In the event, the 1983 manifesto, after Heseltine had moved to his next job, committed the Conservatives both to abolition of the metropolitan boroughs and to rate capping. When Heseltine objected after the election, Thatcher gave him "one of the most violent rebukes I have ever witnessed in Cabinet" according to Jim Prior, who believed that the issue helped fuel the hostility between Heseltine and Thatcher and Brittan, which would later exhibit itself as the Westland Affair.[138]
In opposition, in the late 1970s, Heseltine had been committed to reducing central government control over local government. In the 1980s, the opposite happened, with no less than 50 Acts of Parliament reducing the powers of local government. In Crick's view, although he opposed both rate capping and the poll tax, the overall trend towards centralisation was too strong for him to resist. During his time at Environment Heseltine also brought in compulsory competitive tendering for council services, and helped set up the Audit Commission, whose initial role was to act as an independent supervisor of district auditors of council activities.[139]
Riots
Heseltine became the troubleshooter to deal with the explosion of violence in Britain's
Heseltine visited Liverpool accompanied by a dozen or so officials from different ministries.
Heseltine circulated a 21-page minute to Cabinet on his return, entitled It Took a Riot. He proposed a regional office and a review of the status of the Metropolitan Counties, as well as greater government emphasis on Merseyside in future. He had prepared the ground with a small dinner for Whitehall mandarins including Robert Armstrong (Cabinet Secretary) and Ian Bancroft (Head of the Civil Service). However, Thatcher was not impressed, although she agreed to his appointment as Minister for Merseyside for twelve months. Neither was Keith Joseph (Secretary of State for Industry) nor Howe (Chancellor of the Exchequer), who favoured enterprise zones where businesses would be given favourable tax treatment.[142]
Shortly after his appointment as Minister for Merseyside, Heseltine gave his annual party conference speech, in which he condemned talk of repatriation and called for more public spending on inner cities. Although he felt he had taken a risk – the speech was in marked contrast to Norman Tebbit's "On Your Bike" speech a few hours later – he received his usual standing ovation and later recorded that it was the one of his speeches of which he was most proud.[143]
In autumn 1981 he visited Liverpool again, this time with a thirty-strong task force of representatives of local employers and civil servants (unusually for the time, drawn from different departments – DOE, DTI and Employment, but not the Home Office this time – Heseltine had been pushing for greater cooperation between departments since the setting up of the European Space Agency in 1973). For the next fifteen months he visited Liverpool for a day almost every week, refusing police protection and often driving himself, persuading business and local government to work together. Colette Bowe, a DTI official who was deputy director of the task force, recorded that Heseltine was the most effective minister she had ever seen at getting the official machine to do his bidding through a mixture of charm and tough questions.[144]
Inner city development
Heseltine faced initial suspicion from Labour-led Merseyside Council, but got on well with Sir Trevor Jones, Liberal leader of Liverpool City Council. Jones, also a self-made businessman, got on well with Heseltine, and Jones claimed that Heseltine admitted to him late one night that he was a Liberal at heart, but could not bear the thought of having no realistic chance to win power.[145]
Inspired by the Bundesgartenschauen which had helped to regenerate German cities after the war, Heseltine arranged for the first of five biennial National garden festivals to be held in Liverpool in 1984 (Jones arranged for the council to delegate the bid to the Merseyside Development Corporation, of which he was a director). More than 3 million people eventually attended.[145][146]
Heseltine arranged for Liverpool to receive unused government grants for other cities (from the Urban Programme), although the money was less than had been clawed back from Liverpool through council spending cuts. He also played an important role in the redevelopment of Albert Dock, the development of Wavertree Technology Park (the land purchased by £10 million of public money) and the development of Cantril Farm estate into Stockbridge Village, arranging for Barratt Developments to build many new houses for owner occupiers.[147]
Heseltine also played an important role in the development of
Some criticism was made of his time in Liverpool that he spent a lot of money but generated little in the way of new employment ("I would not blame him for that: Liverpool had defeated better men than Michael Heseltine" commented Lady Thatcher acidly in her memoirs in 1993). Local Labour politicians tended to feel that he had accomplished little, although they acknowledged his good intentions. However a more positive assessment was offered by
Secretary of State for Defence 1983-6
Appointment
In October 1982
Bramall had hoped for a period of consolidation after the reorganisations of the early 1980s and the
Nuclear disarmament and 1983 election
One of Heseltine's main jobs was to campaign against the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which had grown in size from 3,000 to 10,000 in three years amid public disquiet about the deployment of Trident and Cruise missiles, and the hawkish rhetoric often employed by Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan. Nott had had little interest in campaigning and had left the matter to the Minister of State, Peter Blaker, Heseltine's contemporary from Oxford. Heseltine put together a small group of seven civil servants called Defence Section 19 (DS19) to brief MPs and other opinion formers, and argue the case for Britain to have nuclear weapons. Some, both in the civil service and out of it, had qualms about using civil servants for what amounted to a political campaigning role. Opinion polls showed the public to be opposed to Trident and Cruise missiles, but also opposed to unilateral ("one-sided" as Heseltine insisted on calling it) disarmament, so Heseltine steered the debate away from the former and towards the latter.[152]
At the advice of John Ledlie Heseltine visited at the US Air Base at RAF Greenham Common, and after long prior discussion Heseltine insisted on wearing a combat jacket (not, as was often wrongly asserted, a Flak jacket; Ledlie does not accept Heseltine's later claim that he was simply handed it by a military figure to protect his coat from the rain). The jacket was a gift to cartoonists and he wore it on several subsequent visits to military bases. In February 1983 he fell over in the melée (he said at the time that he was pushed) when CND protestors surrounded a meeting of Newbury Conservatives, a propaganda gift, and on Good Friday 1983 he was filmed in West Berlin looking over the wall to the communist east, distracting attention from CND's linking of arms round Greenham Common that day.[153]
With a general election looming, Heseltine was keen to associate Labour with CND, and CND with communists and the Soviet Union (ignoring earlier comments by Party Chairman
Administering the department
Although the Ministry of Defence already had its own "Management Audit" system, Heseltine insisted on introducing his own version of the MINIS system which he had introduced at the Environment. The Ministry of Defence had a budget of £17 million per annum, and employed 246,000 civilians as well as 300,000 in uniform. Whereas the Department of the Environment had 66 directorates, Defence had 156, each headed by a
The three separate service ministries (Admiralty, War and Air) had merged into a single Ministry of Defence in 1981. Heseltine drew up plans on a flight back from Kuwait to merge the services further, so that the three chiefs of staff reported directly to the Chief of Defence Staff instead of being treated as colleagues, whilst some supply services were to be merged. The plans were bounced onto the Chief of Defence Staff, Field Marshal "Dwin" Bramall, over a weekend before publication on Monday, so senior officers had minimal time to drum up opposition in Parliament and the press. There was around three months of protest in the press, including from Bramall's predecessor Admiral of the Fleet Sir Henry Leach. Bramall obtained the concession that the individual service chiefs would be allowed to retain small staffs of their own and have a right of appeal to the Prime Minister. The changes took effect at the start of 1985.[156]
Bramall admired Heseltine's "great drive" and his "style, energy and vision about Europe", but was displeased at Heseltine's rudeness. It was not uncommon for Heseltine to summon him to a meeting early in the day, then keep Bramall "on hold" all day as he kept putting back the meeting, and eventually earning himself a rebuke for failing to display the respect with which every officer in the armed forces is trained to treat his subordinates. A number of senior officers spoke of Heseltine in scathing terms, for example for his self-centredness, to Michael Crick when he was researching his biography.[157] Crick observes that with the exception of some defence chiefs, many people who worked with Heseltine came to "admire and respect him", although those who see him from afar are more suspect.[158]
The sinking of the Belgrano
Heseltine took a hard line on civil liberties issues. He supported Thatcher's attempt to ban trade unions from GCHQ. He supported the prosecution of Sarah Tisdall for leaking his public relations plans for the arrival of cruise missiles in 1983.[159]
Before Heseltine's arrival at the Ministry of Defence,
Six days after Heseltine's letter to Denzil Davies, Ponting sent Davies an anonymous note stating that the letter had been written according to the advice of John Stanley, but contrary to the advice of civil servants, and suggesting other potential lines of inquiry. Three months later he sent two documents exposing the alleged cover up. Heseltine strongly supported, and by some accounts pushed for, the prosecution of Ponting (Ministry of Defence police had advised against, but the Solicitor-General Sir Patrick Mayhew urged that he should be). Heseltine later said that Thatcher had not been involved in the decision to prosecute. Neither Heseltine nor Stanley were called as witnesses at Ponting's trial in January 1985 (Richard Mottram, Heseltine's Private Secretary, gave evidence on behalf of the Ministry of Defence). To general surprise Ponting was acquitted. A week later Heseltine launched a stinging seventy-minute attack on Ponting in the House of Commons, and a year later he walked out of a Channel 4 News studio on being told that a recorded interview with Ponting was also to be shown. Stanley was seen as the villain of the piece, whereas Heseltine had merely declined to correct false statements made by others.[160]
NATO
The Foreign Secretary,
Heseltine came close to misleading the House of Commons over the meeting of NATO defence ministers at Montebello, Quebec, in October 1983. He stated that no "specific" proposals had been made to update NATO short range and tactical nuclear weapons. In fact a decision had been made in principle to do so. Crick describes Heseltine's answers as "highly disingenuous and deceitful". At the time NATO was claiming to be cutting back on such weapons, and the peace movement was still powerful in Germany where such weapons might be used.[162]
Defence procurement
The Defence budget was protected by a NATO commitment to increase defence spending by 3% per annum until 1986, but was still subjected to cuts in the proposed budget during Heseltine's tenure. Some senior military figures felt that Heseltine was obsessed with the minutiae of running the department rather than thinking strategically about defence priorities and procurement. Dwin Bramall recalled that Heseltine never showed an interest in the strategy papers he sent him. Thatcher was highly critical of him for failing to take a decision on the development of the Nimrod early-warning plane, on which £660 million was spent over a ten-year period, only for the project to be cancelled by his successor. Some accusations were raised (the Commons Select Committee on Defence thought him "vague and evasive" on the issue in 1985) that the accounts were being massaged to push costs into the period after 1986, when cuts would become inevitable. The journalist Hugo Young later recalled Heseltine briefing journalists confidentially that spending and funding could be reconciled until 1986, by which time he expected "to be gone".[163]
In Cabinet, Heseltine resented being kept out of economic debates and suspected he might be reshuffled to the job of
It had been agreed to spend £280m for two Type 22 frigates. Norman Tebbit (Trade and Industry Secretary), with the backing of the Cabinet, wanted them built at Swan Hunter in the North East, but Heseltine threatened resignation in January 1985 unless at least one was built at Cammell Laird on Merseyside, at a cost of an extra £7 million, where Type 22s had been built before. Thatcher let him have his way after he persuaded her that it would reward shipyard workers who had crossed picket lines during a recent strike, but was privately furious, and keen to keep defence costs down in future by buying American equipment.[165]
Heseltine also favoured European cooperation in defence procurement, feeling that this allowed Europe to compete with US firms which receive huge orders from
Heseltine also sold 132 Tornados for £4bn to Saudi Arabia later in 1985, accepting oil instead of cash (to the displeasure of Peter Walker, Energy Secretary) so that they would buy British rather than US aircraft. This later formed part of the controversial Al-Yamamah arms deal, the main part of which was signed in 1988.[167]
Westland Affair
Background
In spring 1985 Heseltine displayed little interest in Westland helicopters when approached by Tebbit (then
Heseltine took against the new chairman Sir John Cuckney's plan that Westland merge with
In mid-October Heseltine suggested a European consortium (which would include French Aérospatiale, German MBB and Italian Agusta). The new Trade and Industry Secretary Leon Brittan at first urged Thatcher to consider a European option (Heseltine later said Brittan preferred this option, although Brittan denied this). The Government was officially neutral (i.e. arguing that it was a matter for Westland directors and shareholders) but by November Heseltine was pushing the European option hard. In late November Peter Levene, Chief of Procurement, had a meeting at the Ministry of Defence with his French, German and Italian counterparts (the National Armaments Directors) and the representatives of the consortium, and agreed to "buy European" for certain classes of helicopters, although Heseltine was not actually present. The meeting was later praised by the House of Commons Defence Select Committee. Thatcher, who only learned of the meeting through Cuckney, was displeased, as were Brittan and the Treasury, who thought the US option might be cheaper.[170]
The cancelled meeting
In early December Thatcher had two ad hoc meetings with Heseltine, Brittan, Tebbit,
Heseltine raised his concerns with Tebbit, Whitelaw and John Wakeham (Chief Whip). At Cabinet on Thursday 12 December he had an angry exchange with Thatcher about the cancelled meeting, but Westland was not on the agenda for the meeting and Thatcher refused to permit a discussion on the matter, arguing that Cabinet could not do so without the necessary papers. Heseltine asked for his dissent to be minuted, and this was not done, although Cabinet Secretary Robert Armstrong stated that this had been an error and added it himself. On Monday 16 December Heseltine sat on the front bench with obvious disapproval when Brittan told the House that it was up to Westland to decide; on Wednesday 18 December he won the backing of the Commons Defence Committee for the European Consortium. On Thursday 19 December the matter was discussed at Cabinet for ten minutes: Cabinet approved leaving the decision to Westland and Heseltine was ordered to cease campaigning for the European option. Heseltine had failed to drum up enough support among possible allies like Tebbit, Howe, Walker, Norman Fowler and Tom King. A ministerial colleague at the time described him as "absolutely looney, completely hyped up with the thing" and of having a "persecution mania".[172]
Mayhew's leaked letter
By now the political row was being discussed in the media, partly because of the lack of other news in December. Cuckney wrote to Thatcher, at her behest, asking for reassurance that the Sikorsky deal would not damage Westland's business prospects in Europe. Heseltine was not satisfied with Thatcher's draft reply when he saw it and consulted Sir
Thatcher discussed sacking Heseltine with close colleagues over Christmas; but, as she later admitted in her memoir, refrained from doing so as he was too popular and important as a political figure.[174] She also decided against sending him a letter threatening him with the sack, which had been drafted. Instead she asked Mayhew to write to Heseltine complaining of what he thought were "material inaccuracies" in his letter to Horne, and asking Heseltine to write to Horne again, correcting them.[175] Mayhew's letter of rebuke to Heseltine – marked "Confidential" – reached Heseltine at lunchtime on Monday 6 January and was immediately leaked to the press by Colette Bowe, an information officer at the Department of Trade and Industry, at Brittan's request (some years later he admitted that he acted on the "express" instructions of Charles Powell and Bernard Ingham, Thatcher's two senior advisers). Heseltine was able to produce extra documents which Mayhew accepted as backing up his letter to Horne, but not before The Sun had called Heseltine "You Liar!" on its front page (the newspaper was later required to make a donation to charity in lieu of libel damages).[176]
Resignation
Cabinet met on the morning of Thursday 9 January, with Thatcher already having agreed her position with close colleagues at Chequers that weekend, and arranged that Scottish Secretary
At 4pm that day Heseltine delivered a 3,000 word, 22 minute resignation statement at the Ministry of Defence (rather than waiting to make a statement to the House of Commons when it resumed four days later). He may well have prepared this earlier, although his private secretary Richard Mottram says not. To Thatcher's fury Defence officials had helped him throughout the crisis and in preparing this document.[179] His statement denounced Thatcher's managerial style and suggested she was a liar who lacked integrity.[178] Thatcher later said during a television interview that she had not sacked him or called him to order before the incident because, “Had I done that, I know exactly what the press would have said: there you are, old bossyboots at it again.”[180][181]
Fallout from the affair
Unlike when
Brittan had to resign, partly as a result of fallout from the leak of the Mayhew letter, and partly because of his failure to give an entirely truthful answer to the House of Commons about Heseltine's accusation that he had pressured British Aerospace to withdraw from the European Consortium. Thatcher survived the Westland debate on 27 January, aided by a poor and long-winded speech by Opposition Leader Neil Kinnock. Sikorsky bought Westland.[183]
Up until Westland, Thatcher had approved of most of what Heseltine had done, even though their politics were rather different. Heseltine and Thatcher had quarrelled openly over a question of relations between Britain and the European Community (as it then was).[184] Apart from the clash of personalities, and the escalation of small issues into bigger issues, it has been suggested that Heseltine, concerned at impending Defence cuts in 1986, and worried that Thatcher was unlikely to promote him further, was looking for an excuse for a resignation, which would put him in good stead to be elected party leader after, as seemed likely at the time, the Conservatives would lose the next election due by summer 1988.[185]
Out of office: 1986–90
Campaigning
Heseltine was not one to befriend and gossip with colleagues or backbenchers. He did not regard this as an insurmountable problem, as neither Heath nor Thatcher had been particularly "clubbable" either. From about the mid-1970s, he began a campaign of addressing local associations, sometimes using a helicopter to speak to several in one day.[118] Heseltine had often had a reputation for being very cold and aloof with backbench MPs and party activists (Steven Norris said that after a visit to his constituency in 1983, local activists used a poster of Heseltine as a dartboard). However, in 1986–1990 he was a frequent visitor to local constituency dinners, although he usually attacked Labour rather than the Conservative government, and he used his wealth to afford a chauffeur and a helicopter.[186]
Heseltine campaigned in 100 constituencies in the 1987 election, attracting more publicity than many Cabinet ministers, although seldom mentioning Thatcher by name.[187]
During this period Heseltine enjoyed excellent relations with the media: among TV journalists he was in regular touch with Elinor Goodman of Channel 4 News (herself a former Haymarket employee), James Mates of ITN (son of his lieutenant Michael Mates) and John Cole, whilst among print journalists he was close to his old friend Anthony Howard (Deputy Editor of the Observer), Peter Jenkins, and especially close to Anthony Bevins of The Independent and the young Alastair Campbell of the Daily Mirror.[188]
Books
Heseltine's book Where There's A Will was written by a team of ghostwriters directed by Keith Hampson and Julian Haviland (former political editor of ITN and The Times). Academics, businessmen and economists contributed, and he often had them thresh out ideas in front of him. "He acquires by social intercourse the knowledge that other people acquire by reading", one adviser commented. The collated drafts were then rewritten by Haviland to "give it one voice". Hugo Young called it "the most impressive [book of its kind] I've read by a modern Conservative".[189]
Heseltine's second book, The Challenge of Europe: Can Britain Win?, appeared in 1989. Heseltine was in close touch with
Policies
Out of office Heseltine called for money, including the receipts from council house sales, to be spent on infrastructure investment instead of tax cuts. He also called for reductions in tax relief on mortgage interest payments and pension contributions, in the hope of encouraging investment into industry rather than into property and finance, echoing views being promoted by Will Hutton at the time.[191]
Heseltine also took an interest in the reduction of long-term unemployment, advocating Swedish-style
Differences with the government
Heseltine's resignation in January 1986 had been just before the only occasion on which the Poll Tax was discussed in Cabinet. He spoke against the tax when it was enacted into law in 1987–1988, but abstained rather than voting against as Edward Heath did, although he voted for Michael Mates' amendment which tried to introduce an element of banding according to ability to pay. Heseltine remained aloof from factional plotting in the Commons, and voted with the left-wing Lollard faction in backbench committee elections.[193] Heseltine later said that he regretted resigning from the Cabinet in 1986, as he subsequently often wondered if he and Nigel Lawson might have been able to persuade Thatcher to abandon the tax.[194]
Heseltine clashed bitterly at this time with his former friend Nicholas Ridley. Ridley was a Eurosceptic, a free marketer, a champion of the poll tax and a key ally of Thatcher. Heseltine argued that there was too much green belt building (although in fact only slightly more so than he had himself authorised as Environment Secretary) and stated that as a property developer he had never built on a "green" site, forgetting that he had done so in Tenterden in the early 1960s.[195]
Leadership rival
Although (or perhaps because) many of Heseltine's policy positions were not far removed from those of Labour, which was shifting to the right under Kinnock, he kept up his Conservative credentials at this time. In alliance with
One of the reasons which Thatcher gave to close confidants for not retiring on her tenth anniversary as Prime Minister (May 1989) was worry that Heseltine would defeat
In spring 1990 Thatcher's political fortunes were looking weaker, as the Conservatives were badly defeated at the
1990 leadership contest
Heseltine was being quietly urged to challenge Thatcher for the party leadership by David Mellor, the Arts Minister, but in a carefully worded formula Heseltine had repeatedly insisted that he could "not foresee ... circumstances" in which he would do so. Then came the Conservative defeat at the Eastbourne by-election (18 October) and the resignation of Deputy Prime Minister Geoffrey Howe (1 November).[200]
Heseltine wrote a six-page public letter to his local Association chairman, calling for more regard for the wide range of opinions in the party. Heseltine then left for the Middle East to visit King Hussein of Jordan and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Association officers sent him a 97-word reply (5 November) saying that they supported Thatcher's leadership. The party's regional agent had been present at their meeting, but they insisted he had not interfered with their reply. Round about the same time Thatcher's press secretary Bernard Ingham briefed journalists that Heseltine had "lit the blue touch paper then retired", although he denied having demanded that Heseltine "put up or shut up"; the Daily Mail front page asked "does he have the courage?" and The Times commented that if he did not throw his hat into the ring he would deserve to have it "stuffed down his throat". Thatcher brought the annual leadership election forward by a fortnight, causing Alastair Campbell to write in the Daily Mirror that "Tarzan the Tory Ape Man had made a right monkey of himself". A week later, after meeting Heseltine, the constituency officers issued another letter saying that they regretted how their reply had been construed as criticism.[200]
Then came Howe's resignation speech in the Commons on 13 November, in which he launched a strong attack on Thatcher;[201][202] next morning Heseltine announced his candidacy for the leadership, saying that over 100 MPs had asked him to stand and that he was better placed than Thatcher to lead the Tories to a fourth election victory.[201]
During the subsequent leadership election on 20 November, he polled 152 votes (40.9%) in the first round of voting by Conservative MPs, enough to prevent an outright Thatcher victory. (The rules required an incumbent leader to obtain a majority of at least 15% on a first ballot; Thatcher polled 204 votes, equal to 54.8%). Heseltine was thought by many pundits to be on course to beat her in the second ballot as many Conservative MPs were now rumoured to be ready to switch support from Thatcher and only 27 would had to have done so to give Heseltine the overall majority he would need in the second ballot.[203]
With lukewarm support from her Cabinet, most of whom had told her that she could not win and faced with the bitter prospect of a Heseltine premiership, Thatcher withdrew from the contest and announced her resignation on the morning of 22 November, although she continued to serve as Prime Minister until a new party leader had been chosen.[204]
Heseltine was disappointed not to receive the support of old allies on the second ballot; these included Secretary of State for Defence Tom King (whom he asked in vain to second his nomination, but who was angry at a leadership contest when British troops were soon to go to war in Kuwait and supported Douglas Hurd), Cecil Parkinson and Norman Lamont (who managed John Major's campaign).[205] Over the weekend on 24–25 November, many Conservative MPs were faced with the anger of their local party members who overwhelmingly supported Thatcher but did not at that time have a vote in leadership elections, and opinion polls showed that chancellor John Major would also boost Conservative support if leader (previously Heseltine's unique selling-point). Heseltine had never done much to court support among younger MPs the way Major had, and was seen as aloof even by his own supporters. In the second ballot, a week after the first, Heseltine's vote actually fell to 131 (just over 35%) as some MPs had voted for him in the first ballot as a protest against or to try to oust Thatcher but preferred to vote for other candidates now that they had a wider choice. John Major, with 185 votes, was only two votes short of an overall majority. Heseltine immediately and publicly conceded defeat, announcing that he would vote for Major if the third ballot went ahead (it did not, as Hurd, who had finished a distant third, also conceded).[206]
Although for the rest of his career Heseltine's role in Thatcher's downfall earned him enmity from Thatcher's supporters in the Conservative party, this opprobrium was not universal. In a reference to the reluctance of the Cabinet to support Thatcher on the second ballot, Edward Leigh said of Heseltine: "At least he stabbed her in the front".[207]
Heseltine believed that he would have defeated Thatcher if she had contested the second ballot. It has been suggested that he should have withdrawn after weakening her on the first ballot, and that he would have been restored to the Cabinet whether or not she continued as Prime Minister; he writes that this was never seriously suggested at the time.[208]
Career under Major: 1990-1997
Second term as Environment Secretary: 1990-1992
Heseltine disappointed many of his supporters by not pushing for them to get jobs in Major's new administration. Ian Grist was sacked from the Welsh Office and Michael Mates was eventually given a Minister of State position following the 1992 election. There were suggestions that Heseltine might be appointed Home Secretary, but Heseltine advertised his lack of interest in the position, and Major insisted that he had not offered it to him. By contrast, his enthusiasm for industrial policy made it impossible for him to be appointed Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, the job he most coveted.[209]
After a handshake of reconciliation on the steps of 10 Downing Street, Major appointed Heseltine to the Environment, the same job he had held a decade earlier. Civil servants found him a more secure and mature character the second time round, and keener to conciliate local councils, but at the same time a grander and more detached individual, aware that he had already earned a place in history and had the aura of a political heavyweight.[210]
In a May 1990 article Heseltine had proposed that the
Heseltine was permitted by his colleagues to explore the option of elected city mayors, although it did not meet with Cabinet approval; other ministers were concerned at the likelihood that cities would elect Labour mayors or that there might be deadlock between mayors and local councils. Heseltine also explored the option of unitary authorities (i.e. merging district and county councils), setting up what came to be known as the
In the summer of 1991 Heseltine also launched a City Challenge process, whereby cities competed for government grants for capital projects, and played a key role in Major's decision to back Manchester's (unsuccessful as it turned out) bid to host the
Heseltine received a standing ovation at the October 1991 Party Conference, seen as a sign of his rehabilitation with party activists, and was included on the A-Team to prepare for the
President of the Board of Trade: 1992-1995
Industrial policy
Following the 1992 general election he was appointed Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, choosing to be known by the title, dormant since 1974, of "President of the Board of Trade". He insisted on being addressed as "President" (not "Mr President") and being referred to as "the President". The Board had not met since 1850, but it did not need to as it had a quorum of one.[215]
On the backbenches Heseltine had praised the Japanese MITI, and had been planning a book on the subject. He promised to intervene "before breakfast, dinner and tea" to help British companies, but had little opportunity for intervention as the DTI budget had dropped from over £3bn in the early 1980s to £1bn in 1992–1993, a fifth the budget of the Welsh Office. NEDO, which had been set up to coordinate industrial policy in the early 1960s, was abolished by Chancellor Norman Lamont in June 1992, although Heseltine was able to absorb some of the staff into the DTI to set up working parties to shadow specific industries. His junior ministers were Neil Hamilton and Edward Leigh, both Thatcherites. Gordon Brown mocked him (6 July 1992) as having "absolute power over a department which has become absolutely powerless" and "the tiger that was once the king of the jungle is now just the fireside rug – decorative and ostentatious, but essentially there to be walked all over".[216]
Heseltine was seen as more interested in large than in small and medium-sized companies, and in 1992 was only with difficulty persuaded to refer Lloyds Bank's takeover bid for Midland Bank to the Office of Fair Trading.[217]
Pit closures
Heseltine's responsibilities also included Energy, as the separate Energy ministry was abolished.[215]
Electricity companies now decided on their own contracts, rather than being obligated by the government to choose British coal. With plans being made for the privatisation of British Coal, on 13 October 1992 Heseltine and British Coal both separately announced that 31 of British Coal's 50 pits were to close, with the loss of 30,000 jobs. Most of the detailed work had been done by the Minister of State Tim Eggar.[218][219] Many of the mines in Nottinghamshire that had continued working during the 1984–1985 strike were to close. Although this policy was seen by the Nottinghamshire miners as a betrayal, there was hardly any organised resistance to the programme. The government stated that since the pits were losing money they could be sustained only through unjustifiable government subsidies. Mine supporters pointed to the mines' high productivity rates and to the fact that their monetary losses were due to the large subsidies that other European nations were giving to their coal industries.
An early leak had seen little reaction but Heseltine was taken aback by the public anger. Over 100 pits had closed since the 1984–1985 strike. The closures were to be rushed because the Treasury, under pressure from Major, had agreed to make money for generous redundancy settlements available only in the 1992–1993 fiscal year. It looked terrible coming at the fag end of the recession, when the government had a tiny majority, and just after the fiasco of Black Wednesday and the scandal of David Mellor's resignation. Heseltine was attacked by Marcus Fox, Jim Pawsey, Nicholas Winterton, Bill Cash, Rhodes Boyson and his former supporter David Evans who called openly for him to be sacked.[218]
The High Court found that Heseltine and British Coal had acted "unlawfully and irrationally". Faced with likely defeat in the House of Commons, Heseltine was forced to agree to a moratorium, during which time he attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to seek new markets for British coal and to obtain government subsidies for pits.[220][218]
The band
In February 1993, Heseltine announced that unlike the Dutch and Belgian governments, Britain would not be contributing to any bailout of Anglo-Dutch DAF Trucks (which in the event went bankrupt in June). By early 1993 Heseltine's fortunes were at a low ebb, with his future as a minister being called into question.[221]
A review into the pit closures appeared in March 1993. By this time, public anger had cooled. By the start of 1997, British Coal had been reduced to 28 pits.[218]
Heart attack
On 21 June 1993, Heseltine suffered a serious heart attack[222] in Venice (especially worrying as Heseltine was sixty, and his father had died of a heart attack aged fifty-five). The pains had already stopped by the time he reached hospital.[223] Heseltine was shown looking unwell and using a wheelchair – in fact the result of gout in his foot from the medication which he was taking.[224] He took four months off from work, and did not make a speech at the party conference in October 1993, instead amusing the audience by appearing on the platform and performing mock exercises with his arms.[224]
There were concerns about his ability to remain in government. In 1994
Political resurgence
Heseltine, who had been seen as an arriviste in his younger days, was now something of a grandee and elder statesman. In 1994 he re-emerged as a serious political player, beginning with his testimony for the
Nonetheless, his evidence in February 1994 was seen as an attack on Lyell and on the ministers (Kenneth Clarke, his potential rival for the leadership, Rifkind and Tristan Garel-Jones) who had signed the certificates without demur. The cover of Private Eye announced "A Legend Lives" and one major newspaper ended an editorial by proclaiming that the "balance of probability" was that Heseltine would be Prime Minister before the end of the year – this being at a time when John Major's leadership had lost much credibility after the scandals following the "Back to Basics" campaign the previous autumn.[225]
Heseltine also acted to enforce a squeaky clean image at this time, by announcing an inquiry in July 1994, into allegations of insider dealing by Jeffrey Archer (there was insufficient evidence to prosecute), and by personally (rather than in writing) announcing an inquiry into whether a weapons manufacturing company called BMARC had broken government guidelines on trading with Iraq in the late 1980s.[226]
Heseltine launched a White Paper on Competitiveness in 1994. He was active in leading British trade delegations to South Africa, South America, India and Russia, but despite his enthusiasm for European Unity was seen to display little interest in the nuts and bolts of trade negotiations with the continent.[217]
In 1994 Heseltine planned to privatise 40% of the Post Office, a move which the Conservatives had previously shied away from. He was seen as imperious and intolerant by backbench opponents concerned at the threat to local postal services ("he seemed to have lost touch" one commented after a meeting), and the plan was abandoned by the Cabinet as unlikely to pass the House of Commons, as the Major government's majority had dropped to 14 by then. However, Heseltine was gaining some popularity with the Tory Right at this time, helped by his opposition to lowering the gay age of consent from 21 to 18, and his attack on the European Community as overregulated and sclerotic. (The popularity of his rival Kenneth Clarke, by contrast, was suffering among Tory MPs after his unpopular autumn 1994 budget and his overt enthusiasm for the mooted Single European Currency). However, there was to be no leadership election that autumn.[227]
Eurosceptics had been floating the idea of a referendum on membership of the Single Currency or even of membership of the European Community, since at least 1994. In November 1994 Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd, with Major's approval and supported by Malcolm Rifkind, had advocated a referendum on joining the euro or on the upcoming 1996 Intergovernmental Conference, but Heseltine and Clarke were opposed (only these five senior ministers appear to have been involved) and the proposal was shelved for the time being.[228]
1995 leadership election
John Major was consistently opposed by Eurosceptics in his party (known as the Maastricht Rebels – a small minority of MPs before 1997, but enjoying much wider support among party activists). Heseltine always stated categorically that he would never stand for party leader against Major.[229][230]
In mid-1995 Major challenged his critics to "put up or shut up" by resubmitting himself to a leadership election in which he was unsuccessfully opposed by John Redwood the Secretary of State for Wales. There was speculation that Heseltine's supporters would engineer Major's downfall in the hope that their man would take over, but they stayed loyal to Major. Heseltine had been listening to regular reports about his potential support from his lieutenants Keith Hampson, Richard Ottaway, Michael Mates and Peter Temple-Morris, and in the event of a second ballot hoped to receive Major's endorsement. Peter Tapsell refused to support him because of the European issue. Hampson believed that Heseltine might have won, as did Philip Stephens of the Financial Times. Michael Crick does not agree, pointing out that many of Heseltine's supporters from 1990 had retired from the Commons and the 1992 intake was more right-wing and eurosceptic.[231]
Heseltine, who showed his ballot paper to the returning officers to prove that he had voted for Major,[232] commented that "John Major deserves a great deal better than that from his colleagues". Major was re-elected leader.[233]
Deputy Prime Minister: 1995-1997
Heseltine had a two-hour meeting with Major on the morning of the leadership vote.[234] He was promoted to Deputy Prime Minister and First Secretary of State. He was given a swipe card to enter 10 Downing Street whenever he liked and the right to attend any committee he wished. He chaired four Cabinet Committees, including Environment and Local Government, and two new committees: Competitiveness Committee (effectively, industrial strategy) and the Coordination and Presentation of Government Policy (EDCP) which met every weekday at 8.30am.[235]
The matter of a referendum on joining the euro, after much press speculation, was raised again at Cabinet by
Heseltine made several visits to Manchester in the aftermath of the IRA bomb on 15 June 1996 – he won the praise of opposition politicians for cutting red tape to arrange remedial measures. However, Crick recounts complaints about his aloofness from small shopkeepers, and Crick comments that he seemed to have lost the common touch which he had displayed in Liverpool in the early 1980s.[237]
In 1996 Heseltine was also one of the more hawkish ministers in urging non-cooperation with the European Community over the beef ban. However, after press speculation in December 1996 that he might abandon the government's "wait and see" policy on the euro in the hope of winning Eurosceptic votes, he took to the airwaves – in apparent unison with Clarke – to insist that the government retained a free choice as to whether or not to join, angering Eurosceptics.[236]
Heseltine played an important role in taking charge of the Millennium Exhibition in Greenwich and ensuring that it happened, even having a meeting with Tony Blair, Leader of the Opposition, in January 1997 to agree that a Labour Government would back it.[238]
After government
On 3 May, the day after the government was defeated at the
In the interim
Retirement
Heseltine stood down from his Henley constituency at the 2001 election, being succeeded by Spectator editor and future prime minister Boris Johnson, but he remained outspoken on British politics. He was created a life peer on 12 July 2001 taking the title Baron Heseltine, of Thenford in the County of Northamptonshire.[245]
In December 2002, Heseltine controversially called for Iain Duncan Smith to be replaced as leader of the Conservatives by the "dream-ticket" of Clarke as leader and Michael Portillo as deputy.[246] He suggested the party's MPs vote on the matter rather than party members as currently required by party rules. Without the replacement of Duncan Smith, the party "has not a ghost of a chance of winning the next election" he said.[246] Duncan Smith was removed the following year. In the 2005 party leadership election, Heseltine backed young moderniser David Cameron.[247]
Following Cameron's election to the leadership he set up a wide-ranging policy review. Chairmen of the various policy groups included ex-Chancellor Kenneth Clarke and other former Cabinet ministers John Redwood, John Gummer, Stephen Dorrell and Michael Forsyth as well as ex-leader Iain Duncan Smith. Heseltine was appointed to head the cities task force having been responsible for urban policy twice as Environment Secretary under Thatcher and Major.
In 2008 Heseltine took part in the
In March 2012, he was asked to head an audit of the UK's industrial performance for Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne and HM Treasury, upon which—after 11 years as a member of the House of Lords—he made his maiden speech in the chamber.[249]
Heseltine was interviewed in 2012 as part of The History of Parliament's oral history project.[250][251]
In 2023, Heseltine appeared as the guest star in the first episode of The Rest Is Politics: Leading, a podcast hosted by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart.
No stone unturned
Following the arrival of the Coalition into power in 2010, he was commissioned to draw up "Plan H" or "No Stone Left Unturned" to stimulate growth in local areas. Since then, 81 out of his 89 recommendations have been adopted. At the 2013 Budget, the Coalition pledged to pool billions of pounds of regional spending into a single fund in a bid to de-centralise public spending and boost economic growth outside London.[252]
Other Heseltine comments
Heseltine criticised the Coalition's policy on Europe, but he did support the tightening of immigration laws. He also supported
Views on Brexit and involvement in the campaign for a People's Vote
He described the
In March 2017 he was sacked from a number of advisory roles within government after rebelling over the
In March 2018 Heseltine expressed concern over Theresa May's Brexit negotiations, commenting: "Why is it that after 18 months since the referendum we have not got any closer with these issues? The answer is simple: because no one has got any answer about how to do it." He also said the gulf between what May wanted and what the EU was willing to give was not narrowing and may be widening, adding "While that gap remains industry will continue to make assumptions that will involve moving investment from here to the continent. (...) The downsides are becoming more evident as time passes. We have had a serious devaluation of the currency. We have turned ourselves from the fastest growing to the slowest growing economy in Europe and we have made a complete Horlicks of the Irish border. I am totally with the view of Tony Blair and John Major that this matter has got to go back to parliament and possibly to a referendum or a general election."[261]
Heseltine was one of the signatories of a statement by senior Conservatives calling for a second referendum over Brexit. This stated, "If we are to remain a party of government, it is absolutely critical that we increase our support among younger generations. To do this, we must listen to and engage with their concerns on Brexit. They voted overwhelmingly to Remain in the European Union in 2016 – and since then have become even stronger in their views. Since the referendum, nearly 2 million young people are now of voting age. Of those in this group who are certain to vote, an astounding 87% support the United Kingdom staying in the European Union. If we do not hear their voices, who could blame them for feeling excluded and powerless on this most vital issue. The truth is that if Brexit fails this generation, we risk losing young people for good. Our party's electoral future will be irrevocably blighted."[262] Heseltine participated in various events organised by the People's Vote organisation, including a rally in December 2018 which called for a vote on the Brexit withdrawal agreement.[263] In July 2019, he addressed a rally for a People's Vote in Birmingham and expressed himself critically of the government of Boris Johnson which he accused of being "sworn to an extreme interpretation of the 2016 referendum, bound to articulation based on unfounded and reckless optimism, unrealistic assertions defended by evasion and bombast, blind to the world in which we live".[264]
Conservative whip suspension
In May 2019, he had the Conservative Party whip suspended after saying he would vote for the Liberal Democrats, rather than the Conservatives, at the 2019 European Parliament election.[265]
On 26 November 2019, in preparation for the 2019 general election, Heseltine said he could not support Boris Johnson because the Prime Minister was pursuing an "utterly disastrous" policy that would make Britain poorer and less influential, and he called on voters to back the Liberal Democrats to deny Johnson a majority in Parliament.[266][267]
In June 2023, following the report by the Commons Privileges Committee, he said that Johnson had lied to parliament. Speaking on Sky News, he said that Johnson had resigned before the Partygate report was published because he "saw it coming", adding "We've had four days of this report and the story doesn't change: Boris Johnson told a pack of lies. Boris Johnson got out from under, he saw it coming, he knew he hadn't a case to defend. So he resigned before the suspension that he feared could be relevant."[268]
Family and personal life
Heseltine married Anne Harding Williams in 1962.[250][269] They have three children:[269] Annabel (born in 1963), Alexandra (born in 1966), and Rupert (born in 1967), as well as nine grandchildren.[270] During the period Heseltine was the MP for Tavistock in Devon (from 1966 to 1974), he became part of a local 'fishing gang' with poet Ted Hughes. His wife was delighted, as an admirer of the poet, but Heseltine himself did not initially know who he was.[11]
At the beginning of November 2016, drawing on an interview with
In January 2017, Heseltine was convicted of
Thenford gardens and arboretum
The Heseltines purchased Thenford House and its grounds in 1976. The house was bought privately with the aid of a large loan, and they are thought to have paid around £750,000 (approximately £4.5m at 2016 prices), and to have spent a similar sum on renovating the property. They also own a number of farms in the area.[83][31]
Over the next 25 years they restored 40 acres (16 ha) of woodland together with the walled garden, medieval fish-ponds, and a 2 acres (0.81 ha) lake. There is also a sculpture garden, which includes a large bronze bust of
Honours
Books
- ISBN 1-509-83719-1
- Michael Heseltine, Raising The Sights – A Tory Perspective, in the Primrose League Gazette, vol.91, no.2, Aug/Sept 1987 edition, London.
- ISBN 0-233-98001-6.
- ISBN 0-241-13691-1.
- Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle, ISBN 0-340-73915-0, Heseltine's autobiography, written with the acknowledged assistance of his lifelong friend Anthony Howard.
- ISBN 0-198-71723-7, a history of the Oxford Union Society during the first half of the twentieth century, based on official minutes.
- Alexander Stevenson, The Public Sector: Managing the Unmanageable, 2013 (Contributor)[279]
- Anne Heseltine, Michael Heseltine, Thenford: The Creation of an English Garden, Head of Zeus, 2016, ISBN 978-1784979737
See also
Notes
- ^ Office vacant between 1 November 1990 and 5 July 1995.
- ^ Office vacant between 19 June 1970 and 20 July 1995.
- ^ Office vacant between 2 May 1997 and 8 June 2001.
- ^ His brief opposition to the H-Bomb caused him some embarrassment as Defence Secretary in 1984, when it was unearthed by The Guardian. He later recorded that he would have been more embarrassed had the newspaper uncovered his support for Aneurin Bevan's foreign policy positions the previous year.[Life in the Jungle pp. 29–35]
- ^ Army regulations at the time normally required men earmarked for National Service commissions to first serve a period in the ranks. In practice the Guards, like many other regiments, used this to subject its "Potential Officers" to nine weeks of intensive training under Colour Sergeant Peter Horsfall, designed in part to weed out those who were unlikely to make the grade.[Life in the Jungle: pp. 50–3]
- title deeds or, nowadays, by having the Land Registryupdated
- ^ it is unclear whether they actually built as many as this
- ^ Heseltine misdates this to July 1962. In fact the squeeze was a year earlier, in July 1961, and Lloyd was dismissed as chancellor in July 1962.[Life in the Jungle, pp. 70–3]
- ^ Heseltine writes that it was 40%, Crick 49%. Heseltine also omits any mention of the debts and implies that this was a purely voluntary transaction first mooted by their previous printer Keliher, Hudson & Kearns in 1963, and continued by Hazell Watson & Viney after they took over that printer.
- . By the 1950s they had merged with the Conservatives for practical purposes, but the name was still used locally in some seats.
- ^ It was finally revealed in 2011 that the Belgrano had in fact been sailing back towards the taskforce when sunk, but this intelligence was kept secret at the time – see the article on the Belgrano for details.
References
- ^ "Lord Heseltine - MPs and Lords - UK Parliament". members.parliament.uk.
- ^ "I'm still a Tory part member". Tarzan turns 90, The Oldie, issue 424 (April 2023), p. 19
- ^ "Mr Michael Heseltine (Hansard)". api.parliament.uk. Retrieved 10 May 2021.
- ^ Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage 2008, p. 698
- ^ Michael Heseltine: A Biography, Michael Crick, 1997, pp. 10, 14, 21
- ^ The Foundry Trade Journal, Foundry Trades' Equipment & Supplies Association, Institute of British Foundrymen, Welsh Engineers' and Founders' Association, 1957, p. 462
- ^ Michael Heseltine: A Biography, Michael Crick, 1997, p. 80
- ^ Michael Heseltine: A Biography, Michael Crick, 1997, p. 6
- ^ Michael Heseltine: A Biography, Michael Crick, 1997, pp. 2, 8
- ^ a b Gardham, Duncan (21 September 2008). "Lord Heseltine traces his roots to poverty in Wales". The Daily Telegraph. London. Archived from the original on 12 January 2022.
- ^ a b c d Edwardes, Charlotte (1 November 2016). "Lord Heseltine Talks Gardens, Politics and His Mother's Dog Kim". Tatler. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
- ^ BBC Wales Coming Home – 29 September 2008.
- ISSN 0140-0460. Retrieved 5 May 2021.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 13–25.
- ^ Oxford men speak at Shipyard, Barrow-in-Furness Mail, c1953. Archive of Guy Arnold, 2018.
- ^ Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain (2009), p. 418.
- ^ Lewis Goodall (23 September 2023). "Michael Heseltine on Suella, Enoch Powell and Saving Liverpool". The News Agents (Podcast). Global Player. Retrieved 2 February 2024.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, p. 32.
- ^ Pearce 2016, p. 539.
- ^ ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 25–39.
- ^ Pearce 2016, pp. 541–2.
- ^ a b Magnus Linklater; David Leigh (1986). Not with honour: the inside story of the Westland scandal. Sphere Books. p. 11.
- ^ a b Crick, p. 357.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, p. 33.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 29-35.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, p. 35.
- ^ Pearce 2016, pp. 550–2.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, p. 36.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, p. 39.
- ^ ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 40–1.
- ^ a b c "Compute the Relative Value of a U.K. Pound". Archived from the original on 31 March 2016. Retrieved 20 May 2019.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 41–3.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, p. 46.
- ^ ISBN 0-340-73915-0, p. 48.
- ^ ISBN 0-340-73915-0, p. 43.
- ^ ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 59–61.
- ^ ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 57–8.
- ^ ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 39–47.
- ^ ISBN 0-241-13691-1, p. 79.
- ^ ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 50–3.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, p. 52.
- ISBN 0-241-13691-1, pp. 79, 92–3.
- ISBN 0-241-13691-1, pp. 92–3.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 60–1.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 61–2.
- ^ ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 70–3.
- ISBN 0-241-13691-1, pp. 105–7.
- ^ ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 64–6.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 67–9.
- ^ Crick 1997, pp. 112–3.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 73–4.
- ^ Crick 1997, p. 426.
- ISBN 0-241-13691-1, pp. 109–12.
- ^ Crick 1997, pp. 139-41.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 62–3, 87–8.
- ^ Crick 1997, pp. 139–41.
- ^ Crick 1997, pp. 141–2.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, p. 76.
- ^ Crick 1997, pp. 142–3.
- ^ a b Crick 1997, pp. 138–9.
- ^ Crick 1997, pp. 143–5.
- ^ Crick implies that he rejoined the company; Heseltine writes that he declined the offer.
- ^ a b Crick 1997, pp. 145–7.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 80–2.
- ^ a b c d Crick 1997, pp. 136–7.
- ^ Crick 1997, pp. 147–9.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, p. 78.
- ^ Crick 1997, p. 194.
- ISBN 0-340-73915-0, pp. 82–9.
- ^ Crick 1997, p. 157.
- ^ Crick 1997, pp. 149–55.
- ^ Crick 1997, pp. 155–6.
- ^ Crick 1997, p. 156.
- ^ Crick 1997, pp. 195–6.
- ^ Crick 1997, pp. 194–5.
- ^ a b Crick 1997, p. 196.
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External links
- House of Lords: Lord Heseltine
- Haymarket Group
- BBC: Heseltine: Political CV
- Guardian: Aristotle article on Michael Heseltine
- Guardian interview with Michael Heseltine by Simon Hattenstone
- Interview about battling CND for the WGBH series,
- War and Peace in the Nuclear Age
- Thatcher's First Cabinet
- 2009 New Statesman interview
- 2012 interview as part of the History of Parliament oral history project
- Thenford Gardens & Arboretum
- Photos of the garden
- Thenford: The Creation of an English garden
- Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Michael Heseltine
- Appearances on C-SPAN