Reflections: Conversations with Politicians Volume II

By Peter Hennessy and Robert Shepherd

Accompanying the acclaimed BBC Radio 4 program, Reflections features interviews with twelve of Britain’s most influential political figures from the last twenty years. Presented by Peter Hennessy, one of the UK’s most renowned historians, each interview not only offers an honest and frank assessment of a political career, but also acts as a biography filled with fresh insights and moments of new revelation. From one of the longest-serving Prime Ministers and three of the Conservative leaders who stood against him, to dominant figures of late Thatcherism, stalwarts of successive New Labour cabinets, and leaders of the Liberal Democrats, Hennessy brings his characteristic style to each encounter. The politicians included in this volume are: Tony Blair, Michael Heseltine, Vince Cable, Margaret Hodge, William Hague, Harriet Harman, Michael Howard, Paddy Ashdown, Sayeeda Warsi, David Blunkett, Iain Duncan Smith and Kenneth Baker.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: Sep 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781912208586

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Michael Heseltine (Lord Heseltine)

Series 4, Episode 1, first broadcast 2 August 2016

Born 21 March 1933; Educated Shrewsbury School; Pembroke College, Oxford

MP (Conservative) Tavistock 1966–74; Henley 1974–2001

Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Transport), 1970; Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Environment), 1970–72; Minister for Aerospace & Shipping (Department of Trade and Industry), 1972–74; Secretary of State for the Environment, 1979–83; Secretary of State for Defence, 1983–86; Secretary of State for Environment, 1990–92; President of the Board of Trade, 1992–95; First Secretary of State and Deputy Prime Minister, 1995–97

Autobiography Life in the Jungle, 2000

HENNESSY

With me today is Michael Heseltine, Lord Heseltine, one of the most flavourful politicians of recent times. He was that rare thing, a minister known instantly by his nickname. Sometimes Hezza, sometimes Tarzan, with his forceful speaking style topped off by what an admiring Cabinet colleague describes as ‘Michael’s mane waving.’ He has causes, lifelong causes. Above all, the regeneration of British industry and what he calls the forgotten people. He is one of the most fascinating of the nearly-Prime Ministers of the post-war era. Michael, welcome.

HESELTINE

How nice to see you again.

HENNESSY

You were born in Swansea. Welsh by birth, family history Welsh and I think you’re very proud of your Welsh ancestry, aren’t you?

HESELTINE

I’m very proud, but I have to be upfront. My paternal grandmother was a hundred per cent French. My maternal grandfather I think had at most half Welsh blood. So I’m frankly that very common phenomenon of the United Kingdom, a mongrel.

HENNESSY

But a proud Welsh mongrel.

HESELTINE

But a proud Welsh mongrel, that’s true.

HENNESSY

I think you still have a feel for Swansea and indeed I think you bought yourself out of the army, national service, to stand for a South Walean constituency in 1959.

HESELTINE

It was the Gower peninsula. Now a Tory seat, but of course they’ve lost the Swansea valley where all the mines were and where the huge Labour majority was.

HENNESSY

I think Nye Bevan picked you out, didn’t he, in the ’59 election if I half remember a story?

HESELTINE

It was certainly a wonderful moment for me to be so publicly humiliated by so great a figure. I did the thing that all aspiring politicians do, you know. No one came to my meetings. There were no Conservatives in any numbers in the Gower Peninsula, so I tried to get into a joint meeting with Ifor Davies, the Labour candidate, and I went to any lengths, I challenged him to meet me, you know, I accused him of being a coward and all that sort of thing. Anyway, he very rightly had nothing to do with me. But then I saw this advertisement in the South Wales Evening Post: ‘The Labour Party of South Wales. The Rt Hon Aneurin Bevan will address the party in the Elysium Cinema on the 10th of October, 1959.’ So I thought, well, this is too good to be true. And I, in the rain, in the dark, thousands of us descended on the Elysium Cinema and I took my seat on the back of the third tier and on they all came, and Nye Bevan came and introduced them one by one and he –

HENNESSY

All the Labour MPs?

HESELTINE

All the Labour MPs, one by one, and then he said, ‘And we have Ifor Davies, the candidate for Gower here tonight,’ whereupon a voice was heard at the back of the third balcony of the Elysium Cinema, ‘You have both the candidates for Gower here tonight.’ Nye crouched over the microphone: he said, ‘Ah, I hear the voice of an Englishman.’ I didn’t actually win the seat, you know.

HENNESSY

Good start though, good start. What sort of upbringing was yours, Michael, what did your parents do?

HESELTINE

I think you’d call it a middle class background – comfortable, not rich. My father was a structural engineer by profession. He was in the Royal Engineers as a result of his Territorial experience and then of course the Second World War. We were hugely fortunate in that we had the Gower peninsula as our playground.

HENNESSY

Your earliest memories I suspect are of the transition to war and your father going off to war.

HESELTINE

Certainly very clear memories of the Chamberlain broadcast, standing at Number 1, Uplands Crescent, in the kitchen that morning.

HENNESSY

Sunday, the 3rd of September, 1939.

HESELTINE

Indeed, listening to the broadcast. I can remember the bombers because Swansea was one of the most heavily bombed towns in the country. They came at nine o’clock and our little dog knew exactly when they were coming, he was always at the top of the cellar stairs waiting to go down. I can remember standing in the garden with my grandfather watching the searchlights trying to pick out the bombers.

HENNESSY

What was your family’s politics?

HESELTINE

Politics didn’t seem to play much part. I don’t remember any political debates, but I do know very clearly that in 1951 my father was Chairman of the local Conservative campaign in Swansea West. Oh, and I do remember he did say to me once that in 1945 he was the only officer in his mess to vote Conservative.

HENNESSY

Yes, very interesting.

HESELTINE

Yes.

HENNESSY

But you have a great political hero out of the Welsh political pantheon, who’s not a Conservative. Am I right, Lloyd George?

HESELTINE

Of course. A great war leader. You know, he was a hugely impressive character with many great weaknesses, but nevertheless a leader amongst men and of course exactly the sort of person that you would expect to find in a war circumstance. But he had a great record of social reform and I would identify of course with the Welshness, with the passion. What I’d have thought was the conviction and with the humanity of understanding, although I never personally experienced it, but I was close enough to see the social conditions against which he revolted.

HENNESSY

I remember I came to see you as a young journalist, just after you got to the Ministry of Defence from Environment and I noticed you’d brought that huge portrait of LG with you, Lloyd George, and I remember you saying to me, Michael, I think I can say this now after all these years, ‘It would be very nice if you didn’t mention that too much because you understand why, Peter, but I’m not entirely sure the Conservative Party will understand why he’s up there.’

HESELTINE

Well I think that’s right. I’ve always had that problem that there are those who doubt my credentials as a member of the Conservative Party. They’re quite wrong, of course, because I would argue that without people like me the Conservative Party shrivels to the right and becomes unelectable. But the One Nation Conservative, which I represent, Macmillan, the obvious starting point of my earliest life, that is very much the Conservative Party that I belong to.

HENNESSY

You went to a very English public school. Your parents sent you to Shrewsbury. Did you fit in?

HESELTINE

I don’t think so, really.

HENNESSY

Why not?

HESELTINE

You can’t make these judgements about yourself. I wasn’t interested particularly in lessons. I never got enthusiastic about what I was doing. I wasn’t ever in a school team and I just don’t think I was a sort of clubbable person. And actually that’s quite an interesting observation because that’s what people have said often about the rest of my life. Anyway, I had good friends, but limited in number and it was not until my last year when I got hooked on history that things began to change academically.

HENNESSY

You did well enough to get into Oxford, after all.

HESELTINE

That was a different world. I can’t overstate the gratitude I feel to that university for just enabling me to become me. I did have quite a lot of confidence actually when I think back on it. You know the first day I joined the Oxford Union, I joined the University Conservative Association and I joined the City Conservative Association, so it was quite obvious by then that I knew where I was going.

HENNESSY

You said a moment ago, you were not clubbable, and yet you were a very social President of the Union. You opened up a nightclub in the basement and you had great friendships, life-long friendships. Tony Howard, the journalist – marvellous man – and Jeremy Isaacs, very distinguished journalist and many other things too. You had a gift for friendship, so I’m interested that you still think you were not a naturally clubbable person. Or was it that you said other people think you’re not?

HESELTINE

I was not the sort of person you’d find drinking in the bar. It was just not an ambience that attracted me, and you can translate that into the tea-rooms of the House of Commons. I had things I wanted to do. I had a sort of work-stream, whether it was in the voluntary side of the Conservative Party or in my garden or in the business I created. There was always something to do. And that’s what I did. My motivations, if they were associated with ambition, were to do the job I’d been entrusted with, or selected to do myself, to the best of my ability, believing that if I made a success of it, it would lead somewhere.

HENNESSY

Now after Oxford, though you had the political career in your sights, I think you were determined to have a good business career so you could be financially independent to pursue your public service.

HESELTINE

That is true and it took an interesting form. I’m not one of those who thinks that life is planned. I think that there’s a heck of a lot of luck for all of us, but it’s spotting the luck. My father wanted me to be an accountant. I think I wanted to be an accountant too, and he was going to get me articled. He’s agreed this with Deloitte’s in Swansea, which is a five-year articled clerkship. And something or other made me say, look, I’d like to go to university. He hadn’t been to university and it wasn’t something that was absolutely built into my family’s assumptions. So that meant three years articles, three years at university. But at the end of my time at Oxford I went to London and I was earning £7 a week, which was half what my peer group of graduates would earn – they got about £12, £13 a week. But my grandparents had left me a thousand pounds. So I found another friend who had a thousand pounds and between us we bought a boarding house. And we had I think 13 rooms. We lived in two and let out the other 11. And we lived rather well.

HENNESSY

In west London?

HESELTINE

In Notting Hill Gate – not just Prime Ministers live in Notting Hill Gate.

HENNESSY

Not just Etonians. [Heseltine laughs]

HESELTINE

And the year later we sold the boarding house, we’d doubled our money and we bought a 44-bedroom hotel. And I was in property. So I worked as an articled clerk all working hours and then I painted this building, sort of renovated it all the weekends and evenings.

HENNESSY

And you did quite well out of that?

HESELTINE

Well, it was the beginning.

HENNESSY

You took the traditional route for a Conservative aspirant, in those days anyway, you fought a seat you couldn’t win. But you made it in 1966 in the West Country in Tavistock.

HESELTINE

Well, within no time at all I was adopted in very early January ’65 for the wonderful constituency of Tavistock. It was a huge nostalgic privilege to be the last Honourable Member for Tavistock where Drake was once Member of Parliament.

HENNESSY

You are a romantic, Michael, aren’t you?

HESELTINE

Well, wouldn’t you be romantic about that?

HENNESSY

Were you already self aware, I’m sure you were, about your gifts for moving an audience, because for all the doubts that some kinds of Conservatives have about you, you know how to move an audience and work a crowd. But was it apparent when you were talking to the good Conservative people of Tavistock, trying to persuade them to choose you as their prospective parliamentary candidate?

HESELTINE

Oh yes, yes, yes. The speech I made at the Tavistock town hall – that was quite an evening. Because well, you know, I don’t need to describe what the Conservative Party in those circumstances would have been like. It would have been heavily military orientated I think we can say and I had a magazine called Man About Town.

HENNESSY

You were a publisher by this stage?

HESELTINE

We were publishers by this stage, and we had a magazine called Man About Town and this was when Hugh Hefner and Guccione were launching the revelatory nude magazines and the word got out that ours was in this genre, which it never was, I have to say.

HENNESSY

That you were a mild pornographer?

HESELTINE

That’s what the rumour said, but it was never true. But anyway it electrified the Tavistock constituency and so this huge audience, 600 of them packed the town hall at Tavistock and when I – you know what it’s like, you’re left outside to be called in, and all these macs hanging in the hall, they all had copies of Town magazine, and I was told I was going to be cross-examined and all that. Anyway, it caused me no problem whatsoever. I got a rapturous response and they were very good to me all the way through.

HENNESSY

Now, Ted Heath is having a tough time as Leader of the Opposition after the ’66 election. Harold Wilson is making the political weather. It’s a difficult time for the Conservative Party, but did you get close to Ted in those years, when he was rather an embattled figure who was wrong-footed all the time by slick and clever Harold?

HESELTINE

My memories of Ted Heath are very clear and they’re very focused in time because I got married in 1962, met Anne I think in 1960, and one of the very first things I said, which perhaps should have warned her, is ‘You really must come and have dinner with the Coningsby Club because Ted is speaking and this is tomorrow’s Tory Party.’

HENNESSY

You were a natural Heathite in the sense that you’ve always had – if I can put it this way Michael – a public-private impulse. You’re not a mixed economy man in terms of nationalisations and all that, but you are in terms [of] public-private and industrial intervention when necessary.

HESELTINE

These slogans are so dangerous. I’ve worked with Conservative Party ministers from all persuasions and faced with the real world practical decisions most of these slick generalisations disappear. And because of my political experiences and my commercial experiences, I know that every government intervenes. They may not know they’re doing it, they may not think of it as intervention but do it they do. So was Ted Heath right to save Rolls Royce? Look, Pratt and Whitney, General Electric, they’d have bought it in the morning.

HENNESSY

1971, when he nationalised it, yes.

HESELTINE

Indeed, indeed. But looking back was he wrong to do that? Well of course he wasn’t wrong.

HENNESSY

Ted made this – well, it’s used against him, although I think it’s simplistic – U-turn in terms of prices and incomes policy when unemployment is rising and inflation is rising. Did you have any doubts about that, his swivel as it were in 1972, ’73?

HESELTINE

I think that there was a sea-change in politics shortly after I went into the House of Commons. When I first went in ‘My Right Honourable and Gallant Friend’ was a very common form of address for the field officers who had served in the Second World War, and my generation, of course, didn’t undergo that experience. But those who did, brought up in the ’30s, remembering the ’30s, the poverty, the unemployment, the near annihilation of the reputation of the Tory Party which even Churchill’s incredible achievements were not able to eclipse in 1945 – the men who came through that experience had developed a comradeship across the classes in the most horrendous of circumstances. And that’s what you have to know about Ted. Facing the rising unemployment – we’d had boom years, post-war reconstruction and suddenly it began to look very different and the memories of yesteryear became sharp. So Ted, essentially a rational person, said, ‘I must use every known device I can to find a way of reasoning my way through this appalling crisis.’ He delayed the decision to have a ‘Who governs?’ election, I think, for the same reason, because his colleagues, Willie Whitelaw, Peter Carrington, both in the Brigade of Guards in the Second World War, they had the same experience. And they hesitated before indulging in what they could have felt and others would have said was a sort of political civil war. So that government ended, it was bound to end after the oil hike of 1973; there was no way back for popular support after that, and the next incident was of course the destruction of Callaghan’s government by the same forces. And then Ted’s government was re-elected, that’s the interesting thing, under a different leader, but in 1979 we were battle-hardened troops. We’d been through it all. We knew what had to be done. And there was no demur from Willie or Peter who’d served in all these different circumstances. We knew the law had to be supreme and Margaret led the party through that experience.

HENNESSY

So in that sense she’s the daughter of Ted?

HESELTINE

The continuum is fascinating. You see the speeches of 1978, read ‘Selsdon Man’ of 1968–9.

HENNESSY

Which was the think-piece before the Conservative Manifesto of 1970.

HESELTINE

Yes, yes.

HENNESSY

Yes, a re-balancing of the economy and the power of trade unions. Yes.

HESELTINE

Yes.

HENNESSY

Of course, in the spectrum of popular political memory, Michael, there’s an episode in those mid-’70s which you’re forever part of, which is the Mace waving. What was it that overcame you that evening when you literally picked up the Mace in the House of Commons and swung it around?

HESELTINE

I can deal with people in debate, discussion, I can win, I can lose. What I cannot stand are people who cheat, and that was the issue of the Mace. There is the strictest, clearest parliamentary convention that you don’t break pairs and I –

HENNESSY

This is the arrangement whereby you don’t turn up, if a Labour opposite number doesn’t turn up?

HESELTINE

You’ve done a deal. You say we can’t, for whatever reason, I can’t be voting tonight, will you keep out of the lobbies ’cause you can’t as well, and that is a binding agreement. I was responsible for leading the opposition to one of Labour’s flagship bills, the nationalisation of aircraft and shipbuilding, and we were going to win. And the Chief Whip for the Labour Party found a guy who had paired with one of my people and he pushed him through the lobbies. And the Labour Party then came back into the Chamber to hear the result and stood on the green benches singing the Red Flag. And I didn’t wave the Mace. I picked up the Mace and I said, ‘You have usurped the authority of this House, you’d better share the symbol.’ And then I put it down again. And the cartoonists are very interesting. There is the cartoon with the wild Dervish waving the Mace, but there’s the cartoon that was on the front page of The Sunday Times, which is this heroic figure standing against the mobs. You take your pick.

HENNESSY

Going back to Ted. How did you handle the vote for the succession? He actually stood, didn’t he in February ’75 against Margaret Thatcher. How did you vote, Michael?

HESELTINE

I abstained.

HENNESSY

Did you? Why did you abstain?

HESELTINE

Because he invited me to be a member of his Shadow Cabinet in 1974 and I sat alongside Keith Joseph. Keith is one of the nicest men in politics and he tried to get Ted to have a discussion in the Shadow Cabinet about what had gone wrong, what needed to be done, how the party should reposition itself, the basic answers to very sensible questions. And Ted’s treatment of him was brutal. And I remember sitting there saying, this party has to come together, we have to reunite. This guy cannot do it. And so I abstained in the first vote and then voted for Willie Whitelaw in the second. Margaret then became Leader, and she had a hit list. She was going to sack Peter Walker, Paul Channon and myself. This appeared in the press. And the day, the great sacking day came, and Peter and Paul went. And she was about to do me when someone said, ‘Well, there’s a small problem, Leader, he’s actually speaking at a meeting with you in front of a couple of thousand small businessmen in Westminster Hall at two o’clock and then he’s opening for the opposition against one of the government’s principal pieces of legislation. Of course, you can sack him, but maybe a little delay?’ And so I survived that day. Then I made one of those speeches. It was quite difficult to sack me after