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Michael Heseltine

Michael Ray Dibdin Heseltine, Baron Heseltine, CH, PC (born 21 March 1933) is a Welsh-born British businessman and Conservative Party politician. He is a patron of the Tory Reform Group.

Early life

Michael Heseltine, a distant descendant of Charles Dibdin (from whom one of his middle names was taken), was born in Swansea in Wales. His mother's family came from West Wales, where they were farm labourers from Pembrey; his mother was Eileen Ray Pridmore, whose greatgrandfather came to work in Swansea docks from the village of Gretton in Northamptonshire (as a result, he was latterly made an honorary member of the Swansea Dockers Club). His mother`s father, James Pridmore, founded the West Glamorgan Coal company, which allowed Heseltine to be brought up in relative luxury at 1, Uplands Crescent (now No. 5). He enjoyed angling in Brynmill Park, and won a junior competition.

Heseltine was educated at Shrewsbury School. He campaigned briefly as a volunteer in the October 1951 General Election before going up to Pembroke College, Oxford, where, in frustration at his inability to be elected to the committee of the Oxford University Conservative Association, he founded the breakaway Blue Ribbon Club. Julian Critchley recounts 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'. 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.

Heseltine's biographers, Michael Crick and Julian Critchley, recount how, despite not being a natural speaker, he became a strong orator through much practice, which included speaking in front of a mirror, listening to tape recordings of the speeches of Charles Hill, and taking speaking lessons from a vicar's wife. In the 1970s and 1980s Heseltine's conference speech was often to be the highlight of the Conservative Party Conference, despite his views being well to the left of Margaret Thatcher.

He was eventually elected to the committee of the Oxford Union after five terms at the University. The following year (1953-4) he served (having challenged unsuccessfully for the Presidency the previous summer) in top place on the committee, then as Secretary, and then Treasurer. During this last post he reopened the Union cellars for business and persuaded the visiting Sir Bernard and Lady Docker to contribute to the considerable cost. After graduating with a second-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (described by his own tutor as "a great and undeserved triumph"), he was permitted to stay on for an extra term to serve as President of the Oxford Union for Michaelmas term, 1954, having been elected with the assistance of leading Oxford socialists Anthony Howard and Jeremy Isaacs.

After graduating he built up a property business in partnership with his Oxford friend Ian Josephs; with financial support from both of their families they started with a boarding house in Clanricarde Gardens and progressed to various other properties in the Bayswater area. He trained as an accountant but did not qualify, and after failing his accountancy exams in 1958 could no longer avoid National Service.

Heseltine later admitted to admiring the military (his father, who died in 1957, had been a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Engineers in the Second World War, and active in the Territorial Army thereafter), but felt that his business career was too important to be disrupted, although he and his father took the precaution of arranging interviews to increase his chances of attaining an officer's commission in case he had to serve . Heseltine had been lucky not to be called up for the Korean War (early 1950s) or Suez Conflict (1956), but in the final years of National Service, already due for abolition by 1960, an effort was made to call up men who had so far managed to postpone service. Despite having almost reached the newly-reduced maximum callup age of twenty-six, Heseltine was conscripted in January 1959, becoming a Second Lieutenant in the Welsh Guards. Heseltine left the Guards to contest the General Election that year - according to Ian Josephs this had been his plan from the start - and was exempted from the remaining sixteen months of service on business grounds. During the 1980s his habit of wearing a Guards tie, sometimes incorrectly tied with a red stripe across the knot, was the subject of much acerbic comment from military figures and older MPs with extensive war records. Crick estimated that he must have worn the tie on more days than he actually served in the Guards.

Heseltine built a housing estate at Tenterden in Kent, which failed to sell and was beset with repair problems until after his election to Parliament, , founded the magazine publishing company Haymarket in collaboration with another Oxford friend, Clive Labovitch, and early in the 1960s acquired the famous (but unprofitable) magazine Man About Town, whose title he shortened to About Town then simply Town. In 1962 he also briefly published a well-received weekly newspaper,Topic, which folded but whose journalists later became the "Sunday Times Insight" Team. Between 1960 and 1964 he also worked as a part-time interviewer for ITV.

After rapid expansion, Heseltine's businesses were badly hit by the Selwyn Lloyd credit squeeze of 1962 and, still not yet thirty years old, he would eventually owe £250,000 (over £3 million in 2007 prices). He claims to have been lent a badly-needed £60,000 by a bank manager who retired the same day. Later, during the 1990s, Heseltine joked about how he had avoided bankruptcy by such stratagems as only paying bills when threatened with legal action, or sending out insufficiently completed cheques, although it has never been suggested that he did not pay off all his debts eventually. It was during this period of stress that he took up gardening as a serious hobby.

In 1967 Heseltine secured Haymarket's financial future by selling a majority stake to the British Printing Corporation, retaining a large shareholding himself. Under the management of Lindsay Masters, the company grew, publishing a series of mundane yet profitable management and advertising journals and making Michael Heseltine a personal fortune of hundreds of millions of pounds.

Member of Parliament

He contested the safe Labour seat of Gower in 1959 and a marginal Coventry seat in 1964, before being elected as a Member of Parliament (MP) in 1966 for Tavistock in Devon, subsequently representing Henley from February 1974. Following the Conservative victory in the 1970 General Election, he was promoted to the government by Prime Minister Edward Heath, serving briefly as a junior minister at the Department of Transport before moving to the Department for the Environment, where he was partly responsible for shepherding the Local Government Act 1972 through Parliament. In 1972 he moved to the Department of Industry which he subsequently shadowed during the subsequent spell in opposition.

As Minister for Aerospace in 1973 Heseltine was responsible for persuading other governments to invest in Concorde, but was accused of misleading the House of Commons when he stated that the government was still considering giving financial support to the Hovertrain, when the Cabinet had already decided to withdraw funding. Although his chief critic Airey Neave disliked Heseltine as a brash 'arriviste', Neave's real target, in the view of Heseltine's PPS Cecil Parkinson, was the Prime Minister Edward Heath, whom Neave detested and later helped to topple as party leader in 1975.

Heseltine was Shadow Industry Secretary throughout the Conservative's 1974 - 1979 time in opposition, gaining notoriety following a 1976 incident in the House of Commons during the debate on measures introduced by the Labour Government to nationalise the shipbuilding and aerospace industries. Accounts of exactly what happened vary, but the most colourful image portrayed Heseltine seizing the mace and brandishing it towards Labour left-wingers who were celebrating their winning the vote by singing the Red Flag. Heseltine subsequently acquired the nickname Tarzan and was therafter depicted as such, complete with loin-cloth, in the "If" series drawn by satirical political cartoonist Steve Bell. During the 1980s he was portrayed in the satirical TV puppet show Spitting Image as a flak jacket-wearing psychopath, in a reference to an occasion when, as Defence Secretary, he had been persuaded to don a flak jacket over his suit while inspecting troops in the rain.

In government

New Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher appointed Heseltine to the cabinet as Secretary of State for the Environment in 1979 after her election victory that year. He was a key figure in the sale of council houses and was sent in as a troubleshooter to deal with the explosion of violence in Britain's inner cities in the aftermath of the Brixton and Toxteth riots during the early 1980s. As Environment Secretary, in 1981, he opened Britain's first Enterprise Zone at Corby in Northamptonshire. Heseltine was responsible for developing the policies that led to five bi-annual National Garden Festivals, starting in 1984. He established Development Corporations that were directly appointed by the minister and empowered to circumvent local authority planning controls, a measure which proved controversial in Labour strongholds such as East London, Merseyside and North East England.

He then served as Secretary of State for Defence from January 1983 until 1986, when he resigned over the bitter dispute with Margaret Thatcher over the Westland Affair. His presentational skills were used to take on the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the June 1983 General Election.

Backbenches and leadership contest

He then returned to the backbenches, where he became increasingly critical of Margaret Thatcher's performance, abstaining in November 1989 when Sir Anthony Meyer challenged for the party leadership. At one point during a carefully worded statement he repeatedly insisted that he could "not foresee the circumstances" in which he would challenge her for the leadership. However following Sir Geoffrey Howe's resignation speech in November 1990, Heseltine announced his candidacy for the leadership of the Conservative Party. He did well enough in the first round of voting to prevent an outright Thatcher victory, and was thought by many pundits to be on course to beat her in the second ballot; but faced with humiliation and the bitter prospect of a Heseltine premiership, Thatcher resigned. In the second ballot, John Major was only two votes short of outright victory; Heseltine immediately and publicly conceded defeat, announcing that he would vote for Major if the third ballot went ahead (it did not, as Douglas Hurd, who had finished a distant third, also conceded). Although for the rest of his career Heseltine's role in Mrs Thatcher's downfall earned him enmity from Thatcher's supporters in the Conservative Party, this was not universal. In a reference to the reluctance of the Cabinet to support her on the second ballot, Thatcherite Edward Leigh said of Heseltine: "At least he stabbed her in the front".

Heseltine then returned to government as Secretary of State for the Environment (with particular responsibility for replacing the Community Charge, and allegedly declining an offer of the position of Home Secretary). After the 1992 general election, he was appointed Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, choosing to be known by the title of President of the Board of Trade promising to intervene "before breakfast, dinner and tea" to help British companies. In 1992, when plans were made for the privatisation of British Coal, Heseltine announced that 31 collieries were to close, including many of the mines in Nottinghamshire that had continued working during the 1984-5 strike. Although this policy was seen as a betrayal by the Nottinghamshire miners, there was hardly any organised resistance to the programme, however following a threatened rebellion by some Conservative MPs over the plans, the following week the number of closures was scaled back to the 10 least viable mines.

The government stated that since the pits were money losers they could only be sustained 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 supplying their coal industries. Whilst Heseltine is generally seen as a One Nation Conservative, his reputation in the coalfields remains low. The band Chumbawamba released the critical song "Mr Heseltine meets the public" that portrayed him as an out-of-touch figure; the same group had once dedicated a song to the village of Fitzwilliam, West Yorkshire, which was reduced to a ghost town following the closure of local pits.

In June 1993, Heseltine suffered a heart attack whilst in Venice, leading to concerns on his ability to remain in government after he was televised leaving hospital in a wheelchair. In 1994, Chris Morris jokingly implied on BBC Radio 1 that Heseltine had died, and persuaded MP Jerry Hayes to broadcast an on-air tribute. Morris was subsequently suspended. Nonetheless Heseltine - who after being seen as an 'arriviste' in his younger days was now something of a grandee and elder statesman - reemerged as a serious political player in 1994, helped by his flirting with the idea of privatising the Post Office and by his testimony at the Arms to Iraq Inquiry (at which it emerged that he had refused to sign the certificates attempting to withhold evidence). The cover of "Private Eye" announced "A Legend Lives", and one major newspaper ended an editorial by proclaiming that "balance of probability" was that Heseltine would be Prime Minister before the end of the year. However there was no leadership election that autumn.

Deputy Prime Minister

In mid-1995, John Major, having found himself consistently opposed by a minority of Eurosceptics in his party, challenged them to "put up or shut up" by resubmitting himself to a leadership election in which he was unsuccessfully opposed by the Secretary of State for Wales, John Redwood. There was speculation that Heseltine's supporters would engineer Major's downfall in the hope that their man would take over, but in the event they stayed loyal to Major, and Heseltine (who voted for Major and showed his ballot paper to the returning officers) was rewarded by promotion to Deputy Prime Minister. In this capacity he chaired a number of key Cabinet committees and was also an early key enthusiast for the Millennium Dome. In December 1996 Heseltine, angering eurosceptics, joined with Conservative Chancellor Kenneth Clarke in preventing any movement away from the government's official refusal to decide on whether or not to join the Single Currency.

After Labour won the 1997 election, he suffered further heart trouble and declined to stand for the Conservative Party leadership again, although there was still speculation that Clarke might have stood aside for him to stand as a compromise candidate. He became active in promoting the benefits for Britain of joining the single European Currency, appearing on the same stage as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Robin Cook as part of an all-party campaign to promote Euro membership. He was also made a Companion of Honour by John Major in the 1997 resignation Honours List.

Retirement

He resigned his Henley-on-Thames constituency at the 2001 election but remained outspoken on British politics. He was given a life peerage as Baron Heseltine, of Thenford in the County of Northamptonshire.

In December 2002, Heseltine controversially called for Iain Duncan Smith to be replaced as leader of the Conservatives by the "dream-ticket" of Kenneth Clarke as leader and Michael Portillo as deputy. 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. Duncan Smith was removed the following year. In the 2005 party leadership election, he backed the young moderniser, David Cameron.

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 Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

Member of Parliament from 1966 to 2001:

MP for Tavistock, Devon 1966–1974
MP for Henley-on-Thames 1974–2001 (in which seat he was succeeded by Boris Johnson)

He was ranked 170th in the Sunday Times Rich List 2004, with an estimated wealth of £240 million.

He is now a keen gardener and arboriculturalist and his arboretum is one of the most important private collections of specimens in the UK. It was featured in a one off documentary on BBC Two in December 2005.

External links

Publications

Michael Heseltine, Raising The Sights - A Tory Perspective, in the Primrose League Gazette, vol.91, no.2, Aug/Sept 1987 edition, London.
Julian Critchley, Heseltine - The Unauthorised Biography, André Deutsch, London, September 1987, ISBN 0-233-98001-6
Michael Crick, Michael Heseltine: A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, 1997, ISBN 0-241-13691-1
Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle, Hodder & Stoughton, 2000, ISBN 0-340-73915-0

References

Michael Crick, Michael Heseltine: A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, 1997, ISBN 0-241-13691-1, p92-3
Michael Crick, Michael Heseltine: A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, 1997, ISBN 0-241-13691-1, p79
Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle, Hodder & Stoughton, 2000, ISBN 0-340-73915-0,p49