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ON THE RECORD
MICHAEL HESELTINE INTERVIEW
RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC ONE DATE: 2.5.99
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JOHN HUMPHRYS: So horrified are the Tories at the reaction to their
latest troubles that they've battened down the hatches this weekend and refused to let any of
their front bench spokesmen be interviewed. But there are some brave souls still prepared to
raise the Tory banner in public ... Michael Heseltine, good afternoon to you.
MICHAEL HESELTINE: You�re very flattering the way you describe me
as a sort of also-ran dragged out to sort of fill the void, thank you for the chance�.
HUMPHRYS: No, as a possible alternative who knows��
Maybe the call is about to come to you��
HESELTINE: Oh don�t start all that again for goodness
sakes�..
HUMPHRYS: So if the call comes you�re not available��Can
William Hague at this stage survive because it is going to be difficult for him now isn�t it? I
mean there is a great deal of discontent.
HESELTINE: I think in answer to your question is simply -
yes. The fact is that this row seems to me to be the most extraordinary in that I don�t really
see what it�s about. The idea, put it at its simplest that the Conservative opposition in the
next general election would enter the campaign with some sort of indication or commitment or
policy that it was going to undermine the free provision of health and education can only be a
concept for the sort of barking mad and I don�t know anyone in the Conservative Party who
believes in that sort of thing and so if the researches that we were doing, sort of focus groups,
gave the impression that the canard of the left which has been of course to give that
impression, had got through to the public mind, the quicker it was killed the better. And
coming to the heart of the matter, Mrs Thatcher with whom I worked for many a long year
never questioned that there would be a health service or education service that was free to the
people of this country. I was part of the shadow cabinet that drafted the nineteen seventy-
nine election manifesto. It never occurred to anybody, and certainly I know of no policies
going right through the eighties and nineties where these issues were ever seriously raised.
This is quite inconsistent with�� if you take the Churchillian view, �the net below which
no-one should fall�. Well you can go way back into the nineteenth century and find the origins
of a social conscience in the Conservative Party remains there very deeply entrenched and
rightly so.
HUMPHRYS: So should Mr Hague effectively be saying to
those doubters in the party � put up or shut up�?
HESELTINE: Well it�s a dangerous thing to say. Somebody
might take him at his word but I don�t think he needs to do that. I think that he has to keep
his nerve and to realise that opposition is a very frustrating and long term business,
particularly where you have a government that has done two things: First inherited an
economic background which is almost without precedent for its quality and secondly, in its
language at least has marched onto the territory which the Labour opposition resisted fiercely
and which the Conservative government created.
HUMPHRYS: Perhaps what he should have been doing then,
bearing in mind some of the things you�ve been saying, perhaps he should have been listening
rather more to some of the older wiser heads in the party, those people with their roots deep
in the Conservative Party.
HESELTINE: It�s very difficult for a leader to make up his or
her mind how fast they move on through generations. Of course wisdom, experience having
been through it if you like does make a contribution but on the other hand you have to
recognise the legitimate ambitions of the emerging generations who want to push aside the
people who were there yesterday. It�s very understandable, they�re human, it happens in all
walks of life and the leader has to decide at what pace to do that.
I think it is fair to say that if I was talking to
William now, and he must be constantly thinking of these issues, that the great challenge for a
party leader is to coalesce all these different forces - not just the age or the geographic forces
but the intellectual forces within the party and of course to do that without conceding to the
pressure of the media to put forward endless new policies. If you put forward new policies
for the moment for the Conservative Party, there�s two things will happen: If they�re no good
you�ll get slaughtered by the media and if they are good, Tony Blair will adopt them and
implement them before we have time to put them to the electorate in a manifesto. Those are
wholly predictable things. Now that�s not to say that you don�t want to sort of allow a
thousand intellectual flowers to bloom at the fringe of the party, at the research end of the
party. Backbenchers coming forward with ideas, think tanks having ideas, encourage all of
that but don�t commit yourself to a battle line when the battle isn�t actually joined. Wait until
the mood of the public is clear. Wait until the economic circumstances of the next election are
unchangeable by the government and then attack with your policy initiatives which are too
late for the government to pinch and which are in keeping with the mood of the time but in the
intermediate then the task of opposition is to attack the policies of the government, to
question to harrie, to expose, to reveal to undermine, on and on in a way that is the duty of
opposition but which doesn�t pin you down to a particular set of initiatives that might be the
wrong ones when you actually get to an election campaign.
HUMPHRYS: So was he right then to deal with what he
obviously assumed to be a still existing legacy of distrust of the Tories on the part of the
voters as to your intentions towards public services, schools,hospitals and so on?
HESELTINE: If he was finding in the focus groups that this
frankly brazen political lie of the Labour Party that we were against a free health service or
against free education he was right to tackle it and what is, I find, extraordinary is that
somehow this is seen as an attack on Mrs Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher never believed any of
that��
HUMPHRYS: But that�s how it was presented wasn�t it?
HESELTINE: Well�. Again I wasn�t there so one is relying on
the sort of gossip and all of that but what I understand is that there was a spin doctoring
message delivered and that I find very worrying and it�s not just worrying for the Tory Party,
I must say I am bored to distraction by the quotation I read in the newspapers all the time - �a
senior source said�� where upon somebody who may be important or may be unimportant
gets away with murder unaccountably. We don�t know their names, we don�t know who they
are, we don�t know what their motive is - they suddenly become a source which is quoted in
the headlines and so you can�t make a judgement about the integrity of the person or the
integrity of the motive and it seems to me that in this case that sort of problem did emerge,
that somebody who had presumably reasons for doing so gave a steer to the press, the press
took it like goldfish coming out of the bowl to feed and we got all this stuff over the
newspapers.
HUMPHRYS: Well he�s got to sort these people out then hasn�t
he.
HESELTINE: Well he did, he sacked somebody and he was
right to do so.
HUMPHRYS: Well yes, but there are still other people there
who are spinning stories, I mean it isn�t necessarily the case that the person who was sacked.
HESELTINE: Yes but John this is the weakness. You and I,
well you because are one of the privileged in a circle, I am not. People don�t spin to me, they
spin to you and if they did spin to me it won�t do them any good because I am not in the
business of peddling media and gossip, but the journalists of course, they feed on this stuff
and the moment somebody sort of even gives a curious wink before you know where you are
then that�s the headline story of the day.
HUMPHRYS: There are now people as you will know spinning
against Peter Lilley saying he�s go to go, he�s got to be a scapegoat for this. Do you think Mr.
Hague should stand by Mr. Lilley now and say he is here and here he stays?
HESELTINE: Well I would be very disinclined to act against
Peter Lilley if I was William Hague because this could only exacerbate the difficulties that have
emerged. The press will then have a field day but the background will all come up again and
Peter Lilley�s views and Peter Lilley�s new agenda and all this sort of stuff, I think the essence
as I said earlier in this programme, the essence of leadership, particularly in opposition, indeed
very specifically in opposition, is to try to coalesce your party. There�s always a pressure to
fragment in politics with all the human rivalries and ambitions that you get, but what you
don�t want in opposition is anything other than as a coherent a set of views for the party and
it�s really quite simple to answer what they should be. And they should be about attacking the
Government. That�s what oppositions are for, it�s their duty, so allowing yourself to get the
whole process turned on you about divisions or splits or personalities or rivalries is actually
undermining the position that an opposition should adopt, particularly one that is in the
business of winning.
HUMPHRYS: But can you coalesce your party if you take the
sort of rather confrontational approach that Mr. Hague takes, I mean, this was put to him last
week, and he said �Look, if feathers are ruffled, they�d better unruffle them� In other words,
�I�ll have no truck with it.� Can you do both those things, coalesce and be confrontational?
HESELTINE: Well it is a trick, I would be the first to say that
it is very difficult to achieve, but if we come back to the central issue, if William was talking
there about the decision taken to try to undo the impression that we were against charging for
Education or Health and if in doing that feathers had to be ruffled, well ruffled they had to be.
But to me it is extraordinary that there could be people close to or serious players in the
Conservative Party who would want to give any other impression than that we are in favour
of that free delivery and if they are, well I would guess that they are very marginal and they
should be allowed to express their views because people will then realise just how marginal
those people and those views are.
HUMPHRYS: Michael Heseltine, many thanks.
HESELTINE: Thank you.
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