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ON THE RECORD
RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION BBC-1 DATE: 13.6.93
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JONATHAN DIMBLEBY: Good afternoon and welcome to On The
Record. As if it weren't bad enough to have Norman Lamont plunge his stilletto
between your shoulder blades, the polls this morning are telling the Prime
Minister that he is the most unpopular leader that Britain has had since the
end of the second world war. In today's programme I'll be asking Michael
Heseltine whether John Major is not merely down but on his way out as well.
It has surely been the worst few days in
the political life of the Prime Minister. Even if there is no challenge to his
leadership this year, it is plain that in the eyes of many in his party he is
now on probation. Politics IS a rough old business - a fact which no-one
appreciates better than the President of the Board of Trade Michael Heseltine,
who is at his home in the country.
Michael Heseltine, in his parting shot,
Norman Lamont said that if the government's approach didn't change, it wouldn't
survive and it wouldn't deserve to survive. Do you agree with him?
MICHAEL HESELTINE: I think that you must always recognise
the tension that anyone making a resignation speech of that sort injects into
the political debate. I don't think it's necessary for me to agree or
disagree, I merely observe it as the historic phenomenon of a Chancellor
setting the record the way he wants us to see it. I'm more interested of
course in what the government is going to do, in what the government is
determined to do in the critical areas ahead.
DIMBLEBY: Well we'll come to that, when you, when
you.....
HESELTINE: We've got some difficult issues to face.
DIMBLEBY: Yes, we'll come to those, but just as
this is a major contribution from the ex-Chancellor and people will want to
know how seriously his words should be taken, let me ask you when he says
"there is something wrong with the way we make our decisions", should we
discount that?
HESELTINE: I think that all of us realise that
democracy means every so often you actually listen to or are elected by people,
you give premises, you set a context that limits government's ability to take
decisions. If you have back-benchers that won't support you, that limits
government's ability to take decisions and there's no way in which a Prime
Minister can ignore the political and democratic realties of the job that he
does. A Chancellor will be arguing from a slightly different vantage point.
DIMBLEBY: You should decide what is right, and
then decide the presentation, not the other way wrong - not the other way
round. You discount Lamont on that?
HESELTINE: I wholly think that that is what the
government is doing. We have now got two overwhelming issues which confront
us. One, is the state of the economy and we are fighting that battle, we are
certainly got other aspects of the battle to win but in one very important way
you can see the results of what we've been trying to achieve. The economy is
coming out of recession rather earlier than equivalent economies. We've got
interest rates and inflation down, we've got a competitive currency. We've now
got to deal with the twin deficits of course, very important, but nobody can
suggest we haven't been taking some very difficult decisions along that route.
DIMBLEBY: Now Sir Norman, Sir Norman said that
this speech was a "dud" speech. Do you agree with him?
HESELTINE: Well I gave my view about that on the
Today Program. I see it as part of the high passion of politics. Any Prime
Minister who's going to lose his Chanceller knows that there will be an
explosion of some sort and he will take that into account, and he'll know that
it will be a relatively short term explosion, and that he has in his judgement
no choice but to face that risk.
DIMBLEBY: A wise old bird of British politics,
Tristan Garrel-Jones (phon) today tells Norman Lamont that he "inhabits a
colossal glass house" and adds "I hope he'll keep his stones in his pocket".
Do you share that view?
HESELTINE: Well we all use our own language, I mean
Tristan uses his, he's got his own perspective on these things, I use my
language. I don't have to copy the words of colleagues however much I may
agree or disagree with them.
DIMBLEBY: When you say it's an explosion, are you
saying that this is just an emotional, bitter outburst in effect?
HESELTINE: No, no, no, no, no, I'm not saying that.
I'm saying that if you are a Chancellor and a Prime Minister in what is always
a brittle relationship, you have a different perspective of events. The
Chancellor wants to achieve the macro-economic policies to which his own policy
objectives are totally committed. The Prime Minister wants that as well, but
he has to see the wider political context, and there will be, there always is,
a tension between those two offices.
DIMBLEBY: So the Chancellor in effect if that's
the case, was failing to understand that Prime Ministers have to be political
and not just driven by policy?
HESELETINE: Well, I, I mean you can try and prize it
all apart and inject whatever motives you like, I can only tell you this, that
if you are the Prime Minister and you are going to lose your Chancellor, you
are going to have an explosion of one sort or another, and in those
circumstances the Chancellor who has gone is very likely, and you would take
this into account, to come to the House of Commons, or to write a book, or to
write articles, or whatever it may be, and put his side of the story. It's for
the historians to actually work out where the balance actually lays ......after
the event ...
DIMBLEBY: Yeah but you're a member, you're a
member of this cabinet.
HESELTINE: Sure, sure...
DIMBLEBY: Do you side with the Prime Minister, or
do you side with the former Chancellor?
HESELTIME: You know perfectly well that I have
consistently argued that the Prime Minister is the leader of our party, is
entitled to our support, is pursuing policies which I strongly support, and so
I have no difficulty about these things, but what is so difficult I think, for
the commentating world, is to understand the processes of democracy that lead
to discussion within cabinet. That doesn't mean to say you've got a divided
cabinet, merely that you've got a cabinet doing its job, and with all these
issues, and public expenditure's no exception to these matters, there are many
sides of the argument, many alternatives to be considered, and ways ..
DIMBLEBY: Now a few days, a few days, um, before
he became Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, using his words, said "the government was
in a dreadful hole". After the events of this week, it can hardly be described
as any shallower can it?
HESELETINE: Well, I made a speech which said that
there was turbulence ahead, and I think there is turbulance ahead. I think
there are three issues which are going to cause us considerable difficulties.
The economy is obviously one, the education testing battle is another and there
is the inevitable tensions and discussions about the whole of the European
question. And so ...
DIMBLEBY: If you take the first of those, let's
take the first of those, the economy.
HESELTINE: Yes ..
DIMBLEBY: The government faces the, um, the need
to either increase taxation or cut public spending or a combination of both.
That is bound to make what is now the most unpopular Prime Minister since such
polling records were kept, even more unpopular is it not?
HESELTINE: Well, if I were to advise the Prime
Minister on this matter, it's not important between elections to be popular,
it's important to be right, and therefore the decisions that need to be taken,
have to be taken, and in my view, having been through some considerable period
of experience in these matters in earlier years, if you take the right
decisions, and you are proved right, then people judge you at the time when you
are asking for a new mandate, and they forget the judgements they made when you
took the difficult decisions.
DIMBLEBY: Now to take the difficult decision this
time ...
HESELTINE: Can I just remind you, Jonathan can I
just remind you, I was a member of the 1981 Cabinet, Mrs. Thatcher had been
overwhelmed in the House of Commons because the back-benchers wouldn't agree to
the deal that she was trying to do with the Argentinians over the Falklands.
We had to back down in the face in the miners, and we had, she had actually,
lost control of the cabinet on the public expenditure issue. You cannot think
of a more appalling prospect for a Prime Minister than that. Actually she went
on to win a triumphant election victory two years later.
DIMBLEBY: After the Falklands war. Do you, do you
take the view that for the cuts to be effective, they have to be of a character
which makes them unpopular because they will have to be painful.
HESELTINE: I think it'll be very difficult to go
through the public expenditure round and the new budget judgements that Ken
Clarke has to reach without a degree of pain. I mean the fact of the matter is
that we are facing, let us put it in the starkest language, a bill for fifty
billion pounds to sustain living standards in this country today that we do not
earn. Something has to be done about it, otherwise just at today's rates of
interest, that fifty billion will cost three billion, over three billion pounds
a year, this year, next year, next decade, and what do you think our children
would actually say if they saw that we had passed on to them bills of this
proportion so that we could enjoy living standards we couldn't pay for.
DIMBLEBY: Um, it's going to make that decision of
the government, whatever those cuts are, um, even more unpopular is it not when
people realise that this is a consequence, and I use your term here, a
consequence of quotes "our profligacy", namely, I presume, the government's
profligacy.
HESELTINE: Oh no, no, no, no, no not just the
government's profligacy, our society's profligacy. The fact is that we ...
DIMBLEBY: The voters have been profligate.
HESELTINE: Sorry.
DIMBLEBY: Voters have been profligate.
HESLETINE: The whole of Britain is living beyond
its means, that the problem. We have created over decades an infrastructure of
entitlement and opportunity way beyond the nation's capacity to pay for and we
are now stacking up bills which will be visited in subsequent generations if we
do not deal with the issue, and so the Prime Minister in my view has got that
very simple choice. It is by trying to get away with it, trying to sort of
keep it going, to sustain the present situation in the hope that better times
come and that we win an election without people fully realising it. As an
alternative to that we take the difficult decisions. In my view the cabinet
will take the difficult decisions and rightly so, but that will not be popular
in the short term. That will not deter us either.
DIMBLEBY: But you see you talk all the time and
your colleagues do the same thing, as if you hadn't been in power for nearly
fourteen years. This fifty billion deficit, the voters clearly will
justifiably want to say, is your deficit, not their deficit, it's your bad
decisions.
HESELTINE: Yes of course, everybody wants to try
and pass the buck somewhere else.
DIMBLEBY: That's what you're doing isn't it?
HESELTINE: No, no, no, no, I'm saying it is our
responsibility, and by our, I mean the whole of our society, and politicians
and people have allowed the impression to be sustained that we can maintain
these living standards despite the fact we haven't got the revenue to pay for
them, and we're going to have to reveal the difficulties and the traumas of
this situation with a stark clarity this autumn, and not before time.
DIMBLEBY: Now John Redwood, your new colleague in
the cabinet has just said, "Our manifesto said no to increased income taxes.
It was right then, it is right now". Is he speaking on behalf of the cabinet?
HESELTINE: He is obviously as a cabinet minister
speaking in a way that reflects the views of the cabinet.
DIMBLEBY: Now, that's very interesting then.
You're saying it is not right to have income tax increases?
HESELTINE: I'm not saying anything of the sort. I
am saying ...
DIMBLEBY: Well, let me put the words of him again
to you, so you're speaking for the cabinet. "Our manifesto said no to
increased income taxes, it was right then, it is right now." You say you're
speaking for the cabinet on that.HESELTINE: Yes, I
said that those are the views that would be today held by the cabinet, those
are the manifesto views, but what I'm also saying and this is the self-evident
fact if you were the new Chancellor, is that you will revisit all the options
and all the difficult decisions, and you will find in practically every case
that there is a manifesto commitment which blocks off the options, and if you
then say "Fine, we've made a manifesto commitment, all the options are blocked
off", well I tell you it won't be fifty billion deficit we're dealing with next
year, it will be a bigger one.
DIMBLEBY: Well precisely, that's why I ask you now
is it your view.
HESELTINE: Well, let's now .....
DIMBLEBY: Just a minute I want to ask you, is it
your view now....
HESELTINE: I'm going to help you, I'm going to help
you short circuit this set of questions.
DIMBLEBY: I wonder. I wonder.
HESELTINE: Yes, I am. I'm always on your side,
deep down.
DIMBLEBY: Yes.
HESELTINE: I am not going to discuss individual
measures so that you can ask me this direct question, will I or will I not
argue for this or that, because you know perfectly well that these issues are
yet to be discussed, it is for the Chancellor to make the judgement and the
cabinet to back him....
DIMBLEBY: Well of course, of course, that's
extremely helpful....
HESELTINE: ....predigest ......
DIMBLEBY: ..it's extremely helpful of you, as you
say it's extemely helpful of you. Just let me put this question to you. You
can decide whether of not it's an appropriate question for you to answer or not
in a second. The question is do you take the view now that it is right not to
have income tax increases?
HESELTINE: No, I've just told you, I'm not prepared
to be taken down the road of being put in front of every conceivable option
which I have to consider in order for you to try and get me to advocate them or
block them off, ....
DIMBLEBY: John Redwood's not as coy as you are.
HESELTINE: Well he's a younger man.
DIMBLEBY: Ah, younger man. Younger men make
mistakes. The ....
HESELTINE: No, no, they haven't been through some
of these traumas in the way that I have. But can we get onto another point
which is absolutely fundamental. In all this analysis of the problem of the
government, the one thing that is very difficult to get people to take
seriously is that there is no equivalent society to us in the world that is not
in the same sort of difficulty and the thing that is actually underlying public
unease is not so much the specifics of the British situation, as the
generalisation, and the generalities of this world recession.
DIMBLEBY: So this poor old government, poor old
Prime Minister are suffering the consequences of what the world recession in
respect for political leaders?
HESELTINE: Yes, that's true. It's very
uncomfortable to try and get people to understand that, but the fact is that
all the sort of questions that you are asking about this government in Britain,
are being asked in Germany, in France, in Japan, in America because the
electorates in those countries feel very much the same unease. Now of course
this has a very limited appeal in domestic terms because people with their own
anxieties want results from their government, but the fact of the matter is
that we now live in a very much shrunken world with inter-related economics and
it is very very difficult for any one government to have the muscle and the
economic power to buck what is actually happening in that huge world market
place.
DIMBLEBY: Given that electorates have the capacity
to throw governments out, even if unjustifiably, is the Prime Minister on
probation now?
HESELTINE: No, I don't think the Prime Minister is
on probation at all. I think the Prime Minister is entitled to say to the
Conservative Party: you chose me, I was elected as your leader, we have a very
clear programme, we're going to have tough times ahead, but in my experience as
Conservative Leader I believe that I can take you through it, and we will come
out, and we will win the next election.
DIMBLEBY: He says in an interview ...
HESELTINE: I think he's going to be winning the
next election.
DIMBLEBY: He says in an interview in one of
today's papers that he doesn't think there'll be a leadership - he doubts
there'll be a leadership challenge this year but you can't tell afterwards. Do
you think there might be a leadership challenge?
HESELTINE: No.
DIMBLEBY: At no stage?
HESELTINE: I don't think there's going to be a
leadership challenge, but you see the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister's in
the very interesting position - I mean John Major is an extremely straight guy.
He answers direct difficult questions honestly. The problem with doing that is
that everybody then devours the answer and says, "Oh look, he's accepting
there may be a leadership challenge". Technically there is no doubt there can
be leadership challenges. He's only saying that. It isn't a news story, it's
of no considerable interest that he should admit the technicalities of the
existence of .....
DIMBLEBY: Absolutely not. Given that you like
him, give direct and clear answers to difficult questions, if he does choose to
go, Douglas Hurd has already ruled himself out as a prospective candidate for
the leadership, Ken Clarke says he would like to be leader one day, are you
with Hurd or with Clarke on this.
HESELTINE: Jonathan, you know you're a monkey. You
spend your time psyching up Ken Clarke and Michael Hurd, now you're trying to
do it to me again. I keep telling you that John Major is going in my view to
win the next election and if I may dare say it humbly with all the humility
that you expect from me,
DIMBLEBY: You can.
HESELTINE: I'll be out there punching for him.
DIMBLEBY: You'll be out there punching for him and
you're not going to tell us whether you're ever a candidate for the leadership
again or not?
HESLELTINE: I cannot more explicitly tell you that
I'm a member of John Major's cabinet. I think he will be there at the next
election and I will be there trying to get him re-elected. Now what else can I
possibly say that has got any relevance to the subject?
DIMBLEBY: Very little, except I suspose you could
say you can foresee .......
HESELTINE: BOTH TALKING TOGETHER.
DIMBLEBY: You could add, you can forsee no
circumstance (gap in tape)..as challenger for the leadership.
HESELTINE: Yes, well, I could say that, but I'm not
going to say that because I think that that would produce a belly laugh from
people like you who'd produce some sort of historic precedence in which we have
no need to be concerned at this moment.
DIMBLEBY: President of the Board of Trade, thank
you.
HESELTINE: Thank you.
...ooOOoo...
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