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NB. THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A TRANSCRIPTION UNIT RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT; BECAUSE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF MIS-HEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY, IN SOME CASES, OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS ACCURACY .................................................................................... ON THE RECORD MICHAEL HESELTINE INTERVIEW RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION: BBC ONE DATE: 2.5.99 .................................................................................... 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: You¹re 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 chanceŠ. HUMPHRYS: No, as a possible alternative who knowsŠŠ Maybe the call is about to come to youŠŠ HESELTINE: Oh don¹t start all that again for goodness sakesŠ.. HUMPHRYS: So if the call comes you¹re not availableŠŠCan William Hague at this stage survive because it is going to be difficult for him now isn¹t 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 don¹t really see what it¹s 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 don¹t 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 withŠŠ if you take the Churchillian view, Œthe net below which no-one should fall¹. 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 Œ put up or shut up¹? HESELTINE: Well it¹s a dangerous thing to say. Somebody might take him at his word but I don¹t 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 you¹ve 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: It¹s 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. It¹s very understandable, they¹re 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, there¹s two things will happen: If they¹re no good you¹ll 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 that¹s not to say that you don¹t 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 don¹t commit yourself to a battle line when the battle isn¹t 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 doesn¹t 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 thatŠŠ HUMPHRYS: But that¹s how it was presented wasn¹t it? HESELTINE: WellŠ. Again I wasn¹t 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 it¹s 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 - Œa senior source saidŠ¹ where upon somebody who may be important or may be unimportant gets away with murder unaccountably. We don¹t know their names, we don¹t know who they are, we don¹t know what their motive is - they suddenly become a source which is quoted in the headlines and so you can¹t 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 he¹s got to sort these people out then hasn¹t 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 isn¹t 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 don¹t spin to me, they spin to you and if they did spin to me it won¹t 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 that¹s the headline story of the day. HUMPHRYS: There are now people as you will know spinning against Peter Lilley saying he¹s go to go, he¹s 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 Lilley¹s views and Peter Lilley¹s 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. There¹s always a pressure to fragment in politics with all the human rivalries and ambitions that you get, but what you don¹t want in opposition is anything other than as a coherent a set of views for the party and it¹s really quite simple to answer what they should be. And they should be about attacking the Government. That¹s what oppositions are for, it¹s 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 ³Look, if feathers are ruffled, they¹d better unruffle them² In other words, ³I¹ll have no truck with it.² 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. .....ooooOOoooo.... 4 FoLdEd