Michael Heseltine

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Baron Heseltine, born on March 21, 1933, Michael Ray Dibdin Heseltine, is a British politician and businessman.

He began his career as a property developer and became one of the founders of Haymarket.

Heseltine served as a member of Parliament from 1966 to 2001, and was a key figure in Margaret Thatcher and John Major's governments, including serving as Deputy Prime Minister under the former Prime Minister. Heseltine was introduced to the Cabinet in 1979 as the Minister of State for the Environment, where he pushed the "Right to Buy" campaign, which encouraged two million families to buy their council houses.

He was regarded as a gifted media artist and a charismatic minister, but he was often in doubt with Thatcher on economic issues.

He was one of Liverpool's most prominent "wets" who were embraced by his support for the revival of the city in the early 1980s, which later earned him the City of Liverpool Award in 2012.

He served as Secretary of State for Defence from 1983 to 1986, and was instrumental in the political war against the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

In 1986, he resigned from Cabinet over the Westland Affair and returned to the back benches. Following Sir Geoffrey Howe's resignation address in November 1990, Heseltine vowed to oppose Thatcher for the Conservative Party's leadership, polling well enough not to deny her a landslide victory on the first ballot.

Heseltine eventually lost to John Major on the second ballot following Thatcher's departure but returned to the Cabinet when Major became Prime Minister.

Heseltine, a leading ally of Major, climbed to become President of the Board of Trade in 1995 and First Secretary of State.

Following Major's 1998 electoral defeat, he refused to seek the leadership of the party, but remained a vocal advocate for change in the group. Since stating that he would vote for the Liberal Democrats rather than the Conservatives in the 2019 European Parliament election in the United Kingdom, he was suspended in May 2019.

Early life

Michael Heseltine was born in Swansea, Wales, and the son of Territorial Army Colonel Rupert Dibdin Heseltine (1902–1957), TD of the Royal Engineers, factory owner and South Wales local director of Dawnays Ltd, bridge and structural engineers, and Eileen Ray (née Pridmore). William Heseltine, Michael Heseltine's great-grandfather, worked his way to being the boss of Tetley before being involved in the establishment of a chain of grocers; he died as a result of his debt and bad investments. Michael Heseltine's grandfather, William's uncle John Heseltine, became a tea salesman and relocated from Huntingdonshire to Swansea, with the docks being a major destination for tea delivery. In Pembrey, the earliest generations of farm laborers were employed. His mother was born in West Wales, the daughter of James Pridmore, a dock labourer who unloaded coal from ships, later employing others to do so and founding West Glamorgan Collieries Ltd, a short-lived business that operated in Swansea (1919–1921); his father, also James, worked at the Swansea docks. Heseltine was later elected an honorary member of the Swansea Dockers Club due to her family's roots. Heseltine is a descendant of composer and songwriter Charles Dibdin.

At No. 1, Heseltine was brought up in relative luxury. No. 1, Eaton Crescent, London, No. 1 (Now No. 3) 5: In 2016, he told Tatler interviewer Charlotte Edwardes, "I started a birdwatching group called the Tit Club at prep school." Every member was named after a Marsh Tit, a member of the tit family. I was the Great Tit "I was the Great Tit." "I just know if that had come out when I was in active politics, I would never have recovered." In Brynmill Park, Heseltine enjoyed angling and was named the junior champion of a junior tournament. He was educated at Broughton Hall in Eccleshall, Staffordshire, when it was briefly amalgamated with Brockhurst Preparatory School, Bromsgrove School, Worcestershire, and Shrewsbury School, Shropshire, where it was briefly affiliated with Brockhurst Preparatory School, Worcestershire.

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Business career

In January 1955, Heseltine began writing at Peat Marwick & Mitchell. He began his accounting career as an accountant but also established a property business in the late 1950s London property boom. At 2016, Michael Josephs and his Oxford roommate Ian Josephs all received around £1,000 (roughly £23,000). They formed "Michian" (after their first names) and bought a 13-year lease on the so-called Thurston Court Hotel at 39 Clanricarde Gardens (near Notting Hill) for £3,750. The new tenants were evicted so Josephs' father could renovate the house and let out the rooms for a total rent of about £30 per week. They were able to sell the house at a profit a year later, doubling their capital to £4,000.

Heseltine and Josephs now purchased a group of five adjoining houses in Inverness Terrace, Bayswater, with the help of a £23,000 mortgage. They arranged for some medical students to decorate and renovate the house into a 45-bed boarding house, which they referred to as the "New Court Hotel." Heseltine will often make breakfast himself, but he denies rumors that he will rise early to mix margarine in with the butter. Many of the tenants were American servicemen who, later discovered, were for the most part courteous, but there was occasional arguing at weekends.

When Edward Heath applied for the Conservative Party Parliamentary Candidates' List in October 1956, he was then a government whip who had been attending the Oxford Union. In December 1956, Heseltine purchased his first Jaguar, second hand and cheap, as a result of the increase in the price of petrol due to the Suez Crisis, rising to newer and more expensive models in subsequent years.

In 1957, the first Court Hotel was sold. At this point, Heseltine ventured into industry with another Oxford acquaintance, Clive Labovitch, who introduced Opportunities for Graduates that year. Heseltine arranged for this to be made available for free to last-year students at all British universities, who paid for by advertising. Heseltine ended his relationship with Josephs and with the support of a £4,500 investment by Heseltine's mother (following the death of his father in 1957), he and Labovitch were able to buy a series of houses on Tregunter Road (south of Earl's Court), adding two more in neighbouring Cathcart Road.

Heseltine had moved his papers to a partner at a smaller firm of accountants off the coast of Haymarket, hoping that this would give him more opportunity to be hands-on in the company's affairs rather than being a cog in a larger machine. He took three attempts and special instruction to pass his intermediate exams, but there was no chance of getting his accountancy finals. He also said he was reaping more from his land business than the partner to whom he was published. He could no longer avoid conscription into National Service after the expiration of his papers in January 1958.

Heseltine later expressed admiration for his father, a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Second World War and later serving in the Territorial Army, but said he was too late to be disrupted, but that his career was too important for him to be debuffed. He and his father took the precaution of booking interviews in order to raise his chances of getting an officer's commission in the event that he had to serve. He was lucky not to be called up for the Korean War in the early 1950s or the Suez Crisis in 1956, and in the final years of National Service, the call up was made to call up soldiers who had so far failed to postpone service. Despite being almost call-up age, which has been reduced from thirty to twenty-six in recent years, Heseltine was summoned into the Welsh Guards in January 1959.

Heseltine served as a Guardsman for nine weeks before being sent to Mons Officer Cadet School, Aldershot, alongside other soldiers from other regiments. He was a good soldier, rising to the rank of Junior Under-Officer and graduating with an A-Grade, but his age did not earn him the Sword of Honor or promoted to the rank of Senior Under-Officer, according to some, his rank gave him unfair advantage over younger cadets. He had been frustrated by an old ankle sprain throughout his training, but he turned down a medical discharge. On June 11, 1959, he was sent as a Second Lieutenant.

In October that year, Heseltine was allowed to run for the general election; according to Ian Josephs, this had been his intention from the start. After that, he applied on business reasons for his release from the Army in part because of the difficulties caused by an employee's embezzlement, which also included the need to sort out his father's affairs, and was barred from the remaining sixteen months of service. During the 1980s, his habit of wearing a Guard regimental tie, which was sometimes incorrectly tied with a red stripe on the neck, attracted a lot of criticism from military leaders and older MPs with distinguished war records. Crick said he must have worn the tie for more days than he actually served in the Guards.

By now, the property boom was in full swing. The first one was established by Heseltine and Labovitch, followed by a group of firms identified as "Bastion Properties." Heseltine later announced that he and Labovitch had purchased at least three homes in W1 and W2 which they were able to sell at a profit before they had finished the initial purchases. In Queensborough Mews, Bayswater, the couple also built eight small houses. They bought a 58-year lease on a block of seven properties off the side of Kensington High Street in Stafford Terrace, which they converted into flats and built houses for Stepney Borough Council. Bastion also planned to build an estate of up to 126 homes in Tenterden, Kent, but it didn't sell. Heseltine had to decline an offer of £4,000 for the first house, which had been valued at £7,250 in order to attract more people to the empty estate. The estate was plagued with repair issues until Heseltine's aspiration to Parliament.

Heseltine and Labovitch established Cornmarket, a magazine publishing firm, that also distributed the Directory of Opportunities for School Leavers and Directory of Qualified Men, which generated regular income from advertisement. Other Canadian, French, and German versions were also launched, but these were less profitable. They purchased Man About Town, the prestigious (but unprofitable) newspaper that was originally listed as About Town and then simply Town in late 1959, after losing £10,000 of a £30,000 profit on a freehold site off the coast of Regents Park. They paid £10,000 for Topic, a weekly newspaper that had been launched by a group of entrepreneurs, including the Prime Minister's son Maurice Macmillan, and now owned by Norman Mascall, a pyramid scheme fraudster of the 1960s. The economic climate had been too bleak by then, and many publishers have found that there is no demand for weekly newspapers in the United Kingdom. At the end of 1962, the subject was no longer published, but its journalists later became the Sunday Times Insight Team.

In 1960, Heseltine became the managing director of Bow Group Publications, primarily due to marketing and distribution for the publication (he does not appear to have written any papers or pamphlets himself). He considered suing The Observer for a limerick's lack of style (spelling "Bow" as "Beau") for implying him to be homosexual, but was refused to do so. He was a director until 1965.

Bastion Properties was in danger due to building costs and an unsatisfactory building manager. Heseltine's businesses were hard by the Selwyn Lloyd financial crisis of 1961, which took place even more than 30 years old, when the man was still not thirty years old, owed £250,000 (roughly £4.5 million at 2016 rates). He claims he was lent a desperately needed £85,000 by a bank manager who resigned the same day. Although he eventually settled all of his debts, he avoided bankruptcy by using such tactics as paying bills only after being threatened with legal action. He started gardening as a serious hobby during a difficult period in his life. In a talk about how he had strung creditors along in the 1990s, Heseltine committed a minor gaffe.

In 1960 to 1964, Heseltine served as a part-time interviewer for ITV, which made it possible, in Crick's case, to maintain his public image as an aspiring politician.

Cornmarket was a highly disorganised business, with little in the way of accounting or business plans, cheques, and invoices often going astray despite Heseltine's later insistence on management controls in government departments, which he managed. The Graduate Appointments Register, one of the company's most lucrative ventures, went further after an employee refused to proceed after Heseltine's instructions to abandon the proposal. Heseltine and Labovitch provided a great deal of energy and enthusiasm to new ventures (for example, the in-house magazine for Hilton Hotels or new owners' packs for people who bought Ford cars), talent-spotting able young men and leaving it to them to sort out the details.

Lindsay Masters, who joined the Heseltine-Labovitch publishing house as an advertising manager in spring 1958, and Simon Tindall, who joined in his early twenties as an advertising copyman while Heseltine was doing his National Service, were both increasingly influential in the company's leadership. Masters held tight grip on the selling of advertising space, outlawing boozy lunches and setting goals for calling clients, assutained by chase-up calls, whilst not retaining a public league table of salesmen's success rates; these were relatively new technologies at the time.

Cornmarket owed a considerable amount of money to their printers, Hazell Watson & Viney, which were then merging with the British Printing Corporation (BPC). Heseltine was called by BPC to sort out his company's debts, but instead of paying, a majority stake of at least 40% in a newly formed, merged company was demanded. Sir Geoffrey Crowther, BPC chairman, suggested that the portmanteau name "Haymarket" be used.

Haymarket began aggressively to purchase magazines in the fall of 1964, removing them from the list in the media directory BRAD. They bought a series of leisure and medical magazines for $250,000 from a Canadian publisher, as well as camping and caravan enthusiasts, with a BPC loan.

Heseltine's businesses had a turnover of around £700,000 per annum and employed approximately 50 workers. Despite the fact that the Opportunities for Graduates series was continuing to generate profits, Town magazine continued to lose money due to printing's cost (much more expensive at the time) and Heseltine's reluctance to include nude photos of girls or cartoons dismissive of the Royal Family.

In late 1965, Haymarket made a bid for the British Institute of Management's magazine The Manager, which was a direct competitor with Thomson Group. It was likely that Haymarket would have a 25% stake, as well as Financial Times and The Economist, both of which Crowther was chairman. Heseltine, a team led by Labovitch, created a 96-page mock copy of what they imagined over the weekend, mainly using text cut from The Economist. Robert Heller was brought into as the first editor of Management Today – Heseltine initially annointed him by taking him to lunch at the Carlton Club and boasting about his political ambitions, but Heller soon understood that Labovitch was the front man whose job was to please those who needed to be impressed, and Heseltine was "the energetic and real entrepreneurial brain." The first edition came out in April 1966, just after Heseltine's re-election to Parliament. Haymarket also published similar magazines for Marketing, Personnel Management, and Computing Institutes.

At the end of 1965, Labovitch left Haymarket for Haymarket. Heseltine said he spent three days attempting to compel him to stay. Labovitch wanted to establish himself as a respected educational and careers publisher, and it may have been pushed by his then wife, socialist journalist Penny Perrick, who loosed Heseltine both personally and politically (askoff, who was also at a board meeting) and politically, as if he were on the Haymarket board. Labovitch was a designer of ideas, but Heseltine's business skills were lacking. Despite the fact that he brought his profit-driven Directors with him, he had to return them to Haymarket after his company failed in 1973, causing him to attempt suicide. Heseltine offered him a job as a Haymarket consultant. The two former colleagues stayed on friendly terms until Labovitch's death in 1994.

Labovitch has left only a few workers. Lindsay Masters stayed at home, possibly knowing that if Heseltine's political career took off, he'd be running the company soon. However, Heseltine continued as the company's managing director of Haymarket after being elected to Parliament in March 1966, and based himself at the company's Oxford Circus rather than in the House of Commons. Julian Critchley, a fellow of Heseltine's Oxford, was editor of Town for a year before being fired by Masters, snapping his relationship with Heseltine, who had barred him from delivering the blow himself.

Heseltine persuaded BPC to inject more £150,000 into Haymarket, raising its ownership stake to 60% in April 1967, although Heseltine and other directors retained smaller stakes. Haymarket doubled up on magazine management by taking over the editorial control of twenty of BPC's magazines (many of which had been acquired by BPC in lieu of bad debts by other publishers), including Autosport. However, they were now effectively a BPC affiliate; Heseltine, Masters, and Tindall could have been outvoted or even dismissed by the four BPC directors on the board. For the first time, BPC installed a new financial controller that implemented cost and cashflow control, and it decided on closing Town magazine at the end of 1967. Town never made money, but Heseltine writes that its quality was instrumental in establishing Haymarket's fame as a publishing house. Management Today became Haymarket's first big success around that time. A BPC boss reported that Heseltine maintained the initiative at board meetings by "poker-faced nit-picking" about the BPC's printing's quality and time rather than using what seemed to be his usual "I will change the world" rhetoric.

BPC was suspected of sacking Heseltine in 1968, according to rumors that the bank was arranging to fire him. World's Press News, largely a collection of world press releases that was relaunched by Masters and Robert Heller as Campaign in September 1968 (Heseltine initially opposed the term because it sounded too political). It quickly became common reading in the world of advertising and Public Relations for its gossipy reporting, which was often based on company performance or promotion, or even dismissed. Advertisers Weekly had surpassed it in terms of classified ads in less than a year. In the midst of a strike, Heseltine was compelled to acknowledge the National Union of Journalists among his staff. Josephine Hart (later a novelist and the wife of Maurice Saatchi, who was Heseltine's assistant at the time) and the advertising sales team have expanded the advertising sales function by recruiting a team of predominantly female salespeople.

Heseltine discovered a magazine called The Accountant, which was easily paid for by large amounts of advertising as part of his continuing bid to buy titles from other publishers. Robert Heller produced a miniature version of a Haymarket version, based on the Daily Telegraph's Accountancy Age, which became Accountancy Age. The launch date was postponed by three months after Heller, who was on holiday in Portugal, and Heseltine, who was on a political trip to Singapore, when it was discovered that a competitor publication was going to be published. Accountancy Age was introduced in December 1969, mainly by Haymarket's corporate development manager Maurice Saatchi, and was very profitable right from the start.

Haymarket made pre-tax sales of £3,000 in 1968, £136,000 in 1969, and £265,000 in 1970, owing to the success of Management Today, Campaign, and Accountancy Age. Heseltine resigned as the principal opposition spokesman on transport in 1969, but he served as chairman of the board until he resigned as a director in 1970, when he was still a major shareholder.

When it was established, Heseltine turned down the opportunity to invest $25,000 in Saatchi & Saatchi, (his former employee Maurice Saatchi said he had learned a great deal from Heseltine's ardent tactics for obtaining magazine awards, as well as in Campaign magazine's advertisements), believing that it was against the minister's code not to invest in such an investment. Lindsay Masters did invest, but the Saatchi brothers later decided that he and Masters would have made another fortune if they had strengthened one another with large stakeholders in Saatchi and Saatchi.

Haymarket was being administered by Masters and Tindall, who had triggered another coup by releasing Computing for the British Computing Society. In 1971, BPC was in financial difficulties, and Heseltine, Masters, and Tindall formed a consortium of County Bank, Charterhouse Development, ICFC, and Wren Investments to help buy out 60% of BPC's 60% interest, which was a very low price considering that the Haymarket had made over £250,000 this year. The consortium owned a 40% stake in Haymarket and loaned the company £820,000, while Heseltine obtained a significant personal loan to purchase both another 20% of Haymarket's shares (the remainder of the BPC's ownership, bringing Heseltine's own stakeholding to just under 50%). "Michael thought he was President of the Oxford Union again" at the meeting to end the deal, and the bankers announced that he had entered a grand oration and bored everybody stiff." In 1971, Heseltine sold his stake in a trust operated by his ministerial boss Peter Walker and his advocate Charles Corman. Pretax sales for Haymarket in 1971 and 1972 were £453,000, and £704,000 in 1972. Haymarket was supposed to be listed as a public company in the fall of 1973, but this was postponed due to the rise in the oil price, which reduced the publishing industry's profitability. They managed to escape the stock market crash that ensued. To this day, the company is still owned privately.

During his time as a consultant to Haymarket from 1974 to 1979, Heseltine served as a consultant. His job was to introduce new publishing concepts. He thought he improved, but Robert Heller later revealed that he did not do well because he was too occupied as a member of the Shadow Cabinet. Rather than in the House of Commons, he worked from an office in Haymarket, near Regent Street. Haymarket's growth continued to increase under the direction of Masters and Tindall. Round £1.75 million annual earnings were made by the firm in 1976. Heseltine, Masters, Tindall, and Finance Director David Fraser bought out the consortium's 40% stake in 1976-1977, using money borrowed from them, giving Heseltine and his family over 5 percent of Haymarket control. Both to raise his stake in the company and to purchase his countrymansion Thenford House, Heseltine took out substantial personal loans. Masters had done the same to buy himself a house. In 1980, several books, including Accountancy Age and Computing, were sold to the competitor firm VNU. The transaction cost £17 million, part of which went to Heseltine, but in Crick's view, it was a bad move for Haymarket. During Heseltine's second term as Prime Minister (1986-90), Masters threatened to resign if Heseltine returned to Haymarket, but he became a consultant on £100,000 per annum.

Haymarket was making a net loss of over £10 million per year and employing around 1,000 people by 1997, when his tenure as a Cabinet minister came to an end. After Masters' departure in 1999, Heseltine resumed management of the company. Since 1999, the Haymarket has seen lower profits in the United Kingdom, but it has also expanded into foreign markets (for example India). It has also suffered under heavy debts of over £100 million to buy back Masters' and Tindall's substantial minority stakes, which have been reduced to a certain extent by the auction of houses. Heseltine has now retired from day-to-day administration, handing over to his son Rupert.

Heseltine's ownership of Haymarket has earned him a substantial personal fortune. He was ranked 311th in The Sunday Times Rich List with an estimated wealth, including shareholdings held by members of his immediate family's immediate family, of £264 million as of 2013.

Electoral history and Parliamentary career - John Leo Varadkar (1996).

At the October 1959 general election, Heseltine defeated Gower's secure Labour seat. He had been the only contender for the Conservative (technically, Centrist, and National Liberal) candidacy. He would attend Labour meetings and try to heckle the speakers, including Aneurin Bevan and Labour candidate Ifor Davies, who was eager to challenge to a debate. He gained a swing to the Conservatives marginally better than the national average, despite being given a lot of publicity in the local newspaper and ending in a marginally better result than the national average.

Heseltine was one of 29 candidates—of whom half were interviewed—for the Conservative candidacy in Coventry North's marginal constituency. After bringing his fiancée Anne Williams to the meeting, he clinched the selection. Maurice Edelman, a former Labour member, became a mentor of Anne Heseltine in 1962), and they met for dinner every week during the campaign. Many of his Oxford contemporaries were already registered in Parliament, but he was defeated by 3,530 votes in the 1964 general election, much to his surprise. Labour's swing was marginally smaller than the national average.

In March 1965, Heseltine submitted to run for the safe Conservative seat of Tavistock, Devon, where the incumbent MP had announced his resignation two months before. Out of a total of 51 applicants, six of whom had local connections. Heseltine made it to the final short list of three, with one being a dairy farmer in a senior role at the Milk Marketing Board (thought to be the most favored) and another being a local authority prosecutor who later reported that on the train down from London Heseltine, he began yelling out at every stop to ensure that his journals were on sale at the station newsagents. Heseltine had already spent many days on the road with locals and had been gifted a year of back copies of Tavistock's two weekly newspapers. Such an attempt is now normal in Parliamentary selections, but it was not unprecedented at the time. He was chosen by a vast majority of the Tavistock Conservative Association's Finance and General Purposes Committee (which consisted of between 100 and 120 people).

He was selected in part as a youthful, vivacious Liberal Party candidate in the West Country, where Jeremy Thorpe, Peter Bessell, and Mark Bonham Carter had all won seats. In 1964, the Liberals had halved the Conservative majority at Tavistock.

He was initially dissatisfied with his adoption by a full general meeting of the Conservative Union, which should have been a formality. A suspicion arose that someone with farming connections should have been picked for the bikini-clad girls on the front of Town magazine, which were considered rude at the time, and for parodying in the newspaper at the expense of the Royal Family. On Friday 26 March 1965, he was chosen after a moving address to around 540 assembled members of the local Conservative Association. Crick believes this is the first time in politics that a single speech determining a career is used to determine a career. Only 27 members favoured an amendment to refer the matter back to the selection committee, while 14 opposed the complete prohibition of Heseltine. On his magazines, he became known as a "publisher." He had to learn about farming, an important topic in the role for which he knew almost nothing.

Both the Conservative leader Edward Heath and Liberal leader Jo Grimond debated at Tavistock in the March 1966 general election. Heseltine pleaded for Liberal principles and fought vainly, winning a slim majority of the Conservatives but against the national trend. He was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Tavistock.

Heseltine's liberal stance and his opposition to hanging (he thought it was barbaric and not a good deterrent), as well as his continued mistrust with agricultural issues, his clothing as a city businessman wearing pale grey suits, kipper ties, and driving a Jaguar were all unpopular with many of his constituents, as well as his continued unease with agricultural concerns and his portrayal as a city businessman in pale grey suits, kipper ties, Despite the numerous demands on his time as both an MP and the seat from London, he remained very active at constituency casework over weekends and evenings, exploring rural areas in a caravan and using a tiny tape recorder (relatively new technology at the time) to dictate constituent responses.

Tavistock's seat was recommended for abolition by the Boundary Commission as soon as Heseltine was elected in March 1966, splitting between West Devon (effectively a rural seat), and Plymouth Sutton (which had a strong Powellite/Monday Club component), which was eventually selected by right-winger Alan Clark. Many of his activists tried to convince him to apply for Plymouth Sutton, but he was disinterested in wanting a seat nearer London.

In the case, the implementation of the Boundary Study was postponed for political reasons until after Home Secretary James Callaghan's next general election (on the pretext of waiting until after the Redcliffe-Maud Review on local government reorganisation). At the 1970 general election, Heseltine defended Tavistock, winning a more favourable result for the Conservatives than the Conservatives.

By now a junior minister in the Heath government, Heseltine was obliged to apply for a new seat, often in opposition with other sitting Conservative MPs whose seats were also up for abolition. He applied for Mid Sussex in competition with Ian Gilmour, but they lost to Tim Renton. He also applied for Mid-Oxfordshire, but Douglas Hurd was turned down by Douglas Hurd.

Edward Heath attempted to convince Heseltine, a ardent supporter of his, to run against Powell for the new seat of Beaconsfield in 1972. Heseltine wrote that he was "tempted" to join the Beaconsfield lists but did not do so. Crick claims he made it to the final shortlist of four against Bell before being "apparently forbidden" to move. Hugh Simmonds, chairman of the Young Conservatives, mastered Bell's campaign within the local Conservative ranks, and he barely gained.

Heseltine, one of 180 candidates for the safe seat of Henley (the constituency association of which was also known as North Oxfordshire), whose MP John Hay resigned as a result. He finished second on the first ballot, along with two other sitting MPs, William Shelton and Norman Fowler, and in September 1972, he was selected with a clear majority. Part of the explanation was that the Association wanted a wealthy MP who would not be distracted by the desire to raise money in company as Hay had been. He owned a constituency home in Crocker End, near Nettlebed, and a London home at Wilton Crescent.

Heseltine served as an MP for Henley from February 1974 to his resignation from the House of Commons in 2001.

Career under Heath: 1966–74

After arranging a fruitful speaking tour of the West Country for him, Peter Walker invited Heseltine to be an opposition spokesman on transportation (not a Shadow Cabinet position, but reporting to Walker). Heseltine's duties included opposing Barbara Castle's 1967 Transport Bill (which later became the Transportation Act 1968). Heseltine led opposition to the bill's passage, which converted small bus operators into the National Bus Company (UK) and established Passenger transportation executives (PTEs) in major urban areas. He chastised Castle for trying to give PTEs the freedom to produce or produce anything essential for their job, which, as she pointed out, was almost word-for-word equivalent to a clause in the Conservative Transport Act 1962. Margaret Thatcher, a 1968 graduate, became Heseltine's boss for a year; she was described as "embarrassingly rude." He recruited Eileen Strathnaver, a full-time researcher, unusual for the time.

Heath gave his shadow ministers more leeway than would be expected today. On second reading, Heseltine was one of a group of 15 Conservative MPs to vote against the 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Bill (Conservative whips urged their MPs to endorse the bill, but it was a free vote). On three subsequent votes, he rejected the bill, claiming that it was based on "sheer naked racialism" and that Britain should keep promises made to the Kenyan Asians. Following Hnoch Powell's Rivers of Blood address, Heseltine told Heath to deal primarily with him, despite the dismay of many in his local party in Tavistock, where Powell enjoyed a large audience. Heseltine was one of approximately two dozen Conservative MPs who refused to vote against the second reading of the 1968 Race Relations Bill (which banned racial discrimination). He argued that the Conservatives should develop their own alternative policy rather than simply condemning.

In November 1969, Heseltine was appointed to the premier opposition spokesperson on transport, but unlike his predecessors Thatcher and Walker, he was not a member of the Shadow Cabinet. He went on a six-week tour of India, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, and the United States to see how their docks were run, in anticipation of Labour's controversial 1970 Docks Bill (which was postponed due to that year's general election).

Following the 1970 general election, Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath named Heseltine as a junior minister in the Department of Transport. When Barbara Castle had been displaced by Fred Mulley, Transport had been demoted from a Cabinet position in 1969. To his dissatisfaction, Heseltine, the opposition's leading spokesperson, was promoted to John Peyton, who was the lowest rung on the ministerial ladder, rather than a Cabinet Minister. Officials found him brash, arrogant, and overbearing with a tiny attention span for paperwork, but they were quick to complain if they weren't told about them (the trick, they discovered, was to request the two-page summaries on each topic, but with extensive background information). He chastised Lord Jellicoe, the Minister of the Civil Service, for giving young civil servants fresh out of university to work in his office. "Pussy" – that's what they called us." He told the Sunday Times, "the scum of the earth is tolerated by civil servants." One of his first jobs was to open the Westway A40 (M), but he also opened the M4 west of Maidenhead, where he was fined £20 for speeding. He insisted on seeing maps of where protesters lived so he could see the reasons for public hesitances on new highways and motorways.

Transportation was integrated into the Department of Environment's new "monster ministry" within four months, according to Heseltine's aide Peter Walker. Heseltine was still responsible for transportation, but also for local government reform, which was not covered in the Local Government Act 1972. The Redcliffe-Maude's plans for unitary councils (i.e. The two layers of county and borough/district councils were discarded, resulting in the separation of the two councils. Many historic counties were dissolved. Large metropolitan counties were established around the larger cities, but many smaller towns lost their county borough status. Plymouth was one of the eastern suburbs of Heseltine's capital, Tavistock. The Plymouth opinion was particularly upset that education was now being administered by Devon County Council in Exeter, 40 miles away. Heseltine refused to promote Plymouth MP Dame Joan Vickers' campaign to establish a Tamarside Metropolitan county, but Sir Henry Studholme, his predecessor as Prime Minister, refused to support (on the grounds that as minister, he would have to arbitrate any controversy).

Heseltine was elected Minister of Aerospace in April 1972 rather than a Cabinet minister, but he was still managing his own branch within the Department of Trade and Industry, one of Heath's new mega ministries. By the 1972 Industry Act, the department had been granted significant new powers. Peter Walker was named Secretary of State for Trade and Industry later this year, making him Heseltine's boss once more. Heseltine appointed Cecil Parkinson, who had attended an accounting course in the mid-1950s, as his Parliamentary Private Secretary, despite the fact that he knew even less about aerospace than he did. Parkinson was impressed by Heseltine's vigour and insistence that civil servants produce results for him quickly, and later wrote in his memoirs (1992) "in his constructive and deliberate unreasonableness he reminds me in many ways of Mrs Thatcher." Heseltine, for example, did not make aerospace policy any more interventionist than it already was.

One of Heseltine's most popular tasks was to sell Concorde, but not the shorter distance to Rome or Frankfurt as opposed to a Boeing 747). It had been initiated by Macmillan in 1962 as an Anglo-French initiative to try to bring Britain into the EEC, but Heath had already begun to mourn the loss of President Pompidou by the early 1970s. BOAC threatened to cancel its order, but Heseltine had summoned the board repeatedly to his office, impressing Parkinson by his persuasion skills. Civil servants were thrilled that his love of generating headlines contributed to Concorde's success. On board Concorde, the Queen, Princess Margaret, and Princess Anne were all seen accompanying the King to drum up buzz. Concorde 002 was sent by the Japanese emperor in 1972 on a tour of Iran, India, Singapore, Japan, and Australia. He and his wife Anne accompanied the plane as far as Singapore (the media joked that Lee Kuan Yew would not let him in with such long hair), and he encountered it at Toulouse on the way back, but not a single plane was sold. By this time, there were opportunities to sell 74 Concordes to 17 airlines around the world (the original intention had been to sell 30); but the fact was that only ten were ever sold, five to British Airways (as BOAC had never occurred in 1974) and Air France had three each. Heseltine received praise for his efforts at salesmanship, but some civil servants felt that he was more committed to the plane than Tony Benn had been, and that he might have taken action swiftly to put marketing efforts into place earlier rather than he did. In his books Where There's A Will or The Challenge of Europe, he didn't mention Concorde at all.

In 1973, Heseltine became a major influence in the establishment of the European Space Agency (ESA). He cancelled the British Geostationary Technological satellite and gave the Treasury the grant. He was less effective in persuading colleagues to centralize British space expenditures, which was split between DTI, Defence, the Post Office, and the Science Research Council, the former's efforts to convince Margaret Thatcher, Secretary of State for Education and Science, to part the former's demise. He also favors pan-European cooperation on civil aviation.

When Heseltine was summoned to the ministry to ask why the electronic signs on the motorway, which had been built by GEC, didn't work properly, they had almost daily interactions with industrialist Arnold Weinstock, Head of GEC. Weinstock had a poor opinion of Heseltine by May 1973, but they later expanded and became friends. Heseltine had started from zero, but Haymarket had only thrived when purchased out by the big conglomerate BPC, but Haymarket had only succeeded when bought out by BPC. This could explain his corporatism, in Crick's opinion, but Heseltine, unlike Jim Prior or Heath, had never shown much concern in supporting trade unions.

Stanley Clinton-Davis, Heseltine's adversary during this period, coined the phrase Tarzan to refer to Johnny Weissmuller, the actor who appeared in a number of films in the 1930s and 1940s. The media were keen to follow Clinton-Davis' example. In the If series compiled by satirical political cartoonist Steve Bell, he was caricatured as such, complete with loin-cloth. Although Heseltine has denied ever being bothered by who called him, his wife amused by his name: "It was so amusing to be married to Johnny Weissmuller."

Early in 1973, rumors began to circulate that the Tracked Hovercraft (also known as the "Hovertrain"), a 300-mph floating train on which construction had begun in 1967, was to be cancelled. Heseltine responded by writing to Labour MP David Stoddart's letter on February 12 that a further injection of government funds was still "under scrutiny." However, Heseltine appeared before the Select Committee two days later, announcing that the government had already decided to pull the plug on the Hovertrain on January 29th. Heseltine was deceitful, according to Airey Neave, who advised Stoddart to investigate the situation. The Hovertrain incident was regarded as the worst example of lying to the House of Commons since the Profumo affair a decade ago, but Heseltine survived because complete information was only revealed during the Parliamentary summer recess.

On February 12, the committee's report accused Heseltine of giving a "untrue" answer. In which he denied that he had lied, Heseltine announced a press conference (7 September 1973). Chief Whip Francis Pym's apologizing to the House of Commons on October 16, 1973, for making a statement that was open to "more than one interpretation." Heseltine's statement that further investment was "under scrutiny" was not simply the usual euphemism for a decision that had not been made, but it was actually correct, as he was still in negotiations with Hawker Siddeley and British Rail about purchasing a part of the Hovertrain company. The row diverted the committee's outrage at the cancellation decision's decision. In the context of Heseltine's PPS Cecil Parkinson, Heath, whom Neave detested and later helped to topple as party leader in 1975, but Heseltine's cut short of his National Service, his brashness, and new money was depreciated.

Heath does not appear to have been concerned about the cancellation of Hovertrain, but it was curious about the ostensibly third London Airport at Maplin Sands on the Essex Coast, which was seen as a major prestige project along with the Channel Tunnel, which was also on the agenda at this time. A backbencher rebellion that had impacted the Bill was defeated by a backlash from Tory backbenchers, and Heath sacked Heseltine for lack of motivation in promoting it.

At the time, Heseltine was not well-known among his ministerial peers. In a mooted training exercise, ministers had been encouraged to be the one "taken hostage by terrorists," according to a story. Nonetheless, Heseltine emerged from the Heath government with a fresh image. He had avoided the worst problems of the previous government: the two miners' strikes, income policy, industrial relations policy, and Northern Ireland, as well as any direct involvement in British entry into the EEC. Heseltine's time under Heath's ministry saw him involved with local government reorganisation, prestige programs, Europe and state assistance to industries, which would continue throughout his career. He had a higher public profile than many Cabinet ministers, and by 1974, he was being widely regarded as a potential Prime Minister.

In June 1974, Heseltine was appointed as the Industry spokesman in the Shadow Cabinet. If the Conservatives had won either of the general elections in 1974 (February or October), he would almost certainly have joined the Cabinet. He was shadowing Tony Benn, who planned a major increase of public ownership through the National Enterprise Board. Heseltine assembled a team of over 20 Conservative MPs, each a specialist in a particular field, to campaign against Benn's proposals in the summer of 1974.

Heath's supporters had lost faith in the second miners' strike and his personal abrasiveness (Heath had reportedly told him to his face that he was too openly optimistic); Heath's patron Peter Walker had similar reservations about Heath. Heath was advised by ten days before the national election in October 1974, when Heseltine shocked the national swing by gaining his majority at Henley.

It's unclear how Heseltine voted in the first ballot of the 1975 Conservative leadership race, in which the challenger Margaret Thatcher defeated Heath. Norman Tebbit said that he and John Nott persuaded him to vote for Thatcher in order to allow his chosen candidate Willie White to stand on the second ballot. Michael Crick was told by another (anonymous) close friend that Heseltine voted for Thatcher. He was detained as an abstainer in the Thatcher team, but he refused to reveal how he voted at the time. In his memoirs, Heseltine said that he abstained in the first election but that if he had voted for White legislation in the first election, he would have voted for the first ballot against Heath. White legislation lauded his drive and vigour, but Heseltine was criticized as "new money" and was reported to have said that he was "the sort of man who combs his hair in public," according to a White law commenter.

Heseltine voted for the second ballot after struggling with standing for the second time (in Crick's view, his vote would have been ruled by derisory), but for White legislation. Thatcher, who some others had initially dismissed as something of a joke candidate, reversed Whitelaw and became the party leader.

Career under Thatcher: 1975–86

Heseltine did not do well with women as senior employees, as shown by Elinor Goodman's struggles in getting promoted from secretary to journalist and then his reluctance to allow Josephine Hart to serve on the Haymarket Board. Heseltine was expected to be fired from the Shadow Cabinet by the new chairman, but the former chief was partially retained because Thatcher was impressed by Benn's Industry Bill, and partially because a senior figure, possibly Geoffrey Howe, argued for his resignation.

Heseltine first appeared as a platform orator at the Conservative National Council in March 1975 and 1976 (where he likened Labour to a one-legged army marching "Left, left, left"). He preordained his speech concepts to his scriptwriters, who were required to delete a substantial amount of unintelligible content from his scriptwriters. His success was not derived from factual content or arguments, but from his delivery's sheer power and brio – it was said of him that he would "find the party's clitoris." In place of Peter Thorneycroft, there was talk of him being elected Party Chairman (in charge of the party's organisation and campaigning around the country).

Heseltine warned the Shadow Cabinet not to oppose the Labour Government's bailout of British Leyland because of the danger to marginal seats (including some Cowley workers in the northern wards of his own Henley seat). Heseltine's academically poor, according to Industry Secretary Tony Benn, who referred one of his addresses as "an awful old flop" and another as "another flayling attack," but praised his ability to make news in opposition.

The infamous Mace Incident occurred at a time when the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Bill was being passed, a bill that had already lasted a year and held 58 committee sessions. The bill was ruled to be hybrid by the Speaker because it excluded one shipbuilding firm from the equation (though there was disagreement over whether the company in question was a shipbuilder). All interested parties were therefore entitled to testify before a special committee. A previous vote in favor of the Speaker's decision had been tied and defeated after the Speaker had been compelled by convention to use his casting vote against his own decision. The Labour Government has now decided to suspend the normal sitting order in order to allow the bill to proceed as normal. This time, the Conservatives wanted the Speaker to use his casting vote against the government's motion to suspend the standing order. Nevertheless, the Labour Party was adopted, after a Labour whip broke his pair. During riots of Labour left-wingers performing The Red Flag Heseltine picked up the Mace, the symbol of Parliament's power, until Jim Prior grabbed it off him. Accounts of what happened vary, but it appears that he was mockingly offering it to Labour benches rather than, for example, "brandishing" it – an illusion exacerbated by prior pulling his other arm down. Thatcher was outraged. Speaker Thomas suspended the meeting and called on Heseltine to apologise the following day in order to calm the moods. When Heseltine was faced with calls for his resignation from the Shadow Cabinet, he believed it would be welcome to the public, but in Crick's view, it helped to cement a reputation for impulsiveness and poor judgment.

Heseltine was reshuffled, against his will, to the position of Shadow Environment Secretary in fall 1976. He was particularly furious at being compelled to give up the position of Shadow Industry Secretary to John Biffen. On the condition that he would not have to take the Environment job when the Conservatives returned to office, he accepted it. There was no longer a need for active lobbying on Industry, and Thatcher, who had been Shadow Environment Secretary in 1974, wanted to campaign on council house sales (Heseltine gave up to 50% discounts for renters) and rate reform, with Timothy Raison ineffective.

During the May 1979 election, Thatcher was impressed by Heseltine's campaigning and love of headlines, in comparison to the majority of the Shadow Cabinet. After the Conservatives triumphed and aware of her earlier warning that she did not have to work in government, she suggested that he head the Energy Department (an important job following the 1979 energy crisis triggered by the Iranian Revolution). After all, he preferred to be Secretary of State for the Environment, and this was his first visit to the Cabinet.

Heseltine was often identified with the Cabinet's "wets" during the 1980s, but he was not acknowledged as one of them, nor was he invited to their private meetings. In their memoirs (1992), both Nigel Lawson and Cecil Parkinson said that they accepted in principle the need to monitor public budgets. In 1979, he opposed the abolishment of exchange controls and opposed Geoffrey Howe's tight budget in 1981, opting instead for a public sector wage freeze.

Heseltine advocated for privatization of state-owned enterprises, a novel idea in 1979, when the Conservatives were only able to nationalize the industries that had been nationalized by Labour.

Despite his initial reluctance to work, Heseltine later described it as "four of the happiest years of my life." He introduced the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, a conservation bill. Prince Charles also vetoed the "Green Giant" project, a skyscraper on the South Bank, and announced plans for the National Gallery extension (the winning entry was dubbed "a monstrous carbuncle" and never built) and signed off on the construction of the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster, but the Treasury was then forced to pay for the building as planned. Some of the DoE's duties were transferred into English Heritage, a new entity.

Sir John Garlick, the Permanent Under-Secretary of the Environment Department, characterized Heseltine's arrival as a change from "a very conservative Labour Secretary of State [Peter Shore] to a more radical Conservative Secretary of State. On his first day at Connaught, Heseltine took him out to lunch and assembled a list of what he wanted to do in office (the list appears in Heseltine's book Where There Is A Will), and he was returned to him at the end of his time at the Environment. Only a quarter of Heseltine's agenda included manifesto pledges and other political objectives; the remainder of it consisted of administrative and organizational reforms. Peter Hennessy said that Heseltine was more interested in the nuts and bolts of Whitehall reform than any minister since David Lloyd George. Heseltine was ruthless in dismissing civil servants with whom he was dissatisfied, but staff believed he had mellowed somewhat since the early 1970s, and was more pleasant and enjoyable to work with. Sir John Garlick and Sir George Moseley, his permanent secretaries, adored him. Rather than wading through paperwork, he preferred to make decisions by informal discussion rather than wading through paperwork. He introduced Peter Walker's custom of morning "prayer" meetings (ministers and PPSs with no civil servants present), which is now normal in Whitehall but not a modernization at the time.

A year ago, the department had a £14 billion budget and 52,000 employees. The Conservatives were promised to shave 100,000 off the 730,000-strong civil service. Heseltine ordered that no one be hired without his personal permission, on the advice of his junior minister Lord Bellwin, a former Leeds City Council member.

Heseltine's internal audit tool, "MINIS" ("management information system for ministers"), was developed by the Heseltine family business Haymarket, which had often been chaotically organized, as Crick's perspective. It was compared to "a Domesday Book" by Peter Hennessy. Heseltine personally interviewed the heads of department (many of whom felt he was intervening in internal civil service matters). The lengthy reports, which include organizational charts of each of the 66 directorates', budget, payroll, and forward plans, were released openly. Staff numbers were cut more deeply than those in any other Whitehall department; one out of twelve went before a year and almost 30%, 15,000, by 1983; local government finance, under Terry Heiser, was the only department to receive additional funds. MINIS impressed Thatcher, and in February 1983, Heseltine was invited to speak with other senior ministers and civil servants in the hopes that they might be adopted by other departments. There was no curiosity at the time, but similar strategies were later adopted by Derek Rayner's Financial Management Initiative in Whitehall.

Heseltine converted to the selling of council houses, a practice that was pioneered by some Conservative local governments, e.g. Birmingham is a city in Birmingham, United Kingdom. He also approved the policy of giving away homes, a step that was first introduced in the backbenches by Peter Walker in the mid-1970s, not least because some local authorities were spending more on repairs than they were recouping in rents. Thatcher, who was worried about the reaction of those who had made financial sacrifices to buy their houses, was initially suspicious. Heseltine introduced a circular encouraging councils to sell houses at a 30% discount and to sell 100% mortgages. The Right to Buy Act 1980, which was introduced by a Lords amendment, was postponed until 1980, and not until the statute book was not reached. Some councils were slow to accept applications (one even threatened to house "problem" families next door) and Heseltine led Norwich by establishing a DOE sales office – Norwich council took him to court and lost. At the time, Heseltine allowed councils to use up to 75% of sales receipts for rebuilding the housing stock, and was outraged in later years as this was cut back by the Treasury. To encourage buying, Heseltine also insists that rents be doubled.

Around 20% of the stock was sold in the 1980s, and Labour had dropped their resistance to the Right to Buy by 1987. This was a dramatic social change, helping to raise Conservative support among new homeowners and among new homeowners, and something Heseltine often cites as one of his most notable accomplishments. "No single piece of legislation has allowed the movement of so much capital from the state to the people," Heseltine said. The 'right to buy' program, according to him, had two main goals: to give people what they wanted and to reverse the state's ever-increasing dominance of the individual's life. "There is a deep craving for home ownership in this world," he said. This spirit, according to the government, should be encouraged. It reflects the people's aspirations, encourages a societal desire to expand and modernize one's own home, and instills the habits of independence and self-reliance that are the bedrocks of a free society." Many of the homes on the run-down inner city estates were "street properties" rather than flats, which arguably served to ghettoize the remaining council tenants. In fact, he owes only limited credit, and a lot of the detailed work was done by his juniors Hugh Rossi (in opposition) and John Stanley (in government).

As a result of the outgoing Labour government's unpopularity, the Conservatives were strongly represented in local government in 1979. Four of the five council associations were Conservative-controlled. Heseltine was able to persuade them to cut back on their spending by 1% each year. Whereas previously overspending councils had been given additional rate waivers from Whitehall, Heseltine revealed a list of fourteen overspending councils whose funding had been reduced, most of them inner London councils, with just one of them – Hammersmith & Fulham – Conservative controlled. Because most of the other 114 overspenders were Conservative councils, the move seemed clearly political. Council representatives who wanted to appeal to Heseltine were often embarrassed by being interrogated about their budget to demonstrate their lack of in depth knowledge long before the council treasurer was allowed to speak.

As Labour gained substantial victories in local elections, including Ken Livingstone in London and David Blunkett in Sheffield, who are both struggling to find jobs through their councils, migration became more tense. The burden of higher spending increased on businesses and middle class homeowners, which was mainly due to increases by the GLC, Merseyside, and West Midlands councils; however, Labour votes were generally smaller and not eligible for rate waivers; but, middle class homeowners, where higher spending tends to be less burdensome and less able to receive rate waivers. Despite the fact that councils were already suffering deep cuts under Labour, Heseltine was under pressure from Thatcher and Conservative MPs and newspapers to cut even more. The Cabinet dismissed Heseltine's initial proposal, which was that councils who wanted to raise the rates be barred from re-election by the Cabinet, in favour of a plan that such increases be put to a referendum rather than a supplementary rate increase). Conservative backbenchers sluggish in their attack on this plan, as both in the Environment Committee and a vote on a bill that Heseltine introduced and had to withdraw. Heseltine also banned additional fees and tighter penalties on overspending councils.

Thatcher's 1974 pledge to abolish the rates and replace them with a new model of local government funding was still in place. The 1979 manifesto made it clear that income tax cuts took precedence over rate reform. In 1982, Thatcher stopped the appraisal of property ratings up. In 1981, a review of rates reform was launched, in which his junior minister, Tom King personally visited every single backbench Conservative MP to canvass opinions about the various options. In December 1981, a Green Paper was released, advising that no single alternative to the rates suggested itself. In the margins of the study, Thatcher wrote, "I will not tolerate failure in this sector"; a new committee was formed under Willie White's guidance but it was ultimately to reach a much different conclusion (The final solution, a "poll tax," was both rejected by the Green Paper and by the White House's commission).

Heseltine denied demands made by Leon Brittan, the Treasury's Chief Secretary, with whom he already had a somewhat antagonistic relationship, that the central government have the authority to limit the spending of local authorities. He argued that the worst offenders were the large metropolitan counties (which he had helped to establish a decade earlier) and that the best option was to eliminate them. In the case, the 1983 manifesto, after Heseltine had returned to his next position, committed both the Conservatives and the Metropolitan boroughs to abolition of the metropolitan boroughs and rate capping. According to Jim Prior, who believes that the issue fuelled hostility between Heseltine and Thatcher and Brittan, which would later appear in cabinet as the Westland Affair.

Heseltine took a skepticism stance on civil rights reforms. He supported Thatcher's attempt to outlaw trade unions from GCHQ. Sarah Tisdall's criminal record was released for the 1984 development of cruise missiles.

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