Draft:Early life and career of Michael Heseltine (1933 - 1975)

Main article: Michael Heseltine

For the senior civil servant and General Medical Council Registrar, see Michael Heseltine (civil servant).

The Right Honourable The Lord Heseltine CH PC
Official portrait, 2007
Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
In office 5 July 1995 – 2 May 1997
Prime Minister	John Major
Preceded by	Geoffrey Howe
Succeeded by	John Prescott
First Secretary of State
In office 5 July 1995 – 2 May 1997
Prime Minister	John Major
Preceded by	Barbara Castle
Succeeded by	John Prescott
Secretary of State for Trade and Industry President of the Board of Trade
In office 11 April 1992 – 5 July 1995
Prime Minister	John Major
Preceded by	Peter Lilley
Succeeded by	Ian Lang
Secretary of State for the Environment
In office 28 November 1990 – 11 April 1992
Prime Minister	John Major
Preceded by	Chris Patten
Succeeded by	Michael Howard
In office 5 May 1979 – 6 January 1983
Prime Minister	Margaret Thatcher
Preceded by	Peter Shore
Succeeded by	Tom King
Secretary of State for Defence
In office 6 January 1983 – 9 January 1986
Prime Minister	Margaret Thatcher
Preceded by	John Nott
Succeeded by	George Younger
Junior ministerial offices Minister of State for Aerospace and Shipping In office 24 March 1972 – 4 March 1974 Prime Minister Edward Heath Preceded by Frederick Corfield Succeeded by Stanley Clinton Davis Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment In office 15 October 1970 – 7 April 1972 Prime Minister Edward Heath Preceded by Office established Succeeded by Reginald Eyre Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport In office 24 June 1970 – 15 October 1970 Prime Minister Edward Heath Preceded by Albert Murray Succeeded by Office abolished
Shadow Cabinet portfolios Shadow Secretary of State for the Environment In office 19 November 1976 – 4 May 1979 Leader Margaret Thatcher Preceded by Timothy Raison Succeeded by Peter Shore Shadow Secretary of State for Industry In office 11 March 1974 – 19 November 1976 Leader Edward Heath Margaret Thatcher Preceded by Office established Succeeded by John Biffen
Parliamentary offices Member of the House of Lords Lord Temporal Life peerage 23 October 2001 Member of Parliament for Henley In office 28 February 1974 – 14 May 2001 Preceded by John Hay Succeeded by Boris Johnson Member of Parliament for Tavistock In office 31 March 1966 – 8 February 1974 Preceded by Henry Studholme Succeeded by Constituency abolished
Personal details
Born	Michael Ray Dibdin Heseltine (1933-03-21) 21 March 1933 Swansea, Wales
Political party	Conservative
Spouse	Anne Williams ​ (m. 1962)​
Children	3, including Annabel
Alma mater	Pembroke College, Oxford
Signature
Military service
Allegiance	United Kingdom
Branch/service	British Army
Years of service	1959
Rank	Second lieutenant
Unit	Welsh Guards

Michael Ray Dibdin Heseltine, Baron Heseltine, CH, PC (/ˈhɛzəltaɪn/; born 21 March 1933) is a British politician. He was a prominent figure in the Cabinets of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, and served as Deputy Prime Minister and First Secretary of State under the latter. Having begun his career as a property developer, he became one of the founders of the publishing house Haymarket. Heseltine served as a Conservative Member of Parliament from 1966 to 2001.

Despite his undistinguished academic record Heseltine emerged as a leading figure at Oxford University and was President of the Oxford Union in Michaelmas Term 1954.

After graduating he built up a property business. Welsh Guards. Haymarket

Early life

Michael Heseltine was born in Swansea in Wales, the son of Territorial Army Colonel Rupert Dibdin Heseltine (1902–1957), TD, of the Royal Engineers during the Second World War, a factory owner and South Wales local director of Dawnays Ltd, bridge and structural engineers, and Eileen Ray (née Pridmore). The Heseltine family were in the tea trade: Michael Heseltine's great-grandfather, William Heseltine, was a clerk who worked his way up to being manager of Tetley, later being involved in establishing a chain of grocers; he killed himself after suffering the loss of his fortune through debt and bad investments. Michael Heseltine's grandfather, John William Dibdin Heseltine (whose mother was a great-granddaughter of the composer and songwriter Charles Dibdin), became a tea salesman and relocated from Huntingdonshire to Swansea, the docks being a major arrival point for tea shipments. Earlier generations had been farm labourers in Pembrey.

Heseltine's mother originated in West Wales, daughter of James Pridmore, a dock labourer who unloaded coal from ships, later hiring others to do so and founding West Glamorgan Collieries Ltd, a short-lived company that briefly worked two small mines on the outskirts of Swansea (1919–1921); his father, also James, worked at the Swansea docks. Due to this heritage Heseltine was later made an honorary member of the Swansea Dockers Club.

Heseltine was brought up in relative luxury at No. 1, Eaton Crescent, Swansea (now No. 5). He told Tatler interviewer Charlotte Edwardes in 2016: "At prep school, I started a birdwatching club called the Tit Club. Every member was named after a member of the tit family: the Marsh Tit, the Blue Tit. I was the Great Tit". He once feared the story might reach the press: "I just know if that had got out when I was in active politics, I would never have recovered". Heseltine enjoyed angling in Brynmill Park and won a junior competition. 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.

Oxford

Heseltine campaigned briefly as a volunteer in the October 1951 general election before going up to Pembroke College, Oxford. While there, in frustration at his inability to be elected to the committee of the Oxford University Conservative Association, he founded the breakaway Blue Ribbon Club. Along with undergraduates Guy Arnold, Julian Critchley and Martin Morton he canvassed workers at the gates of the Vickers Shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness. Julian Critchley recounted a story from his student days of how he plotted his future on the back of an envelope, a future that would culminate as prime minister in the 1990s. A more detailed apocryphal version has him writing down: 'millionaire 25, cabinet member 35, party leader 45, prime minister 55,' though Heseltine himself disputes this and instead recalls a lack of self-belief. He became a millionaire and was a member of the shadow cabinet from the age of 41, but did not manage to become Party Leader or prime minister.

His biographers Michael Crick and Julian Critchley (who was a contemporary of Heseltine's at Brockhurst Prep School) recount how, despite not having an innate gift for public speaking, he became a strong orator through much effort, which included practising his speeches in front of a mirror, listening to tape recordings of speeches by television administrator Charles Hill, and taking voice-coaching lessons from a vicar's wife. (In the 1970s and 1980s, Heseltine's conference speech was often the highlight of the Conservative Party Conference, despite his views being well to the left of the then leader Margaret Thatcher.) He was eventually elected to the Library Committee of the Oxford Union for Hilary (Spring) Term 1953. The Oxford Union minutes record after a debate on 12 February 1953 that "Mr Heseltine should guard against artificial mannerisms of voice and calculated flourishes of self-conscious histrionics; this is only worth saying because he has the makings of a first class speaker".

Heseltine was then elected to the Standing Committee of the Oxford Union for Trinity (summer) Term 1953. On 30 April 1953 he opposed the setting up of the Western European Union (a European defence treaty), not least because it might antagonise the USSR following the supposed "recent change of Soviet attitudes" (i.e. after Stalin's death). On 4 June 1953, he called for the development of the British Commonwealth as a third major power in the world (after the US and USSR). At the end of that summer term he stood unsuccessfully for the Presidency but was instead elected to the top place on the committee. In his third year (1953–54) he served in top place on the committee, then as Secretary, and finally as Treasurer. As Treasurer he attempted to solve the Union's financial problems not by cost-cutting but by an ultimately successful "Brighter Union" policy of bringing in more students for food and drink, and by converting the Union cellars into a venue for events. The Union's Senior Member (the university don that every society was required to have) resigned in protest at what he saw as Heseltine's profligacy, and was replaced by the young Maurice Shock.

At the end of the Trinity (summer) Term 1954, Heseltine was elected President of the Oxford Union for Michaelmas term 1954, largely on the strength of his business management, and with the assistance of Union contemporaries Jeremy Isaacs and Anthony Howard, the then chairman and chairman-elect of the Oxford University Labour Club; Heseltine had even, for a brief period that term, joined a protest group against the Conservative government's testing of an H-Bomb. He had done little study at University, and passed his finals with the help of last-minute coaching from friends. After graduating with a second-class degree in Philosophy, politics and economics, described by his tutor Neville Ward-Perkins as "a great and undeserved triumph", he was permitted to stay on for an extra term to serve as Union President.

The Union cellars were opened on 30 October 1954, and Heseltine persuaded the visiting Sir Bernard and Lady Docker to contribute to the considerable cost. Debates over which he presided included censorship of the Arts (no vote taken), welcoming the decline of British Imperialism (defeated 281–381) and calling for a "change in the principles and practice of British Trade Unions" (carried 358–200). Guest speakers that term included Rajani Palme Dutt, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, his old headmaster John Wolfenden and Jacob Bronowski, whilst Aneurin Bevan addressed a packed meeting of the University Labour Club, chaired by Anthony Howard, in the Union Chamber.

Business career

Early business career

Heseltine began articles at Peat Marwick & Mitchell in January 1955. Whilst training as an accountant, he also built up a property business in the London property boom of the late 1950s. He and his Oxford roommate Ian Josephs had each inherited around £1,000 (around £23,000 at 2016 prices). They formed a property company called "Michian" (after their first names) and with the aid of a mortgage bought a 13-year lease on the so-called Thurston Court Hotel at 39 Clanricarde Gardens (near Notting Hill) for £3,750. They evicted the existing tenants so that Josephs' father could renovate the property and let out the rooms for a total rent of around £30 per week. A year later, they were able to sell the property at a profit, doubling their capital to £4,000.

With the aid of a £23,000 mortgage, Heseltine and Josephs now bought a group of five adjacent houses for £27,000 in Inverness Terrace, Bayswater. They arranged for some medical students to decorate and remodel the property into a 45-bedroom boarding house, which they called the "New Court Hotel". Heseltine would sometimes cook breakfast himself, although he rejects tales that he would get up early to mix margarine in with the butter. Many of the tenants were American servicemen who, he later recorded, were for the most part respectful but sometimes rowdy at weekends.

Edward Heath, then a government whip whom he had met at the Oxford Union, was his referee when he applied for the Conservative Party Parliamentary Candidates' List in October 1956. Heseltine bought his first Jaguar, second hand and cheap because of the rise in the price of petrol owing to the Suez Crisis, for £1,750 in December 1956, upgrading to newer and more expensive models in future years.

New Court Hotel was sold in 1957. At this point Heseltine went into business with another Oxford friend, Clive Labovitch, who brought out Opportunities for Graduates that year. Heseltine arranged for this to be distributed free, expanded from 40 pages to a 169-page hardback book, to final year students at all British universities, paid for by advertising. Heseltine ended his partnership with Josephs and with the aid 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 group of houses at 29–31 Tregunter Road (south of Earl's Court), adding two more in neighbouring Cathcart Road.

National service

Heseltine had transferred his articles to a partner at a smaller firm of accountants located off Haymarket, feeling that this would allow him more chance of hands-on involvement in the affairs of the firms whose books he examined, rather than being a cog in a bigger machine. It took him three attempts and special coaching to pass his intermediate exams, and he had little immediate prospect of passing his accountancy finals. He also estimated that he was earning more from his property business than the partner to whom he was articled. With the expiry of his articles in January 1958 he could no longer avoid conscription into National Service.

Heseltine later wrote that he admired the military, for his father had been a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Engineers in the Second World War and active in the Territorial Army thereafter, but that he had felt that his business career was too important to be disrupted. He and his father had taken the precaution of arranging interviews to increase his chances of attaining an officer's commission in case he had to serve. He had been 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, already due for abolition by 1960, an effort was made to call up men who had so far managed to postpone service. Despite having almost reached maximum call-up age, recently reduced from thirty to twenty-six, Heseltine was conscripted into the Welsh Guards in January 1959.

Heseltine spent nine weeks in the ranks as a Guardsman before being sent for three months of officer training at Mons Officer Cadet School, Aldershot, alongside men from other regiments. He was a capable cadet, reaching the rank of Junior Under-Officer and graduating with an A-Grade, but he was not awarded the Sword of Honour or promoted to the rank of Senior Under-Officer, as it was felt his age had given him an unfair advantage over younger cadets. Throughout his training he had been troubled by an old ankle sprain, but he declined the offer of a medical discharge. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant on 11 June 1959.

Heseltine was granted leave to contest the general election in October that year; according to Ian Josephs this had been his plan from the start. Afterward he applied on business grounds for exemption from return to the Army, in part because of difficulties caused by an employee's embezzlement, and partly including the need to sort out his late father's affairs, and was exempted from his remaining sixteen months of service. During the 1980s his habit of wearing a Guards regimental tie, sometimes incorrectly knotted with a red stripe on the neck, was the subject of much acerbic comment from military figures and from older MPs with distinguished war records. Crick estimated that he must have worn the tie on more days than he actually served in the Guards.

Business career: expansion and near disaster

By now the property boom was in full swing. Heseltine and Labovitch established first one, then a group of companies under the name "Bastion Properties". Heseltine later recorded that he and Labovitch bought at least three properties in W1 and W2 which they were able to sell at a profit before they had completed the original purchases. They also built eight small houses in Queensborough Mews, Bayswater. They bought a 58-year lease on a block of seven properties at Stafford Terrace, off Kensington High Street, which they converted into flats and built houses for Stepney Borough Council. Bastion also planned to build an estate of up to 126 houses at Tenterden, Kent, which failed to sell. In order to attract other buyers to the empty estate Heseltine had to accept an offer of £4,000 for the first house, which had been valued at £7,250. The estate was beset with repair problems until after Heseltine's election to Parliament.

Heseltine and Labovitch also founded the magazine publishing company Cornmarket, and brought out Directory of Opportunities for School Leavers and Directory of Opportunities for Qualified Men, which earned a steady income from advertising. Canadian, French and German versions were also launched, although these were less profitable. In late 1959, using £10,000 of a £30,000 profit on selling a freehold site off Regents Park, they acquired the famous (but unprofitable) magazine Man About Town whose title was shortened to About Town then simply Town. In 1962, they paid £10,000 for Topic, a weekly newspaper that had been launched the previous year by a group of entrepreneurs including the Prime Minister's son Maurice Macmillan, and which was now owned by Norman Mascall (a pyramid scheme fraudster of the era). By then the economic climate was too difficult, and like many publishers they found that there is limited appetite for weekly papers in the UK. Topic ceased publication at the end of 1962, but its journalists later became The Sunday Times Insight Team.

Heseltine became managing director of Bow Group Publications in 1960, mainly looking after advertising and circulation for its Crossbow magazine (he does not seem to have written any articles or pamphlets himself). He contemplated suing The Observer for a limerick mocking his dress sense (spelling "Bow" as "Beau") for implying him to be homosexual, but was talked out of it. He remained a director until 1965.

Bastion Properties was in trouble because of building costs and an unsatisfactory building manager. After rapid expansion, Heseltine's businesses were badly hit by the Selwyn Lloyd financial squeeze of 1961 and, still not yet thirty years old, he eventually owed £250,000 (around £4.5 million at 2016 prices). He states he was lent a badly needed £85,000 in December 1962 by a bank manager who retired the same day. He avoided bankruptcy by such tactics as paying bills only when threatened with legal action, although he eventually settled all his debts. It was during this stressful period of his life that he took up gardening as a serious hobby. Later, during the 1990s, Heseltine committed a minor gaffe when he joked in a speech about how he had strung creditors along.

Between 1960 and 1964, Heseltine also worked as a part-time interviewer for ITV, very likely, in Crick's view, to maintain his public profile as an aspiring politician.

Formation of Haymarket

Despite Heseltine's later insistence on management controls in government departments which he ran, Cornmarket was a highly disorganised company, with little in the way of accounting or business plans and cheques and invoices often going astray. One of its most lucrative ventures, the Graduates Appointments Register (albums of anonymous graduate CV; companies had to pay for the names and addresses of those whom they wished to interview), went ahead after an employee simply ignored Heseltine's instructions to abandon the project. Heseltine and Labovitch brought a great deal of energy and openness to new ideas (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 had joined the Heseltine-Labovitch publishing business as an advertising manager in spring 1958, and Simon Tindall, who had joined in his early twenties as an advertising salesman while Heseltine had been doing his National Service, played an increasingly large role in managing the company. Masters kept a tight grip on the selling of advertising space, banning boozy lunches and setting targets for calling of clients, followed by chase-up calls, whilst keeping a public league table of salesmens' success rates; these were relatively innovative techniques at the time.

By 1964, Cornmarket owed a great deal of money to their printers, Hazell Watson & Viney, which was then merging with the British Printing Corporation (BPC). Heseltine was summoned by BPC to be told to sort out his firm's debts, but instead persuaded them to accept, instead of payment, an equity stake of at least 40% in a new, merged business. The portmanteau name "Haymarket" was suggested by Sir Geoffrey Crowther, chairman of BPC.

Haymarket grows

From the autumn of 1964, Haymarket set out aggressively to acquire magazines, approaching them from the list in the media directory BRAD. They acquired small, modestly profitable magazines for tape recorder and camera, and camping and caravan, enthusiasts, and using a loan from BPC bought a series of leisure and medical publications for £250,000 from a Canadian publisher, in competition with Thomson Group.

In 1965 Heseltine's businesses had a turnover of around £700,000 per annum, and employed around 50 staff. Although the Opportunities for Graduates series continued to generate profits, Town magazine continued to lose money, hampered by the cost of printing (much more expensive at that time than nowadays) and by Heseltine's reluctance, for political reasons, to include pictures of nude girls or cartoons disrespectful of the Royal Family.

Haymarket launched a bid for the British Institute of Management's magazine The Manager, again in competition with Thomson Group, in late 1965. It was envisaged that Haymarket would take a 25% stake, as would the Financial Times and The Economist, of both of which Crowther was also chairman. Over the weekend Heseltine, inspired by how Donald Stokes had once won a Scandinavian bus contract for British Leyland by building a model bus, had a team led by Labovitch prepare a 96-page mock copy of what they envisaged, mostly using text cut from The Economist. Robert Heller was brought in as the first editor of what became Management Today – Heseltine initially irritated him by taking him to lunch at the Carlton Club and talking of his political aspirations, but Heller soon recognised that Labovitch was the front man whose job was to impress those who needed to be impressed, and Heseltine was "the dynamic and real entrepreneurial brain". The first edition came out in April 1966, just after Heseltine's election to Parliament. Haymarket went on to publish similar magazines for Marketing, Personnel Management and Computing Institutes.

Labovitch left Haymarket at the end of 1965. Heseltine stated he spent three days trying to persuade him to stay. Labovitch wanted to establish himself as a successful educational and careers publisher, and may well have been pushed by his then wife, the socialist journalist Penny Perrick, who disliked Heseltine both personally (as best man at their wedding he had, she said, welcomed various business figures in his speech as if he were at a board meeting) and politically and whom he had refused to include on the Haymarket board. Labovitch was a generator of ideas but he lacked Heseltine's business skills. Although he took his profitable Directories with him, he had to sell them back to Haymarket when his business failed in 1973, causing him to attempt suicide. Heseltine offered him a position as consultant to Haymarket. The two former partners remained on friendly terms until Labovitch's death in 1994.

Very few staff left with Labovitch. Lindsay Masters stayed behind, very likely in the knowledge that he might soon be running the company as Heseltine's political career took off. However, Heseltine continued as managing director of Haymarket even after being elected to Parliament in March 1966, and based himself at the company offices near Oxford Circus rather than in the House of Commons. Heseltine's Oxford friend Julian Critchley was editor of Town for around a year from 1966 until he was sacked by Masters, ending his friendship with Heseltine who had shrunk from delivering the blow himself.

Further growth

In April 1967, Heseltine persuaded BPC to inject a further £150,000 into Haymarket, increasing its ownership stake to 60%, whilst Heseltine and other directors retained smaller shareholdings. Haymarket doubled their magazine portfolio by taking over the management 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 subsidiary of BPC; Heseltine, Masters and Tindall could potentially be outvoted or even sacked by the four BPC directors on the board. BPC installed a new financial controller who installed cost and cashflow management for the first time, and insisted on finally closing Town magazine at the end of 1967. Town had never made a profit, but Heseltine writes that its quality was instrumental in establishing Haymarket's reputation as a publishing house. Around that time, Management Today became Haymarket's first big success. A BPC manager recorded that Heseltine kept the initiative at board meetings by "poker-faced nit-picking" about the quality and timing of BPC's printing, rather than by employing what came to be considered his usual "I will transform the world" rhetoric.

In 1968, there were rumours that BPC was planning to sack Heseltine. Another of the titles acquired from BPC was World's Press News, largely a compilation of world press releases, which was relaunched by Masters and Robert Heller as Campaign in September 1968 (Heseltine initially opposed the title, thinking it sounded too political). It rapidly became standard reading in the world of advertising and Public Relations, for its gossipy reporting, often obtained by trading information, of who was gaining or losing accounts or being promoted or sacked. Within a year it had overtaken Advertisers Weekly for its volume of classified ads. Heseltine was forced, in the face of a strike, to recognise 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 this time), further improved the advertising sales operation by recruiting a team of largely female sales staff.

As part of his ongoing campaign to buy titles off other publishers, Heseltine noticed a magazine called The Accountant which was easily paid for by vast amounts of advertising. Robert Heller produced a dummy edition of a Haymarket version, modelled on the Daily Telegraph, which became Accountancy Age. Following an international phone call between Heller, who was on holiday in Portugal, and Heseltine who was on a political trip to Singapore, the launch date was brought forward by three months on learning that a rival publication was to be launched. Accountancy Age was launched in December 1969, largely by Haymarket's business development manager Maurice Saatchi, and was profitable from the start.

Buoyed by the success of Management Today, Campaign and Accountancy Age, Haymarket made pre-tax profits of £3,000 in 1968, £136,000 in 1969 and £265,000 in 1970. Heseltine resigned as managing director of Haymarket on his promotion to principal opposition spokesman on transport in 1969, although he continued as chairman of the board until he became a minister in 1970, at which point he resigned from the board altogether, whilst remaining a major shareholder.

1970s: Heseltine takes ownership of Haymarket

In 1970, Heseltine turned down the chance to invest £25,000 in the advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi when it was set up (his former employee Maurice Saatchi said that he had learned a great deal from Heseltine's aggressive techniques of acquiring magazine titles, and from publicity in Campaign magazine), believing wrongly that it was against the code for ministers to make such an investment. Lindsay Masters did invest, but was eventually bought out by the Saatchi brothers; Heseltine later believed that he and Masters together could have made another fortune if they had reinforced one another with large shareholdings in Saatchi and Saatchi.

With Heseltine a government minister from June 1970, Haymarket was being run by Masters and Tindall, who had secured another coup by publishing Computing for the British Computing Society. BPC was in financial trouble in 1971, and Heseltine, Masters and Tindall assembled a consortium of County Bank, Charterhouse Development, ICFC and Wren Investments to help buy out BPC's 60% stake for £1m, a very low price given that Haymarket had made over £250,000 the previous year. The consortium took a 40% stake in Haymarket, and loaned the company £820,000, while Heseltine took out a large personal loan at this time to buy both another 20% of Haymarket's shares (the rest of the BPC shareholding, bringing Heseltine's own shareholding to just under 50%). At the meeting to close the deal, one of the bankers recorded, "Michael thought he was President of the Oxford Union again, and entered into a grand oration and bored everyone stiff". In 1971 Heseltine placed his shares in a trust controlled by his ministerial boss Peter Walker and by his solicitor Charles Corman. Haymarket's pretax profits were £453,000 in 1971 and £704,000 in 1972. Haymarket was due to be floated as a public company in the autumn of 1973, although this was cancelled because of the rise in the oil price, which reduced the profitability of the publishing industry. They thus avoided the stock market crash which followed. The company remains privately owned to this day.

Heseltine acted as a consultant to Haymarket during his period out of government office between 1974 and 1979. His role was to bring in new publishing ideas. He believed he increased performance, although Robert Heller later recorded that he did very little, for he was too busy as a member of the Shadow Cabinet. He worked from an office at Haymarket, near Regent Street, rather than in the House of Commons. Under the management of Masters and Tindall, Haymarket continued to grow. By 1976 it was making annual profits of round £1.75m. In 1976–1977 Heseltine, Masters, Tindall and the Finance Director David Fraser bought out the consortium's 40% share, using money borrowed from them, giving Heseltine and his family over 50% control of Haymarket. Heseltine had taken out large personal loans both to increase his stake in the company and to buy his country mansion Thenford House. Masters had also done the same to buy himself a property. Several titles, including Accountancy Age and Computing were sold to the rival company VNU in 1980. The transaction raised £17m, half of which went to Heseltine, but in Crick's view was a bad move for Haymarket. During Heseltine's second period out of office (1986–1990), Masters threatened to resign if Heseltine returned to Haymarket, but once again he became a consultant on £100,000 per annum.

After 1997: return to business

By 1997, when his career as a Cabinet minister ended, Haymarket was making an annual profit of over £10m and employing around 1,000 people. Heseltine resumed management of the company after Masters' retirement in 1999. Haymarket has seen reduced profitability in the UK since 1999, but has expanded further into foreign markets (for example India). It has also laboured under heavy borrowings of over £100 million to buy back Masters' and Tindall's large minority shareholdings, which have been reduced to some extent by the sale of properties. Heseltine has now retired from day-to-day management, handing over to his son Rupert.

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

Electoral history and Parliamentary career

Gower 1959 and Coventry 1964

Heseltine contested the safe Labour seat of Gower at the October 1959 general election. He had been the only applicant for the Conservative (technically, Conservative and National Liberal) candidacy. He would at times attend Labour meetings and attempt to heckle the speakers, including Aneurin Bevan and the Labour candidate Ifor Davies, whom he kept trying to challenge to a debate. He obtained plenty of publicity in the local paper and obtained a swing to the Conservatives slightly better than the national average.

In 1961, Heseltine was one of 29 applicants—of whom half were interviewed—for the Conservative candidacy in the marginal constituency of Coventry North. He clinched the selection after bringing his fiancée Anne Williams to the meeting. He got on well with the incumbent Labour member Maurice Edelman (whose daughter was a friend of Anne Heseltine, as she became in 1962) and they met for dinner sometimes during the campaign. Many of his Oxford contemporaries had already entered Parliament, but, to his disappointment, in the 1964 general election he was defeated by 3,530 votes. The swing to Labour was slightly less than the national average.

Selection for Tavistock

In March 1965, Heseltine applied to be candidate for the safe Conservative seat of Tavistock in Devon, where the incumbent MP had announced his retirement two months earlier. Of the 51 applicants, 14 were considered, six of whom had local connections. Heseltine reached the final short list of three, the others being a dairy farmer in a senior position at the Milk Marketing Board (thought to be the favourite), and a local authority lawyer, who later recalled that on the train down from London Heseltine kept jumping out at every stop to check that his magazines were on display at the station newsagents. Heseltine had already spent several days driving round talking to locals and had ordered a year's worth of back copies of Tavistock's two weekly papers. Such effort is nowadays common in Parliamentary selections but was unusual at the time. He was selected by a clear majority of the Tavistock Conservative Association's Finance and General Purposes Committee (which contained between 100 and 120 people).

Heseltine was picked in part as a young, dynamic candidate who could face the challenge of the resurgent Liberal Party in the West Country, where Jeremy Thorpe, Peter Bessell and Mark Bonham Carter had recently won seats. The Liberals had halved the Conservative majority at Tavistock in 1964.

Trouble then arose at his adoption by a full general meeting of the Conservative Association, which should have been a formality. Criticism arose that a person with farming links should have been chosen, for the bikini-clad girls on the cover of Town magazine, which were considered risqué at the time, and for jokes in the magazine at the expense of the Royal Family. He was selected after a stirring speech to around 540 assembled members of the local Conservative Association on Friday 26 March 1965. Crick believes that this is a rare example in politics of a single speech determining a career. Only 27 members supported an amendment to refer the matter back to the selection committee and 14 opposed Heseltine's adoption altogether. Thereafter his name stopped appearing as "publisher" on his magazines. He had to learn about farming, an important issue in the seat, about which he knew almost nothing.

MP for Tavistock: 1966–74

In the March 1966 general election both the Conservative leader Edward Heath and Liberal leader Jo Grimond spoke at Tavistock. Heseltine stressed his agreement with Liberal principles and fought extremely hard, achieving a small swing to the Conservatives, bucking the national trend. He was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Tavistock.

Heseltine's liberal stance on race issues and his opposition to hanging (he felt it was barbaric and not an effective deterrent, although he later expressed openness to the idea of hanging terrorists) was unpopular with many of his constituents, as was his continued unease with agricultural issues, and his dressing as a city businessman in pale grey suits, kipper ties and driving a Jaguar. Despite the huge demands on his time as both an MP and running Haymarket Press, and the distance of the seat from London, he remained relatively active at constituency casework at weekends and during the late summer recess, touring rural areas in a caravan and using a small tape recorder (relatively new technology at the time) to dictate answers to constituents' problems in front of them.

As soon as Heseltine was elected in March 1966, the seat of Tavistock was recommended for abolition by the Boundary Commission, divided between the new seats of West Devon (effectively a rural seat, where Heseltine would have had to compete for the candidacy with the sitting MP Peter Mills who had a strong local following) and Plymouth Sutton (which had a strong Powellite/Monday Club element—they eventually selected the right-winger Alan Clark). Several of his activists attempted to persuade him to apply for Plymouth Sutton, but he was not interested, wanting a seat nearer London.

In the event, the implementation of the Boundary Review was postponed for partisan reasons until after the next general election by Home Secretary James Callaghan (on the pretext of waiting until after the Redcliffe-Maud Report on local government reorganisation). Heseltine therefore defended Tavistock at the 1970 general election, achieving a better than average swing to the Conservatives.

MP for Henley: 1974–2001

Heseltine, by now a junior minister in the Heath government, was now forced to apply for a new candidacy, often in competition with other sitting Conservative MPs whose seats were also due 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 lost to Douglas Hurd.

In 1972, Edward Heath attempted to persuade Heseltine, a strong supporter of his, to challenge Powellite MP Ronald Bell for the Conservative nomination for the new seat of Beaconsfield. Heseltine wrote that he was "tempted" to enter the lists at Beaconsfield, but did not actually do so. Crick writes that he reached the final shortlist of four against Bell, before being "apparently persuaded" to withdraw. Bell's campaign within the local Conservative ranks was masterminded by Hugh Simmonds, chairman of the Young Conservatives, and he narrowly won.

Heseltine was one of 180 applicants for the safe Conservative seat of Henley (the constituency association of which was known as North Oxfordshire), whose MP John Hay was stepping down. He reached the final shortlist of three along with two other sitting MPs, William Shelton and Norman Fowler, and in September 1972 was selected as candidate with a clear majority at the first ballot. Part of the reason was that the Association wanted a wealthy MP who would not be distracted by the need to earn money in business as Hay had been. He maintained a constituency home in Crocker End, near Nettlebed, and still maintained a London home at Wilton Crescent. The constituency is around 40 miles west of central London, and has excellent transport links, making it a prime residential area for London-based professionals.

Heseltine was MP for Henley from February 1974 until his retirement from the House of Commons in 2001.

Career under Heath: 1966–74

Opposition front bencher: 1967–70

In 1967, Peter Walker invited Heseltine to be opposition spokesman on transport (not a Shadow Cabinet-level position, but reporting to Walker), after he had arranged a successful speaking tour of the West Country for him. Heseltine's duties included opposing Barbara Castle's 1967 Transport Bill (which eventually became the Transport Act 1968). Heseltine led opposition to the parts of the bill which nationalised small bus companies into the National Bus Company (UK) and set up Passenger transport executives (PTEs) in major urban areas. He criticised Castle for wanting to give PTEs the right to manufacture or produce anything necessary for their function, which as she pointed out was almost word-for-word identical to a clause in the Conservatives' Transport Act 1962. In 1968 Margaret Thatcher became Heseltine's boss for a year; he found her "embarrassingly rude". Unusually for the time, he employed a full-time researcher, Eileen Strathnaver.

Heath allowed his shadow ministers more leeway than would be normal nowadays. Heseltine was one of a group of 15 Conservative MPs to vote against the 1968 Commonwealth Immigration Bill on second reading (Conservative whips advised their MPs to support it, but it was a free vote). He also voted against the bill on three subsequent votes, arguing that it was based on "sheer naked racialism" and that Britain should honour promises previously made to the Kenyan Asians. Following Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech Heseltine publicly urged Heath to deal firmly with him—to the consternation of many in his local party at Tavistock, where Powell enjoyed strong support. Three days later, Heseltine was one of around two dozen Conservative MPs who defied the whip to abstain rather than vote against the second reading of the 1968 Race Relations Bill (which banned racial discrimination). He argued that the Conservatives should state their own alternative policy rather than just oppose.

Heseltine was promoted to principal opposition spokesman on transport in November 1969, although 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 US to study how their docks were run, in readiness for Labour's planned 1970 Docks Bill (which in the event was cancelled because of that year's general election).

Minister: 1970–74

Transport and Local Government

Following the Conservative victory in the 1970 general election, new Prime Minister Edward Heath appointed Heseltine a junior minister at the Department of Transport. Transport had been demoted from a Cabinet position in 1969, when Barbara Castle had been replaced by Fred Mulley. To his disappointment Heseltine, who had been principal spokesman in opposition, was appointed a Parliamentary Under-Secretary, the lowest rung on the ministerial ladder, to John Peyton (himself only a Minister of State rather than a Cabinet Minister). Officials found him brash, arrogant and overbearing, with a very limited attention span for paperwork, although quick to complain if he was not told about things (the trick, they found, was to submit the two-page summaries on each topic which he demanded, but with extensive background documents). He complained to Lord Jellicoe, Minister for the Civil Service, about being given inexperienced civil servants fresh out of university to work in his office. "Pussy – that's what they called us. The scum of the earth, tolerated by civil servants" he told the Sunday Times (1 May 1983). One of his first duties was to open the Westway A40 (M), and he also opened the stretch of the M4 west of Maidenhead, on which he was shortly afterwards fined £20 for speeding. He insisted on being shown maps' of where protesters lived, so that he could see the reasons for public concerns at new roads and motorways.

After four months Transport was absorbed into the new "monster ministry" of the Department for the Environment, under Heseltine's ally Peter Walker. Heseltine was still responsible for transport, but also for local government reform, covered in the Local Government Act 1972. Redcliffe-Maude's proposals for unitary councils (i.e. merging the two layers of county and borough/district councils) were abandoned. Many historic counties were abolished. Large Metropolitan counties were created around the big cities, but many smaller cities lost their county borough status. One such was Plymouth, the eastern suburbs of which lay in Heseltine's seat of Tavistock. Plymouth opinion was particularly angry that education was now to be run by Devon County Council in Exeter, 40 miles away. Heseltine declined to support a campaign by Plymouth MP Dame Joan Vickers to create a Tamarside Metropolitan county, and was rebuked by Sir Henry Studholme, his predecessor as MP for Tavistock, for declining to support (on the grounds that as minister he might have to adjudicate any dispute) Plymouth Council's attempt to buy more land near Sparkwell to develop light industry under its control.

Aerospace

In April 1972 Heseltine was promoted to be Minister for Aerospace, a Minister of State rather than a Cabinet minister but effectively running his own department within the Department of Trade and Industry, another of Heath's new mega ministries. The department had been given major new powers by the 1972 Industry Act. Later in the year Peter Walker was appointed Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, making him Heseltine's boss once again. Heseltine appointed Cecil Parkinson, whom he had met on an accountancy course in the mid-1950s, as his Parliamentary Private Secretary, ostensibly on the grounds that he knew even less about aerospace than he did. Parkinson was impressed by Heseltine's vigour and his insistence that civil servants produce results for him quickly, later writing in his memoirs (1992) "in his constructive and deliberate unreasonableness he reminds me in many ways of Mrs Thatcher". Heseltine arguably did not make aerospace policy any more interventionist than it already was.

One of Heseltine's main jobs was to sell Concorde, which was difficult because of its cost and limited range (it could fly from New York to London or Paris, but not the short extra distance to Rome or Frankfurt) and capacity (a quarter that of a Boeing 747). It had been initiated by Macmillan in 1962 as an Anglo-French project to try to get Britain into the EEC, although by the early 1970s Heath was already broaching cancellation with President Pompidou. BOAC threatened to cancel its order, and Heseltine several times summoned the board, who had threatened to resign en masse, to his office, impressing Parkinson by his skills of persuasion. Civil Servants were happy that his love of generating headlines helped the cause of Concorde sales. The Queen, Princess Margaret and Princess Anne were all seen accompanying Heseltine on board Concorde to drum up publicity. In the summer of 1972 he sent Concorde 002 on a tour of Iran, India, Singapore, Japan and Australia. Heseltine and his wife Anne accompanied the plane as far as Singapore (the press joked that Lee Kuan Yew might not let him in with such long hair), and he met it at Toulouse on the way back, but not a single plane was sold. By this stage there were options to sell 74 Concordes to 17 airlines around the world (the original hope had been to sell 30), but this went wrong because of the rises in the oil price in 1973 and 1979; in the event only 10 were ever sold, five each to British Airways (as BOAC had become in 1974) and Air France. Heseltine won 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 should have acted decisively to cut back marketing efforts sooner than he did. He did not mention Concorde at all in his books Where There's A Will or The Challenge of Europe.

Heseltine was a key mover in the setting up of the European Space Agency (ESA) in 1973. He cancelled the British Geostationary Technological satellite and handed back the grant to the Treasury. He was less successful in persuading colleagues to centralise British space expenditure, which was split between the DTI, Defence, the Post Office and the Science Research Council – his attempt to get Margaret Thatcher, Secretary of State for Education and Science, to give up control of the latter, soured their relations. He also favoured pan European cooperation on civil aviation.

Heseltine had almost daily dealings with the industrialist Arnold Weinstock, Head of GEC – as transport minister Heseltine had once summoned him in to the ministry to ask why the electronic signs on the motorway, built by GEC, did not work properly. By May 1973, Weinstock was thought by Cecil King to have a very low opinion of Heseltine, but this later improved and they became friends. Heseltine had started almost from nothing, but Haymarket had only succeeded when bought out by the big conglomerate BPC. This may explain his corporatism, in Crick's view, although unlike Jim Prior or Heath, Heseltine had never shown much interest in involving trade unions.

During this period, Heseltine's opponent Stanley Clinton-Davis coined his nickname of Tarzan, due to his similarity to Johnny Weissmuller, the actor who had played Tarzan in a number of films in the 1930s and 1940s. The media were quick to follow in Clinton-Davis's example. He was caricatured as such, complete with loin-cloth, in the If series drawn by satirical political cartoonist Steve Bell. Heseltine has claimed never to have been bothered what people called him, although the nickname amused his wife: "It was quite fun to be married to Johnny Weissmuller".

Hovertrain

Early in 1973, rumours began to circulate that the Tracked Hovercraft (known as the "Hovertrain"), a planned 300 mph floating train on which work had begun in 1967, was to be cancelled. On 12 February 1973, Heseltine gave a written answer on Peter Walker's behalf to a written question from Labour MP David Stoddart, that a further injection of government money was still "under consideration". However, two days later Heseltine appeared before the Select Committee, and revealed that the government had already decided to pull the plug on the Hovertrain on 29 January. Airey Neave believed Heseltine had been lying and urged Stoddart to pursue the matter. The Hovertrain incident came to be regarded as the worst example of lying to the House of Commons since the Profumo affair a decade earlier, and Heseltine survived because full details only emerged during the Parliamentary summer recess.

The committee's report in September accused Heseltine of having given an "untrue" answer on 12 February. Heseltine immediately gave a press conference (7 September 1973) in which he denied that he had lied. On the orders of Chief Whip Francis Pym he apologised to the House of Commons on 16 October 1973 for having made a statement which was open to "more than one interpretation". Heseltine said that his statement that further investment was "under consideration" was not just the normal euphemism for a decision that had not yet been announced, but was actually technically true, as at that time he was still talking to Hawker Siddeley and British Rail about buying part of the Hovertrain business. The row deflected attention from the committee's anger at the cancellation decision. Neave's real target, in the view of Heseltine's PPS Cecil Parkinson, was Heath, whom Neave detested and later helped to topple as party leader in 1975, but he and Sir Harry Legge-Bourke, both of whom had distinguished war records, also deplored Heseltine's cutting short of his National Service and his brashness and new money.

Heath does not appear to have been overly bothered about the cancellation of Hovertrain, but was bothered about the mooted 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 begun at this time. The Bill was threatened by a revolt of Tory backbenchers whose seats were affected, and Heath gave Heseltine a dressing down for his lack of energy in promoting it.

Assessments

Heseltine was not popular with his ministerial peers at this time. A story was told of how ministers had volunteered him to be the one "taken hostage by terrorists" in a mooted training exercise. Nonetheless, Heseltine emerged from the Heath government with an enhanced reputation. He had avoided the worst crises of that government: the two miners' strikes, incomes policy, industrial relations policy and Northern Ireland, as well as any direct involvement in British entry into the EEC. Heseltine's career under Heath's ministry saw him associated with local government reorganisation, prestige projects, Europe and state aid to industries, themes which would recur throughout his career. He had attained a higher public profile than many Cabinet ministers, and by 1974 he was being seriously tipped as a future prime minister.

Heseltine was promoted to the Shadow Cabinet in June 1974 as Industry spokesman. 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 expansion of public ownership through the National Enterprise Board. In the summer of 1974, Heseltine put together a team of over 20 Conservative MPs, each a specialist in a particular industry, to campaign against Benn's plans.

1975 leadership election

Heseltine had lost faith in Heath over the second miners' strike and over Heath's personal abrasiveness (Heath had apparently once told him to his face that he was too openly ambitious); his patron Peter Walker had also come to have similar doubts about Heath. Ten days before the October 1974 election, at which Heseltine bucked the national swing by increasing his majority at Henley, he urged Heath to consider his position by the end of the year.

It is unclear how Heseltine voted in the first ballot of the 1975 Conservative leadership election, in which the challenger Margaret Thatcher defeated Heath. Norman Tebbit stated that he and John Nott persuaded him to vote for Thatcher so as to open up the way for his preferred candidate Willie Whitelaw to stand on the second ballot. Another (anonymous) close friend later told Michael Crick that Heseltine voted for Thatcher. The Thatcher team had him down as an abstainer, while he refused at the time to reveal how he voted. In his memoirs Heseltine wrote that he abstained in the first ballot, but that he would have voted for Whitelaw in the first ballot had he stood against Heath. Whitelaw admired his drive and energy but looked down on him as "new Money" and is said to have commented that Heseltine was "the sort of man who combs his hair in public".

Heseltine toyed with standing himself for the second ballot (in Crick's view his vote would very likely have been derisory), but voted for Whitelaw. Thatcher, whom Heseltine like many others had initially regarded as something of a joke candidate, defeated Whitelaw and became party leader.

Books

• Julian Critchley, Heseltine – The Unauthorised Biography, André Deutsch, London, September 1987, ISBN 0-233-98001-6.
• Michael Crick, Michael Heseltine: A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, 1997, ISBN 0-241-13691-1.
• Michael Heseltine, Life in the Jungle, Hodder & Stoughton, 2000, ISBN 0-340-73915-0, Heseltine's autobiography, written with the acknowledged assistance of his lifelong friend Anthony Howard.
• Edward Pearce, The Golden Talking-Shop, Oxford University Press, 2016, ISBN 0-198-71723-7, a history of the Oxford Union Society during the first half of the twentieth century, based on official minutes.

External links

• House of Lords: Lord Heseltine
• Haymarket Group
• BBC: Heseltine: Political CV
• Guardian: Aristotle article on Michael Heseltine
• Guardian interview with Michael Heseltine by Simon Hattenstone
• Interview about battling CND for the WGBH series,
• War and Peace in the Nuclear Age
• Thatcher's First Cabinet
• 2009 New Statesman interview
• 2012 interview as part of the History of Parliament oral history project
• Thenford Gardens & Arboretum
• Photos of the garden
• Thenford: The Creation of an English garden
• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Michael Heseltine
• Appearances on C-SPAN

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