Talk:Michael Heseltine

Merge here of Hezza

I suggested on Talk:Hezza that Hezza was unencyclopedic, but hoped that people would fix it rather than me taking it to AfD which I will do if it is not fixed. It is now been suggested that it be merged here. I can see see only a few words being merged, such as "His nickname was "Hezza". The rest is of no relevance and in my opinion should be deleted, but I prefer to let the only editor of that article time to alter it. --Bduke 08:27, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Ode To Heseltine

A whole two Google hits for the words to this poem. Is it really relevant here? Much as I sympathise with the sentiments, it seems more like something penned in someone's bedroom than a Wiki-worthy reference.

And if everyone takes that attitude, it'll stay with two Google hits. Keep it on! As long as references are cited, they are valid. It's often quite hard to find what are called "valid references" for opinion of average miners, etc. If you don't accept things like this, how are we supposed to document their feelings? Remember that most miners did not trust reporters one jot in this period.

I think it shall have to be removed now, seeing as the link leads to nowhere. Let's replace it with the Chumbawamba song.

Controversy

Most people have a section called this: one here could include his remark during the early '90s recession, that company's with cash flow problems should pay all their bills late. I think it's worth mentioning. Malick78 (talk) 11:58, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Julian Critchley quotes Hezza's as saying that he staved off his near-bankruptcy of the early 1960s by only paying bills when writs were about to expire, and mentions somebody (Hezza's accountant's wife?) saying "that's nothing. I remember when the cheques went out with only one signature", ie. null and void until returned for the other partner to sign. In his memoirs Hezza does not specifically deny this but instead tells a tortuous story of how as payments came in he was able to release pre-prepared cheques for payments of various bills. It's unclear even from a close reading of Hezza's own memoirs whether his net personal worth was positive or negative at this point. (It should of course be made clear that Hezza did pay his bills - he just staved off bankruptcy by taking his time about it.) Then in the early 1990s he got into trouble by joking about it in some after-dinner speech or other, iirc making the point that large companies who can afford good lawyers often drag out payment while squeezing small businesses.

Switch

How did MH come to switch from a constituency in Devon to one in Henley? David Colver (talk) 22:35, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

Boundary changes. Tavistock (an historic seat for which John Pym and Lord John Russell had sat in previous centuries) was abolished in time for the Feb'74 election. In 1966 an ambitious young Hezza would have been glad to be selected for a safe seat anywhere, but by 1974 he wanted somewhere nearer London.

BLP references

This is an article about a living person. Anything in this article that is not absolute common knowledge can be challenged, or simply deleted for lack of verifiable references, even for example, such apparently innocent mentions of hs attendance at Shrewsbury School if it can't be proven. The article isin fact surprisingly poorly referenced for a page about such an important person. A wealth of printed biographies and other works about him exist, indeed some are mentioned in the text, however none have been cited in the manner required by WP:V and WP:CITE. Please addfress these issues if you can. Thanks.--Kudpung (talk) 04:23, 19 March 2010 (UTC)

Opening

Have made a more thorough opening for the article. Have looked at other Tory and Labour openings from the same period e.g. Douglas Hurd/Neil Kinnock and feel the new opening is fair. It seemed strange that such a high profile figure had such a small opening to the page so attempted to increase it, giving the basic information about his career —Preceding unsigned comment added by Horleye (talk • contribs) 23:22, 23 April 2010 (UTC)

Early Life

I removed slightly controversial unreferenced content from the article [1] for which I have been attacked on my talk page. I am moving the discussion here.

I did not "add controversial information". I restored correct information, which has been public knowledge since the 1980s and can be found in almost any book on the subject, and which had been in the article since late 2007, and which had been deleted for reasons at least 50% of which were nonsense. The "consensus" is what was there before the correct information was deleted, not after; if it was clearly false somebody - very likely me - would have deleted it by now. You would have more of a case if I had added material out of the blue.

Of the reasons given for deleting the information, one was nonsense - that it was "defamatory" (hardly, given that Hezza dined out for years on the tale of how his bank manager "saved his career") and the other that it was "uncited" - even though the only cites being demanded were for matters of obvious public knowledge, e.g. that Hezza is worth several hundred million on the back of Haymarket Press, a fact which is printed in the Sunday Times Rich List every year. Ultimately it is just an excuse for an under-informed young man (the previous deleter) who imagines that he is "improving" articles by going through deleting stuff which he doesn't happen to know about, in this case a politician whose serious career ended before he is old enough to remember. I don't want to be too hard on him, as I dare say he thought he was doing the right thing, but now the effect of the gentle slap on the wrist which I gave him has been completely removed, and he will, I suppose, do it somewhere else, rather than putting in a bit more effort and looking up the information for himself (as, to be blunt, could you have done).

This is a particular problem when, as here, correct information was added in the days when people were less retentive about "citations" and so is vulnerable to being zapped on these grounds - and since most of my books were boxed up in a house move a few months ago and will remain so for a while, I am unable to fix this without going to a second hand bookshop to look up page numbers. The net result is ultimately vandalism - people cannot now come to the article to look up how he made his fortune - even if done with the best intentions or by blind application of wikipedia "policies". Different people have different priorities, of course, but mine happens to be ensuring that articles contain correct information.

I wasn't aware of any official wikipedia status which entitles you to administer "cautions" to other editors on your edit summaries, so I assume all editors have the same entitlement, which is why I am doing so to you. I shall refrain from adding pompous links to "official" wikipedia policies (such policies can be found to support almost anything one cares to do, and as often as not is used to justify idiotic editing) as I find the practice deeply tedious. Thank you.MissingMia (talk) 17:31, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

Wikipedia requires references, it is the most basic of the encyclopaedia's requirements. Supply a reference and feel free to add the content back. Theroadislong (talk) 18:07, 3 December 2014 (UTC)

Wrong, and as is not uncommon in those who love to lecture others about official Wikipedia “policies”, I am sorry to say that you need to read them more carefully. Leaving aside for a moment the most “basic requirement” of all, that articles contain correct and complete information, Wikipedia requires “verifiability” (and I mentioned in the edit summary how the material in question could be verified – at least two published biographies and the man’s own lengthy ghosted memoirs, all of them already listed in the bibliography), whilst citations are only strictly required in certain circumstances, e.g. direct quotes, or genuinely contentious information about a living person, such as if somebody were (hypothetically) to post that Hezza had dubious links to a corrupt foreign regime. It tends to be good practice to include cites nowadays, and cited information is less likely to be wiped for stupid reasons (although I’ve certainly known it happen), but there are few circumstances under which it is actually mandatory. In other circumstances, the recommended policy is raise a query on the talk page or demand a citation, and if there is no answer then delete after a reasonable period of time has elapsed. Citations are a means to an end, not an end in themselves, still less an excuse to obstruct the efforts of those who are keeping a rather closer eye on the content and quality of the article than you are.

So, strictly speaking, I am “free” to restore the wrongly deleted information at any time - I certainly don't need your permission to do so - and as the material is verifiable, question the “reasonableness” of any further challenge from you or anybody else. However, I dare say a tedious edit war would ensue were I to do so, so the article is likely to remain in its de facto vandalised state for a while. Nice one.MissingMia (talk) 19:11, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

@MissingMia: Suggest you read WP:BURDEN: "All content must be verifiable. The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material, and is satisfied by providing a citation to a reliable source that directly supports the contribution." A cite is not some vague edit summary. --NeilN ^{talk to me} 19:26, 4 December 2014 (UTC)

@NeilN:, suggest you read the quote you have just posted a little more closely and carefully (and the temptation to repeat that the practice of lecturing others about official wikipedia “policies” is “deeply tedious” because those who do so usually “need to read them more carefully” is, I’m afraid, too overwhelming to resist). The policy says that the burden “is satisfied” by providing a citation, i.e. that doing so is a sufficient condition, not that it is a necessary condition. In plain English, the policy does not say that the burden must be satisfied in this way, nor that it may not be satisfied in any other way when there are simpler and more obvious ways of doing so.

Hezza, for all his undoubted charms, is not a major historical figure like Napoleon about whom enough books have been written to fill a large building, and about whom the reader cannot necessarily be expected to trace obscure facts. He has been the subject of two full-length biographies (there may be others, but I am not aware of them – I think another was written in 1990 but was shelved when he didn’t become PM) and has, inter alia, had a long volume of memoirs ghosted in his name. Consulting any one of these three works (and describing reference to them as “some vague edit summary” is hardly a balanced and open-minded response) and looking up the early 1960s section on the contents page, or looking up “Haymarket Press” or “Lindsay Masters” in the index is not beyond the wit of any person of normal intelligence.

Had I had access to books at the moment, I probably would have added in the cites, but I don’t, so I can’t. So the net result of this is that lazy and obtuse editing (wiping correct material, which has been in the article for seven years, and which can be verified easily enough from books listed in the article’s bibliography, in the mistaken belief that it is “defamatory”) has to be allowed to stand, because the efforts to gently look after the quality and content of the article by somebody who knows enough about the subject to do so are being obstructed by somebody who doesn’t, but who wants to “play God” over other people’s editing. As I said, nice one.MissingMia (talk) 19:34, 6 December 2014 (UTC)

If I had access to the books I would add the cites myself but I'm sorry I don't. Can the information be found online anywhere, I haven't been able to find it.Theroadislong (talk) 00:23, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Books are obviously preferable (more permanent and likely to have been more widely researched and cogitated upon in the first place) to internet articles, but some information can be gleaned from:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/finance-obituaries/9018803/Lindsay-Masters.html

http://www.moreaboutadvertising.com/2012/01/campaign-founder-and-scourge-of-numerous-editors-lindsay-masters-dies-at-79/

http://www.inpublishing.co.uk/news/articles/founding_father_of_haymarket_lindsay_masters_dies_aged_79.aspx

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/michael-heseltine-the-tories-golden-vision-lays-down-his-political-mace-and-becomes-a-publisher-first-and-last-1240563.html

I dare say there would have been more fifteen or twenty years ago when H used to be the subject of countless newspaper profiles, but before the internet had really taken off. The tall tale of how he handed over his car keys, cufflinks, gold watch etc to his bank manager, who "saved his career" and who retired the same day, and whom he never met again, sadly does not seem to appear on line. Otherwise it will have to wait until one of us has access to the relevant books.

The better way to deal with this, incidentally, would have been to tag the article for "needing more precise inline citations".MissingMia (talk) 16:07, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

As luck would have it I was in London last week and stumbled across an unsold copy of Hezza's memoirs (one of the best books the late Anthony Howard ever wrote :) ) in a bookshop. That said, the next person who posts a "caution" on my talk page will receive an equally robust response.MissingMia (talk) 02:33, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

Making this article more up-to-date

This article could be more up-to-date if it mentioned how Theresa May sacked Heseltine over the Brexit rebellion. It could then have that tag indicating it is about a person who is in contemporary news.Carltonio (talk) 09:40, 8 March 2017 (UTC)

images in the article

Perhaps other users would like to start a conversation here about the images used in the article rather than edit warring over them. I have no opinion on the use of any of them. Theroadislong (talk) 18:02, 9 March 2017 (UTC)

"Lost his marbles"

When UKIP start to say someone has "lost his marbles" and that Germany would be "deeply offended" by his comments, you've got to realise that someone has said something pretty notable? Is there a good reason why this article shouldn't mention Heseltine's recent swift sacking from a number of advisory positions and also state fully what he said on Friday about Germany "winning the peace"? Martinevans123 (talk) 08:46, 26 March 2017 (UTC)

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1st heart attack

He had a severe heart attack in 1993, although it was described as mild at the time. (81.153.133.220 (talk) 20:34, 28 December 2017 (UTC))

I don't doubt it. Michael Crick, whose 1997 biography I'm using heavily, hints that he believes the heart attack was more serious than was publicly admitted (I'll be ploughing through Life in the Jungle shortly, to flag up any other moments where his take on things is a bit different or where he is clearly being a bit evasive). Normally people get upset about links to a Daily Mail article as a source - it's an interview with his daughter so she may well have insisted they get his heart attack "right", but at the same time the article contains obvious inaccuracies about the politics, eg. Thatcher "agreeing to leave the Cabinet" (it was universally agreed by everybody at the time that there was no other job which she could be offered - I actually remember Hurd telling a journalist not to be so silly when he suggested that Thatcher remain in the Cabinet) or that the heart attack put a permanent end to Hezza's leadership ambitions (in fact Hezza did rather a good job of reinventing himself as an elder statesman and staunch Major loyalist, far more so than is remembered nowadays, and the leadership might very well have fallen into his lap had Major quit).Paulturtle (talk) 16:04, 1 January 2018 (UTC) ("Article" in the above comment refers not to the wiki article but to the Daily Mail article which is being used as a cite for the entirely plausible claim that Hezza's 1993 heart attack was in fact serious.) Paulturtle (talk) 15:23, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Nickname

A lot of modern sources state Heseltine's nickname of Tarzan comes from the mace incident, this seems to be a misconception arising from it being incorrect in Wikipedia. The nickname predates the mace incident, it was coined by Stanley Clinton-Davis in the early 1970s (presumably while they were opposite numbers at Aerospace and Shipping), due to his resemblance to Johnny Weissmuller, the actor who played Tarzan. Max Madden is recorded in Hansard as referring to Heseltine as Tarzan on 19 May 1976, when the mace incident didn't happen until 28 May 1976. 81.130.72.65 (talk) 12:10, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

That's a very useful find, thanks, although I'd suggest the contribution to the popularity of the nickname, made by Private Eye and the cartoonist Steve Bell, should probably not be underestimated. Martinevans123 (talk) 12:52, 4 July 2018 (UTC)

Length

I see somebody has tagged the article for length, which I always suspected was going to come sooner or later.

Rather than sticking to strictly chronological coverage, I kept the discussion on (a) his business career (obviously people are going to want to know how he got so rich) and (b) his Parliamentary history, which is interesting for people interested in politics and political selections (a topic which, it has been remarked, tends to be under-reported in this country, and yet getting picked for a winnable seat is the Rubicon which must be crossed in any British political career) separate so that they could easily be hived off into one or more separate articles.

At the moment it draws very heavily on the Michael Crick biog (obviously a highly reputable source - he is a well-regarded journalist and Hezza was still DPM when it came out at the start of 1997, and would presumably have sued over anything that had not been thoroughly fact-checked). I haven't yet ploughed through Hezza's own memoirs (2000) which are a solid meaty work - it is no secret that they were written with the "acknowledged assistance" of the late Anthony Howard.

I also, some time ago, noted the relevant chapter of Charles Moore's Thatcher biog on Westland, but most of that detail can go into the article on Westland when I get round to writing it up. Westland was a generation ago now so more is in the public domain than was the case in 1997 or 2000. (Example: in his memoirs Hezza writes "one day somebody will talk" about a dodgy share support operation - politically-connected tycoons secretly buying shares to keep the price high - that was clearly going on. I'm pretty sure somebody has indeed since "talked", although I'd need to refresh my memory).

Further opinions about where the article should be split are perfectly welcome.Paulturtle (talk) 06:27, 21 March 2019 (UTC)

The length of the article, in my opinion, is fine. I say that as a person with only a passing interest in the subject, but became quite interested when I cam across this article. It is, in fact, unusual to find an article in Wikipedia in the humanities that is more than a Buzzfeed stub. Wikipedia started out with the (rather overly ambitious) goal of being a repository for the planet's knowledge. With the recent swarm of editors with their need to deface articles with graffiti tags comes the need to create policies (whether anyone wants them or not). Hence, we have to assume that readers are bored idiots (millennials?) who only stopped in for a break from their celebrity sites, video games or cat videos. There's nothing to be done I suppose. Ants always swarm the carcas of dead elephants. AnthroMimus (talk) 19:02, 3 April 2019 (UTC)

Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party

There was some back and forth at Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party (UK) some time ago over the absence of reliable sources for many figures described as such actually holding the title as a formal office which resulted in many of them being removed from the article, Heseltine being one of them. His parliamentary biography doesn't include the title ([2], compare to Peter Lilley's which does [3]). I did pick up a source for him being interim Deputy Leader of the Opposition ([4]) but that's not quite the same—presumably more to do with him being DPM beforehand. I've deleted the post from Heseltine's infobox accordingly but if there is in fact a source for him being formally Deputy Leader of the party feel free to add it back, with the reference (and adjust the Deputy Leader article too). —Nizolan ^{(talk · c.)} 23:35, 15 May 2021 (UTC)

For what it's worth. I don't recall him ever being Deputy Leader of the Party in the 1995-7 period. Just DPM. Had it been mentioned in the Crick biography or his own memoirs, I should think I would have included it in the article. I don't get involved with infoboxes, in which people sometimes put all sorts of nonsense. Paulturtle (talk) 20:15, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

Music connection

Intriguing that Heseltine is a descendant of Dibdin but apparently unrelated to Philip Arnold Heseltine (composer, 1894-1930)... ELSchissel (talk) 00:48, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

NS

No mention of National Service. Did he get out of it somehow? Esedowns (talk) 18:30, 25 February 2023 (UTC)

There is a section discussing it. He almost certainly tried to "get out of it", postponing his service until he was almost too old, then getting an early release to fight the 1959 Election.Paulturtle (talk) 06:30, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

Length, revisited

I'm an American and 18-year wikipedia veteran who came to this article to learn more about Heseltine, who just published an open letter in The Guardian re: Labour reforms of local government. I am a good deal more conversant with, and interested in, the generality of British politics than the vast majority of my countrymen; but even so, I was bored to tears by the extreme length of this article, which at the moment is more than three-fourths as long as the Margaret Thatcher article.

In this article, a great deal of non-notable fluff could and should be eliminated--in particular, the excruciating detail of his multifarious business ventures sixty-plus years ago when he was a nobody. This is an encyclopedia, NOT a biography; there is a difference. Details irrelevant to the reason for his notability - i.e., his service as MP and cabinet minister - could be summarized in a few sentences, not slavishly reported like a fawning tabloid report on some celebrity's latest fashion statement.

Less is sometimes more, and mo' better. That's all I have to say. Textorus (talk) 06:35, 15 July 2024 (UTC)