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Blueprint

Michael Heseltine masterminded the seminal housing programmes of the Thatcher years. The Tory grandee tells Simon Brandon he has a few ideas for the current crop of Conservatives, too.

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Blueprint

It should be a great day to interview one of the Conservative Party’s biggest hitters of the past 30 years.

Hazel Blears has just resigned, latest-but-not-the-last in a slew of ship-jumping Labour cabinet members. The government appears to be imploding. Every newspaper, it seems, is calling for Gordon Brown’s resignation. For all the tales of duck houses and moats, it is surely a great time to be a Tory.

So what does Michael Heseltine, once Margaret Thatcher’s deputy prime minister and a man often described as the best Conservative prime minister Britain never had, think about what has been going on?

Beneath his famous perpendicular eyebrows, familiar blue eyes refuse to twinkle. ‘Well, what has been going on? All I know is Hazel Blears is gone. But this is nothing to do with housing.’ But what about Jacqui Smith and the rest? What does it mean for the government? ‘It’s very bad for the national interest,’ he says, a little impatiently. ‘But look – we’re doing housing.’

Pleasantries over with, then. Baron Heseltine of Thenford, as he became upon retirement from frontline politics in 2001, has influenced housing policy for almost three decades, and he may yet have a hand in the policies adopted by the next government. As someone who has had the ear of Conservative leaders, past and present, from Thatcher to Cameron, what light can the 70-year-old shed on the opposition’s housing policy? I endeavour to pin him down at the offices of his Haymarket publishing empire – easier said than done.

Lord Heseltine was ‘deeply involved in housing’ even as an opposition MP. Then in 1979 he became environment secretary in Mrs Thatcher’s first cabinet, and when the Brixton and Toxteth riots kicked off in 1981, it was him the prime minister sent in to tackle the unrest. He became the de facto ‘minister for Merseyside’, highlighting urban deprivation and setting up the Merseyside Development Corporation. But his call for major investment to regenerate the inner cities was blocked by the Treasury.

In 2006 he was asked to reprise his role as urban troubleshooter. Tory leader David Cameron asked Lord Heseltine to head a cities task force, with a brief to report on Britain’s inner cities and consider capital projects which might be undertaken by a future Conservative government.

Asked how much our inner cities have changed since 1981, he replies: ‘Dramatically. In the period that followed on from the 1980s we have seen the biggest urban renaissance since Victorian England.’

He doesn’t go so far as to claim he was responsible for that change – but others will. Alastair Balls, once chair of the Tyne & Wear Development Corporation, was an independent member of Lord Heseltine’s urban task force and worked with him in Whitehall as a civil servant.

‘At a time when Margaret Thatcher was seeking to withdraw state control wherever she could… Michael Heseltine realised that inner cities were an issue that the government had to tackle head on,’ Mr Balls says. ‘He was an incredibly inspiring leader to work with. Anyone who knows about urban regeneration will tell you that the centre of Newcastle Gateshead is far changed from how it was… its turnaround over the past 20 years began with Michael Heseltine. And it’s not the only city.’

Regeneration game

The task force’s report, Cities renaissance: creating local leadership, was published in June 2007. At its core, as its title suggests, is a recommendation to decentralise power from London to local government and local communities.

At the time, Mr Cameron said he was keen on some of the report’s proposals and not so enthusiastic about others. The Tory leader’s preferences will remain uncertain until the party’s next manifesto is finalised, but Lord Heseltine is confident that his key message has been noted. ‘[Mr Cameron] does make speeches very frequently explaining how keen he is on moving power from Westminster and Whitehall to local government and local people,’ he says. ‘And as a lot of the thrust of what I was arguing is precisely that, a lot of what he was saying is very much in tune with what I hoped he would say.’

Mr Cameron’s tenure as leader meets with approval from this party grandee. ‘He’s done extremely well. You only have to look at the polls to see that is a commonly held view. He will do well in the European elections and he will win the next election.’

The Tory leader has said housing will be his main focus should his party win the next election. Here again he presumably concurs with Lord Heseltine, who describes choosing where to live as the single most important decision that people take. But it’s not enough to interest him in keeping up with current Tory housing policy.

I ask him what he thinks about security of tenure, widely expected to be scrapped by a Cameron government. His silence prompts me to explain what it means. ‘I don’t speak for the Conservative Party, you know,’ he replies, the note of impatience returning. ‘That may be so.’

But what Lord Heseltine did in this area will be felt by any incoming Conservative government. Most famously, of course, he oversaw the execution of the right to buy programme in the 1980s. It is, he says, something of which he remains extremely proud.

‘A million homes moved from the public to the private sector,’ he says. ‘And that, I felt, was a huge social phenomenon and actually righted a problem I had detected. Because people who had bought their own homes on mortgage had seen the value of those homes increase out of all recognition… because inflation had caused a massive rise in property prices. Giving tenants the right to buy was one way to give them the opportunity to catch up with the benefits of ownership.’

Its legacy is today the subject of heated debate. Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of the Conservative Party, has said the right to buy policy was not thought through properly. He and many others have suggested that separating tenants who could afford to join the property ladder from those that couldn’t has had a hand in creating the pockets of deprivation that pepper our cities. Lord Heseltine will have none of it.

‘I don’t understand why buying your flat should have anything to do with creating adverse housing conditions,’ he says, darkly. A criticism he will address, however, is the indisputable fact that the right to buy has severely depleted much-needed social housing stock. Given that national waiting lists how total 1.7 million households, does he still believe the right to buy was a good idea?

‘That depends on how much of the money you raise through right to buy you put back into social housing,’ he says. ‘Secondly… the houses didn’t go out of availability – they are still there. Those arguments were created, in my view, by people who were against the principle.’

Is the solution, then, to reinvest those capital receipts in more council housing? ‘It would be irresponsible for anyone who has any idea about the economic situation’ – his tone suggesting I’m not included in this category – ‘to start pushing for higher public spending, because however desirable certain things may be, we’re not going to get it.’

His answer, finally, is pure blue language: ‘The market will recover, and that will deal with a lot of the public sector demand.’

Father Thames

What of his Lord Heseltine’s second major legacy then: the Thames Gateway? In 1979 he helped create the London Docklands Development Corporation, which took over 6,000 acres on the north bank of the Thames ‘and injected a degree of urgency and a degree of very much-needed public capital’ into the project. Though the Gateway’s regeneration has proceeded in fits and starts since, the original model is still upheld by some as an example of how to get renewal right. 

Things have gone sharply downhill since (see video, below). ‘It has lost its momentum,’ he says. ‘There are too many bodies, too much overlapping power, there is too much endless prevarication and consultation and too little action… this government is not good at managing parts of the public sector.’

When I ask him what he would do to sort these problems out given a free hand, Lord Heseltine actually chuckles before answering carefully: ‘If someone was to put me in charge – which they are not going to do and which I would not want to be – I would soon find structures which would meet the urgency and the scale of the opportunity.’

He permits himself another snicker when asked if he misses the House of Commons. ‘No, no, no. There is a point in life when the task of frontline politics is just too much.’

And then he says he has to prepare for an appearance on Channel 4 News, to discuss what has been happening in Westminster today.

Hopefully Jon Snow won’t stray off-topic.

Chest thumping

  • Michael Heseltine became an MP in 1966. He entered government for the first time under Edward Heath in 1970 and stepped down as an MP in 2001.
  • He earned the nickname Tarzan while in opposition in 1979, after reportedly brandishing the House of Commons mace at Labour MPs who were celebrating winning a vote by singing the Red Flag. The name appears to sit well – Lord Heseltine entitled his memoirs, published in 2000, Life in the jungle.
  • He is famously said to have planned his career on the back of a napkin while a student at Oxford, but today denies this. ‘It would have been very uncharacteristic,’ he says.
  • A keen horticulturist, Lord Heseltine’s arboretum at his estate in Oxfordshire is said to be one of the most important private collections in the country.

Video:

Michael Heseltine interview

 

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