................................................................................ ON THE RECORD RECORDED FROM TRANSMISSION BBC-1 DATE: 6.2.94 ................................................................................ JOHN HUMPHRYS: Good afternoon, and welcome to On The Record. In today's programme, we take the temperature of the Tory Party in Parliament. What is the mood of the Backbenchers? DAVID WILSHIRE MP: The mood is right across the spectre from total paranoia and panic, on the one hand, to a sort of genteel resignation and acceptance on the other. HUMPHRYS: So, I shall be asking Michael Heseltine if it's time to say to the Prime Minister: Come out of Number Ten, your time is up. And, we've a report from inside Sinn Fein, on the prospects for peace in Northern Ireland. They're not good. But, first, the troubles of the Tory Party and its luckless leader. Every time Mr Major calls for unity, the internecine warfare seems to break out again. On Tuesday, he won some Brownie points for being tough, when he told a deputation of Right Wingers: I'm in charge, and promptly showed them the door. Two days later, he invited himself to a meeting of Backbenchers, read the riot act and won himself a lot of desk banging and a clutch of good headlines. It didn't last long. Michael Portillo's foreigner bashing speech saw to that. Has Mr Major, then, lost control of his Party, or is all got up by the Press? Kim Catcheside reports. ***** HUMPHRYS: Kim Catheside with the Tory faithful and not so faithful. Earlier today I spoke to Michael Heseltine near his country home. I asked him first if he or any other members of the Cabinet were thinking the unthinkable? MICHAEL HESELTINE: Certainly not, except in terms of looking at policies wherever there's an opportunity to see how we can improve, take the message and the action further forward. That's what a government is about. I believe that what John Major is doing is a very important act of leadership. I think he will be seen to have delivered a very remarkable package of reforms and I have no doubt whatsoever that he will win the next general election. JOHN HUMPHRYS: But there are many people who are concerned about his leadership. HESELTINE: They always are. That is part of politics. I've been through it so many times under various Conservative Prime Ministers, there's always the mid-term blues and the interesting thing that it isn't just characteristic of Britain, it's very difficult to think of a government in broadly a similar economy which isn't in much the same sort of difficulty and the reason is there staring you in the face. We've had arguably the longest recession since the 1930s, in those circumstances there is a malaise in public opinion, people are disenchanted, they're worried about their own prospects, their own futures, their own lives, they switch off from the government of the day whatever party it comes from. The idea that Conservatives are somehow uniquely unpopular just doesn't stand up to scrutiny of what happened recently in France, what's happening in Spain. HUMPHRYS: Mid-term blues is one thing but we're talking here, Peter Wiltshire..David Wilshire was talking here about a mood that swings from total paranoia and panic to genteel resignation, that's more than mid-term blues, isn't it? HESELTINE: Look frankly, I mean I haven't given up my Sunday morning to sort of indulge in the sort of tittle-tackle of politics, I'm interested....you can do those interviews, you can cut, you can juxtaposition, you can take ten million interviews, put them into one sentence. I've no idea what the questions were, what the context was, but I know how you make your programmes. What I'm concerned with, which is very simple, is to explain why I believe that what John Major is doing requires strong leadership and is very important and very fundamental for the way in which the Conservative Party is evolving in the face of a rapidly changing world. HUMPHRYS: I think we're agreeing, aren't we, that what the country is... HESELTINE: That's going to be a very boring, very boring programme if we're agreeing this early on. HUMPHRYS: Up to a point Lord Copper, that what everybody needs and everybody wants is strong leadership - your phrase - the question is whether that is what they believe they're getting and manifestly from the interviews that we've done and a lot of other things, a lot of people feel that is what they're not getting and that is a problem, that's a serious problem, isn't it, that's not just tittle-tattle? HESELTINE: It's a serious problem if, in fact, you put it in a context which is of the moment, as opposed to in the context of, first what we've seen happen in the past and secondly, in the context of a parliament. I don't know of a political leader who has not gone through this sort of crisis in mid-term but above all else, I know this, that if the leader doesn't keep his nerve or her nerve and weather the storm and stick with the policies and the principles and the philosphies, then they would find it difficult to account satisfactorily but I know enough about John Major to know that he intends to do just that and rightly so. HUMPHRYS: You use the word crisis. HESELTINE: I only use the word crisis in the sense that one is looking at a position where the party is now behind in opinion polls and obviously that is something we have to address but I don't regard that as a crisis in the sense that is something we can't cope with, because as
I've made the point several times alreay, I've seen this happen so many times before. HUMPHRYS: But isn't it also a crisis where members of the government and Mr Wilshire after all, is a member of the government, are so manifestly disenchanted with the leadership? HESELTINE: Well I don't believe that you will find that that is the general position, but I have absolutely infinite faith in the ability of the newspapers or the media to select quotations to give an impression. What I know perfectly well is that the Conservative Party is determined to fight whenever it fights elections and that it is united by the broad economic and philosophical thrust of its policies. And there's no way which I'm going to sit here as a member of John Major's Cabinet and sort of wallow in the mire of despond. What I am in the business of doing is explaining to Conservatives that we have a programme, that we have to keep our nerve and that when we come to account when it matters at the time of the next election, I believe we can win. HUMPHRYS: Why are so many people wallowing then, why is Mr Major not able to get across that message? HESELTINE: I've explained that very clearly, all political leaders with similar economic circumstances are in very similar situations and they always are. Once the economy is in the sort of difficulties that world recession has imposed upon so many similar countries, the people switch off, they are not listening, they are preoccupied by their own problems and anything that goes wrong for the government is a sort of release of tension in that it focuses their discontent on that particular issue. It's very interesting, if I give you one example of how this can be reversed in favourable economic circumstances. I suppose the American President has now got problems of allegations of one sort or another that he faces which are in every way more difficult than those which we've seen recently in this country and yet his popularity is in fact buoyed up by the state of the American economy. Whereas in our country, the problems of the last month, which are transitory, in fact, seem to overwhelm the overall economic strategy of the government. HUMPHRYS: And you can understand that as far as ordinary voters are concerned, people who don't understand politics, people who can't quite understand what's going on. But as far as your own MPs are concerned, members of your own government, isn't that a bit puzzling that they're wallowing in this slough of despond that you describe? HESELTINE: Not at all. Look, democracies are immensely sensitive, people think that politicians are out of touch, they think parliament and governments don't listen. It's absolutely not true, there is an immense vibrancy between the body politic and the general public and it's all revealed by Press comment, by MPs saying what they say, by the sort of conversations you and I are having. But can I just make the first point that I made to you. This is a totally wasted interview from my point of view because what I want to talk about is the way in which the philosophy and the policies of this government are relevant and how they will carry us through. That's what matters. I tell you that today is not an important day in the life of a government. The important day in the life of a government comes when we have to account for our stewardship and that's the point that is relevant. HUMPHRYS: But you're going to have to account in all sorts of ways quite soon. I mean you've got very important elections coming up; Local government elections and European elections. HESELTINE: We'll fight those elections to win, we always fight to win as the only approach you can possibly adopt. And we will put candidates in the field, we'll put resources behind them, we'll all be out there campaigning for them. We'll fight as hard as we know how, with all the weapons at our disposal. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, we don't want to erect great hurdles as to what the benchmark should be. But the test that really comes is the general election and a governemnt that tried to win every election - every by-election, every local government election, once a year, by and large - or every European election, would actually all the time be shoving a thermometer in its mouth and taking short term decisions with no strategic objective and no long term fulfilment. Why I'm absolutely confident that John Major's leadership will be seen to be as creditable as I believe it to be, is that he has got exactly that long term strategy in mind. He is bringing about fundamental reforms in very difficult areas of this country which have been neglected for too long and I think that they will be seen to have been the important reforms to help Britain face the ever growing competition that the changing world circumstances is thrusting upon us. HUMPHRYS: He may or may not, have a long term strategy, does he have time, that certainly is time.... HESELTINE: Just let's look at the hard economics. Britain is leading Europe out of recession. Productivity is up, industrial relations are excellent, interest rates are down, inflation is down. Interest rate productions alone have taken thirteen billion pounds off the costs of industry. One of the things about the tax increases which Ken Clarke rightly has had to introduce to deal with the public deficit, is that they will be in part offset by the fact that something about two and a half million people with mortgages are about to get a significant reduction in their interest rate bills. Plus, of course, the fact that significant numbers of people are getting rebates on their electricity bills. HUMPHRYS: All of that may be true and given enough time, no doubt people would say, 'fine, yes, I can see the economy's improving and it's helping me personally', but you've got these important elections coming up and between now and then you've got substantial tax increases, people aren't going to start benefitting from lower inflation, from lower unemployment between now and then, what they're going to see is that they're going to be worse off in the short term and that's how people respond, to the short term, by and large, isn't it? You're an experienced politician, you know that, if you feel worse off at the time of an election, you're likely to vote against the government. HESELTINE: The question for the Prime Minister is this: What is right for the country and what is right for the country is that we keep the economy on the steady expansionary mode which we have now achieved. That we take the right decisions to maintain the low level of inflation, the low interest rates which we have achieved. That's the right decision, that is what leadership is about. If he were to say, oh, no, no, what we've got to do is the media bit, worried old boy, so let's sort of monkey around, let's simulate demand, let's let the thing go and try and win a few more seats round the place. That would be wet and weak, and he won't do it. So the fact of the matter is that the very thing you're looking for, which is leadership, is being displayed. You don't like it because, of course, it is not bowing to the mood created by the recession that there has to be change, gimmicks, quick fixes. It's not possible, he won't do it. HUMPHRYS: It might be wet and weak but it's also high risk, isn't it, because if people don't feel better off, they're not going to vote for you. HESELTINE: But if you're Prime Minister, if you're Prime Minister, frankly, your preoccupation is to deliver the promise and that can only be done in this context, in the context of a parliament. You do not divert yourself down by-ways in order to be preoccupied by interim elections, however important they may be and certainly they have to be fought very toughly. HUMPHRYS: But you've got to persuade you're own members of that, haven't you, the people who may or may not mount some sort of challenge against Mr Major eventually. It may not happen, of course, but Peter Temple-Morris, you heard him in that film saying that the patience of everyone will run out as time goes by if things don't get better. This is the last session of parliament when we can afford the luxury of comparative failure. HESELTINE: But he'll be as thrilled as I am of the evidence of the statistics. We've just had a recent CBI survey showing the highest business confidence since 1983, and that is buoyed up by the record level of exports and the interest rates and the industrial relations figures. All of these things, it's coming through, Britain is ahead of the European recovery and what we've now got to do is to keep our nerve, not be diverted and I haven't the slightest doubt that every Conservative member of parliament knows that. HUMPHRYS: But it isn't happening quickly enough for you, is it? That's the problem, you are twenty per cent behind in the polls, not withstanding everything you've told me. HESELTINE: But the logic of your question is that somehow or other we should accelerate it and that's exactly the disaster which
the Prime Minister will not tolerate. HUMPHRYS: No the logic of my question - if there is one to it - is that there's actually not very much you can do now because, of course, you can't accelerate it and that's why Mr Major is in difficulty. HESELTINE: There is a very important thing we can do and that is to keep our nerve and explain our case. That's why programmes like this are important. HUMPHRYS: You've been doing that. HESELTINE: Sure. HUMPHRYS: You've been doing it for so long. HESELTINE: But you have to keep on doing it. You have to keep on doing it and you must not be deflected by the thermometer process of public opinion on a day to day basis. In the end, public opinion comes to respect people who deliver results and that's what we have to do and all the signs are there that as long as we don't lose our nerve, those results will come through. I think that, I have to say it, I think the economic factors today facing the British economy are about as encouraging as I can ever remember, providing we don't do what has happened, time and again, since the war, when the currency has been devalued, which is to let inflation overrun our expectations. HUMPHRYS: But public opinion also respects and indeed demands, not to mention opinion within parliament, strong leadership and Mr Major's problem seems to be that he isn't seen to be exerting that strong leadership, rightly or wrongly. HESELTINE: You're now ignoring the fact that in every other country for whatever the reasons, but the same thing unites the reasons, every other leader has got the same situation. Chancellor Kohl.... HUMPHRYS: Oh, Mr Balladur is doing terribly well in France.... HESELTINE: Yes, yes, but well, is he. We'll have to see about that, but you have President Mitterrand who is the lightning conductor because he is associated with a Socialist government which was recently defeated in France, but nobody questions that Chancellor Kohl is a strong leader. Look at the position of his standing in German politics today, a very strong leader, but recession and therefore all the flak. Look what's happened in Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party, forty years of power upset because of the economic circumstances there, so the fact of the matter is that it is very difficult to persuade people to focus on this, it is that economic situation, characterising all broadly similar economies to our own except America, who's ahead of the race, that is causing this unease, but we are coming out of it earlier and therefore we will see a recovery in our political fortunes earlier. HUMPHRYS: The trouble is every time Mr Major tries to reassert his leadership he seems to get blown off course doesn't he? HESELTINE: Well, not true actually. He did actually have a very much better moment before Christmas and then events of various sorts blew up, but they were not within his ... yes, fine, but then that's politics and you don't want to believe for a minute that life is always like that. You get the bad moments, you get the good moments. You must not be in the position where you run your government on a day to day basis, you've got to have a strategy, and it's because, and this is the interesting thing to me about John Major, is that he has got a very clear understanding of how the anxieties of the British people affected as they are by this shrinking world, by the globalisation of markets, by the telecommunications and communications revolution, but the internationalisation of so much, how people are uneasy. So his strategy is to try and push back to the people power, then you see it everywhere, you see it in deregulation, you see it in Citizen's Charter, you see it in the competitiveness exercise that we're about to take on, you saw it in the policy of Back to Basics. It's about empowering the people and the interesting thing about that is where does that idea come from, it's straight down the line of Disraelian philosophy, the condition of the people. Now that is what John Major is doing. Let me give you some examples, the teacher and training programmes. We are trying to give to parents and to schools the power over their own destiny, publishing results, giving parents the entitlement to reports about the education of their children. It's happening in housing for example, more and more people owning their own homes. We're trying to encourage small businesses. More and more people to own their own businesses in order to give people a bigger stake in society. That is what people want and as long as we can deliver the economic process whereby they gain from that, as they will over the years ahead, then I believe that the Conservative re-election is assured and the triumph will be John Major who saw the need to encapsulate this frustration and to find policies to meet it. HUMPHRYS: But you're not going to achieve all of those things unless you're seen to be as a government, and Mr Major as a leader, firmly in charge. There comes a point doesn't there when people look at the leader and say: you, know, he can, for instance, he can't keep going to the backbenchers and making this sort of plea, this demand, this insistence that they toe the line - the headline that says one day "Major Cracks the Whip" and the next day "Major's back in trouble again". This just can't go on. HESELTINE: You're back on the tittle-tattle of politics. HUMPHRYS: No, but .... HESELTINE:: Can I just - can I just remind you of 1981. Around that time Mrs Thatcher had lost control of her cabinet on public expenditure, she'd lost control of the ability to reach a negotiation of the Falklands with the Argentinian government, where her policy was overturned by the backbenchers, she had had to accept that she couldn't face down the miners at the stage, and there was a very difficult economic circumstance and great anxiety at that moment. She won the general election eighteen months, two years later. Exactly the same sort of things were being said about being out of touch, not understanding, no leadership, all those things. Actually within a very short period time the economic recovery brought the Tories to another triumphant victory. HUMPHRYS: You could as well have given me the example of the last time Mrs Thatcher was in great trouble and a lot of people said, "Oh, she'll ride it out, she'll ride it out, no problems, it's all exaggerated, it's the tittle-tattle of politics", and she was thrown out of office. HESELTINE: Well, that's a judgement that some of us had to make at the time, but that's history, I've no intention of investigating or revisiting that particular issue in this programme now. HUMPHRYS: But, but, no but I raise it you see because ... HESELTINE: I think there's a world of difference between someone who'd been in power for a very long period of time and John Major, who's been there for a very short period of time. I'll give you another example, can I just deal with the European thing because it's very interesting. John Major steered in my view brilliantly the Maastricht negotiations with the overwhelming endorsement of parliament and the Conservative Party. All sorts of people protested. He kept his nerve, he saw the treaty ratified. Now I call that strong leadership. Other people say, "Oh well, he should have bowed, he should have given in, he should have listened to the party". That would have been weak leadership. There's no question about it that John Major in the Maastricht negotiations changed forty years of European process. The centralism that had dominated the European movement from the nineteen-forties onward was checked and in the respect of parts of it actually reversed. That's very strong leadership. HUMPHRYS: But not withstanding that, you still have deep divisions within the parties, you still have factions within the parties who are as it were, almost preparing for a leadership contest. You heard what was said on that film there, and that's got to be worrying for Mr Major. That's got to make it difficult for him to carry on. HESELTINE: I don't think that there were factions preparing for a leadership contest. I haven't the slightest doubt that if you go round the bars of the House of Commons you can get people to talk about these things, but that is just the tittle-tattle of politics. I don't believe there's substance in it, I don't believe there's going to be a challenge to John Major. HUMPHRYS: It's one thing to talk in the bars but it's another thing to sit in front of the television camera and say so isn't it? HESELTINE: It depends entirely on the sort of questions were asked. I've no idea what questions were asked, I've no idea of the length of the interview or how these things have been juxtaposed, and that's why these sort of clippings programmes are so difficult. I've found it myself time and again, where I've done an interview, twenty minutes of questions, thirty second sound-bite. HUMPHRYS: Yes, but you're a - if I may so, a wily old bird, perhaps not that old, but as are so many of the people we interviewed in that film there. They know perfectly well what they're saying, you know and I know and everybody else knows there's a kind of code in politics that you speak in, and it's quite clear what a lot of them are saying, indeed Peter Temple Morris: loyalty to John Major as far as they are concerned, meaning the right wing of the party means more time for their people, its sincerity is extremely hollow, they're waiting for their man as it were to be ready, and then he went on to say, "We don't scheme, but if necessary we are ready to act. HESELTINE: I have a very simple and very boring rule. I never analyse or criticise or comment on my colleagues in parliament and it doesn't get me into trouble and it's a very sensible thing to do. So you won't get me - I'm very fond of Peter Temple Morris... HUMPHRYS: And he's very a credible figure. HESELTINE: He's a very credible figure, but I'm also very fond of all sorts of people on the right wing of politics, and they do have this fun and games amongst themselves - there is a sort of great debate that goes on. The interesting thing about that actually, the real interesting thing is what's the debate on the Labour Party side? There isn't one. What's their contribution to politics? They haven't got one, they've got no views, they've got no policies, they've got no philosophy, all they've got is "Me-tooism". HUMPHYRS: Yes, but they're not in power, you are. HESELTINE: You've got sort of John Smith like a sort of anxious undertaker, wringing his hands trying to pretend he's a modern day Tory, and it's a sort of pathetic performance really. The whole debate in politics today is on the right wing of politics. How you do this, how you involve people, how you become more competitive, how you drive the economies forward, how far you can take privatisation, how you can encourage people to own shares and houses, and all of these things, it's all on the right wing of politics all over the world, and that's the reversal of what - thirty years ago I can remember Anthony Wedgewood Benn talking about the irreversibility of socialism. In the grand old province of China today it's sixty-five per cent capitalist and they call themselves Communists. HUMPHRYS: But what some of your members are now saying is "Look, we can't actually have this real debate about where we're going and the kind of policies we ought to be working towards while we're under pressures of government as we are at the moment. Perhaps we ought to go into opposition for a period and then we can get it all together again. It worked for us from '74 to '79, perhaps we ought to do it again" HESLELTINE: Well, interestingly enough, the big changes that took place in the 1979 government took place after we came to government. HUMPHYRS: Yes, but some of the ideas were born. One of them was yours as I recall - council house sales. HESELTINE: Oh, of course, yes, of course, but.. that didn't come up in HUMPHRYS: You dreamt that up in opposition. HESELTINE: That didn't come up in 1974-9. That was already high on the list of Conservative experience in local government before 1974, on a voluntary basis. All that happened in 1974-9 when I was responsible for policy is we decided to make it a statutary right, but on the big privatisation issue which is perhaps arguably one the most important changes we made, a vital change, actually we were elected in '79 to manage the public sector more effectively. It was after the sale of council houses that we moved to the sale of other industrial and commercial activities. HUMPHRYS: So you disagree with John Biffen then. He said that was a remarkably successful brain-storming exercise, and the implication of what he said was pretty obvious. HESELTINE: Well, I can tell you why it was remarkably successful, we won the election. HUMPHRYS: Yes, but you came up with the ideas to enable you to win that election, you got the party together. HESELTINE: But it would be wrong to suggest that somehow or other we had found a huge new raft of ideas in 1974-79. What we did was to re-articulate the basic Tory ideas and extend them in council house sales and to industrial relations policy which we'd been pursuing before, but above all else we had a Labour government and people realised there were no cosy soft options. The winter of discontent, rampant inflation, huge public debts, that's what actually gave us the background against which the
Conservatives were elected. HUMPHRYS: So you disagree then with David Wilshire who says there are fund ... HESELTINE: You're not going to get me, no, no, no, you've not going to get me to pick off one colleague after another. They're all my colleagues. HUMPHRYS: Ignore the names, if we can disagree with the notion then, forget that it was David Wilshire who said it, a junior member of the government. The fundamental issue's only ultimately capable of very radical change when we're able to think without the pressures of government. HESELTINE: Well, let me just go back to one issue. The Prime Minister enabled me to announce recently that we're going to produce a competitiveness White Paper. Now I happen to think that's one of the more interesting things that any government that I can remember has announced its intention of doing. It is to recognise that this country has to compete in the world of the next century, across the board in every field, and we're going to analyse how we can do that, and this is a very radical idea. It is bringing detailed application of management to the public and the private sector, and it is an idea whose time has come. That is not a product of opposition, that is a product of government. HUMPHRYS: You talk about the tittle-tattle of politics, but let us make an assumption. Let's assume that the pressure does continue on Mr Major, and that in the end either he decides that he wants to go or that there is a leadership election. Now we've already heard some people on our film saying: We might turn to X-Y-or Z. Are people going to say to you next time around, "Uh, well he's a bit you know - he's had his heart attack and Michael Heseltine's bound to be out of the game?" HESELTINE: Look, if that's all they say about me, I would be a very happy man because most of my life they've said things a great deal worse, but I think this thing is just barking. I began the week with the Today programme, and they couldn't resist asking those sort of questions. HUMPHRYS: Well, you've done it before so
we assume you've going to do it again. HESELTINE: Six days later you're back on it. The real thing is that I will help John Major in any way he asks me to to try and sustain and improve his position as premier of this country. We were once involved as rivals, he won, I respect that position, and my interest now is serving in his government and above all else getting him and the Conservatives re-elected at the next election, and if you want a small bet on the result I'm your man. HUMPHYRS: Michael Heseltine, I might take you up on that, thank you. ...oooOooo...