Popular Political Loner Emerges as Most Likely Successor to Thatcher

Told by an interviewer that Britain’s biggest bookmaker considered him, at 6 to 1, a leading candidate to succeed Margaret Thatcher as head of the ruling Conservative Party, Michael Heseltine affected a lack of interest.

“I’m not a gambling man,” said the former defense minister who shook the Thatcher government in January, 1986, by resigning abruptly over the government’s handling of a rescue effort for Westland, the ailing helicopter firm.

But as the interviewer prepared to leave, Heseltine spotted a handwritten list with the prevailing odds on some other top Tories as well, and he said: “Six-to-one, you say. May I see that?”

Michael Ray Dibdin Heseltine, 56, is in fact very interested in a shot at becoming prime minister, and this is not surprising.

“I have not been more or less preoccupied with the greasy pole upward in politics than other colleagues,” he conceded.

Political Survivor

What is surprising is that after crossing the “Iron Lady,” Heseltine has managed to survive politically at all, to say nothing of re-emerging as one of the most intriguing and talked-about figures in British public life.

He did not figure in last month’s reorganization of the Thatcher Cabinet. But nobody thought he would. And while some of his rivals appeared to gain ground, Heseltine’s shadow still looms large.

“I would have thought when he walked out of the Cabinet that his chances of succeeding Mrs. Thatcher would be no more than a snowball’s in hell,” British pollster Robert Worcester said in an interview.

But, Worcester added, Heseltine “stands six inches taller than anyone else in the running.”

London Sunday Times political correspondent Edward Pearce observed recently: “The hills are alive with the sound of Heseltine. When the name of Heseltine for the succession is mentioned among Conservatives, it is nowhere mocked.”

‘He Will Be There, Waiting’

The Independent said in a recent profile: “When Mrs. Thatcher goes, as one day she must, he will be there, waiting. If she falls, by accident or election, he could well succeed her. But even if she went in her own sweet time, the next leader will need Michael Heseltine to help heal the bruises, even wounds, that she will leave behind.”

The whole question of Heseltine’s standing would be mostly academic except for the fact that after more than 10 years in office and in the middle of her third term, Thatcher has encountered some stormy political waters. It may be no more than a case of the midterm blues, as her close advisers insist. But it may also be, as her critics charge, that the public is ready to move beyond “Thatcherism.”

Her Conservative Party took a worrisome beating in the June elections for the European Parliament. And a series of recent polls have given the rival Labor Party a lead of up to 13 points over Thatcher’s Tories--an extraordinary turnaround since late last year.

The prime minister hopes that her unexpectedly sweeping reorganization of the Cabinet will turn the tables again. But that remains to be seen.

Meanwhile, without directly challenging her, Heseltine has slowly emerged as a less rigidly ideological alternative to Thatcher, someone who offers what is reputed to be a more forward-looking “Thatcherism with a human face.”

Heseltine has “a distinctive kind of appeal that could fit neatly into a post-Thatcher Conservative Party,” Independent columnist Peter Jenkins said in an interview.

While the prime minister is seen as having jumped only recently and half-heartedly on board the “Green” bandwagon, with initiatives such as her “bag it and bin it” anti-litter campaign, Heseltine is a longtime environmentalist, a bird watcher and former minister of the environment who takes pride in his private arboretum.

At a time when an unhappy majority of British voters suspect Thatcher of trying to at least partially dismantle the popular National Health Service in the name of cost-cutting reform, Heseltine is associated with a more active government role and higher spending in areas of particular social need, such as education and urban redevelopment.

But the point on which the two differ most publicly is Britain’s role in Europe. The difference was emphasized by the publication a few weeks before the European elections of Heseltine’s new book, “The Challenge of Europe; Can Britain Win?”

Thatcher has become Europe’s most notable naysayer on many proposals for greater European union. She says she will not cede Britain’s sovereignty to a European bureaucracy that threatens to impose the very sort of socialist philosophies that she has made a career of trying to destroy in Britain.

Britain’s Mistake

Heseltine, meanwhile, warns that Britain made a mistake by failing to get in on the ground floor of the European Economic Community in 1957. It dare not make another, he says, by failing not only to participate in but to lead its current transformation.

“The conditions which made it possible for Britain to be semi-detached from Europe for so long have vanished forever,” he argues in the book. “There is no empire to sustain us; we are no longer an industrial superpower; we can no longer pretend that Britain is in any sense an equal partner of the United States. There is nowhere for us to go except as part of a European consortium.”

There are, he adds, “those who fear that in moving closer to Europe, Britain will lose her identity. On the contrary, I believe that within Europe she will find a much greater one.”

Neither in his book nor in interviews and public appearances does Heseltine seek to personalize his differences with the prime minister, even though for many years there has been no love lost between them. It is critical to his political strategy, which is to be ready to succeed Thatcher, not to try to topple her.

“I don’t think it’s helpful to try and define the attitudes and the assumptions of other members of the party,” Heseltine said in the interview, which was conducted in his chauffeur-driven Jaguar between the offices of his successful publishing company and Parliament. “It’s good newspaper copy and big headlines, but it doesn’t further the debate.”

Could Be Political Suicide’

It could also be political suicide, given the fact that under the British system one must be the leader of one’s party before one can become prime minister. While the colorful Heseltine has long rated high with the general public, it is the party faithful who choose their leader. And to them, “letting down the side” is bad form.

Some Tories still fault Heseltine for just that when he resigned in 1986 over the Westland affair.

“If the basis of trust between the prime minister and her defense secretary no longer exists, there is no place for me with honor in such a Cabinet,” he said at the time.

After spending virtually his entire political career either in the Cabinet or as a spokesman for his party in opposition, Heseltine suddenly became a Conservative back-bencher.

“It’s extremely frustrating,” he said, “but I made the conscious decision. I have huge regrets, but I have no doubts it was the right thing to do.”

No Return Ticket

As long as Thatcher is in charge, there is no question of his returning to a top party job.

“I never assumed that there was a return ticket,” he said.

That does not mean that he was giving up, just that he would have to change his modus operandi.

“If you think of the career I’ve had, which is essentially that of a front-bench spokesman, dependent on the patronage of whoever was the leader of the party and no one else, I didn’t need the support of a wider constituency than that,” Heseltine said. “But of course in the last three years, in order to survive in politics, I needed very much such a constituency.”

He had several strikes against him. In the clubby atmosphere of British politics he was a lone wolf, more interested in spending his weekends at his 800-acre country estate with his wife, his children, his birds and his trees. Others found him too flashy or coolly ambitious for their taste.

A tanned and rangy six-footer with full, sometimes unruly gray-blond hair, Heseltine has been nicknamed variously “Tarzan,” “Goldilocks” and, in an unkind reference to his reputed lack of cultural interests, “Michael Philistine.”

While he has a distinctly upper class British accent, Heseltine describes himself as a member of “the commercial middle classes of South Wales,” the son of a steel fabrication company director. He had what the London Times describes as an “undistinguished private education” before going to Oxford University.

Of his family, Heseltine has said: “They didn’t read. They didn’t have great academic discussion. They didn’t expect to produce intellectuals.” His ambition, he added, was “to make money,” something at which he succeeded beyond most men’s wildest expectations.

He parlayed a small--about $3,000 in the early 1950s--inheritance into a very successful publishing fortune now estimated at around $100 million. He has a $3.5-million home in London’s posh Belgravia section and his country estate is valued at nearly three times that much. His wife rides to hounds, and their dinner parties are reputed to be on a regal scale.

To build his party constituency, Heseltine, an accomplished orator, has hit the speaking circuit in a big way. He gave three addresses on the day of the interview, and he said that typically he speaks 10 or 12 times a week, mostly at the request of party activists.

“Wherever three or more are gathered in the name of Tory politics, there is Heseltine among them,” pollster Worcester said.

On the Speaking Circuit

When he is not on the speaking circuit, he is giving interviews, making guest appearances on televised current affairs programs or writing guest columns for the British press. He writes and speaks as a loyal party man but one with just enough of a difference to set him slightly apart, particularly when it comes to Europe.

The formula seems to be working, Worcester said. Until about a year ago, he noted, his polls showed that among the party loyalists, Norman Tebbit, a Thatcher confidant and former secretary of employment and industry, was the most popular likely successor to Thatcher. Heseltine was most popular among non-Tories. But now Heseltine is holding his own among the loyalists too.

The bookmakers, at least, like Heseltine’s chances. Right after last week’s Cabinet reshuffle, the odds on his succeeding Thatcher shortened to 4-1 from the earlier 6-1.