LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Michael Heseltine : Britain’s Prime Tory Assesses Party’s Chances--They’re Good (of Course)

To Conservative Party supporters and the British tabloids, he is known as “Tarzan.” Indeed, Michael Ray Dibdin Heseltine looks the part and is one of the most popular political figures with the Tory rank-and-file--at the grass-roots level. Tall, rangy, with Kirk Douglas looks and flowing blond locks that are beginning to whiten, Heseltine always stirs up the faithful with rousing speeches at Conservative Party conferences. In person, he seems almost too big for his top-floor office as secretary of state for trade and industry in Prime Minister John Major’s Cabinet. The job also carries the title president of the board of trade, and, perhaps significantly, he prefers the title “president” to “secretary of state.”

Now 61, he was a successful publisher before winning a seat in the House of Commons and served in the government of Prime Minister Edward Heath in the early 1970s. Heseltine supported Heath in his losing battle for the Tory Party leadership against Margaret Thatcher in 1975. But Thatcher appointed him to her first Cabinet as environment secretary in 1979. He shifted to defense in 1983 but, after in an internal argument over policy, he resigned in a huff in 1986.

In 1990, from the backbenches, Heseltine led the move to depose Thatcher. He was successful--but partly because of his spoiling role, lost the vote for the prime minister’s post to Major. Nonetheless, Heseltine is often mentioned as a leading successor to Major if the prime minister should step down or be deposed. Heseltine maintains that he is a loyal supporter of Major.

Heseltine lives at his 800-acre country estate with his wife, Anne. They have three children. He suffered a serious heart attack last year, which may have reduced his chances of ever becoming prime minister. But he was looking tanned and fit during a recent conversation in his Spartan office in the department’s high-rise overlooking London’s Westminister district.

Question: As Britain gets closer to Europe, it gets farther from the United States. Should America be worried?

Answer: No. American governments since that of President Eisenhower have been consistent in urging Britain to become more closely involved in the European postwar movement. And so, they shouldn’t be surprised if we do. But it serves both British self-interest and American interest. It serves British self-interest for all the obvious reasons that the configuration of power is increasingly focused on the shrinking world market and three regional markets of the Pacific, America and Europe. And for Britain to be a leading voice in that process means that we tend to influence the climate, the environment in which decisions are taken that affect us profoundly.

From America’s point of view, the attitudes of the Anglo-Saxon, capitalist culture, the attitudes toward the defense of the free world, the common language, gives America the opportunity to know that there is a very sympathetic and historically close ally at the decision-making process which--as our interests tend to coincide in many ways--is to American interests as well.

Q: Isn’t there a lot of tension in Britain right now, as regards the role of Britain in the world?

A: Well, there’s always tension in democratic politics, that’s the great strength of democracy, that it resolves tensions in an amicable, peaceful way.

But it would be unthinkable for a shift of British policy of such historic proportions to be conducted without tension across the political spectrum, both within and between parties. But the broad thrust of the process is acknowledged by all parties today.

Q: Another American fear is the fear of a Labor Party government--we’ve been dealing with a Conservative Party government for 15 years, and it’s worked rather well, on the whole. Are the American fears of a Labor government legitimate?

A: Well, they’re not going to be in power. Socialism is bankrupt. If you look at the late 19th Century--where the excesses of capitalism were thought to be susceptible to cure by statist solutions, whether they were socialist or communist--it was quite widely believed that there had to be a more orderly, a more planned, a more centralist, a more egalitarian way of managing complex societies. The movement in that direction lasted until the 1980s.

The fact is that there is no serious contribution today being made by socialism across the world. To the extent there is a huge debate about the future of societies, it’s all based upon the philosophies of the free-enterprise capitalist culture. Cuba may be the exception--but there’s hardly any exceptions to this rule. So any party which has its roots and its emotions, its instincts and its power base in yesterday’s structures cannot win. They are simply out of date.

Q: In the event, however likely or unlikely, of a Labor government, what would be the implications of British foreign policy vis-a-vis the United States?

A: The difficulty about the Labor foreign policy at the moment is that it’s very difficult to know what it would actually amount to in practice. It has always tended to be anti-American in its basis. There are (Labor Party) trigger words--there are bosses , there’s profits, there’s capitalism and there’s America. And those are the sort of words that bring rapturous applause from the audiences of the left. If you want to get them off their butts, cheering in the aisles, you play that variety of music. Now, of course, trying to win power they’ve learnt to suppress this instinct and this phraseology but, deep down, it’s all there.

Q: As a leading light of the Tory Party, with polls in the last six months to a year showing the party quite low, what’s your solution for bringing the Tories back out on top for the next general election--which might not be until 1997?

A: Well, you’re right to set the question in the right time scale--the next general election is a long way from today. And the answer to your question, in a single word, is recession. If you look at similar societies to ours, you will find that there is no exception to the rule, that recession has cost the governments of those countries their existence. President Bush failed to secure reelection in America, the incumbent government was beaten in Canada, the Liberal Democrats lost power for the first time in 40 years in Japan, the socialists were beaten in France and, until recently, Chancellor Kohl has been into similar difficulties in Germany. We, too, are no exception to this rule.

Democracies take a toll of their political leaders when the economic circumstances take a toll of democracies. As we’re just coming through the longest and deepest recession of the postwar world, there’s no way that elected governments could escape from its ravages. And the answer follows from this analysis, that if we, as a government, are going to keep our nerve, we are in an extremely competitive position, economically and industrially, today, and by the time we get to the election, the growing confidence in the management of our companies will have been translated into an understanding in the public mind of why we had to achieve the low-inflation and low-interest background for the restoration of our fortunes, and how the people have benefited from that. But you can’t get people to understand that in advance of the delivery.

Q: There is speculation about the next prime minister. Who will that be?

A: Yes, well, my analysis goes on to answer the question quite easily. I think that the current prime minster, John Major, will lead the Conservatives in the next election, and we will be elected with an increased majority. The prime minister will be seen as a man of steel who’s kept his nerve and led us through the most difficult, stretching circumstances, and I can hear the speeches that everyone will be making then. I say all this because I’ve been through these experiences so many times in the mid-term of governments.

Q: Now that Tony Blair has succeeded to the Labor leadership, is this bright, fresh face a danger to the Conservative Party?

A: The only thing that would be a danger to the Conservative Party is if the economy isn’t as good as I think it will be. The personalities will fade into insignificance against economic delivery. You can’t fool the people--they know whether the economy is suiting them or not, because they know what their relative living standards are doing, and a sense of confidence in jobs, and all of that is very much a personal judgment for them.

Q: It seems as if there is a trend toward a more measured role for the state.

A: Yes, it’s a very important point, and I think it’s manifest in many ways. The whole privatization across the world is an indication of governments recognizing the restraints in what they can do. The need to cut public borrowing across the world is the recognition that governments just can’t go on borrowing; it has malign consequences on the management of the economy. So there’s a new consensus and essentially a right-wing consensus--this is, in fact, the analysis I was giving you a few minutes ago.

A left-wing government could no more escape from that than any other government, but they would hate not being able to escape, whereas on the right, we tend to welcome the disciplines that it imposes once we recognize the beneficial effects. That presents left-wing governments with enormous difficulties--because their heart isn’t in it. They actually want to supply the left-wing solutions, the statist solutions, but they can’t.

Q: You often emphasize the need for government to help and be involved in sectors of the economy that are hurting. One phrase in America for this is “industrial policy.” Do you favor a kind of industrial policy?

A: Oh, yes. Every government has an industrial policy, even if the essence of the policy is not to have a policy . . . . The concepts of industrial policy, industrial strategy, whatever you call it, are the subject of deep and burning controversy. Now you have gone to one aspect of the dangers of one sort of industrial strategy, which is overregulation.

There are many other dangers. One is oversubsidization, because you preserve inefficiencies. The other is over-state ownership, because then you create monoplies and then you protect them.

You can go to the other end of the political spectrum and have an industrial policy which says we’ll do nothing to help anybody in any circumstances, whereupon you find yourself getting wiped out by other countries that have heavily supported this, that or the other thing . . . .

Helping (British) companies to win (in the world marketplace) means you have to be very hard-nosed about your analysis about what will help them win. You do not work on the assumption that what they tell you is what will help them to win. Because if you do that, you go down the road that you were talking about--which is subsidy protection. It doesn’t help them to win; it may only help the weak to survive, but not for long.

The first and biggest goal of all is getting the macroeconomic policies right. You get low inflation, low interest rates, good industrial relations, high productivity, low taxes at a competitive exchange rate and a heck of a lot will go right for you. Not everything, if you don’t educate your people and train them properly. So you’ve gotta get that right and even if you get that right, there are all sorts of other things that then come into play.

America today, for example, is being very aggressive in its use of export credits. And I get companies saying we can beat them on price but we can’t beat them on the credits--well, that’s a state intervention. I mean, America has always been a very formidable competitor.

Q: You’ve got an awfully small desk; one expected to see something like that Chaplin movie, with the biggest desk in the world.

A: Not much happens in this office.

Q: Why such a small desk?

A: There’s nothing much to put on it.