Reflections on a life of public service: An Interview with Lord Heseltine
Reflections on a life of public service: An Interview with Lord Heseltine
GRI sat down with the Rt Hon Lord Heseltine, former Conservative deputy prime minister and defense secretary of the United Kingdom, to discuss his political philosophy, private sector experience and proudest achievements in public service.
This interview was edited for the purpose of clarity and length.
GRI
What motivated you to enter public service?
Lord Heseltine
You will not be very attracted by the reply, because I do not know, is the answer. I know how and when it happened, but I do not know why it happened. And it is very simple. It was in 1951 in the course of a general election campaign, I was walking down the main street in Swansea in South Wales to meet friends for coffee and on the other side of the road I saw a large poster that said ‘Henry Kirby, Conservative candidate’ and I crossed the road and asked if I could help. That is how I got into politics and 10 days later, I went up to Oxford as an undergraduate, I joined the City of Oxford Conservative Association, the University Conservative Association and the Oxford Union on my first day, and from that moment on, I have been on the fringe to start with and then increasingly deeply involved in the political world.
GRI
Do you believe that your experience and skills developed in the private sector helped you succeed in the public sector?
Lord Heseltine
To generalise my answer, I think that the skill to go into public life, if you can go in with a contribution to make because of your experience, is a very important attribute in itself. From my point of view, I started a small business and I knew all the calculations and excitements of starting a small business – you win some, lose some and sometimes make mistakes. Hopefully you make more good judgment than mistakes. You learn the rough world that commercial life is about. I suppose it went relatively well – what started off with three of us in an office in Soho, now is a company of 1400 people spread across the world. The experience of doing that was hugely invaluable to me. That does not mean that you should only go into public life or service if you are inclined to the commercial, business world. But the lesson to learn is that by the time I got into public life, I had run a medium sized company and so I had good knowledge about management and the commercial world and I knew what I was talking about from personal experience. However, that experience was to change very significantly because my experience has been that of a small businessman, an entrepreneur of a startup. Within hours of becoming a minister, I was dealing with giant corporations and multi million pound programmes. Literally, one week I was approving every petty cash voucher over 50p on the basis there were not many 50p’s around. And next thing I know, my first day as a junior minister, they asked me to sign away 6 million pounds worth of investment in a rail line in the east of England.
GRI
How would you define One Nation conservatism and what led you to embrace this political philosophy?
Lord Heseltine
With regards to the definition, One Nation conservatism is a belief in the individual and a system that enables individuals to flourish in freedom, to express themselves, explore and fulfill the talents they may have. This political philosophy is also recognising that there are huge differences in people’s aptitudes and abilities and so there should be a big role for government in protecting those less fortunate, encouraging those who have abilities but maybe have not had the opportunities to exploit them. I think it was Churchill’s phase, “a net below which no one may fall, above which everyone is free to rise.” It is the middle ground of politics, recognising the role of the state, but also the primacy of individual responsibility and initiative. There is enterprise in both the public and private sector. People are naturally enterprising. That means they wish to develop and build on the opportunities that are there and you see many examples of that in the public sector but of course it is preeminently in the private sector.
In terms of what made me embrace this political philosophy, I think that one must start with life in Swansea. I lived a prosperous middle class life in Swansea, but you did not have to go very far to see that there was a very different story for many people. Undoubtedly, that awareness influenced me, and there was one particularly formative experience when I suppose I was about 15 or 16. I was a student at a leading public school and one day I wandered out of the school into the town itself. I do not remember how far I wandered or where it was, but I know I was in a very poor district and I turned around the corner and there was a little girl. I stopped and blinked. She was the spitting image of my sister. Perhaps saying that she was in rags would be an extreme but she was quite obviously very poor.
The starkness of that memory has lived with me ever since. There are great inequalities in ability and in the distribution of wealth, and this requires a benign government to draw a balance as to how you redistribute to protect whilst not suffocating the entrepreneur and the wealth creators.
GRI
What is your proudest moment in public service?
Lord Heseltine
My speech in 1981 after spending three weeks walking the streets of Liverpool after the riots of the summer of ‘81. I dealt with the racial tensions that have been part of British politics ever since I was in the House of Commons. I was elected very shortly before Enoch Powell made his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech. I was the first Conservative politician to attack Enoch Powell’s speech. I had seen certain amount of racial prejudice in my commercial world. Fast forward to ‘81, where I had seen something of the racial tensions in Liverpool and I decided that I had to talk to the Conservative Party frankly about this and at my conference speech, I addressed the issue, ‘what does equality of opportunity mean to people living in the slum lands of Liverpool?’ And then I came to the words that I had spent a long time agonising over – ‘they are black, they are British, they live here, they vote here.’ And the Tory party cheered me to the echo. That is one of my proudest moments. I am also proud that many years later, a local council consisting virtually of all Labour councillors offered me the Freedom of the City.
