POLITICS

With a display of goldilocked probity Hezza stabs a colleague in the front again

BORIS JOHNSON

One thing they agree on in the Tory party about Michael Ray Dibdin Heseltine: the man is no team player. Whichever way you cut it, there was no imperative for his department to confirm rumours of an inquiry into insider dealing and cause Lord Archer such palpitations in the run-up to a reshuffle. The bringing of Jeffrey's name into the public domain in the form of a long DTI statement, is, indeed, unprece- dented and unexplained.

Unexplained that is, unless one examines the course of Mr Heseltine's political life. One thinks of Westland, and the near-fatal goring of Lady Thatcher, the unmanning of Leon Brittan. On that occasion, admittedly, Hezza (or `Hezzie' as he was then more commonly known) was a man more leaked against than leaking. But, without wishing to press it too far, we can see a similarity of disposition: in his dispassionate ditching of Archer, and his readiness to rut publicly, head to head, against senior colleagues.

Westland was merely a foretaste of the grand guignol of 1990: the matricide. The leadership challenge was the ultimate act of a man who had always held himself at a dis- tance from Margaret Thatcher and senior colleagues. Heseltine alarmed the rest of them, not just because he was a corporatist, but perhaps because he was richer. All that money from property, from Haymarket Pub- lishing, gave him an unsettling air of personal security, an independence from the herd.

In March this year he again set himself apart, in the Matrix Churchill case. Once more, over the use of the gagging orders which could have sent innocent men to jail, Heseltine was able to find a point of princi- ple with which to distinguish himself from his colleagues, more pedestrian creatures, more hugger-mugger. `Up with this I will not put,' said Heseltine in the same voice, one imagines, in which he once announced: 'I cannot accept that decision. I must there- fore leave this cabinet.' By his display of goldilocked probity, he caused the reputa- tions of several eminent Cabinet members to be correspondingly besmirched; not just the hapless Sir Nicholas Lye11, but Mr Lil- ley, Mr Rifkind, and Mr Clarke as well.

Taking all these things together, it must be a matter of common observation that when Mr Heseltine spies some near neigh- bour's political life hanging by a thread, he does not hesitate to play Lachesis; especial- ly when he, Heseltine, has some kind of moral advantage. Down to Gehenna or up to the throne, seems to be the Heseltine watchword; he travels the fastest who trav- els alone.

To repeat: as Julian Critchley, his Boswell, observes along with everyone else, 'Michael has never been a team player.' At Shrewsbury, where the President exhibited a lack of physical co-ordination, he was captain merely of the house (not school) second XIs in football and cricket. 'I could always beat him up,' says Critchley. Per- haps that indignity of being pulverised by the adolescent Critchley is somewhere at the psychological root of all this, the mak- ing of a lonely predator. At his Palladian mansion in Oxfordshire, Heseltine is ill at ease with visitors. He spends his time work- ing in his study, or planting trees in his famous arboretum.

There is the cynical view, that in these intra-party conflicts, Heseltine is simply out for himself. You could say the Westland row was elaborately provoked as a means of attacking Thatcher's style, and the lady herself. Perhaps, in the case of the Scott inquiry, he took an extra joy in inverting Sir Nicholas Lye11 so squarely in the dung-hill, because he still harbours resentment at the role of Lye11 and other government law officers in 1986 in undermining the Euro- pean consortium he had put together for Westland.

Some MPs speculate that he bore no par- ticular love for Jeffrey Archer, and decided to take revenge on the man who had not backed him in the autumn of 1990, slickly switching from Thatcher to Major. 'I am sure he would not have wanted Archer as chair- man of the party. He would have wanted Nick Soames,' says one Heseltine friend.

It must be said that in the case of the matricide, and Westland as well, the Hesel- tinian issue of 'principle' had a slightly manufactured feel. Over the helicopters, Heseltine was at least as much in breach of the principle of cabinet government as the Prime Minister. As for his leadership chal- lenge, I wonder how many of his constituen- cy association in Henley believed his asser- tion, in his epistolary shot across Mrs Thatcher's bows, that, The issue is Europe.'

And yet, whatever his underlying motiva- tions, Heseltine must be granted at least one redeeming characteristic. All Tory politicians, perhaps all politicians, spend their time trying to 'stitch up' their col- leagues. The metaphor suggests careful, invisible sewing. But if Heseltine attacks, he stabs not in the back but in the front. He is not one of the many who brief behind their hands against colleagues.

And what is more, one can even argue that in at least some of the cases where he has acted as lone wolf, it is because he is simply a better politician, in that he has more of the politician's most vital attributes: judgment, and ability to antici- pate events. Unlike any other minister con- cerned, he bothered to read the Matrix Churchill evidence. Dyslexic or not, he had the nous to see that use of the Public Inter- est Immunity Certificates would lead to accusations of a cover-up; and similarly, perhaps, with Archer, say Heseltine's defenders. The President was merely think- ing ahead, foreseeing embarrassment for himself and the Prime Minister if it was thought that he was protecting Archer.

Perhaps, in conclusion, the two interpreta- tions are not mutually exclusive. It may be that from Mr Heseltine's point of view, his political stars are most perfectly aligned when he can take a stand which simultane- ously embraces a principle and scuppers a rival.

As this column was going to press, the view at Westminster was that Jeffrey Archer was now out of the running, if indeed he had ever been in it, for a post in Central Office. If that is true, he will, by his own account, give up his chicken-chewing stump-bashing, which has raised so many millions for the party. The Tories' loss, though, will be literature's gain. Instead of dissipating his energies in speeches, he might compose a fictional warning for Mr Major, of the dangers of being outflanked, on any point of 'principle', by Mr Heseltine.

Boris Johnson is on the staff of the Daily Telegraph.