ANOTHER VOICE
The straight and narrow way or the primrose path for the Tory party
CHARLES MOORE
As the editor of this journal could tell you better than I, when you interview Politicians you try to catch them out. After this has happened, the politicians and many of their supporters assume that you, the interviewer, were filled with hostile intent. But this is not necessarily so. It is rather that 'catching them out' is an impor- tant way of getting them to say something interesting, which is the interviewer's job. . In the past tumultuous week, I inter- viewed both Mrs Thatcher and Mr Hesel- tine. I wanted Mrs Thatcher to win, and would have wanted her to win even if she had had a different opponent. I wanted Mr Heseltine to lose, and would have wanted him to lose even if his only opponent had been any of the other 370 Conservative MPs, except Mrs Edwina Currie. But I felt that I succeeded in catching Mrs Thatcher out, and that with Mr Heseltine I failed.
Mr Heseltine is a model of efficiency. When my colleague George Jones and I arrived at his beautiful, surprisingly and Pleasantly dilapidated house in North- amptonshire on Sunday, the photo- graphers had broken ranks and tumbled over his wall. They jostled him in the midday sun, and he walked calmly smiling Up and down a small part of his garden, surrounded by that white cloud of televi- sion fighting which is the worldly man's equivalent of a halo. The photo- Opportunity finished when it was supposed to finish. Mr Heseltine's son escorted us to the house, Mrs Heseltine gave us coffee and Mr Heseltine sat in the chair in his study where the light was best (we had a Photographer). We had 45 minutes before it was time for ITN.
. Mr Heseltine understood every ques- tion. By this I mean that he saw the Political implication behind each question and how to give an answer which would strike home with the audience he wanted to reach. It would never cross his mind to answer a question in the way that an Ordinary person answers a question: to consider what the true answer might be and then to give it. He has a ruthless clarity 9f Purpose, like that of a general to whom it never occurs that the men under his command have mothers and wives and Children at home. I failed in my most carefully staged attempt to catch him out. I asked him if he was a European federalist. He said, 'Certainly not. I don't believe federation is on the European agenda in serious terms.' I then quoted a passage from his recent book on Europe in which he said that we were now pervaded by 'federalism by stealth' about which politi- cians refused to tell the voters. Without hesitation, Mr Heseltine explained that that was why his proposals for a greater check on central powers — a Senate of Europe, an independent central bank in Britain — were so important. Not an answer, of course, but the neatest use of the chance to say what he wanted to say.
When I listened to the tape afterwards I realised that Mr Heseltine had made only one slip, although he had made it twice. Of the decision to stand, he said, 'I could have left it to someone from the backbenches'; of Mr Hurd, he said, 'I am not prepared to put words into a Cabinet colleague's mouth.' Mr Heseltine is an the backben- ches: Mr Hurd is not his Cabinet colleague. His only unintended revelation was of a trait of character — an excessive eagerness for power — not of a point of view that might be unpopular or unwelcome, or interesting.
Mrs Thatcher is often described as an interviewer's nightmare. Certainly she does not observe the ordinary manners of these things. At one point, when I saw her at Downing Street last Thursday, I asked her if, over Europe, she thought she was in the position of Sir Robert Peel over the Repeal of the Corn Laws, torn between what she believed was right for her country and what would hold her party together. Her unusable answer went on for more than five minutes and encompassed (I am not exaggerating) the Old and New Testa- ments, the Emperor Justinian, the Re- naissance, the scientific and industrial re- volutions, the Ottoman Empire, the Mogul Empire and China. Sir Robert Peel only got a look in in the last sentence, and was dismissed as irrelevant.
On the other hand, Mrs Thatcher finds it very difficult to avoid saying what she believes and disclosing what is on her mind, even when she knows that it may not be to her advantage to do so. This is the sense in which I felt that I caught her out. So it was that she could not hold back whenever I raised passages from Sir Geof- frey Howe's resignation statement. (She seemed much more hurt by him than by Mr Heseltine.) His criticism of her for saying that the hard ecu would not be widely used provoked her to extremes of indignation that her critics would not let her say what she thought. 'Poor wee bairns! Poor wee bairns!' shouts my tape. And when I used his phrase about 'living in a ghetto of sentimentality about the past', she deli- vered an answer of great and combative eloquence about the British tradition of freedom and the rule of law, which did nothing to pour oil on troubled waters, lots of people have died for that past, died that we might have our present'. Mrs Thatcher is a highly professional politician, of course, but that is never merely that. It was only after I had switched the tape off that she remembered there were various , other straight political points she had meant to make, so she asked me to switch it on again so that she could make them. Mr Heseltine would never have forgotten himself to such an extent.
Obviously one should admire Mr Hesel- tine's determination. Wanting something very much indeed is the first qualification for getting it. But with really interesting and important politicians, of whom there are extremely few, the egotism reaches beyond itself to something worth having, so that more is left behind than 'the wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command' on the broken statue in the desert. To say of a politician that he or she can be caught out in an interview can be a compliment. People attribute Mrs Thatcher's con- tinuing energy after 15 years as leader to an iron physical constitution and a love of power. That must be true, but there is also, more apparent in her present days of adversity than in the rather disagreeable period when she was telling us how tremendously rich we all were, an endless striving to work out what should be done for her country. It is almost a pilgrimage, of a woman discovering by trial and error (a good deal of both) what it is to be a Tory. I am not surprised that many Con- servatives are now fed up with stumping along with peas in their shoes o'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, and perk up when Mr Heseltine offers them the king- doms of this world and the chance of turning stones into bread. They are hu- man, all too human. But if he wins next Tuesday the Conservative party will be taking a vain jump and there will be no angels to break its fall.
Previous page
