Bernard Ingham: Tarzan gets back in the swing... and asks the right questioN

SOMETIMES I think I am losing it. This is serious at my age. I might never recover. These were my thoughts when this week I discovered myself agreeing with Michael Heseltine.

In mitigation, I should say that I am not an uncritical admirer of Tarzan. I doubt whether he has had a new idea for at least 30 years. This is not surprising since his forte is doing, not thinking. His performance in securing the deployment of cruise missiles in the 1980s in the face of CND opposition is testimony to his campaigning capabilities.

He is also a raging Europhile, which has been known to cause him to go off the rails. His resignation over the Westland affair in 1986 – he wanted the helicopter company to merge with a non-existent European consortium whereas the Cabinet thought it should find its own commercial salvation, as it did – began his long guerrilla war against Margaret Thatcher’s Euroscepticism.

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He is also a conspiracy theorist. He claims that No 10 was behind the leaking of the Solicitor General’s letter about “material inaccuracies” in one of his letters about Westland. Well, if it was, it forgot to tell its press secretary. I refused point blank to leak the letter at the request of the DTI saying “I must keep the Prime Minister above that sort of thing”.

In spite of all this, there is something to be said for Heseltine’s views on two issues: government intervention and our will to recover our economic vitality.

Let’s deal first with government intervention. Only a man of Heseltine’s overweening self-confidence could proclaim his intention in government to intervene morning, noon and night to help businesses. The idea that a Minister can tinker endlessly and beneficially is little short of barmy, especially if you accept that what business wants most of all is a degree of certainty.

But the idea that a Minister can create a framework within which the nation can prosper is not out of this world. Thatcher did just that and was instrumental in providing the largesse that Gordon Brown used to try to bribe the voters, with disastrous consequences for public debt. In other words, it all depends on what you mean by intervention. Here Heseltine says successive governments have had no effective industrial policy and left “market forces to prevail without any attempt to support swathes of the British economy”.

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If only it were as simple as that. It is true that Nigel Lawson’s belief that the market will provide has held remarkable sway over Tory, Labour and Con-Dem coalition governments. But that has not stopped them from picking “winners”, which is supposed to be the most heinous sin in the books of free marketeers.

Take, for example, energy policy. Here governments have been driven by ignorant “Greens” into subsidising largely useless “renewable sources of energy” – effectively wind – while at the same time setting their faces against any subsidy for nuclear power, which provides security of low carbon supply. In other words, they picked a “winner” that experts told them was a sure fire loser and for a long time sidelined what ticked all their boxes. Yet Heseltine is surely right if he is saying that governments have a responsibility to keep the lights on and must make sure they do. If that is what he means by intervention – securing the nation’s strategic interests – I’m with him all the way. What else are governments for?

But governments can only do so much. And here again Heseltine recognises this. He says: “There is no God-given rule saying you’ve got to have a well-performing economy... It’s a question of whether the national will is there, whether we want it. And the richer you get the less imperative there is. Maybe one of the problems of advanced economies is that people are sufficiently well-off that they don’t need to drive themselves any more.”

Well, all this is compatible with the theory enunciated by General Sir John Glubb Pasha, British commander of the old Transjordan Arab Legion. He put a 250-year term on the average length of national greatness. In that time, he said, nations go through six ages – pioneering, conquest, commerce, affluence, intellect and decadence.

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Decadence, he said, was marked, among other things, by frivolity, an influx of foreigners, the welfare state and a weakening of religion. It was due to selfishness, love of money and loss of a sense of duty.

Let us salute Michael Heseltine for asking the right question. Are we prepared to work ourselves out of this mess?

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