Michael Heseltine is preaching his vision of can-do capitalism – just as he did in Margaret Thatcher's government
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Michael Heseltine makes his recommendations in a report called No Stone Unturned. Photograph: David Levene
What a pleasure to see Michael Heseltine spreading his distinctive brand of infectious optimism across our newspapers and TV screens today, to hear him nimbly dodging political booby traps on Radio 4's Today programme as he preaches his vision of can-do capitalism – government-backed but dramatically decentralised, a formula which would unleash what he calls "the extraordinary dynamism of provincial Britain".
As Patrick Wintour reminds readers in his Politics Guardian interview, the thing about Hezza is that he's done it all before, been there, got the government T-shirt, faced down timid civil servants. A minister under Ted Heath, Margaret Thatcher (whom he brought down) and John Major, he's been in frontline politics for nearly 50 years. It's a Gladstonian or Churchillian record and, like those two old warhorses, he's still fired up at 79.
More than that, Lord Heseltine is a very rich man who made his own money – unlike most of his critics on the supposedly free-enterprise right (or the anti-enterprise left) who did neither. Their theories are just that: theories. Hezza is a (mildly dyslexic) doer, not a thinker, but he understands the restless dynamic of capitalism and is not naive about its weaknesses. The basic CV is here.
Do I sound like a fan? You bet. Is he scary? You bet again. As the late Frank Johnson, sketchwriter and wit, once said of a Heseltine conference rant: "One People, One Reich, One Heseltine." As PM he would have tyrannised his cabinet as much as Thatcher did, but his economic mix of policies might have worked better than the lawyer-chemist's book-learning.
I have known Hezza for over 30 years and was even present in the press gallery the night in 1976 when "Tarzan" – as he was rapidly becoming known – picked up the Commons mace in anger at Labour MPs singing the Red Flag on winning the vote (in dodgy circumstances) to nationalise the aircraft and shipbuilding industries. I saw it re-enacted in the National Theatre's excellent 70s politics production, The House, only last night.
Yes, children: we nationalised failing private enterprises in those days, much in the same panacea-prone way we privatise all or parts of failing public services now. In the right hands either option can work; in clumsy hands they often fail, as they did the aircraft and ship builders. So did Hezza's mace gesture: intended as one of despair, it looked like attempted bodily harm in the gloomy 10.30pm chamber of the pre-TV era.
Never mind: he's never dull and often good fun. You can tease him. Last spring I shared a train journey to Birmingham with him on a Hezza tour to promote the idea of elected mayors. He was like a sleepy lion until someone tweaked his tail. Then he roared and provided all the day's best quotes. The coalition's referendum strategy – half-baked like 15 November's police commissioner ballots – failed everywhere except Bristol, of course. But that wasn't Hezza's fault.
As you may have read or heard, the former DPM's report to David Cameron – called No Stone Unturned; it's out today – wants a national growth council to promote long-term economic strategy. He wants £58bn worth of business support funds taken from Whitehall and given to cities and to the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) which replaced (wrongly, says Hezza) Labour's larger Regional Development Agencies (RDAs).
He wants a more coherent energy policy after years of faffing about. He wants the airport crisis in the south-east resolved too. Hezza wants chambers of commerce to become Finnish-style "one-stop shops" for business support. And – to the alarm of the rightwing Institute of Directors and other theoreticians of the market – he wants legal powers, in the French style, to prevent foreign takeovers deemed to be against the national interest.
There, I told you he's never boring. Hezza has given interviews to any passing newspaper today to preach his case, just as he did when he challenged Margaret Thatcher for the Tory leadership in November 1990. He's a bold man, who decided he would become PM at Oxford and might have made it had he been slightly less bold. He has always scared more cautious colleagues for good reasons as well as bad ones.
Yet civil servants admire his can-do spirit, his capacity to energise a department. Peter Mandelson enjoyed a similar reputation – both admired and feared – at the interface between capitalism and the state. One of Labour's achievements was to protect and nurture the British care industry, now foreign-owned but also successful. The coalition is pumping research cash into high-end science and biotech.
We can do better, says Hezza, who wants civil servants with real market skills to get paid a lot more.
He's right about that too. Today's media cherry-picks his report, as we always do. The Times stresses his "fix the airports" message (it's very keen), the Mail likes his analogy to a "war footing" (but not much else), the Guardian's Patrick Wintour stresses the report's implicit critique of the coalition's economic performance so far.
He's right about that too. But Hezza is too old a campaigner to stand accused of disloyalty (yet again). On Radio 4's Today he lavished praise on David Cameron, George Osborne and Vince Cable ("Vince"), and said that leaked reports and hostile briefings are all part of the policymaking game – as they are. Hezza has that T-shirt: do you remember how viciously Thatcher's people leaked against him when, as defence secretary, he walked out of her cabinet over the Westland deal in 1986?
It's not that the Hezza formula, if implemented – Larry Elliott thinks it's destined for the long grass – would be proved right in all respects. But he is fundamentally right in rejecting what the BBC's Evan Davis called the "defeatist passivity" of Treasury orthodoxy ("I don't work for the Treasury, I work for George Osborne," he deftly countered), which still insists that austerity in an increasingly austere world will do the job. It won't, not alone.
I'd like to think that the coalition is smart enough to cannibalise enough of Hezza's report to tweak Osborne's Plan A even more than hard-pressed ministers and pressure of events have already tweaked it. No point in calling it Plan B – or even Plan H, though Hezza's vanity would love it – which would only frighten the financial markets. But it's an opportunity to do something bolder, even if it offends nostrums cherished by the easily offended Tory right. They see Heseltine as a corporatist, almost a socialist. But he's the publisher sitting on £100m (more?), a country seat and his home-grown arboretum.
Hezza is a buccaneer, a bit of a wide boy, well-suited to what the Economist called the Del Boy mentality of Britain, which likes to package things up and sell them to foreigners. I once heard him say of his first venture – a small hotel in Bayswater – that the important thing was to get the guests to sign the register before the Tube train rattled the building from beneath.
Deplorable, I know, but modern Britain feels a bit like that Bayswater hotel. The two Eds – Miliband and Balls – and well-meaning progressives could do worse than watch Hezza at work. If they can remember as far back as his post-riot efforts on behalf of Liverpool in the early 80s, they might realise they can learn something useful.
