Lord Heseltine: ‘It requires a great act of faith to believe Labour won’t trash the economy again’ (2024)

How do famous names spend their precious downtime? In our weekly My Saturday column, celebrities reveal their weekend virtues and vices. This week: Michael Heseltine

9am

I don’t get up early, normally. If I wake up at 7am or 8am, I go back to sleep. All my life I’ve slept at least eight hours a night and I probably sleep more now. I don’t have an alarm, I rely on nature to tell me when I have had enough sleep. I shave, get dressed and go downstairs.

9.30am

I always have the same thing for breakfast: a glass of orange juice, Shredded Wheat, half a grapefruit, coffee and buttered toast. Then I look at the newspapers – always in paper form. I tend to focus on the news, comment and business sections, while my wife reads the Saturday magazines. The sports sections go in the bin.

10.30am

I’ll go to my desk to check my post and emails. At my age, there is not much difference between a Saturday and any other day of the week. It’s all one long day, interspersed with sleep. There’s nothing special that happens on a Saturday as opposed to a Monday, because I don’t have an office to go to.

Sometimes I’ll go somewhere specific to speak or take part in a meeting, but other than that, every day is much the same. I’ve not been asked to do any general election campaigning by the Conservative Party, so I am not doing any. As for Rishi’s chances of winning, you never give in until the game is lost – and I tell myself: every cloud has a silver lining. But when people ask me what will happen if Labour gets in, I say: every Labour government of which I have knowledge has trashed the economy. With a record like that, it requires a great act of faith to believe it won’t happen again.

11am

I’ll take the dogs out for a walk. We have Fergus, the West Highland terrier; Fred, the Labrador, and Fritz, the dachshund. They have to be taken out, but I have a buggy because our grounds here at the arboretum are quite extensive. There are about 70 acres and it’s an important part of my day to go around it and see what’s happening and what’s in flower. [Thenford Arboretum, the 70-acre garden that surround Heseltine’s Northamptonshire home, is open to the public on selected days from February to October and features a collection of more than 4,000 trees and shrubs.] The dogs get a very good run because normally I cover the whole garden in about an hour.

Noon

I try to spend some time every day working on my book. I’m updating my autobiography, which was published in 2000, up to the present day. After David Cameron became leader, I was invited to help with the research into urban policy. I then had the extraordinary experience of going back into Government as a kind of special adviser on industrial strategy. So I was at the heart of Whitehall for several years until I got sacked by Theresa May in 2017 and she took the whip away from me after a Brexit revolt.

Now, I’m looking back over my political career to figure out: did I actually achieve anything during my time in Government? Did any of the changes I made last? Did the promises I made in the 1980s get fulfilled? At this point, I can look back and see. And I think quite a lot of the things I did worked – and quite a lot of the things I wanted to work got stopped, largely by my own colleagues in Government. But on various occasions I outlived them so I was able to recreate the policies that they had stopped.

What’s particularly satisfying is that the issues I have been most concerned about in my career – devolution, Europe, industrial strategy – are still at the top of the agenda. So I’m able to write about the things that I think need to be done. It’s a forward-thinking book, as well as an historical analysis.

1.15pm

My wife and I have lunch. It could be beef, lamb or fish – always with one glass of wine, largely white: a chablis, something like that. I’m very fond of sole Véronique with creamed potatoes. We don’t cook for ourselves; we have a cook. After that, I sleep for an hour or so.

3.30pm

I’ll go out in the garden again in my buggy. My wife also has a buggy, and she’s got a horn on hers, which is a great luxury because you can hoot it and tell the dogs to come with you. I don’t have one so instead I call out their names. Fred and Fergus are quite obedient but Fritz has a will of his own. When we go out, he will rush wildly in every direction but he has an uncanny sense of where I’ll be and will appear ahead of me.

5pm

I’ll come home for tea with my wife. I’ll usually have a piece of cake or a biscuit. Occasionally, one of our grandchildren who live nearby will pop in and join us. They sometimes help out at the arboretum on our open days. Afterwards, I’ll go back to my desk. There’s a lot of work involved in the arboretum because we have a huge collection of different plants, trees and shrubs and they all have to be catalogued, updated, photographed and labelled.

8.15pm

I’ll usually change for dinner because I’ve been out in the garden. I have two glasses of wine with my meal, which tends to be lighter than lunch. Afterwards, we’ll watch TV. Recently, it was the American thriller series The Diplomat, which is one of the most preposterous portrayals of political life I’ve ever seen. It’s all about an American ambassador at the Court of St James’s. It’s so awful, it’s hypnotic. I prefer watching documentaries, especially about the Second World War, because I lived through it. I remember listening to Neville Chamberlain announce the declaration of war in 1939 – and at the end of the war, the abiding conviction was: it must never happen again. I know why there’s a united European movement.

10pm

We watch the news on the BBC. I don’t tend to watch comedy shows, even about the news, because I don’t find them funny. I’m always amazed at the hysterical laughter that greets non-existent jokes in some of these humorous programmes.

11pm

The earliest lights go out is 11pm. I get into bed and, as soon as my head hits the pillow, I’m asleep.

As told to Donna Ferguson

Lord Heseltine: ‘It requires a great act of faith to believe Labour won’t trash the economy again’ (2024)
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