Lord Heseltine: "We Must Not Have Reform Or Restore Anywhere Near The Corridors Of Power"
Photography by Tom Pilston
10 min read
Lord Heseltine speaks to Noah Vickers about regenerating Britain’s cities, the devolution agenda and why Margaret Thatcher ‘would have hated’ Nigel Farage
In Lord Heseltine’s sitting room, which offers a view of his estate’s sloping lawns and serpentine lake, a bookcase is lined with Nikolaus Pevsner’s 46-volume series The Buildings of England. The Northamptonshire edition has been bookmarked, possibly on the page describing Heseltine’s 261-year-old Palladian manor, Thenford House, as “decidedly conservative for its date”.
The former deputy prime minister, now aged 93, is perhaps known less for what he conserved, and more for what he tore down and built anew. His most enduring legacy can be found in two of 20th-century Britain’s most significant regeneration projects: the redevelopment of Liverpool and the creation of Canary Wharf. Both were instigated during his time as environment secretary under Margaret Thatcher.
As the Labour government plans to build seven new towns across England, along with potential development corporations to deliver thousands more homes in Oxford and Cambridge, ministers could do worse than look to Heseltine, who overcame significant opposition within Whitehall to get his projects off the ground.
“Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas,” the peer points out. “Every aspect of the British administrative system was opposed to what I was trying to do.
“The Treasury were against because it cost money. Keith Joseph, who was the great intellectual guru of the Thatcher years, was against because it was interventionist. My department was against because it was interfering with local government. The spending departments were against because it was a challenge to their monopolist, functional power structure.
“But I knew enough about government across the world to know that we were a top-heavy, centralised, functionally divided, administrative country – and that is the least effective way to run a country.”
In Liverpool particularly, Heseltine took what now seems a remarkably hands-on approach. Every Thursday for about 18 months, he would meet with a team of secondees from the public and private sectors in the city. They would update him on any political or logistical blockages hindering the scheme – and each Friday, he would ensure they were unblocked.
“For 18 months under Mrs Thatcher, I was [part of] the most interventionist government in British history,” he declares.
Heseltine later set his sights on getting new homes and infrastructure built in the “east Thames corridor” of south Essex and north Kent – a vision never fully realised in the years since. But the peer has not let go of the idea, and in a call for action from ministers, he urges them to resurrect his plan for ‘Hezzaville’, as it was dubbed by the media.
“The biggest potential growth area in Britain is the Thames Estuary,” he says. The problem that governments face there and elsewhere, he believes, is one of political and economic geography. He argues that England’s local government is still far too fractured and should be simplified along the lines recommended in the 1969 Redcliffe-Maud report.
“You need about 60 authorities, with directly elected mayors. Instead of doing a development corporation for a new town in a particular area, you should let the mayor of the county create the necessary structures. The important thing is to have the local person in charge and with resources,” he says.
To get ‘Hezzaville’ off the ground, the peer has a roadmap at the ready: “Essex and Kent should have unitary mayors – full stop. They should then set up a development corporation with roving powers over the estuary. They don’t need to take away the whole power structure – they should simply determine where growth is relevant in the estuary and then work with any development corporation to accelerate that potential.”
Some of the infrastructure need is already being met. The government is pressing ahead with the Lower Thames Crossing, and it is thanks to Heseltine that the High Speed 1 rail route already includes a stop at Ebbsfleet.
The peer was a big supporter of its successor, High Speed 2, and accused Rishi Sunak of committing a “gross act of vandalism” by scrapping the route’s ‘northern’ leg to Manchester in 2023.With an estimated cost now stretching potentially above £100bn, Heseltine laughs when asked what can be done to rescue HS2.
“I have a simple slogan in life: show me a problem, show me the person in charge. It’s not a bad slogan. You need somebody with the skill, tenacity and frankly the determination to make the thing work.”
Comparisons with road and rail projects on the continent, he caveats, are not entirely fair.
“We are a very small, tightly-developed island, so the problems here are quite different to building great motorways on the continent – but it is a national disgrace.”
The scheme will be one of several to watch if Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham becomes prime minister. In his campaign to become Makerfield’s MP, Burnham lays the blame for Britain’s ills squarely at Thatcher’s door, as he condemns her government for the “privatisation of life’s essentials”.
Heseltine refuses to get into a sparring match over this. He knows the Labour leadership hopeful “very well” and praises him for having “made a success of the Manchester mayoralty”.
In his 2025 book From Acorns to Oaks, however, Heseltine argued that privatising each public utility “required careful examination to ensure the proposed structure would deliver a wider spread of wealth in a more competitive environment”.
He wrote: “Judged against the above criteria, it can be argued that water privatisation failed both of these tests, for example.”
It is a point he reiterates to The House: “It’s very difficult to see how you have competition with the water industry, so I think there is a legitimate case to ask questions there.”
What he wants, he says, is “the maximum amount of competition and accountability in the management of resources”, while emphasising that the private sector “is an absolutely fundamental bastion of freedom”.
Does he see any case for renationalising the water industry, then? “I would be very reluctant to do that,” he says. “Look, I have not studied the water industry in the last week, month or year or so, so I don’t know what I would do.
“All I know is, whenever I looked at any of these things – and I certainly did privatise more of the state than anybody else ever has, or ever will – I’ve never regretted [it].”
Even if the formal mechanisms for one haven’t yet been triggered, a Labour leadership contest is effectively underway. Would Burnham or Wes Streeting make a better PM than Keir Starmer?
“I actually like Keir Starmer,” the peer replies. “I think he’s a nice guy and a good guy – and he’s got a terrible job.”
Starmer is struggling, he points out, amid problems caused by Donald Trump’s US administration, the war in Ukraine, conflict in the Middle East and the impacts of Brexit.
“Every aspect of the British administrative system was opposed to what I was trying to do”
While the PM is “undoubtedly culpable” for the effects of his government’s tax policies, Heseltine argues there is “very little he can do” about those other four issues, calling it an “absolutely non-win” situation.
“In many ways, any prime minister would be in this present situation, because the underlying malaise affecting this government is the one that always affects governments: living standards are falling and people want change. It’s as simple as that.”
He will not be drawn further on the question of Labour’s leadership, but adds: “My preoccupation with the Makerfield by-election is very simple. We must not have Reform or Restore or anything like it anywhere near the corridors of power in this country. I’ve seen it all before. [Oswald] Mosley in the 30s, Enoch Powell in the 60s.”
He claims that “the Reform and the Restore generation” are making “the most sinister, antisemitic, extremist appeal to a very nasty side of the human character”.
Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has always admired Thatcher, saying after her death that she was a “great inspiration” to him. What might the Iron Lady have made of Farage, had she been alive to see the rise of his political project?
“She’d have hated him,” Heseltine replies without hesitation. “Nigel Farage will assimilate himself with anyone he thinks has got a resonance in public opinion. He is Donald Trump’s vicar in Britain…
“But the origins of ‘Nigel Trump’ are a guy with a beer tankard and a fag. Then the farmers get into trouble, and he turns up looking like a farmer – and this is all a communications process.
Successful, but based on opportunism, based on a degree of prejudices which I find abhorrent. She would have had nothing to do with him.”
If Farage’s party is as dangerous as he claims, should the Tories have stood down in Makerfield and endorsed Burnham?
“I don’t think you can stand aside. I think you attack Reform. You throw everything into the battle.”
So far, the Tories have distanced themselves from Reform on fiscal policy, but have made little attempt to do so on areas like immigration.
“There will come someone,” is all Heseltine says in response to this point, with a slight smirk. Is he saying someone in the Conservative Party will have to start making that case?
“There will come someone, yes,” he repeats. “David Cameron came from not a totally different background.”
What then of the party’s current leader, Kemi Badenoch? Has he been impressed by her performance over the last 18 months?
“Well, I think she is beginning to climb the ladder,” he offers, cryptically.
Has his opinion of her changed at all?
“I had no opinion. I’ve never met her.”
Does he think she’ll win the next general election?
“I think she’s got a very challenging journey, and I’m not going to make any simplistic statements.” Not exactly a ringing endorsement.
At an age when most people would be looking to retire from public life, Heseltine clearly enjoys his status as an elder statesman – and he stands ready with a prescription to deliver Starmer’s elusive “decade of national renewal”.
“I know what this country needs to do,” he says. “First to get rid of its punitive tax policies, secondly to rejoin the European Union and thirdly to go for a devolution agenda.”
Devolution, he argues, has stalled outside England: “What Scotland and Wales did was to replicate Whitehall in Cardiff and Edinburgh.
“I come from South Wales, Swansea. We didn’t think that Cardiff was all that special. Why can’t Swansea be its own self-governing unit? Pembrokeshire, mid-Wales, north Wales [too]. If I was a Conservative in those principalities, that’s what I’d be saying.”
Rejoining the EU, meanwhile, has returned as a serious long-term prospect. If rejoining would be so beneficial for everyone concerned, should Brussels be making a compelling offer to Britain that even Farage would find hard to argue against? For example, one that would give the UK all of the opt-outs it had before?
“If I was the EU, I wouldn’t do that, because I wouldn’t want to look silly. You’ve got to wait until this country has people who are prepared to say, ‘This is what we want to do,’ and carry the public support with them. If I was the EU, I would be waiting for that to happen; I would do everything I could to encourage that to happen. That’s what diplomacy’s about; that’s what private conversations are about.
“If I was a European today, I would know that Britain is an invaluable part of the European power structure. When I see what Donald Trump is saying, it’s a vital part of the defence of Europe.
“But it’s for the young people. It’s for the opportunity to be part of the only credible power structure which can offer us the avenue to research and development on a relevant scale in the modern world.”
