I admire Lord Heseltine’s honesty

Some commentators, including me, have written about a pandemic of ministerial dismissals that seem to be strangely biased.

Practically all the Tory ministers who lost their jobs in recent months, for whatever reason, were staunch Brexiteers. Among them are Suella Braverman, Priti Patel, Michael Gove, Nadhim Zahawi, Gavin Williamson, Dominic Raab – and of course Boris Johnson.

Different reasons were cited in each case, but the conspiracy theorist in me couldn’t help noticing a definite anti-Brexiteer slant. And now that the Privileges Committee has ruled that Boris Johnson “deliberately” misled Parliament about lockdown breaches, another one bites the dust.

Johnson claims he did that inadvertently, but the distinguished Committee members peeked into the wrongdoer’s brain and ascertained beyond any doubt that his transgression had been deliberate rather than merely inadvertent.

Frankly, I don’t know anyone who didn’t breach the lockdown at some point. Why, even such law-abiding people as I committed one or two such indiscretions. It’s true that not every one of us has lied to Parliament about it, but it’s the acme of hypocrisy to hold politicians to the apocryphal standards of honesty set by either George Washington or his cherry tree.

Every day politicians make promises they have no way, or intention, of keeping. That’s treated with boys-will-be-boys equanimity – par for the course, old boy, what? Accusing a politician of massaging the truth is like accusing a footballer of committing the odd foul, something impossible to avoid.

Nevertheless, the Committee spent 14 excruciating months investigating Johnson’s case as if it was serial murder. The clear, if unarticulated, intention was to get him for something, anything. Again, people like me suspected Brexit had something to do with that.

For Johnson not only voted for it, but he also campaigned for party leadership under the slogan of Let’s Get Brexit Done. And as prime minister that’s precisely what he achieved, bypassing or breaking through the sabotaging efforts by the civil service and most MPs.

Now those same people accuse him of undermining democracy – after they themselves took two years trying to subvert the biggest democratic vote in British history. Clearly, Johnson’s real crime was Brexit, not that unauthorised slice of cake he ate at a proscribed party.

I say ‘clearly’, but until the other day that had been merely conjecture – Johnson’s detractors wouldn’t come out and say it outright. So much more admirable is Lord Heseltine’s honesty.

For those of you too young to remember, or too foreign to know, in 1990 Heseltine led the coup that stuck a knife into Maggie Thatcher’s back. The conspirators desperately wanted Britain to join the EU by signing the Maastricht Treaty, but Mrs Thatcher, as she then was, declared it “a treaty too far”.

As Deputy Prime Minister, Heseltine then became the éminence grise of the cabinet, and greasy he doubtless was. It was Major’s signature that went on the Maastricht Treaty, but it was Heseltine who moved the PM’s hand.

Obviously, later he campaigned vigorously against Brexit and took the vote for it as a personal tragedy. Though he had retired from active politics, Lord Heseltine, as he had become, continued to lobby and conspire against leaving the EU, defying the will of the very demos in whose name Parliament is supposed to govern.

That made Johnson Heseltine’s enemy, definitely political and probably also personal. But unlike other Remainers who have finally succeeded in getting Johnson, Heseltine is forthright in explaining his reasons.

“I’m glad we finally got the bastard,” he told Sky News. “That’ll teach him how to side with the people against his colleagues. No one secures Britain’s sovereignty and gets away with it.”

Sorry, I’ve made it up. Or rather I’ve made up the letter of Heseltine’s remarks while accurately conveying their spirit. This is what he actually said:

“All of this, I’m sorry to distract slightly from the subject of the report – all of this is about lying in the most senior of public offices.

“And you can’t escape from the consequences of that on Brexit. Because we left the EU, one of the worst decisions, one of the most regrettable decisions, most economically damaging decisions of modern times, on the basis of lies of which Boris Johnson was the principal architect.

“It is a clarion call to begin the process of restoring our relationship with Europe. We are Europeans. We are a part of Europe. We are essential to their defence, we are dependent upon their home market. And there are no credible alternative ways in which to make a success of the British economy.”

Right, I get it. Because Johnson lied about that slice of cake in 2020, the British people voted for Brexit in 2016. Who can fault that logic? Oh well, many people, I suppose. But Heseltine’s honesty is beyond reproach: he owned up to the real reason for the Johnson witch-hunt.

As to Heseltine’s comments on Brexit, the poor chap is 90, so one can expect some symptoms of senility. On second thoughts, he was saying exactly the same things 30 years ago, and the onset of dementia usually happens later in life.

If Heseltine thinks Brexit damaged Britain economically, he hasn’t been reading the papers. In fact, the Eurozone is in recession, and the British economy isn’t. It’s not growing as briskly as we’d like, and our government of Heseltine’s philosophical kin is doing all it can to prevent real growth.

But we are still doing better than the Eurozone, which makes it hard to believe that the British economy would miraculously improve by joining it. Yet to his credit Lord Heseltine still remembers his geography. Britain is indeed a part of Europe, and we are indeed “essential to their defence”.

That’s why most Eurozone members and Britain are members of Nato, a military alliance designed to defend Europe against the likes of Putin. Does Lord Heseltine think Nato isn’t doing an especially good job? Perhaps. But it takes a singular lack of understanding to believe that a European army run by corrupt socialist bureaucrats would fare better.

He also shows the same legerdemain that’s typical of all Remainers. Heseltine uses the terms ‘Europe’ and ‘European Union’ as if they were synonymous. They aren’t.

Europe is a geographical, cultural and civilisational entity. The EU is a strictly political contrivance designed to make the rule of socialist bureaucrats absolute. It’s only to EU fanatics that being ‘a part of Europe’ is tantamount to being a part of a single European megastate.

People of Lord Heseltine’s age often suffer from single or double incontinence. I hope he has been spared that indignity, but he is clearly afflicted with logorrhoea, verbal incontinence. Then again, he never made much sense at 60 – so it’s hardly surprising he is mouthing gibberish at 90.

But let’s not be ageist about this. Even much younger Remainers are incapable of putting a cogent thought together, certainly not on that subject. The longing for ‘Europe’ is visceral, not intellectual. And make no mistake about it: if (make it when) Labour takes over, every effort will be made to drag Britain back into the EU, tail between her legs.

Every economic ill of the country will be blamed on Brexit – not on the staggering incompetence of our national governments and certainly, God forbid, on any systemic defects of liberal democracy. Our comprehensively educated public will swallow it, especially since this time one doesn’t detect many visible political figures ready to present the opposite view.

Why, even Nigel Farage is saying that “Brexit has failed”. Unlike Putin’s Russia that, according to Farage, had been a rip-roaring success until February last year.