Tory grandee's attacks on coalition growth strategy shows an interventionist Conservative, one unbowed by criticism and armed with the wisdom, and facts, of experience
One of the most attractive aspects of the older politician, as Lord Heseltine perhaps needs to be described at the age of 79, is that they do not care too much what other people say about them. Another joy is that they have an institutional memory. Long forgotten and little read official reports into local government reorganisation published back in 1969 remain at their finger tips. Little is new under their sun, making it a good deal harder for a civil servant to pass off bromide as initiative.
Both in interview, and in his blockbuster report into the absence of a coherent government growth strategy, Lord Heseltine glows with both strengths. Few features of public life, government bureaucracy, private sector managers, chambers of commerce, civil servants, Tory ideologues, local councillors, timewasting planning officers or self-serving financiers are spared the lash in his report spanning 226 pages and more than 80 recommendations.
His conversation is also replete with references to previous doomed attempts to reorganise local government, create industrial strategies or galvanise Whitehall.
In an eloquent personal opening passage he admits that the very words "industrial strategy" are controversial. "With them comes the baggage of past attempts and past failures," he says.
He also recalls how it is 57 years since he left Oxford University for London, and how his first view as a businessman was that all he wanted was to get government off his back, and then how his experience in government so tempered that view.
The complexities of local government reform, the planning system. Britain's role in space, the saving of Rolls-Royce, Concorde , defence procurement, the international competitiveness agenda all made him confront the way in which other national governments, unlike Britain, aided and abetted their wealth creators.
His views on the role of government were never so simple again.
But that leads to the question of why David Cameron ever asked an interventionist such as Heseltine to conduct such a wideranging review of government growth strategy. After all, Cameron's previous favourite peer from the Thatcher era had been Lord Young of Graffham, a man that broadly believed government was a problem, and not a solution.
In interview, surrounded by two ferociously bright civil servants, Heseletine says few should be surprised by the scope or contents of his report. He explains it was Steve Hilton, (Cameron's former director of strategy and a fellow Whitehall iconoclast) "fixed for me to see the prime minister with a view to do something broadly like this, and I outlined the view I broadly hold. The prime minister said this was something he wanted done, and would I report to the Chancellor George Osborne and to Vince Cable."
It was not an invitation from the blue. Cameron had asked Heseltine to speak to the Tory conference in 2006 on city mayors, an idea that has for the moment been stalled. Despite his advancing years Heseltine had been chosen by Cameron to chair the advisory committee on the regional growth fund.
Cameron was also happy to give him an official from each department, something each department delivered, including the Treasury.
Little has escaped his unflinching gaze, skills policy, airport expansion, the appointment of permanent secretaries, immigration, or foreign company takeovers and finance for industry. "I think it has been a unique experience and I think from the very beginning everyone knew of the scale of what I was doing."
He knows his report will, to use one of Cameron's favourite phrases, put "rocket boosters up Whitehall and industry".
"If you want a sit rep for the status quo, well stay where you are. Will Britain become more competitive ? Answer no. It is not rocket science. We ought to recognise that every other capitalist economy on Earth has adopted a local bottom-up strategy – maybe we should try it too, if only for the simplest possible reason is that it is what made this country in the first place. London did not drive the national economy in the 18th and 19th centuries, it was driven by the great buccaneer cities of the industrial revolution."
Asked if he is confident his blueprint will be implemented, Heseltine says: "I travel with more than hope. The government is committed to localism. I am not countering government policy. I am saying 'Good, let us have another leap.'"
His central proposal, and perhaps biggest leap, is a plan to reorder government to make it focus on industrial growth. At the apex of this structure would be a national growth council responsible for a growth strategy, leading to further sub-growth strategies department by department, setting out how each Whitehall department will hold dialogues with its relevant industrial sectors.
He then proposes taking £49bn currently administered by central government departments, and putting this cash, plus £9bn in EU funding into a single funding pot.
The cash covers skills, local infrastructure employment support, new housing, business support services and innovation. Local enterprise partnerships, the bodies bringing together local businesses and councillors to drive growth, would be expected to bid for this cash in what he sees as a big extension of localism, or regionalism.
He says precedents for this include the work of Howard Bernstein in Manchester with Goldman Sachs, Hesletine's own work in Liverpool and plans by Lord Adonis to galvanise the north-east economy.
He insists the 39 Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) set up by this government can be made to work, and that high-quality entrepreneurs do want to be involved in them, so shaping their city economy. He explains: "At the moment they don't think there is an opportunity do a man-size job on these bodies and in the present circumstances, and I would agree with them."
He recognises some secretaries of state may be reluctant to hand this cash into the single pot, saying: "That is what 100 years of impoverishing the provinces have done. It is perfectly conceivable if the prime minister wants it. That is what localism is about."
He accepts that 39 LEPs as currently structured may need to change their boundaries to better fit the local economic shape, and suggests Whitehall and LEPs have three months to discuss if their confines need adjusting.
He insists that LEPs are currently shaped broadly to match city regions, the future engines of growth, pointing out that they do broadly match the boundaries set out by John Redcliff-Maud in the late sixties, and then rejected by the Heath government of 1970-74. He insists he is not imposing unitary councils on local government; just suggesting they are the preferred option. There are a dozen unitary councils already and they save £15m a year , he points out.
He insists he is not proposing a throwback to the era of the national economic developments councils attempted in the 1960s and 1970s, saying: "Those were tripartite talking shops. They had no money. I was part of it. It was ridiculous. People turned up with their prepared statements and the conversation was designed to get nowhere."
He adds that he is not interested in accusations of corporatism or picking winners, two of the phrases that have been successfully deployed by free marketeers to keep the state and industry apart. He said: "There is an army of people in Whitehall picking winners every day. When they gave me £2.4bn to spend on a regional growth fund what I am supposed to do ? Pick losers?"
Nor will he bow at the altar of deregulation. "Civilisation depends on regulation. The market will not regulate itself. The market knows no morality. If you allow the law of the jungle, you will get the consequences of the jungle, so governments of all persuasions create the basis of civilisation which is stopping people doing terrible things at the extreme. You just have to get the balance right.
"The simple solution to growth – 'get off our backs, cut taxes, deregulate' – but you would not find that solves the problem because no other government finds that it does solve the problem. Those three sentiments may have a contribution to make, but they are so simplistic.
"Confidence is the thing holding back the economy at the moment and who can blame anyone from feeling so. There are no signs yet that there is a way through it – maybe now just a bit – and that is we do not have the confidence to invest."
Whether all this emerges to be Heseltine's last will and testament, patronised as a throwback to a failed corporatist era and so doomed to be of interest to historians, or instead the start of a new era of industrial activism, it will be for Cameron, or a future government to decide. Either way, the jungle is a richer place for having such big beasts on the roam once again.