Michael Heseltine is making a bid to become the fresh new face of Remoanerism. Earlier this month ‘Hezza’ wowed the wets at Tory conference with a speech to the effect that Reform are ‘equivalents to the fascists in the 30s’ for the crime of wanting to reduce immigration. This week, having acquired a taste for the spotlight, he has spoken to the Times from his Northamptonshire stately home, setting out his stall in even greater and more tedious detail. Aged 92 and still a Tory peer, he hopes that his ‘final contribution’ to public life ‘may be to try to stop Nigel Farage’ – not out of any personal vanity, you understand, but ‘for the welfare of this country’.
Like many deluded liberals, Heseltine has a schizophrenic approach to multicultural Britain, and in particular what it means for Jews
The whole interview is a truly ghastly spectacle. The reader is to be dazzled by Heseltine’s ‘white locks’, his ‘enthusiasm and graciousness’, the ‘soaring greenhouses resurrected medieval fishponds, lakes of geese and swans’ he owns and even – at his age – his ‘deft three-point turns in the arboretum’. Here, we are given to understand, strides a benevolent grandee from a more refined era. Before people opened their phones on Tuesday evening to see videos of a dogwalker being stabbed; before we had any of that nasty ‘populism’. This preening fossil – James O’Brien meets David Attenborough – clearly hails from an elevated plane above all that present-day tawdriness. Thus, says the house paper of the British establishment, we must dutifully listen to him.
So, what is it that Lord Heseltine has descended from on high to tell the masses? Well, as it turns out, the notorious Tory wet believes all the dismal pieties of the failing liberal establishment.
Today, the British people are suffering under an ‘open-borders experiment’ of more than three million arrivals in three years, the vast majority of whom are never expected to be net tax contributors. But Heseltine wants you to know that ‘being anti-immigrant throughout history has always been the cheap option’. Indeed, the very ‘idea that foreigners are out to get you and your jobs, they are criminals and rapists, is encouraging the worst kind of prejudice’ – and we wouldn’t want that! You see, dear reader, Heseltine is here to tell you that mass migration is really a wonderful thing. No doubt this is easier to imagine when you live in a rural village of 74.
Illegal migrants may be developing a nasty habit of viciously murdering members of the public but Heseltine helpfully informs us: ‘They are not idlers, shirkers and rapists’ – in fact, ‘they want jobs in circumstances many Brits will not do.’ So not only must the British public pay to put these foreign arrivals up in hotels, plus to give them free mobile phones, healthcare, food – the works. It’s also our fault – certainly not our feckless politicians’ – that these men are here in the first place. If only those lazy old Brits were more willing to ride around on a moped delivering boxes of hot food.
Like many deluded liberals, Heseltine has a schizophrenic approach to multicultural Britain, and in particular what it means for Jews. The thinking from these people – if you can call it that – is that since a few hundred thousand Jews migrated to the UK in the early 20th century, and because many of them experienced anti-Semitism, anyone opposed to immigration today is likewise a ‘racist’ and bad news for Jews. In this way, ‘populist’ Farage becomes a ‘reincarnation’ of both Enoch Powell and Oswald Mosley. We’re supposed to think this is all very grand and portentous. ‘Learn your history’ Heseltine goes on to warn, ‘it has all happened before’.
But in reality, this is facetious nonsense, the kind of thing you might hear from Owen Jones. The fact is that allowing vast areas of our inner cities to become ethnic ghettoes is utterly historically unprecedented and has terrible consequences which Heseltine is apparently blind to. He makes no mention of the grooming gangs. He does note that ‘he didn’t think he would see the day in his nineties when [Jews] are being killed in synagogues again’. Yet extraordinarily, this somehow still forms part of his criticism of Farage and his politics – the fact it was an Islamist terrorist who killed two Jewish worshippers last month in Manchester goes unmentioned. Nor indeed do we hear about the anti-Semitism that has Israeli football fans banned from travelling to Birmingham for their own safety, let alone the demographic change that lies behind it.
We also learn, naturally enough from the man who has just driven his interviewer on a golf buggy through the grounds of his listed 18th-century manor, that Farage’s working-class appeal is ‘phoney and fake’. That’s because Farage went to private school (like Heseltine) and worked in the City, as a commodities trader. This has always been a dim and dismal argument, belied most obviously by Reform’s polling with the working class, but it seems there’s no lefty canard Heseltine won’t trot out. For one thing, it’s beyond me how people can maintain that Farage is a privileged fixture of the financial establishment when in 2023 he was unceremoniously debanked by Coutts over his dissenting political views. As for his popularity with the working man, maybe, just maybe, it’s because he articulates their valid concerns over mass migration, which Heseltine thinks isn’t a problem?
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