Talk:Michael Heseltine

message: I suggested on Talk:Hezza that Hezza was unencyclopedic, but hoped that people would fix it rather than me taking it to AfD which I will do if it is not fixed. It is now been suggested that it be merged here. I can see see only a few words being merged, such as "His nickname was "Hezza". The rest is of no relevance and in my opinion should be deleted, but I prefer to let the only editor of that article time to alter it. --Bduke 08:27, 12 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Merge here of [[Hezza]]

message: Most people have a section called this: one here could include his remark during the early '90s recession, that company's with cash flow problems should pay all their bills late. I think it's worth mentioning. Malick78 (talk) 11:58, 22 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Controversy

message: How did MH come to switch from a constituency in Devon to one in Henley?  David Colver (talk) 22:35, 8 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Switch

message: This is an article about  a living person. Anything in this article that  is not absolute common  knowledge can be challenged, or simply  deleted for lack of verifiable references, even for example, such  apparently  innocent  mentions of  hs attendance at Shrewsbury School if it  can't  be proven. The article isin  fact  surprisingly  poorly  referenced for a page  about  such an important  person. A wealth of printed biographies and other works about  him exist, indeed some are mentioned in the text, however none have been cited in the manner required by  WP:V and WP:CITE. Please addfress these issues if you  can. Thanks.--Kudpung (talk) 04:23, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  BLP references 

message: Have made a more thorough opening for the article. Have looked at other Tory and Labour openings from the same period e.g. Douglas Hurd/Neil Kinnock and feel the new opening is fair. It seemed strange that such a high profile figure had such a small opening to the page so attempted to increase it, giving the basic information about his career  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Horleye (talk • contribs) 23:22, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opening 

message: This article could be more up-to-date if it mentioned how Theresa May sacked Heseltine over the Brexit rebellion. It could then have that tag indicating it is about a person who is in contemporary news.Carltonio (talk) 09:40, 8 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Making this article more up-to-date

message: Perhaps other users would like to start a conversation here about the images used in the article rather than edit warring over them. I have no opinion on the use of any of them. Theroadislong (talk) 18:02, 9 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  images in the article 

message: When UKIP start to say someone has "lost his marbles" and that Germany would be "deeply offended" by his comments, you've got to realise that someone has said something pretty notable? Is there a good reason why this article shouldn't mention Heseltine's recent swift sacking from a number of advisory positions and also state fully what he said on Friday about Germany "winning the peace"? Martinevans123 (talk) 08:46, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Lost his marbles" 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: He had a severe heart attack in 1993, although it was described as mild at the time. (81.153.133.220 (talk) 20:34, 28 December 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't doubt it. Michael Crick, whose 1997 biography I'm using heavily, hints that he believes the heart attack was more serious than was publicly admitted (I'll be ploughing through Life in the Jungle shortly, to flag up any other moments where his take on things is a bit different or where he is clearly being a bit evasive). Normally people get upset about links to a Daily Mail article as a source - it's an interview with his daughter so she may well have insisted they get his heart attack "right", but at the same time the article contains obvious inaccuracies about the politics, eg. Thatcher "agreeing to leave the Cabinet" (it was universally agreed by everybody at the time that there was no other job which she could be offered - I actually remember Hurd telling a journalist not to be so silly when he suggested that Thatcher remain in the Cabinet) or that the heart attack put a permanent end to Hezza's leadership ambitions (in fact Hezza did rather a good job of reinventing himself as an elder statesman and staunch Major loyalist, far more so than is remembered nowadays, and the leadership might very well have fallen into his lap had Major quit).Paulturtle (talk) 16:04, 1 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  1st heart attack 

message: A lot of modern sources state Heseltine's nickname of Tarzan comes from the mace incident, this seems to be a misconception arising from it being incorrect in Wikipedia. The nickname predates the mace incident, it was coined by Stanley Clinton-Davis in the early 1970s (presumably while they were opposite numbers at Aerospace and Shipping), due to his resemblance to Johnny Weissmuller, the actor who played Tarzan. Max Madden is recorded in Hansard as referring to Heseltine as Tarzan on 19 May 1976, when the mace incident didn't happen until 28 May 1976. 81.130.72.65 (talk) 12:10, 4 July 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: That's a very useful find, thanks, although I'd suggest the contribution to the popularity of the nickname, made by Private Eye and the cartoonist Steve Bell, should probably not be underestimated. Martinevans123 (talk) 12:52, 4 July 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Nickname 

message: I see somebody has tagged the article for length, which I always suspected was going to come sooner or later.
Rather than sticking to strictly chronological coverage, I kept the discussion on (a) his business career (obviously people are going to want to know how he got so rich) and (b) his Parliamentary history, which is interesting for people interested in politics and political selections (a topic which, it has been remarked, tends to be under-reported in this country, and yet getting picked for a winnable seat is the Rubicon which must be crossed in any British political career) separate so that they could easily be hived off into one or more separate articles.
At the moment it draws very heavily on the Michael Crick biog (obviously a highly reputable source - he is a well-regarded journalist and Hezza was still DPM when it came out at the start of 1997, and would presumably have sued over anything that had not been thoroughly fact-checked). I haven't yet ploughed through Hezza's own memoirs (2000) which are a solid meaty work - it is no secret that they were written with the "acknowledged assistance" of the late Anthony Howard.
I also, some time ago, noted the relevant chapter of Charles Moore's Thatcher biog on Westland, but most of that detail can go into the article on Westland when I get round to writing it up. Westland was a generation ago now so more is in the public domain than was the case in 1997 or 2000. (Example: in his memoirs Hezza writes "one day somebody will talk" about a dodgy share support operation - politically-connected tycoons secretly buying shares to keep the price high - that was clearly going on. I'm pretty sure somebody has indeed since "talked", although I'd need to refresh my memory).
Further opinions about where the article should be split are perfectly welcome.Paulturtle (talk) 06:27, 21 March 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The length of the article, in my opinion, is fine. I say that as a person with only a passing interest in the subject, but became quite interested when I cam across this article. It is, in fact, unusual to find an article in Wikipedia in the humanities that is more than a Buzzfeed stub. Wikipedia started out with the (rather overly ambitious) goal of being a repository for the planet's knowledge. With the recent swarm of editors with their need to deface articles with graffiti tags comes the need to create policies (whether anyone wants them or not). Hence, we have to assume that readers are bored idiots (millennials?) who only stopped in for a break from their celebrity sites, video games or cat videos. There's nothing to be done I suppose. Ants always swarm the carcas of dead elephants. AnthroMimus (talk) 19:02, 3 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Length 

message: There was some back and forth at Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party (UK) some time ago over the absence of reliable sources for many figures described as such actually holding the title as a formal office which resulted in many of them being removed from the article, Heseltine being one of them.  His parliamentary biography doesn't include the title (, compare to Peter Lilley's which does ). I did pick up a source for him being interim Deputy Leader of the Opposition () but that's not quite the same—presumably more to do with him being DPM beforehand. I've deleted the post from Heseltine's infobox accordingly but if there is in fact a source for him being formally Deputy Leader of the party feel free to add it back, with the reference (and adjust the Deputy Leader article too). —Nizolan (talk · c.) 23:35, 15 May 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: For what it's worth. I don't recall him ever being Deputy Leader of the Party in the 1995-7 period. Just DPM. Had it been mentioned in the Crick biography or his own memoirs, I should think I would have included it in the article. I don't get involved with infoboxes, in which people sometimes put all sorts of nonsense. Paulturtle (talk) 20:15, 15 June 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Deputy Leader of the Conservative Party 

message: Intriguing that Heseltine is a descendant of Dibdin but apparently unrelated to Philip Arnold Heseltine (composer, 1894-1930)... ELSchissel (talk) 00:48, 4 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Music connection 

message: No mention of National Service. Did he get out of it somehow? Esedowns (talk) 18:30, 25 February 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: There is a section discussing it. He almost certainly tried to "get out of it", postponing his service until he was almost too old, then getting an early release to fight the 1959 Election.Paulturtle (talk) 06:30, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  NS