There will soon be a new word in the language; to heseltine, meaning to build up a monumental pile of blonde hair, fix it in place with a complicated system of scaffolding and webs, and then spray it with lacquer. It would be advertised in hairdressers╒: ╥Unisex shampoo and heseltine, ú3.╙
Young men would have their hair specially heseltined for their first speech at a Tory conference. Mrs Thatcher has hers heseltined every week. Unfortunately, something has gone wrong with the display mounted on the original owner.
Mr Michael Heseltine is the Environment spokesman, and by now probably the most popular single figure for the Tory faithful. Yesterday he was supposed to be talking about local government but this got only a short look-in as he produced instead a mighty anti-Socialist diatribe designed, no doubt, to show what a great Tory leader he will make.
It was being said that he had been put into the slot just before lunch in order to punish him for being so overwhelmingly popular last year. The idea was that if he overran, the delegates would get angry about missing their lunch and he would be driven from the platform by the concerted rumbling of tummies. In the event they loved it so much that he could have gone right through lunch-time, dinner, and into breakfast this morning.
But to the detached observer the fascination lay in the terrible things that were happening to his hair. Something had gone dreadfully wrong with the engineering system holding it up. Great chunks of it crashed down, like cliffs falling into the sea, covering his forehead and sometimes blotting out his eyes.
Now and again he tried to shore it up in mid-speech, but then a bit would sheer off and crash around his ears. By the end the whole noble edifice was in ruins, a sad reminder of the frailty of man-made things.
What makes him so popular is, I think, the air of controlled lunacy. He manages to appear as if he is so outraged by socialism and by the present Government that it is only by supreme self-control that he can prevent himself from picking up the lectern and smashing it on to the nearest Socialist. Once, on a famous occasion, the self-control did snap, and he started swinging the House of Commons mace. But this, of course, looked just silly, and the caged tiger routine is far more effective.
Sometimes he even loses touch with his voice and weird involuntary squeaks creep in at the top of his vocal register. All in all, it is amazingly effective, and it is no wonder that they stopped the conference ball to applaud him when he walked in last year.
One young man who had obviously had his hair heseltined for the day was a 16-year-old from the Rother Valley called William Hague. One hesitates to say too much about the young men at this Tory conference, except that there are an awful lot of them and they are terrifyingly confident. Young William had a surprisingly elderly-sounding Yorkshire accent which made his voice sound almost exactly like Harold Wilson╒s, to the obvious confusion of delegates who had their backs turned. He had, however, a far greater command of the clichÄ than the former Prime Minister, and he marked the economic debate with phrases like ╥rolling back the frontiers of the state,╙ ╥home-owning democracy,╙ ╥large and progressive cuts in public spending,╙ and ╥a society where effort and initiative are rewarded.╙ The sight of these aged saws coming from so young a head had the entire conference on its feet at the end of his speech.
The most disconcerting thing of all was that William did not even look surprised as Mrs Thatcher herself leant over from the platform to applaud him. He merely seemed faintly pleased, as if he had won the hundred-yard dash or the school prize for diligence.
