Tarzan is back. He’s been away too long.
Michael Heseltine was in an unfamiliar part of the political jungle, standing, as he was, behind an orange-coloured Liberal Democrat lectern in the grand West Wing of the De Vere Connaught Rooms in London’s Holborn.
On the podium were two sprightly new Lib Dem zealots, Chuka Umunna, formerly a Labour MP, and Sam Gyimah, formerly a Tory MP.
With his trademark swept-back white hair, Hezza rose slowly to his feet and, once behind the tangerine lectern, unleashed a walk down memory lane, name-dropping Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher and others along the way.
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Declaring himself to be a “proud Conservative,” who joined the party in 1955, he explained, however, on the one issue of Brexit he was aligning himself with the orange peril.
The pro-EU 86-year-old peer said he saluted those politicians who had risked everything to put country before party.
His trip through time highlighted his fights as the “ruffian in the middle of the battleground” with the likes of CND over nuclear weapons and Labour over nationalisation.
Turning to the present, he suggested the mantra of “get Brexit done” was a Johnsonite illusion, explaining: "It is sort of like a boxer about to enter the ring. He will take us to a position where…the real punch-up[on a trade deal] begins and there is no certain end to that.”
Asked about what he thought of Boris, Hezza looked slowly over his glasses like a bemused professor spying an inpertinent student and insisted dryly he did not get into personal abuse.
The big beast admitted to liking the PM, who made him laugh. And then described him as the “most flexible politician of modern times”. Flexible seemed to be a euphemism for duplicitous.
However, the grandee said he agreed with his flexible friend on one thing; that this was the most important election of modern times.
Because, he explained, it was “not just about our prosperity and our living standards; we’re talking about the sort of people we want to be…the sort of society we want to leave to the younger generation”.
- READ MORE: War of words as Labour claims Tories secretly plotting to sell off NHS in Donald Trump trade deal
In his speech, he warned how a Brexit vote would lead to “repercussions” for Scotland and the UK would be “poorer” for it.
When gently pressed by yours truly, Hezza declared: “There is a very serious risk a Brexit vote, largely driven by England, will fuel the independence movement in Scotland and the reunification movement in Ireland.”
Insisting “together we are so much stronger,” to prove the point he recalled how as a boy during the war “my tanks were from the Black Watch”. And with that the press conference was over. Tarzan rose up and disappeared back into the jungle.
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