Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Conservative politician and Chancellor of the Exchequer, known for his combative style and quick brain.
On the island
Eight records
I decided to start with Litter Richard and Long Tall Sally.
from a rather famous film which happened to emerge at about the time I was at Cambridge... Jazz on a Summer's Day
a live performance when I was there. I was actually in a club called the Bass Clef and the night this was being recorded
Night in TunisiaFavourite
probably my favourite jazz track of all... Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell
just to show that I do listen to traditional jazz... Bessie Smith's Young Woman Blues is a blues and we must have a blues and it's a very moving one
just uh the great ring uh monk tune which people who haven't heard him before will not believe you can actually whistle along to once you get used to the strange sound of it
George Adams, Don Pullen Quartet
a good, lively, jazz club type record
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:10Your image is that of a bruiser, a man who's unafraid of the heat in any political kitchen. Does that come naturally to you?
Well, I don't think so. Uh it's always rather surprised me that I've acquired that. I I think in politics you get a a cut-out cardboard image. After a bit the people who write about politics have got to fit you in into this sort of great soap opera uh that it's become. And if you'd asked me when I started in politics that I was getting regarded as combative, you've just described me, or robust as I've often described, I would have been very, very surprised.
Presenter asks
5:20What did people think of D. H. Lawrence then when you were a lad? Were they proud of him or were they?
Well they weren't at all. They weren't at all. My father knew a lot of people who'd known the family and Eastwood really refused to acknowledge this man for years and years. They liked his father who was regarded as a great character and they thought his mother and D. H. Lawrence himself were a stuck-up pair who never really settled down there and then he brought shame on the village by writing all those dirty books.
Presenter asks
10:35What was it that made you choose the Conservative Party in the end? One would have thought you were naturally more attracted to Gaitskell than to Macmillan at the time.
The keepsakes
The book
David Cecil
I'd read incessantly political biography. Uh not just my contemporaries but nineteenth century and eighteenth century politicians as well. Uh so I probably take Cecil's Life of Melbourne, that I think is the best of its kind, uh rather than the sons and lovers that everybody always expects me to say.
The luxury
my one unfulfilled ambition in life is to be able to play a tenor saxophone. If I could have become a tenor saxophone player like a few of those who've heard, who knows, I might never have taken up politics.
Well, the reason a lot of my friends became Conservatives, a great raft of them in the Government now, I think was we were genuinely inspired by Ian MacLeod above all, but people like Rap Butler, the great figures in the Macmillan Government. I identified with them because I thought they were modernising the country, which is one of the themes that I've always been rather keen on throughout my political life.
Presenter asks
17:48You played a significant part in Margaret Thatcher's going, because you were the first one in to that room when she was contemplating whether to stay or go. You were brutally frank, weren't you?
I wasn't brutally frank, though. That's a colour that's been put on it. I had spent my time campaigning for her and voting for her in the first round, and I was convinced that she'd failed to get through the first round. 170 people, I think, had voted against her, and there was no way she could carry on. So I went in, sort of blooded with battle, as it were, and sought to persuade her that she had lost. and that it was no good going on, she was going to be defeated, that in my opinion the party wanted to have some more candidates, particularly John Major and Douglas Heard. I was doing what I usually did, which was give my genuine advice.
Presenter asks
19:57So what's gone wrong? The Government has been in a hole for a long time. Has this government been in power for too long?
No, I don't think it has. I think if you ask me why have we got in such serious problems since the last election, it really all stems from Black Wednesday, I think, and the fact that we came out of the ERM in the way we did. I personally think we put back together our economic policy remarkably rapidly with the guidelines we've followed since, carried on reducing interest rates, carried on getting inflation down. But it undoubtedly rocked our authority and since that time and we've gone through one of those patches which I've been in government long enough now to remember we've been through many times before. I reckon the end of 1981 in Margaret's first term was worse than the situation we're in now.
Presenter asks
33:18This Government has been in a hole for a long time. It's inevitable that John Major's leadership is called into question, and your name is mentioned as a possible successor. So will you stand if and when the time comes?
Well, I've been mentioned as the next Prime Minister, but three, for about the last ten years. It's come a bit closer, no. That comes a bit closer. The odds have shortened, but I've always said the same thing whenever this question is asked. If any one of the 650 members of Parliament denies that he or she wants to be Prime Minister and don't believe him, because obviously if you go into politics, you wish to have very interesting jobs, you wish to actually see yourself the opportunity of doing things. But when John eventually retires, I have no doubt I shall hope to be a contender, as the saying goes, and no doubt by that time he'll be drawing his pension, and some young man or woman we've never heard of will pick me at the post.
“I think in politics you get a a cut-out cardboard image.”
“My father knew a lot of people who'd known the family and Eastwood really refused to acknowledge this man for years and years.”
“I wear suede shoes. A lot of them are hush puppies, but I do it defiantly nowadays since people started making rude remarks about them.”
“I'm interested in things that people don't know about. I mean, I I get subjected to so many diary pieces that people have cottoned on to the fact that I'm mad keen on bird watching.”