Michael Heseltine is that rare thing: a Conservative Europhile. Throughout his 50-year political career, he has championed European integration as the best means of advancing prosperity and security. He was one of the few senior Tories to advocate membership of the single currency after Labour’s election victory in 1997. That project stalled long ago but Heseltine and his fellow pro-Europeans now confront a graver possibility: that the UK could leave the EU altogether.
When I met him recently, the former deputy prime minister told me that Brexit would be “catastrophic” for Britain. “It would have an appalling effect on the way the rest of the world sees us, the UK having opted out of the top table of politics which we’ve occupied for so long and so successfully . . . It would leave Europe exposed to a dominance by Germany that Germany doesn’t want and nobody else wants,” he said. “We are the only credible balancing power to stand alongside France in that central concept of a balance of power . . . I cannot myself believe that the British people are going to vote for that [withdrawal].”
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