Some years ago, a journalist went to interview Lord Michael and Lady Anne Heseltine about their garden. The woman in question was a poor choice for the job, Lady Heseltine thinks: “I forget her name, but she is married to … Alan ... Oh, God, the little man who’s slightly in disgrace now, but I imagine that’s why she was given the job.” (She means Alan Yentob and his wife Philippa Walker, who, it should be said, has a long and serious list of documentary credits to her name.) “She didn’t know anything about gardening at all, which was rather a pity, and she kept wanting to bring Michael back to politics. He said: ‘No, this is the garden, not politics.’ And she didn’t want to talk to me at all.” She laughs brightly, her message artfully transmitted. I run my hand over the list of questions about the state of the Conservative party and her husband’s forceful interventions in the Brexit debate that I’ve written down on my way here, smile back, and try to think of something intelligent to say about snowdrops.
We’re in a living room at Thenford, the family’s grand Northamptonshire home and venue of the remarkable gardens and arboretum that are a large part of their life’s work. Lord Heseltine isn’t here yet. He’s out there somewhere, I guess, lecturing an errant sapling, as he has acknowledged that he occasionally must, or taking issue with a squirrel. Who knows how long he’ll be: being out in the garden at Thenford is not like being out in most gardens. “Before we had the golf buggies and mobile phones it was a nightmare,” Lady Heseltine – can I call her Anne? I don’t risk it – says. “You’d spend half the morning looking for him.” They would alert him from the bell tower, and Michael would occasionally return, a little breathless, only to find that the summons was not on behalf of No 10 but from someone offering to clean the windows.
The estate runs to about 1,400 acres, and they’ve reinvented it all. “It is completely barmy,” Anne says. “We never meant to do it. We never meant to do it.” At that moment, in the driveway visible through the window behind her, I see a rangy 83-year-old in corduroy trousers and purple socks, his luxuriant hair buffeted by the wind, whistling past in a golf buggy. It’s Tarzan, with a hint of Fred Flintstone. An image arrives of a prehistoric political titan, mace in hand, doggedly propelling his stone-age vehicle onwards with his feet. Before Michael has even walked in, it’s obvious that he’d rather be out there than in here.
But in here he must be. With the Tarzan-and-Jane era more or less behind them – while he was swinging that mace in the cabinet and carving out a niche as the best Conservative prime minister that never was, she was on the boards of four major museums – the Heseltines have finally written the book that they have talked about for years. So, OK, you win, Heseltines. Fine. We’ll start with the garden.
Thenford is an account of a horticultural transformation from a neglected wilderness, where “old trees remained where they had fallen, like sticks in a giant’s game of spillikins”, to great English gardens. It features useful advice, hearty family photos and the odd entertaining political anecdote, but mostly it’s a monument to an undertaking that, whatever they were doing in London, you cannot help feeling was their real calling.
When they came here in 1977, the Heseltines hadn’t quite reckoned with the scale of the project. “The plan was the house rather than the garden, wasn’t it?” says Anne. “We were not looking for the garden,” says Michael, who has sat down in an enormous armchair next to his wife, with an appealingly shabby 16-year-old sausage dog called Casper at his feet. “There was an assumption that there would be a garden already there. But we never thought we would find a broken down wood, which is what we got.”
“We did it bit by bit,” Anne goes on. “Usually, we completed one section, and then we thought: what’s next? We started with an aviary, then there was this little stream, and then we made some ponds …” On the list goes. They did once decide against building a bridge because of the expense, but that appears to be about the only economy, which is probably not that surprising when you consider that this year’s Sunday Times Rich List estimated the fortune they have accumulated via Haymarket publishing at £300m. He swiped cuttings from the prime minister’s country retreat, Chequers (Edward Heath visited, as did John Major, David Cameron, the American ambassador during the Westland affair, Prince Charles, and any number of other grandees; Margaret Thatcher never did), and she chose sculptures by Lynn Chadwick and Elisabeth Frink. A massive bust of Lenin, rescued from the former Soviet Union at the end of the cold war was meant to cost €2,000; when the dealer sheepishly explained that he had left a zero off the end of the price, they rolled their eyes and bought it anyway. The garden itself, meanwhile, is entirely their own. Today, there are about 13,000 varieties of plant catalogued here, among them 3,000 trees and shrubs in the arboretum, 400 different roses, 370 oaks and 342 snowdrops, which, I am almost certain, are those little white ones.
The house and its owners have the same careless, unapologetic grandeur as the gardens. I don’t mean to be crass, but Michael Heseltine’s loo is an actual throne: a gigantic wooden chair with arms and a wicker seat that you have to lift to discover its true purpose. There are many beautiful things, as well as a bobblehead of George W Bush. The Heseltines, for their part, have a laconic, almost indetectable haughtiness to their excellent manners. There is, for example, no indication that they’ve registered my name. I quite like them for it, to be honest. They are here to talk about the garden, which they love fiercely, and they are not that interested in discussing anything else – certainly not politics, as we have seen (although they will, after a slight hesitation, reveal the time that Michael punched a drunk in the face).
But that’s later. For now, they’re describing the consequences of their great project’s exposure to the world with some of the same reluctance. At the moment, they open the gardens to the public four times a year; with the book, Anne says: “I’m not sure what’s going to happen. I think we will have to be open more than four times a year, don’t you? Otherwise the garden will be trampled to bits.” At the thought, I surmise, of large family groups with screaming toddlers and a pram carving its way across the grass, a cloud crosses Michael’s face. “The website is coming,” he says ominously, sounding like the voiceover on a trailer for a horror film called The Website. “We can see how it goes.” Yes, he admits, there is trepidation at the prospect. “Being open is a new dimension, and it starts with things called loos, and teas, and gates, and” – he italicises his dismay – “choke points.”
Anyway, even without such chaos, there are already some interlopers in paradise. One of the statistics that stuck with me from the book, I say, was that the Heseltines have shot a genocidal 300 grey squirrels for the protection of small birds and trees in just six months. Three hundred! It’s a massacre out there. “Three hundred and fifty,” Michael corrects me. “Absolutely awful things,” says Anne. Taken though I am with the image of Tarzan taking potshots from the golf buggy, I suspect it’s probably mostly the work of Thenford’s dozen gardeners. Still, Michael bows to no one in his antipathy for the little buggers. “These foreign intruders may have a Walt Disney appeal in London parks,” he writes – the couple take alternating chapters – “but to us they are Public Enemy Number One … and are shot without hesitation.” He is variously “enraged” and “aggravated” by their presence. But now they are on the run and, as a result, says Anne, “we are hearing and seeing all sorts of birds that we didn’t before.” In such idyllic circumstances, the Heseltines are more enamoured of their garden than ever, and more determined to spend as much time there as they can. “I can tell you exactly when I feel it most,” Michael says, “on a cold January day when I’m out shooting, and I say to myself: ‘Why am I doing this?’ All those lovely greenhouses, and I’m here.”
If all this – anxiety at the influx of the great unwashed; shooting; that throne – give an impression of elitism, the Heseltines are bracingly unconcerned. It makes you nostalgic for a certain stripe of patrician Conservative, now in short supply, who viewed the sensible stewardship of the nation as their natural responsibility, and didn’t much care if they seemed remote in exercising it. It would be harder to get away with on the front lines of politics now, wouldn’t it? In the post duck-island-era, a life like this would come with a political price. Not a bit of it, says Michael. “You have just got to believe in what you are doing. Anyway, there is a huge gardening world out there. And I would much rather have them on my side than the journalists.”
Feeling embarrassed about my firm position in the latter camp, I talk ruefully about my own back garden, whose state of disrepair can be summarised by the ominous weed that keeps sliding in under the back door. “They are not toys,” Michael says solemnly. “They are very demanding. Well, you can pave it.” A thought occurs to him, and he looks a bit surprised. “There is something I want to clarify,” he announces. “Are you the gardening correspondent of the Guardian?” No, I’m not. “Oh,” he replies. “I thought you were.” He sits back and narrows his eyes.
I look back down at my notes about Brexit and Theresa May. Is it all right if I ask a couple of political questions? “You can try,” he says. Now Anne, too, has a distinctly sceptical look; despite the tea and biscuits recently provided by a servant summoned by telephone, the atmosphere has chilled. Oh, well. I’m trying to link the garden’s impervious, permanent beauty to the state of chaos around the country when Michael cuts me off. “My views are quite well known on the referendum,” he says. (They are both firm remainers.) “We know what happened in the referendum. But no one knows what is going to happen as a consequence. We will see.”
He waits. Anne sips her tea. We’re meeting the day after David Cameron’s former spin doctor Craig Oliver’s incendiary diaries were splashed across the Mail on Sunday, revealing the bitter divides that the referendum created in the government, and putting the boot into Brexiteers such as Boris Johnson. What did Oliver’s account tell us about the leaders of the leave campaign? “They did what they believed in, and the consequences will one day be evident,” Michael says, and falls silent again. When he does elaborate, he moves with impressive efficiency into the weeds of policy. A question about the social effects of the division provokes a lively discussion of whether a friend called Susie was leave or remain but, otherwise, the subtext of every answer is clear: why is this question not about our garden?
At this point, something slightly surprising happens. Accepting that the killer line about Boris that I had secretly hoped for is not about to materialise – I mean, earlier this year Michael described his Henley constituency successor as “a general who marches his army to the sound of the guns and the moment he sees the battleground he abandons it”, for God’s sake – I find myself babbling out of awkwardness. I should, I hear myself saying, have asked the question a friend once advised me would get an interesting response out of anyone: have you ever thrown a punch? We all cheer up a bit. “I don’t think I have, actually,” says Michael, but Anne is on hand to correct him. “You did! You did!” she cries. “Don’t you remember? You were coming back from the House of Commons, and a man approached you. He was drunk or druggy or something. And you just went” – she enjoys this bit – “voomph.”
“Oh, no,” says Michael, looking slightly alarmed. “I’m sure you did,” she says. “Do you remember, when we lived at Wilton Crescent, we used to walk back from the House of Commons with your heavies, and presumably they weren’t doing their stuff this time. And this old drunken, sort of, I don’t know what he was, he came up to you ...” – “I do vaguely remember this,” Michael says uneasily – “And you told me you just went like that.” Anne wallops an imaginary nose in front of her. “And he fell over! And nobody was more surprised than you.” The trouble, she reflects, is that “he was too wobbly on his feet”. This shows, Michael says ruefully, that you have to be careful answering these sorts of things. Anne, for the record, has never punched anyone.
How will it play that Lord Heseltine once squared up to a drunken lurcher, not deemed much of a threat by his bodyguards, and smacked him in the face? I don’t know but, personally, I’m all right with it. At least he wasn’t vandalising the country. In any case, the Heseltines give not a fig. Active though they still are, their richest life now is in the confines of Thenford, basking in the splendour of the blooming world they have made for themselves (and, just occasionally, for others). It feels like a little citadel of a lamented and non-pyromaniac conservatism, a conservatism that treasures the past and carefully seeks to augment and protect it. Eventually, their son Rupert will take it over. In the meantime, whatever is happening outside, however much those beyond the gate are screeching about Marmite and the royal yacht Britannia and immigrants’ teeth, the garden will endure.
When he is asked about his greatest political legacy, Michael is fond of answering that his garden will outlast all of it. “My trees,” he told Peter Hennessy on Radio 4 recently. “It’s the only thing people will remember.” Before I go, then, I ask if the book marks an end point of sorts; if the great project of their lives is complete. “The reverse is the case,” Michael insists, Anne nodding as he speaks. “We could stop planting trees, but we won’t. It is just a question of how much time we have got.”
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