ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO SOPHY RIDGE ON SUNDAY, SKY NEWS

SOPHY RIDGE: Now if you believe the reports in the papers this morning, the Conservative party is gearing up to ask Theresa May to go in a new direction and one man who will have plenty to say on that direction, I would imagine, is one of the party’s biggest beasts, Lord Michael Heseltine, who joins us now from his home in Oxfordshire. Hello Lord Heseltine, thank you very much for being with us. So it has been an absolutely remarkable week for Theresa May, she’s lost her majority, she’s lost her two closest advisors, do you think she can continue as Prime Minister?

LORD HESELTINE: Well she’ll never lead the Conservative party into another election but there is no immediate need for a change. Indeed my own hope would be that perhaps her last service to the party would be to give it the time to think about a successor but very much in the context of the policies of the successor. You see you’ve got to face the reality that the present situation is unsustainable. The DUP may be a short-term palliative but it is not enough of a support to last through a parliament and what the Conservative party has to ask itself very simply is how do we stop Jeremy Corbyn entering Number 10 Downing Street? By producing a manifesto in a forthcoming general election that genuinely can appeal to young and old, north and south, across the country. There have been all sorts of assertions of unity and national interest but actually the Conservative party is deeply divided over the issue of Brexit and it is absolutely fundamental for me that the new leader finds a way of genuinely trying to lance the boil, which is of course immigration, that underlies the public anxiety.

SR: So let me get this straight, do you actually think that Jeremy Corbyn could be Prime Minister?

LORD HESELTINE: I have no doubt at all that he is a handful of seats away and looking ahead, what do I see? I see a parliament that has not got the ability to legislate on the big issues of the time, I see an economy which will continue to deliver frustrating circumstances in probably frozen living standards and I see one story after another about the dilemmas of Brexit. I don’t see an early general election because the opposition parties don’t want it, I don't think, certainly not the Scots Nats but government doesn’t want it and the public opinion doesn’t want it. So all that the opposition parties have got to do is harry the government and wait and the inevitable merciless process of by-elections will create a climate in which a general election becomes possible and in which public opinion by then has moved into the tradition mid-term blues when people are crying out for a change. This is likely to coincide with the end of the Brexit negotiation. Now we’ve not going to win the Brexit negotiations, there is no way the Europeans can allow us to leave on better terms than we’ve got now. Why? Because other countries might take the same option, so they’re not going to do it and whatever the words, whatever the promises that we’ve seen, all this stuff – the fact is we will suffer by leaving the European Union. Now there’s one issue beneath all of this which is immigration and there is genuine concern: you saw Donald Trump exploit it, you saw the problems in France and Germany so it is possible that the right leader of the Conservative party could approach Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron and offer them a deal which deals with the big issues of immigration and there are three components. First, they need to take the student numbers out, we need the students to enhance our universities, to raise the standards and to keep us at the top of world education standards. Secondly, they should deal with the issue of non-European immigration which is over half, nothing to do with the European Union at all. Thirdly, they should accept the principle of free movement but to look for transitional arrangements where the flow gets out of balance, in other words they should look at a process which is very similar to that that applies to the new members joining the European Union and use that where the economies are out of balance. It will require leadership and vision.

SR: Lord Heseltine, you paint a very gloomy picture there and yet it is a situation entirely of the Conservative party’s making because David Cameron chose to call the EU referendum, Theresa May chose to call the election. Who do you blame for the situation we’re in now?

LORD HESELTINE: I blame the economic collapse of 2008, I blame those who sought to blame the European Union for the consequences of that, I blame Nigel Farage for exploiting the immigration issue and, I’m sad to say, that the Conservative party and to some extent the Labour party found themselves being dragged down this anti-European road by public opinion but it was not the Conservative party that created that public opinion.

SR: But the gambles that the Conservative party took on the referendum but also on this election was proved disastrously wrong, certainly with this election. Theresa May was expecting to come out with a strengthened hand, with a mandate, with a majority and look at what’s happened.

LORD HESELTINE: Yes, well we all know what’s happened so we have to look ahead and what I am now preoccupied by, frightened by if I may be frank, is that Jeremy Corbyn is within a handful of seats of Number 10, with all the risks to the nation’s defence that that implies and this is why we need, the Conservative party needs time to think through the policies which can genuinely attract the young and our more elderly supporters, who can genuinely sound as though they believe in the devolution of power across the United Kingdom and who can actually show that they have policies that deal with the housing and education and skills crisis, which we have to do regardless of whether we are in or out of Europe.

SR: Now you said a little earlier about the Conservative party needing leadership, who would you like to see as the next leader of the Conservative party? There is lots of talk about Boris Johnson for example, would you like to see him in the hot seat?

LORD HESELTINE: No, you see you missed my point. I’m interested in what they are going to say, not the personalities. Personalities of course are important but it is the message, it is the cancer at the heart of the Conservative party – Brexit – that has to be dealt with if we are going to unite this country and I want to know who is prepared to stand up within the House of Commons and tell the British people the truth, devoid of all the empty flannel – a new world, a free trade, getting out there and creating new markets. We are systematically destroying the principle market of Britain’s prosperity, wilfully on our own at our decision and as long as you keep doing that, all this talk of greater prosperity and a new world is frankly misleading.

SR: You are saying there is a cancer in the Conservative party, is there a risk then that if the Conservative party doesn’t get the next few months right that that cancer could be terminal?

LORD HESELTINE: Not terminal, the Conservative party is the most successful democratic force in human society, they will recover, they always do but it could perpetuate in the present circumstances the uncertainty and the economic stagnation which could give Jeremy Corbyn the key to Number 10. It is as serious as that.

SR: Another report in the big stories at the weekend and the fallout from the election is this idea of an arrangement with the DUP. How do you feel about the Conservative party and the DUP linking up?

LORD HESELTINE: Well I’m more Ruth Davidson than I am Arlene Foster but it’s a delusion you see. The DUP don’t have enough votes to guarantee the life of this parliament through its full term so they may get us through, what, to halfway through, to the erosion of by-elections, to the defections within the Conservative party itself erode the DUP support for a majority government. Then what happens? Then we’re in a position where the public mood will have been reflected in the mid-term blues that always comes, there will be desire for change and who will be waiting? Jeremy Corbyn will be waiting and what will be happening? We will be concluding a bad Brexit deal, the consequences of which will have adverse effects across the country and then we get forced into a general election. This logic is staring us in the face, you have to deal with it now and not in two years’ time.

SR: Lord Heseltine, thank you very much for your time