The circumstances of his flouncing out of government in 1986 are equally instructive. The Westland helicopter crisis has many angles, but at stake was whether a private company was to decide its own future or whether government was to impose its preference. Heseltine, naturally, wanted to impose. He was a proponent of a European link-up, and Europe has remained an obsession. Only last  April, Heseltine was predicting that the euro would survive and that Britain would join it.

The Heseltine report contains a few unexceptionable observations. It is obviously true that industry needs a consistent energy policy. It is equally clear that government should stop dithering about airport capacity. But it is the underlying philosophy of a report like this that counts, and the philosophy here is muddled, backward and illiberal.

It assumes that government can create economic growth, that it can only do so if it has a "strategy", and that this is, in practice, how successful nations behave. There is to be a National Growth Council chaired by the Prime Minister. Government money is to be centrally allocated to regions to "build economic growth". Industry councils will be instituted. Chambers of commerce will be built up to add a touch of Germanic order.

The corporatist model is everywhere recognisable—regimentation, integration, coordination, committees, chains of command, and, above all, the exercise of Will. The tone is authoritarian, no messing with quirks or differences or alternatives. It is also belligerent: "We need to engage the war psychology," he says. For Lord Heseltine, international commerce has a mercantilist flavour. Government must readily step in to stop foreign takeovers: "In today's world it is difficult to see who else, other than national government, is capable of looking out for the longer-term interests of UK plc."

Lord Heseltine is, nowadays at least, a throwback. This is not necessarily a criticism. If the Conservative party since the Second World War, when collectivism swept the field, had not contained a few irrepressible throwbacks to the thinking of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, the party and perhaps the country would have been lost. But Heseltine is a different sort of throwback. He has retained an undimmed confidence in a collectivist approach to economic policy that comprehensively failed.