THE CURIOUS CASE OF HESELTINE’S WAR . . .

THE Stop-Brexit rally in Parliament Square thrilled to the oratory of Lord Heseltine, as he recalled his wartime experiences in aid of the argument that the UK should never be ‘alone’ in Europe, as we were in 1940.

He thundered: ‘I was there. I saw our Army evacuated, our cities bombed, our convoys sunk.

‘Churchill did everything in his power to end this isolation. Alone was never Churchill’s hope or wish: it was his fear.’

This might have led his more youthful listeners to believe Lord Heseltine was a participant in the British war effort in that fateful year of 1940. In fact, he was seven years old at the time.

I was older than that — eight — during the great debates in Parliament over the abolition of the death penalty, in 1965. I would never dream of making an argument about that on the basis that ‘I was there’ — as if I had been personally connected with this historic episode.

But then, I lack Heseltine’s nerve (and, of course, his oratorical gifts).

Heseltine’s aim was to link Churchill to the idea of Britain as part of a federal Europe. As he did in a 2017 radio interview, citing the great war leader’s Zurich speech of 1946 calling for a ‘kind of United States of Europe’.

But as the author of a new and magnificent Churchill biography, Andrew Roberts, wrote: ‘Churchill in that speech made it perfectly clear that he did not want Britain to be a member of the European project.’

Or, as Churchill told Parliament in 1952: ‘We are not members of the European Defence Community, nor do we intend to be merged in a Federal European system ... we are with them, but not of them.’

Heseltine should know that. He was there. Sort of.