Rebel Heseltine refers letter threats to police

MICHAEL Heseltine, fresh from opposing a hard Brexit and a dismissal from Theresa May, has been forced to involve the police after receiving threatening correspondence.

Yesterday Lord Heseltine sent a letter to all those who had been in touch with their support after he defied Tory Whips and voted against the Government in the Lords debate over the Article 50 Bill.

“An overwhelming majority of the messages have come from people who voted to remain in the European Union,” he wrote. “A small number have come from those who voted to leave and who, in various shades of language, wish me to become silent. They will be disappointed. A handful have had to be referred to the police.”

Lord Heseltine became an MP in the Sixties, was Margaret

Thatcher’s Defence

NO SEX please, we’re MPs. In Sophy Ridge’s new book The Women Who Shaped Politics, Shirley Williams recalls an older male colleague trying to protect her from hearing anything rude when she joined Parliament in 1964. Months in, Secretary and bête noire, and held five government adviser roles in regional development. However, after voting against the Government, May fired him from all five jobs.

He is one among a number of peers who have been receiving rather ripe correspondence for standing up for the Remain argument, though this is the first public instance of a peer reporting threats — presumably serious to the police.

Lord Heseltine’s office said he had nothing further to add this morning on the nature of the threats, or comment on police involvement.

Despite them the peer, 84, has pledged to carry on. “Each one of us has a voice and the right to use it,” he writes in the letter. “We are about to embark on an unchartered journey to an undefined destination. I will do all in my power to speak for the millions of my fellow citizens who wish to turn back.”

Williams asked Tory Bernard Braine what they were voting on. “Don’t you trouble your pretty little head about it,” he said — it was the legalisation of homosexuality. “Bernard was trying to protect me from ugly things like sex,” Williams thinks.