The Edinburgh Festival is in full swing. Broadcaster Iain Dale’s run of All Talk shows was limited to just four days this year because, apparently, the Oasis concerts last  week had booked out all the hotels. These interview shows are always worth going to and often make the headlines.

I was absolutely gutted to miss the first shows with Rachel Reeves and Jess Phillips as I had committed many months ago to look after my nephews.

However I managed to go to both shows the following day. The first was a double header  with his current podcast partner historian Tessa Dunlop (who looks very like Taylor Swift in this photo according to my son) and his former partner in hilarity Jacqui Smith. Their For the Many podcast came to an end last year after 500 episodes when Jacqui was ennobled and appointed a Minister in the Department for Education. Iain now hosts a twice weekly podcast with Tessa called “Where Politics meets History” which I love because Tessa is very good at calling out Iain’s BS and I love both politics and history.

It was a very funny hour. I am sure it can’t be legal to look as fresh as Jacqui did considering she had had 3 overnight flights after a ministerial trip to Japan and Malaysia last week.

If you had told 2009 me that I would really like Jacqui, who was then the Home Secretary and responsible for all manner of Labour authoritarianism designed to enrage liberals, I wouldn’t have believed you. However, she and Iain’s hilarious and irreverent  podcast banter brightened my life through some very dark times and for that I will always be grateful. It was good to see that several of the For the Many superfans had travelled to see the team reunited.

It didn’t take long to get to toilet humour – a discussion of Japanese toilets. Jacqui and Tessa did as I’d hoped and ganged up on Iain quite a bit and he,unusually, didn’t say that much. I felt that Tessa might have gone slightly hard on Jacqui over the Government’s record, as this was more a fun thing rather than the Today programme, but as she said afterwards, she had a Government minister in front of her and wanted to hold her to account.

A very big penny dropped for me not long into it. Tessa talked about staying with her little brother in Dunbar. It couldn’t be Duncan Dunlop, the top of the list Lib Dem candidate for the South of Scotland region in next year’s Scottish elections, could it? And indeed it was.

Later in the afternoon, 92 year old Michael Heseltine talked about his time in various Government positions and Brexit and Boris. He was very illuminating, saying his proudest achievement was regenerating Liverpool after the Toxteth riots. He talked about how he would have a meeting with all the key people involved on a Thursday and would then spend Friday sorting out the problems every week and getting people to work together and removing the barriers to them doing so. His work was so admired that the Labour Council gave him the freedom of the City.

This has led him to a firm belief in devolution of power. He supports elected mayors and says that you need someone at that level who can bring everyone together and get stuff done. When asked what change he would like to see in Scottish poltiics, he at first said that it would be unwise for him to comment but then added in something that warms the cockles of every liberal heart – that more power should be given to local councils and taken away from Edinburgh.

He described Boris Johnson, who succeeded him as MP for Henley, as very charming but lacking in any moral scruple whatsoever.

I will admit to bristling a bit when he talked about the Greenham Common women who camped outside the base where cruise missiles were kept from 1981 until it finally ended in 2000. Joan Ruddock, the Chair of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament he described as an “attractive girl.” He seems to think he defeated CND but they survive to this day, although they admittedly don’t have the prominence they had back then.

Had I not been blethering for ages to Jacqui and Tessa after the earlier show, I might have had the chance to put in a question about his decision to close half the UK’s remaining coal mines in 1992. Back then, Paddy Ashdown spoke at a massive rally in London opposing the closures and calling on the Government to create new jobs and stimulate economic recovery.  My husband was made redundant as a result of these closures. At the time, he was 42 and was pretty much told by the Job Centre that he was not expected to be able to work again. He did, but it took 10 months and came with a massive pay cut.

Heseltine didn’t manage to work the same magic as he had in Liverpool as many former coalfield communities struggle today. However I will say that British Coal Enterprise, set up to help redundant mineworkers provided invaluable support, training, interview practice and a place for people to work and apply for jobs, providing stamps for job applications and the like.  Last year, he talked about this decision:

He said the decision was “unpleasant” but that apologising for taking it would be “a pointless thing to do”.

He added: “The timing and process were extremely uncomfortable and I had great sympathy for the communities who were very admirable, loyal, decent and hard-working people.

“I had a job to do as a minister. That doesn’t mean you were proud of what you did, but you had to do it. There was no alternative but to do it.”

Iain Dale asked him if, at 92, he had any thoughts on his death. Quick as a flash, he said “I’m opposed to it.” He promised that his best was yet to come.  He completely charmed the room.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social