This what I was talking about yesterday:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/gift/8cfbe5f3351b7264
"This year, attending the Conservative Party conference for the first time since 1997, Michael Heseltine used a European Movement fringe meeting to speak up against the new direction.
He opened his speech with a forceful condemnation of the rise of Right-wing movements across Europe, singling out Reform as one of the “Right-wing equivalents of the fascists in the 1930s.”
The veteran peer also delivered a sharp critique of Ms Badenoch’s newly announced policy to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court. He argued, “If any changes are needed, the worst possible response is to walk away and abandon one of Europe’s most civilised achievements.”
Finally, he addressed growing anxieties surrounding the asylum system by saying that “the overwhelming majority of asylum seekers come here to embrace our values and escape persecution or civil war.”
Read this without context, and it is more than believable it had been uttered by Zack Polanski or Ed Davey. What is the advantage to the Tories of having this emerge from our ranks? Nothing; the Cameron coalition is not coming back. All it will do is convince the electorate that within our ranks lie dormant thousands of quiet Lib Dems and Greens, ready to betray them again as soon as we are back in power.
Singling out Reform, who are powered by tens of thousands of decent but disillusioned former Conservative voters as “fascist” will only fuel their resentment; whilst his comments on the widely-abused ECHR and asylum “system” betray his decades out of date political understanding. Hesletine ceased to be in Government in 1997; until the mid-1990s, net migration tended to be quite low and as likely to be positive as negative. He also lives in the 18th Century Palladian Thenford House in Thenford, Northamptonshire – which, according to the 2021 Census, is over 95 per cent white British."