Faces of The Future

By Guy D. Garcia

Julian Critchey, a Tory M.P., is fond of telling about the night he dined with fellow classmate Michael Heseltine at Oxford in 1952. Scribbling on the back of an envelope, Heseltine listed his ambitions for the second half of the 20th century. Under the 1990s he wrote, "No. 10."

Born into a middle-class Welsh family, Heseltine studied accounting after Oxford and then went into property development and publishing, amassing a fortune worth more than (pounds)50 million. Elected to Parliament in 1966, he held various non-Cabinet posts under Edward Heath. When Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, she appointed Heseltine Environment Minister, and four years later moved him to Defense. A reputation for impetuosity has followed him since an episode in the Commons in 1976 when, irate over a demonstration staged by Labour M.P.s, he seized the ceremonial mace and brandished it over his head. Heseltine's sense of judgment was called into question again in 1986 when, after a bitter argument with Thatcher over the bailout of the privately owned Westland helicopter company -- she favored an American, he a European partner -- Heseltine stalked out of a Cabinet meeting and announced his resignation. An able orator and administrator, Heseltine, 57, has spent the past four years campaigning quietly but persistently against Thatcher, waiting for the right moment to achieve his Oxford goal.

In his 1972 thriller Truth Game, one of seven he has written in his spare time, Douglas Hurd described a British Prime Minister whose Cabinet waffles over a decision to send troops to a distant island republic. But the Foreign Secretary's firm response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait has united Britain behind the government's policies and won him high praise from fellow Tories.

The patrician Hurd is the son and grandson of Tory M.P.s. After graduating from Cambridge, he joined the diplomatic service and served in Beijing, Washington and Rome. Eager to break into politics, he joined the Conservative Party's research department in 1966, and two years later became Heath's private secretary. In 1974 Hurd was elected M.P. for mid-Oxfordshire. Under Thatcher he served as Deputy Foreign Secretary, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Home Secretary. Last year, despite Hurd's advocacy of closer ties with Europe, Thatcher appointed him to the job he had always wanted, Foreign Secretary.

If Margaret Thatcher had a political son, he would be John Major, 47, who has been on the fast track ever since she made him Foreign Secretary in July 1989 and, the following October, Chancellor of the Exchequer. Though he has had relatively little Cabinet experience, Major is gunning for the premiership with the apparent blessing of his mentor.

Like Thatcher, he rose to the upper political echelons from humble beginnings. The son of a circus trapeze artist and onetime mercenary in Brazil, Major grew up in a two-room apartment in the poor London suburb of Brixton and left school at 16 to help support his parents. He drifted for a while before starting what turned out to be a successful career in banking. During that period, he worked as a laborer and even spent some time on the dole. Major later went to Nigeria to do community work; there he confirmed his deep hatred of racism. Following two failed attempts to reach Parliament, Major was elected in 1979 to represent Huntingdon. He is said to have first caught Thatcher's eye when he engaged her in a blazing dinner debate on economic policy. As Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 1987 to July 1989, Major gained a reputation for his quick grasp of complex issues and steady nerves. Later as Chancellor he combined with Douglas Hurd to persuade Thatcher to take Britain into the E.C.'s Exchange Rate Mechanism, an achievement of considerable political agility.

With reporting by Anne Constable and Helen Gibson/London