ONE REVEALING moment in Michael Heseltine's appearance last week before the Commons Select Committee on Trade and Industry has so far gone unreported.

Hezza was there to face a grilling from MPs on his interventionist tendencies. Recalling his early days as a magazine publisher - he ran and still owns Haymarket Publishing - Barry Porter, the Conservative member for Wirral South, asked him half-mockingly, half- ingratiatingly whether he would have run such a successful and profitable business if government had forever been poking its nose into his affairs.

'My view at the time was that we should close down the Department of Trade and Industry,' confided the President of the Board of Trade.