Heart trouble forces Tarzan to retire from the jungle

It began on the back of an envelope during his student days in Oxford more than forty years ago, and it ended yesterday in the bedroom of his Georgian country mansion.

The glittering political career of Michael Heseltine spanned four decades of rise and reverse, and came within an ace of his openly-nursed ambition to become Prime Minister.

The end was signalled by a terse anouncement from Conservative Central Office just before 6pm last night, saying he had suffered "mild angina pains" and was in hospital undergoing tests. It added: "He would like to confirm that he will not be a candidate in the leadership campaign for the Conservative Party."

"Hezza", the lion of the Tory Party, had only just finished a six-week campaign which would have seen off most men half his sixty four years.

But his first biographer and friend from Oxford University days Sir Julian Critchley, noticed that something of the old elan was missing. "I thought he was looking ill on television towards the end, and becoming increasingly short-tempered. He had driven himself to the point of exhaustion."

It was to the young Julian that "Hezza" confided his plan for a long march to the highest office: for the Fifties, he wrote, "millionaire". In the Sixties, "MP". In the Seventies, "Minister". In the Eighties, "Cabinet". And in the 1990s: "Downing Street".

His ambition was often derailed, but political perseverance of a high order always got it back on track as he climbed the ladder. He was the darling of the Tory conference, and the unsung hero of the constituency association rubber-chicken circuit, assiduously cultivating his power base against the day he would need grass-roots support.

Hesletine stormed out of the Cabinet over the Westland Affair in 1986, but was rehabilitated by John Major, who was the ultimate beneficiary of his drawn-out coup against Margaret Thatcher. He finally reached Downing Street in 1995, but as second-in-command.

Critchley, a Tory MP until last week's election, said: "He should have become leader, but when push comes to shove the Tory party usually plumps for mediocrity."

His most recent biographer, Michael Crick, wrote: "The real pressure to retire from politics will almost certainly come from his wife, Anne, who fears for his health." He might then become Baron Heseltine of Henley on Thames, his parliamentary seat since 1974. A fitting climax for the greatest nearly-man of his generation.