But he warned that the deep ethnic and sectarian divisions in the country meant that it would be difficult "to put those piecesbacktogether" if there was an implosion of the Syrian state.
Sources say it is intended to be along the lines of his gargantuan 1990s white papers, definitive pieces of analysis puttogether by Heseltine back when he was president of the board of trade in John Major's government.
In his spare time he trained his instincts by field-stripping old watches, scattering the pieces, and teaching himself to put them backtogether like a jigsaw puzzle.
What if it was possible to break a complex piece of machinery into a thousand pieces and then, at some predetermined moment, have the machine put itself backtogether again?