Press Office

Aired: Sunday, 15 June, 2008 10:00
Sunday Live

Any quotes used should be attributed to Sky News, Sunday Live



COLIN BRAZIER:
Well we’ve been talking about him all the way through the show, now the man himself is here. David Davis, MP, but for how much longer David Davis, how long will you have that little acronym at the end of your name for?

DAVID DAVIS:
A few days, then there’ll be a three week battle hopefully and then I hope to have it again but we’ll see, that’ll be down to the people of Haltemprice and Howden.

COLIN BRAZIER:
I was broadcasting on, which day was it, Wednesday, Thursday?

DAVID DAVIS:
Thursday.

COLIN BRAZIER:
You could have heard a pin drop in here when the news came that you had resigned. Nobody knew why of course for fifteen, twenty minutes or so and then the bombshell came through, then the political reaction came through. Since then you get a sense that as the dust has settled people have thought okay, maybe this is an act of conscience but it is not a very astute political move. As the days have gone by, we have got to the weekend, have you repented at leisure?

DAVID DAVIS:
No, not at all. I mean I knew that would happen. This is the nature of the Westminster Village. One of the interesting things that has happened with all this is the distinction between the sort of comment inside the village …

 

COLIN BRAZIER:
The commentariat as Eric Pickles called it.

DAVID DAVIS:
The commentariat, exactly, who all want to know … there is an old joke about Metternich, when the Russian ambassador died he said "I wonder what he meant by that?". In Westminster they look and say, well what’s his motivation, when it is as plain as a pikestaff that we have had a sordid squalid deal in the House of Commons, our liberties have been sold and as a result we are going to have people, probably some innocent people, locked up without charge for six weeks and today, today is the anniversary of the Magna Carta, so there is a big issue of principle here. We use the word madness, it is actually a madness about politics that you can’t do something on principle without it being questioned.

COLIN BRAZIER:
People will always question motivation, I was talking to Kelvin MacKenzie on Friday morning and he was saying, ah well, wait to see what happens next, David Davis is repositioning to have a go again at the party leadership, he’ll start opining on various right wing issues, he’ll put himself forward as a standard bearer of the right. Is that just twaddle?

DAVID DAVIS:
It’s twaddle, absolutely twaddle. I have absolutely no intention of – I said in the papers, categorically no I said as to whether I’d ever run again. So it’s not that. This is a really, really big issue and we are going to take it out to the people. Now already today there has been a poll in the papers saying that 70 odd percent think there is a matter of high principle, most people agree with me about the erosion of freedoms not – I was going to say not just – not simply the issue of putting people in prison for six weeks, but also a whole series of other things, DNA databases with innocent people on them, down to the ordinary – you know, the fact that councils do a thousand surveillance operations a week, not MI5 but local councils.

COLIN BRAZIER:
Watching where you put your rubbish.

DAVID DAVIS:
Watching where you put your rubbish or watching where you take your kids to school. So what we are going to do is try to appeal to people out there, we have set up already a David Davis for Freedom website so email me at due dd@daviddavidforfreedom.com and that is to try and get the public involved. What we have found is that the public out there really do care about this and I’ll tell you know, I can’t walk through a railway station – you shouldn’t let it go to your head but I can’t walk through the railway station without people coming up and saying, well done, stick to it, go for it. People want to see their politicians do something on principle alone and not for profit. In fact sometimes, as in this case I suspect, they lose money.

COLIN BRAZIER:
A lot of people emailed in here, certainly on Thursday and they were saying how delighted we are, we’re chuffed that an MP has shown a backbone and that the argument has been thoroughly ventilated but you can’t ventilate an argument at a by-election without spending some money, it is going to cost the tax payer £75,000 just to have this by-election and it’s not coming out of your pocket.

DAVID DAVIS:
If I could pay for it, if I was legally allowed to pay for it, I would raise the money and pay for it. I’m not allowed to do that. But you know, last week we had a £200 million spend on a corrupt outcome, because we had a vote on six weeks, on the 42 days and if everybody had voted on their conscience that Bill would have been thrown out or that piece of that Bill would have been thrown out by a massive majority, much bigger than there was on 90 days. What happened was that a load of people were bought off so £75,000 is small money but remember something else as well, Big Brother has expensive tastes. When you have a DNA database with a million innocent people on it, that million innocent people cost one million pounds a year. If you have a big ID card system, that’s £90 billion. So if I win any of these arguments, even one of these arguments, it will pay for this election a hundred, no, a thousand times over.

COLIN BRAZIER:
Let’s just talk about the by-election itself. There is a real danger of it being a pantomime to put it kindly. We have just been talking to Miss Great Britain who is going to be standing, she has got some would say very valid reasons for doing so ….

DAVID DAVIS:
She seems quite sensible.

COLIN BRAZIER:
… and there is probably some publicity, self publicity. Kelvin MacKenzie is talking about standing and …

DAVID DAVIS:
Let’s wait and see who turns up.

COLIN BRAZIER:
Let’s put it directly then, would you be chuffed if the government put up a candidate?

DAVID DAVIS:
Absolutely. I mean the truth …

COLIN BRAZIER:
But they probably won’t.

DAVID DAVIS:
Let me finish the argument. Absolutely I want them to put up a candidate, I want them to defend these policies, these erosions of our freedoms. Now if they don’t, what does that say about the Prime Minister? The Prime Minister, he ran away from, he funked the General Election, he funked a referendum on the European Union and now he is funking even a by-election.

COLIN BRAZIER:
But you know what they’ll say, they’ll say what they’ve said all along which is we’ve had endless debate about 42 days in the House.

DAVID DAVIS:
Oh really? And outside? If he is willing to defend his policy with an electorate that can’t be bought, bribed or bullied, then maybe I’d respect him a bit more but I suspect that they are trying to avoid it by any means possible, get somebody else to stand in their stead, do something, anything other than stand for their own case. If they don’t do that, if they don’t do that then I have to face the fact that – and I thought at the beginning that was one of the possibilities they might go for – then we’ll find other ways of bringing this to the public eye because a large part of this is about getting people to understand these issues together. I was Home Secretary, I’m sorry I was getting above myself, I was Shadow Home Secretary for four and a half years, I think I did a reasonable job of it but in that it was impossible to get all these issues in front of the public eye for more than fifteen seconds. You guys, you move on from one issue to the next to the next and so the focus moves on. There is a chance here for three weeks of drawing people back time and again, there are ways of doing it but I am not going to talk about that until the government makes its decision, drawing it back to the issue and I promise you – there’ll be some fun in it, the young lady before will no doubt add some amusement to it and fine, good luck to her, that happens with every big election – but we will also have some very, very serious debates, serious issues and my people will have their say.

COLIN BRAZIER:
You’ll have your say and let’s say you carry the day and you get your seat back, will you get your front bench, shadow front bench position?

DAVID DAVIS:
That’s not for me to say and I’ll tell you what …

COLIN BRAZIER:
Come on, you must have had conversations with Cameron on this.

DAVID DAVIS:
No, I didn’t, I had a single conversation with David about who was going to succeed me and just so it’s on record I suppose, I actually said to him that Dominic Grieve is by far and away the best candidate to do this job, I actually think he will do this job better than me, that was the exact quote. Now in terms of the decision, look, this is my penalty, you know, I pay this cost. I knew before I started that there would be a number of penalties here. One, there would be a lot of attack on me because the Westminster village can’t cope with things it doesn’t understand and has never seen before and this is unique. Secondly, I worried about whether it would hurt the party. I thought actually it would help the party to have somebody standing up for a principle in very stout terms. We have gone up by two percent points since Thursday so it’s worked there but I’ve paid a price. I understand that, I am willing to pay that price because I actually think the issue is that big.

COLIN BRAZIER:
To quote Norman Lamont, ‘Je ne regrette rien."

DAVID DAVIS:
I'm afraid I don’t regret anything, in English, because I’m an Englishman.

COLIN BRAZIER:
Okay, David Davis, thank you very much indeed.