Press Office

Aired: Sunday, 18 January, 2009 10:00
Sunday Live

Any quotes used should be attributed to Sky News Sunday Live

COLIN BRAZIER:
Margaret Thatcher famously said of Willie Whitelaw that ‘everyone needs a Willie’. David Cameron seems to agree, he has anointed William Hague his de facto deputy, the Shadow Foreign Secretary joins me from Darlington now. William Hague, a very good morning to you. Let’s begin if we may with events in the Gaza Strip. As events and these pictures testify so eloquently, it is easy to call a cease fire, quite another matter to make it stick.

WILLIAM HAGUE:
Well absolutely, yes. Declaring a cease fire is not the same as having a cease fire and now it is very important that Hamas stops this rocket fire. I think this will be an important test of whether Hamas really cares about the welfare of their own people because if they continue that rocket fire then clearly these kinds of exchanges that you are seeing there look likely to continue. It does mean the international meeting that’s taking place today in Sharm El Sheikh is very, very important because from that meeting we’ve got to see sufficient assurance to the Israelis that the international community can help police and prevent the flow of rocket components in to Gaza and sufficient assurance to Hamas that there is a great deal of international aid and assistance ready to flow in to Gaza to help the people there when the border crossings are opened, so that’s a pretty important meeting taking place today.

COLIN BRAZIER:
It’s been an operational secret but it’s an open secret now that Gordon Brown is in the region, I imagine he may be amongst the half dozen leaders who have been invited by Ehud Olmert, the Israeli Prime Minister, to have dinner in Israel tonight. From Gordon Brown’s perspective, from the British perspective, what pressure can we bring to bear, what pressure in what direction ought we bring to bear?

WILLIAM HAGUE:
Well it is very important that Britain is there, in fact I was rather critical of the government for not being involved in the previous initiative by President Sarkozy so I am very pleased that the Prime Minister is going there. It is part of showing the international solidarity about this. We do play some role in both the things that I just mentioned a few moments ago. The Foreign Secretary has announced this morning £20 million of additional aid to Gaza and he is absolutely right to do that and of course the Prime Minister has spoken of the Royal Navy taking part in the policing of the smuggling of rockets into Gaza. Now we need to know a lot more details about that because we have a very over-stretched Royal Navy, I think we only have got 23 destroyers left in the Royal Navy and so we do want to know how that is going to be provided for amongst all the competing priorities but clearly Britain can play a role in each of these things.

COLIN BRAZIER:
On the subject of over stretch, Gaza serves to remind us doesn’t it, just how complicated a foreign affairs brief can be. You are also taking on the role of effective deputy shadow, well I should say deputy leader of the Conservative party. I mean it is a big role matched with your outside interests, some of which you have been criticised for, for holding on to as before as well.

WILLIAM HAGUE:
Well I don’t have many outside interests left, they are diminishing but actually I have been doing this deputy role behind the scenes for the last three years, chairing the Shadow Cabinet when David Cameron isn’t there and chairing his other meetings when he’s not there and what David was talking about last week was making that a more public thing but the great thing is we’re not very hierarchical now in the upper reaches of the Conservative party, we have a very good team that works together and I have never known a more cohesive team, when I look around the table at the way that David Cameron and George Osborne and I work together, I’ve never seen a more mutually supportive team at the top of politics than the one we’ve got today and it is one of the things that gives us great confidence coming towards the next general election.

COLIN BRAZIER:
I suppose leaders don’t make things public for no good reason and it has been suggested that one of the reasons that that deputy role was made public was effectively as a sop to the euro sceptic right within the party who are perhaps a little bit anxious about the fact that Ken Clarke was making a return to the shadow cabinet, it’s not happened yet but there is a lot of speculation though that he will.

WILLIAM HAGUE:
I obviously can’t comment on what might happen in any reshuffle, that is solely for the leader of the party to …

COLIN BRAZIER:
You can tell us whether you would like to see him back.

WILLIAM HAGUE:
I’ll tell you this, I think in spirit Ken Clarke is already back because that’s one of the great things that has happened in the Conservative party in the last year, that everybody has piled in to help. Everyone has seen the importance of changing the government of this country, that’s why I came back a few years ago to the front bench even though I was having a fine time away from the front bench, that’s why you have seen people like Ken Clarke over the last year really rowing in with the rest of the party and behind David Cameron. So I think that in many sense has already happened but you wouldn’t expect me to reveal or comment on reshuffles in advance. 

COLIN BRAZIER:
No, but being there in spirit is very different from being there in practice. Certainly Alan Duncan would feel there’s a big difference if it’s the case that Ken Clarke ends up taking over his brief as Shadow Business.

WILLIAM HAGUE:
You are trying to draw me on things you know I can’t be drawn on. Any reshuffle will only be announced by David Cameron, you know that, and I can’t go any further than that but all I can say is what I observe already which is the greatest cohesion and working together in the Conservative party that I have seen for a good twenty years and I think that is a very good sign when it comes to the next Conservative government.

COLIN BRAZIER:
I'm sure you will take as a very good sign that the polls this morning have shown a restored Conservative lead back up to 13%. Is it your view that any suggestion of a snap election now has disappeared, that that margin, that lead that you are enjoying over the government means that they won’t go early, they won’t cut and run?

WILLIAM HAGUE:
No, that's not my view, these things can change very quickly. We should never get over excited or over depressed actually about movements in opinion polls. I think opinion is steadily shifting against the government in the country because I think that people can see that what the government has done on the economy in recent months hasn’t actually worked. The VAT cut is the most glaring example of that, which is costing the country £12 billion for no evident benefit for the economy at all so is opinion totally moving against the government? Yes, but I think we’d be presumptuous to think we knew what that meant for the timing of a general election. Probably the next election won’t be until next year because Gordon Brown is so scared of the voters. He didn’t want an election at the obvious time, 18 months ago, he had refused to hold a referendum that was promised on the Lisbon Treaty so he is obviously pretty scared of the voters and will probably go right to the end in May 2010.

COLIN BRAZIER:
Can I just ask you a question about candour in politics? I mean you were famously pilloried for talking about your alcohol consumption. Baroness Vadera this week was clobbered for talking about, in answer to a question from a journalist, the green shoots of recovery. Have we created do you think, perhaps we in the media as well as politics, a culture where it has become extraordinarily difficult now for any serving politician with ambitions to even retain office to speak frankly and actually answer a question honestly?

WILLIAM HAGUE:
No, I don't think so actually, I don’t agree with that. Hopefully most of us the vast majority of the time do give frank and honest answers to questions. We were just talking about Ken Clarke, I think he has always been very famous for doing that and he has had a high public reputation so no, I don't think that’s the case. I think the problem with remarks from Ministers that you are talking about from a few days ago of seeing green shoots out there in the economy and we got it again today with Margaret Beckett, the Housing Minister, talking about a housing boom going on in the near future, I think the problem here is that these Ministers are clearly divorced from reality. We are in a very serious economic downturn with this country worse placed than any other nation among the leading industrialised nations, thanks to Gordon Brown’s policies of the last eleven years, and here they are, when tens of thousands of people are losing their jobs, talking about green shoots and housing booms. I don't think they really understand what’s going on out there and that’s the problem with them.

COLIN BRAZIER:
William Hague, thank you.


WILLIAM HAGUE:
Thank you.