Topical discussion in which a panel of personalities from the worlds of politics, media and elsewhere are posed questions by the audience. From a different location each week Jonathan Dimbleby chairs the topical debate from Leeds. Jonathan Dimbleby chairs the topical debate from Leeds. The panellists are associate editor of the Daily Telegraph Simon Heffer, secretary of state for children, schools and families Ed Balls, shadow foreign secretary William Hague and Green Party Parliamentary candidate Bea Campbell. WILLIAM HAGUE is the Shadow Foreign Secretary and former leader of the Conservative Party. It was when he was leader, in 2000, that the party donor and deputy chairman, Michael Ashcroft became a Peer, having promised Hague that he would become a permanent resident of the UK. Yesterday, he admitted it had been a “mistake” to say in 2000 that the agreement would cost Lord Ashcroft millions in extra tax but he denied any secret deal had been done. He said Lord Ashcroft had only told him he was a non-dom "around the turn of the year" and that he subsequently went on to "explain" his position to David Cameron and announce it publicly: "You could argue that that should all have been done earlier. OK, you can argue that. But we have done all of that." Last week, he said that the Tories would play a “leading role” in the EU and be “highly active” in promoting European co-operation on climate change. He was his party’s leader in 2001 when it suffered its second defeat by Labour – he resigned the following day. At the age of 16 he delivered his first speech to a Conservative Party conference and became an MP at 27. He succeeded John Major as leader after the party’s 1997 defeat, winning praise for his debating skills in Prime Minister’s Questions. During his time on the backbenches he published the biography of William Pitt the Younger, following that with the biography of William Wilberforce. He returned to the frontbench as a member of David Cameron’s shadow cabinet in 2005. ED BALLS MP is Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families. Since 2005, his Constituency Party has received £5, 395 from Unite, the union organising today’s strike at BA. Asked earlier this month about his career plans, he replied, “of course I'd love to be Chancellor, it's one of the great jobs and if you're offered jobs then you say yes”. He is also talked about as a possible future leader of his party and this month he let slip some details of his election planning: "I think it's very unlikely we'd go after May 6, after the local elections. Could happen before. These are matters for the Prime Minister... If you ask me what I'm doing, I'm planning on May 6. But I might be surprised." Always one of Gordon Brown’s closest political allies, he was appointed to the cabinet in 2007 taking on the newly created role in which primary and secondary education was split from the higher education sector. His appointment crowned a sprint up the ministerial ladder; he was elected to parliament in 2005 as MP for Normanton and within a year had been appointed as Economic Secretary to the Treasury. He had been chief economic adviser to Gordon Brown at the Treasury until 2004, where he was dubbed “the Chancellor’s brain”, and was associated with many of the Government’s most significant economic decisions, in particular the independence of the Bank of England. He was a former Kennedy Scholar at Harvard before joining the Financial Times as a leader writer on economics. SIMON HEFFER is Associate Editor of The Daily Telegraph and is continuing to write columns for the paper whilst taking a year’s sabbatical, after being asked by Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, to do post-doctoral work. This week’s column, like many others, attacked Labour’s record: “ A danger of the Government's having made such a mess of the economy is that one risks forgetting all the other horrors for which it is responsible. Despite stiff competition from matters like the near-destruction of our education system, one is perhaps worse than all the others: the insidious and at times quite terrifying assault on our civil liberties”. But he is no fan of David Cameron either, complaining that the party has no sense of vision and that the “Notting Hill Tories” have no popular touch. He thinks Lord Ashcroft “ has been an embarrassment. If you wish to own a political party in Britain, you should at least have the good manners to pay all your taxes in Britain” and he was critical of William Hague’s role in the affair. He has just returned from the States, from where he wrote about something close to the heart of tonight’s audience: how one should behave at the end of a classical music concert: he was in favour of “giving full and demonstrative voice to our appreciation”. Formerly a medical journalist, he has been a columnist for the Daily Mail, and a contributor to The Spectator. He has written a number of books on a wide range of issues, including Power and Place: The Political Consequences of King Edward VII, and A Century of County Cricket. He has also produced biographies of Enoch Powell and Vaughan Williams. BEA CAMPBELL is the Green Party’s Parliamentary Candidate for Hampstead and Kilburn, as well as an award-winning writer and broadcaster. In a column for The Guardian this week, she was critical of the Stern review into rape investigations, for failing to expose:” this toxic correlation, the institutional sexism that disarms rape investigation”. She was a Communist until 1989 and has described why she joined the Greens: it was about social justice as much as the environment. Among the books she has published are Diana, Princess of Wales - How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy and Wigan Pier Revisited. She is a Writer in Residence at a Young Offenders’ Institute and has been visiting Professor of Gender Studies at Newcastle University. Her awards include the Cheltenham Festival Literary Prize, the Fawcett Prize, and several honorary doctorates for her work on community, crime, and most recently children’s welfare. Last year she accepted an OBE for services to equality, despite feeling that, "by clinging to symbols and rituals that belong to a cruel imperial order the government compromises the gonged”. She defended herself on the grounds that "getting gonged confers recognition of 'citizens' contributions' to a good society – in my case equality – and the gesture affirms our necessity; the radicals – not the royalists – are the best of the British”. Find related BBC Radio 4 programmes.Any Questions?
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