William Hague is the Tories’ “lost leader”, whose stewardship of the party from 1997 to 2001 saw him pitted against Tony Blair at the height of his powers, losing the only general election he fought by a landslide. However, back in the frontline as shadow foreign secretary under David Cameron, he has been anointed the Conservatives’ “deputy leader in all but name” and is ready to bring all his experience to bear in the forthcoming campaign. Here, the one-time teenage Tory conference star, who was a Cabinet minister at 34 under John Major, explains why he wants to be part of the first Conservative government for 13 years. He also launches the most comprehensive attack by any senior Tory on what he sees as the failures of the Tony Blair/Gordon Brown years, during which, he says, the British people have been “lions led by donkeys”. HAGUE ON… HIS GENERAL ELECTION ROLE A self-styled “Northern bloke”, Mr Hague will be a valuable counterpoint to what some critics see as a metropolitan-centred public-school elite at the heart of the party’s current leadership. Mr Hague says his role will indeed be to campaign in “Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the West Country – pretty much all the places furthest from London, you’ll note”. However, he will also play a key strategic role. “I’ll be assisting each day with the overall strategy of the election campaign, meeting with David Cameron each night when I get back to London, and with George Osborne and other colleagues. “I led the campaign in 2001, which wasn’t exactly our most successful, of course, but I have been through a general election campaign as the leader and so hopefully have some experience of that to bring to the table. I’ll be doing a lot of the television programmes and radio discussions.” HAGUE ON… THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN THE TORIES AND LABOUR The shadow foreign secretary believes that the commonly voiced view that there are few differences between the two main parties is “not fair”. He adds: “We’ve never seen this with a government before – leaving office, coming up to an election, and building in tax rises for future years. This is the extent of the poison pills they are leaving behind and we are saying: no, we’ll take this country in a different direction. “If there’s waste in government spending, which the Labour Government says there is, we should be saving the waste, not saying we’ll go on wasting it for several more years. “The objectives that we’ve set out, the vision for the future of the economy, is light years away from this more and more bloated state that we see under Labour. For people who think there’s no difference – look at how much of the national income was spent by the state when Labour came to office: it’s now more than half. It’s gone over 50 per cent. So, less than half the country is paying for more than the other half. And that is unsustainable. “There are huge differences in how we approach social policy as well as economic policy but I think we mustn’t blame the electorate. The sailor must not blame the sea. “You can also see why people have tuned out of politics, why they’re disillusioned with politics, why they have said politicians are all the same. Because of so many expenses scandals, they’re disillusioned with the current Government to the extent that they’ve lost hope that anybody will sort things out. You know, you can understand that. So it’s our job in the election campaign to show there’s a real choice here. It is change or ruin. It’s as stark as that. “Politicians always say it’s the most important election in a generation, but it really is, I think. The country had to be rescued in 1979, and this is the first election since then when it has needed rescuing again. If we don’t act now, in five years’ time it will be too late.” HAGUE ON… FIVE MORE YEARS OF GORDON BROWN The Tories’ recent poster campaign – directly attacking the Prime Minister for a series of policy failures – has been seen by some as a return to the days of the “nasty party”, but Mr Hague is unapologetic. “We’re entitled to point out what’s wrong with the record of the Government.” What if Labour won? “I think this country would have lost its attractiveness in the world, for other people in the world. In the past two decades, students have wanted to visit Britain, to learn in Britain. Many people have wanted to set up their businesses in Britain even when they could have put them in other countries. I think that, in another five years of Brown-style policies, those things would have gone. “This country was ranked fourth in the world for the extent and effect of taxation and for our regulatory environment in 1997. Now, in respect of those two things, we’re ranked 84th and 86th. That is the extent of the decline. “We were seventh in the world in the World Economic Forum of Competitiveness, and now we’re 13th. We had 4,000 pages of tax law and now we’ve got 10,000 pages – even though they’ve made the print smaller. “You have only to look at these comparisons to see where the country is heading.” HAGUE ON… THE RETURN OF TONY BLAIR “I think there’s a lack of sincerity in it, first of all, because we all know that he never wanted Gordon Brown to be Prime Minister for a start. There isn’t anybody in Westminster who thinks that he was an enthusiast for Gordon Brown to be Prime Minister. “Secondly, we all know that he would have given anything not to be in this position because he intended, and hoped, to be President of the European Council at this stage and to be loftily above any British election campaign. “I don’t think it was part of his intended script to be standing in Sedgefield endorsing Gordon Brown to be Prime Minister again, but he presumably felt he had to do it. “In any case, it’s no longer a great asset to have such a speech to the Labour Party, coming back in our miserable winter, with his suntan, to tell us all how to vote, when it was under the 10 years of his premiership that this country drifted, that it began to lose the advantages that the country had built up in the 1980s and 1990s. “It’s not really the party he helped create. I think New Labour is dead. When you look at the growth of trade union funding and power in the Labour Party, is this what Tony Blair really wanted to bring about? “New Labour was, if you remember, ‘no tax increases at all’, and it was certainly no tax increases on middle class people with aspirations, who wanted to create some wealth, who wanted to pass things on to their family.” HAGUE ON… THE ECONOMY While Mr Brown and Alistair Darling claim they showed the world the way out of recession, by pump-priming the economy and refloating battered banks, Mr Hague says voters “shouldn’t believe them”. “We’ve had the longest and deepest recession of the major developed economies. We’ve been the last to emerge from the recession of all the G20 nations. So Brown and Darling are in no position to talk about recovery. “David Cameron and George Osborne have comprehensively won the argument the Government was happy to engage in a year ago about whether there needed to be reductions in government spending. “Because if you remember, for a while, Gordon Brown was trying to make the argument that you could carry on increasing spending, and now his Chancellor has sometimes put him right on that and has subsequently talked of bigger reductions than in the past. “But it was George Osborne who first made the case – bravely, because he was denounced on all sides at the time – for saying that we are going to have to reduce government spending to get the debt under control. So I think the Conservatives have won the big argument on that, and clearly, for whoever succeeds in the election, there are going to have to be some serious reductions in government spending.” HAGUE ON… GORDON BROWN’S BELIEFS AND LEADERSHIP “I’ve come to the conclusion that he really is Old Labour, not New Labour, because he’s not stupid. “He’s not accidentally produced over 13 years a vastly more complex tax and regulatory system, public services that are so top-down, driven by targets that distort people’s behaviour and demoralise the people working in those services. He’s not done that because he wasn’t noticing what he was doing, so he must have thought those were the right things to do. “I think he has an excessive faith in what can be achieved by trying to drive things from 10 Downing Street, and from Whitehall, in a command-style approach. I don’t think he would share our beliefs that you get the best out of people when you give them responsibility themselves at the local level. “That’s never how he’s gone about trying to achieve anything in health care, education or anything else. And so, just to conclude, after 13 years, he doesn’t actually believe in that. “I don’t think he’s suited to being Prime Minister. He’s not a team leader. We know Gordon Brown wanted to get rid of Alistair Darling but was too weak to be able to dismiss his own Chancellor. And we know most of the Cabinet would have got rid of him. “That poisonous environment is such a world away from the spirit that we have in the shadow cabinet.” HAGUE ON… EUROPE The Tory politician who fought an election to “save the pound” is known as the shadow cabinet’s keeper of the Eurosceptic flame. Although he says Britain under the Conservatives would be “positive partners” in the European Union, Mr Hague makes three key policy pledges designed to check the influence of the EU in Britain’s day-to-day affairs. The first is a firm commitment that the UK would have no part whatsoever in plans for a powerful European Public Prosecutor, which is being proposed under the Lisbon Treaty. As it stands, this would allow the new prosecutor to issue European arrest warrants to force UK citizens to face prosecution in another member state – without asking the permission either of the government or the Director of Public Prosecutions, Keir Starmer. Mr Hague says: “Other countries could go ahead with that if they wished but the European Public Prosecutor would not have jurisdiction in Britain.” He also pledges new action against any moves to use the Lisbon Treaty to end national vetoes in key areas of policy in favour of “qualified majority voting” (QMV). “If, for instance, Europe were ever to decide that foreign policy is no longer by unanimity but by majority voting, that would constitute, to us, the transfer of a new competence and power to the EU, and that would trigger a referendum. So we are very serious about the referendum lock and defining that carefully in law.” There would also be an unceremonious end to any preparation – however low-key – in Whitehall towards a future decision by Britain to join the eurozone. It is still Labour and Liberal Democrat policy to join the euro at the appropriate time. Well, we think it is abundantly clear that Britain should not be joining the euro, and so the assessment that is due with the next Budget, of whether we should join the euro, we would scrap in its entirety. “We’ve made our assessment of whether we should join the euro and a Conservative government will not join the euro.” HAGUE ON… HIS FRONTLINE COMEBACK “What changed my mind, the critical ingredient, was the election of David Cameron as the leader because I thought that there was a good chance with him that we could really get our act together, as indeed we have, and that there would be a proper team spirit. “George Osborne has been, for the past 13 years, one of my closest friends in politics. So you can see how the attraction of a group that can work together developed in my mind, and indeed that is how it has turned out. “And also, I thought the chance of the party doing well again was there, but on top of that, we all have, hopefully, some sense of public duty. “I do love writing books, probably more than being a politician, and I did love all the things I did outside politics. But there are times in life to do the things you want to do for your own satisfaction, and there are times when you have to just plunge in and participate and help the country, be part of the community, and this is one of those times.” HAGUE ON… WHAT DRIVES HIM FORWARD “I think this is still a great country, and it has the people of a great country, but they are not led in that way, and their potential is suppressed. Everywhere you go you find frustration and obstacles. I mean, it’s that First World War sense of lions led by donkeys. We’ve got to be able to do better than that. And I have a strong sense of history. I don’t mean this in the old-fashioned way, but I don’t think the days of Britain being one of the most respected, most influential nations in the world, are over. I don’t think they need be over but if we’re not careful they are going to be over.” The historical figure he most identifies with? William Pitt the Younger – the reforming prime minister of two centuries ago, about whom he has written a book. “He was the first Prime Minister to really articulate the case for free trade, to advocate a more open economy, in a very internationalist sense. “There should be a distinctive British foreign policy that makes the most of our advantages in the world and says: yes, we’re going to work within the EU and, of course, we’re allies of the United States, but we are going to build up intensified bilateral relations with countries of the Gulf and South Asia, Latin America, in all sorts of ways. “At the moment, there is no strategy for doing so. And that’s a badly led country without a vision of the future.” HAGUE ON… A HUNG PARLIAMENT “It would be a serious problem for the country. Political parties will work their way through any parliamentary arithmetic, but for the country it would not be a good thing because it would create a lot of economic uncertainly at a time when we’ve got a lot of economic uncertainty. “Also because, historically speaking, hung parliaments in Britain tend to lead to another general election, and I don’t think people want another general election soon after this one. I think they want clear national leadership one way or the other. “So I think it would be a serious problem if there was a hung parliament – and that is another reason not to vote for fringe parties or minor parties. “What this country needs above all is a new government with a clear mandate, and that’s what we’ll be fighting for in this campaign.”William Hague: now the gloves are off
In an exclusive interview, the former Conservative leader William Hague tells Patrick Hennessy how the Tories intend to undo the damage wreaked by Labour’s 13 years in power
Sunday, 4 April 2010
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