'I knew it would harm me'

The new Tory outsider admits he's taken a risk.

David Davis MP

ANDREW MARR: Now, until recently David Davis was a Conservative's Conservative.

Heading for a top job in a future Conservative government. But not any more.

We talk too easily about Westminster being shocked by this or that, but MPs and commentators really were shocked when just after losing a knife-edge vote on the detention of suspected terrorists for up to 42 days the Shadow Home Secretary announced that he would be resigning his parliamentary seat and forcing a by election on the sole issue of civil liberties.

Vanity, hubris, misjudgement, or a rare act of selfless risk-taking principle? David Davis insider yesterday, outsider this morning? Welcome.

DAVID DAVIS: Morning.

ANDREW MARR: What do you actually hope to achieve?

DAVID DAVIS: On Wednesday we had a squalid outcome here on the issue of 42 days. Six weeks' detention without charge, often of innocent people, that's what's being proposed. If the House of Commons had voted on principle it would have been thrown out by as big a majority, or bigger, as 90 days was.

What happened was the government used bribery, bullying, cajolery, to get it through. This issue, and other issues that go with it, issues of ID cards you mentioned earlier, talking about me, right down to the sort of snooping on our people, even by local governments, a thousand surveillance operations by, not by MI5, but by local government.

Snooping on people's bins, snooping on their, the way they take their kids to school. All those issues have led to a sort of corrosion of freedom in this country. Now I deal with quite a lot of them, or dealt shall I say, more accurately, with quite a lot of them, as Shadow Home Secretary.

I don't think I did a bad job of that. But I could not get that critical mass to move that argument forward. And I just basically got to the point, this is a fundamental issue, 42 days. This has been decided in the wrong way. It was going to go through to the Lords and be rejected. But the government would have parliament acted it and we would have had a piece of law on the statute book which was plumb wrong. Now, I knew...

ANDREW MARR: Can I just unpick some of that.

DAVID DAVIS: Yes, but before I finish, I knew, let me say right up frint I knew it would do me harm. That's just self-evident. Anybody, people say oh why didn't you ask us.

Because I knew they'd say the same thing. I didn't think it would do the party harm, and I think, you know, we've actually improved by two points in the polls in the Sunday Times poll since, since last Wednesday. But it mattered. And I just think sometimes it does matter that you do something like this.

ANDREW MARR: Mmm. All right. Let's take these things you said.

DAVID DAVIS: Yes.

ANDREW MARR: The Parliament Act question.

DAVID DAVIS: Yup.

ANDREW MARR: Parliament acting this - that will happen in a year's time. It would have been more dramatic and momentous for you to wait till then. You were in a position, being Shadow Home Secretary in a party way ahead in the opinion polls.

DAVID DAVIS: And it still is.

ANDREW MARR: And a maximum of two years from a General Election. You were on course to be the man who personally would be able to repeal this measure and change those laws to deal with all the civil liberties issues that you've been talking about. And now you've put yourself outside all of that.

DAVID DAVIS: Now we've got a good successor to me, Dominic Grieve.

ANDREW MARR: Yup, but I'm talking about you.

DAVID DAVIS: ...who'll do that job well and may do it better than I will. But the simple truth is, in a year's time, as you say the Parliament Act or it will be about then when it comes up, people will have forgotten the squalid deal. Even the next day...

ANDREW MARR: But Parliament's full of squalid deals. There's more horse trading in Parliament than at Cheltenham.

[talking over each other]

DAVID DAVIS: Frankly that's not true. Not on this scale. I mean, a week ago there were, just over a week ago, there were over 55, 54 Labour rebels, maybe over 60. The DUP were saying to me, you know, you don't need to worry.

All the people who suddenly crossed over, didn't cross over because of the issue, they crossed over because of other deals. Now, it's never been done on a scale like this before, and not with an issue which is so important. Understand, at the moment we have 28 days. I agree with 28 days and the great 90-day debate a few years ago.

Of the people who have been held for four weeks in prison without charge, half of those people were innocent. The longer the period is the more likelihood the people you hold will be innocent. What we have in front of us is a piece of law which is a gross offence to justice, and a complete offence to our tradition of liberty. Today is the anniversary of Magna Carta, the creation of habeas corpus.

ANDREW MARR: So, I still, accepting your views on all of that, that's what you think about those issues. I don't quite understand what you hope to achieve. If, let's assume for sake of argument there is a vigorous by election, it's interest, the country's noticing, and you come back with an increased majority. Does that, for instance, absolutely nail the Conservative Party to the wall on repealing 42 days, makes it impossible to come off that perch?

DAVID DAVIS: Well it's nothing to do with the Conservative Party because the Conservative party certainly will repeal 42 days.

ANDREW MARR: Are you sure about that?

DAVID DAVIS: Well Dominic Grieve said so the day after he took over.

ANDREW MARR: Mmm.

DAVID DAVIS: So it was the policy before, it's the policy now.

ANDREW MARR: So this is not about trying to ensure that David Cameron and George Osborne and others who have been less clear about this issue in the past than you've been, stick with the course.

DAVID DAVIS: No. I mean there are a lot of stories around. I mean completely bogus stories. I mean from your days in the village, as it were, you will remember the way the sort of furore gets up of complete nonsense.

There were, throughout this David has been good in two very significant ways. One, he has shared my views on the principles and the policies involved in this, and he's given me a completely free hand on the strategy for delivering it.

And more than that, he's complimented the success of the strategy. So don't go down that route. This is not about, this is not about an issue between me and the Conservative Party, it's an issue between me and the government. Not just me actually, all those people out there. And that was the signal, as you said earlier...

ANDREW MARR: If they were so happy, David Davis, why are we seeing this torrent of extremely abusive briefing against you personally from Conservative MPs - he's vain, he's bonkers, he's lost it, it's a mid-life crisis - coming in many cases from named Conservative MPs, and even people like Liam Fox, you know, who agrees with you over so many things.

DAVID DAVIS: Well, you know...

ANDREW MARR: If that's supportive...that was not supportive.

DAVID DAVIS: I don't expect him to be supportive of what I'm doing now. I mean that's a different matter. What I'm doing now, it's my decision on this, and that's quite right. Nobody else could take this decision.

ANDREW MARR: So why are they cross?

DAVID DAVIS: Well, I think, you know, people don't like the things that are surprises, that's really simply the point. And that fact is, you know, people didn't necessarily know that we'd gained two points in the polls on the back of this.

This is so important to me, you know, I was willing to take that risk. Other people don't see that as sensible, they don't see that as a sort of thing they expect from a Westminster politician. I can tell you that the public at large out there see it very differently.

I mean I actually can't walk to a train station now for people coming up to me and shaking my hand. Now, be very careful not letting this go to people's heads, you shouldn't, because, but we've had massive amounts of emails, calls and my office, all three offices have been paralysed by the calls of support.

ANDREW MARR: And it's not because you were not part of the David Cameron inner court, part of the inner cabal.

DAVID DAVIS: No, I mean I went to the 9.15 meeting every morning, you know, and as I say, on my areas I have a very, very free hand. This is not about David Cameron and me, this is about the government and me.

ANDREW MARR: OK. When it comes to the by election itself, you need a strong opponent to set this alight, and at the moment you haven't got one. It looks like Kelvin MacKenzie is having second thoughts. How are you going to make people take interest if you're effectively fighting nobody?

DAVID DAVIS: Well let me start off by saying it would be extraordinary. I've said this is going to be about a central plank of the government's counter terror policy, and related freedom issues.

Mr. Brown is now saying I don't want to fight that fight. This is a man who bottled it on the General Election, bottled it on a referendum, and now he's going to bottle it even on a by election where he could bring the full resources of his party to play against me and argue this.

I have not seen quite such an example of gutlessness in my political career. This is an issue that matters. All my constituents, or the massive majority of them, think this was a thing worth doing. And they think this is an argument worth having, and the Prime Minister's treating with contempt.

ANDREW MARR: Is there anything, there's nothing you can do about that? It doesn't give you a fight.

DAVID DAVIS: First off, that's going to look pretty weak on his part when that happens. Secondly, if he does do that then we'll make the issue anyway, we will make the arguments anyway, and it won't just be me.

I mean you've already seen Bob Marshall Andrews this morning, Ian Gibson, both talking about coming to campaign on this.

ANDREW MARR: You could have lots of Labour MPs, you could have lots of other people on your side. I don't know what your plans are but you've somehow got to bring this thing alight.

DAVID DAVIS: We'll do that, don't worry about it coming alight. There'll be plenty of people, not just MPs coming, I mean, for example, I'll give you an example out of the air, I've got Colonel Tim Collins, the hero of the Iraq war who's fought the IRA, fought Al Qaeda, is gonna come and talk about how you defeat terrorism without using repression. We're going to have a huge campaign on that basis.

Now, in a year's time if the government hasn't even contested me, and we have taken those arguments one by one apart, it's going to have a serious problem of authority, actually delivering on a Parliament Act.

ANDREW MARR: This is not just of course about 42 days, it's about other civil liberties issues - DNA testing, CCTV cameras, you've raised yourself.

Now, do you accept that if there is going to be much less DNA testing, and DNA is going to be held much more rarely, then people will get off who are guilty? Because that's what the police say.

DAVID DAVIS: Yes, I know they say that. But a lot of people now who had, who've served criminal prison sentences, who didn't get put on the DNA database, people from ten years ago or more.

If you really want to do this properly take all the innocent people off and put on people who've actually served a prison sentence in the past, quite a way in the past if need be. You'll get many, many more crimes solved that way than by having innocent people on the database. There's a second issue which the police tend not to think about. There's a relationship between the citizen and the state.

I am not a prospective, I am not a suspect in my daily life. I should not be treated as a suspect in my daily life. And frankly the police shouldn't be doing that, treating everybody as a suspect. And it's not free either, it costs a million pounds a year to keep those million innocent people on that database. So you can get an outcome which is better for crime, and also better for the citizen.

ANDREW MARR: You see, ah you sound like the Shadow Home Secretary and you're heading, it seems, for life on the back benches, at best.

DAVID DAVIS: That is entirely possible. So what.

ANDREW MARR: You're one of the two or three biggest beasts in the Conservative Party at the moment. It still seems very odd to me that you are prepared to contemplate life on the back benches that there is no clever David Davis plan C?

DAVID DAVIS: That's what the Westminster village always think. There was the old joke about Mettermich you know when the Russian Ambassador died he said what do you mean by that, that's what happens in the most obvious bits of news in Westminster. There's an elephant in the room here, there's a big principle being destroyed by this government.

ANDREW MARR: You accept you could win the argument, you could win the by election handsomely, we could all be very interested, you come back into the House of Commons and you do not return to the Conservative front bench and you do not serve in a Conservative government?

DAVID DAVIS: Well that's entirely possible. Some things are more important than any one person's career, even your own, you know. And this is more important than a career.

Now that may be by the normal lexicon of Westminster operation outside the normal, it might be outside what anybody can imagine is rational. But it's not in my view. And I'm afraid the public at large out there agree with me by a massive majority.

ANDREW MARR: David Davis, thank you very much indeed.

DAVID DAVIS: Thank you.

INTERVIEW ENDS

Please note "The Andrew Marr Show" must be credited if any part of this transcript is used.

NB: This transcript was typed from a recording and not copied from an original script.

Because of the possibility of mis-hearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, the BBC cannot vouch for its accuracy

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