William Hague MP

On Sunday 07 June Andrew Marr interviewed William Hague MP, shadow Foreign Secretary

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

ANDREW MARR:

William Hague MP, shadow Foreign Secretary

The Conservatives say that their successes in the local election are a sign that people want a strong, positive and united alternative to the government.

On the basis of the council elections in England, the Tories would probably win a general election but not with a very large majority. They've still got an uphill struggle to win over the Scots and the Welsh.

I'm joined now from Darlington by the Shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague. Thank you for joining us, Mr Hague.

WILLIAM HAGUE:

Good morning.

ANDREW MARR:

Very good election results for the Conservatives in the local elections. We'll see about the European ones later.

But what about the thought that they're not quite good enough; that given the extraordinary events inside the government, you'd have expected to do a bit better?

WILLIAM HAGUE:

Well these are very good election results. It's very hard to take much away from them. We would be happy with a general election result in which we swept to victory in Lancashire, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and all across the South West against the Liberal Democrats in Somerset and Devon. So I think however you look at it in general election terms, you know this was a huge success for the Conservative party.

As you say, we'll see what the European elections are like later today. I think with those, it's important to remember that in a proportional voting system, as we use in the European elections, that does help the extremist and fringe and minor parties and does fragment the result, so obviously we would expect a lower share of the vote there than in the local elections on Thursday.

ANDREW MARR:

Talking of extremists, you've got some pretty rum new companions, don't you, in the European family of parties? Are you proud of all of them?

WILLIAM HAGUE:

Well you don't know who they are yet. We're founding the new group with the Czech Civic Democrats. It will be after these elections that we get together in Brussels this week, with other parties, to bring that new group together so that it's there at the beginning of the new European parliament next month.

But the importance of what we're doing here is that at the moment every major grouping in the European parliament supports the euro, supports the Lisbon Treaty, supports the federalism, the centralisation of Europe. We want to make sure there's a mainstream grouping that believes in our sort of open and democratic Europe of nation states, and I think we will achieve that.

ANDREW MARR:

And just to nail this down. In the past when I've said to you are you definitely, under all circumstances, going to hold a referendum on that treaty, you've slightly hummed and hawed, but now you can say that will definitely happen?

WILLIAM HAGUE:

Well we've always been very clear that if we come to power and that treaty has not been ratified by all of the 27 nations of the EU - and 4 of them still haven't ratified it - then we go straightforwardly ahead and hold the referendum that people have always been promised and that they were promised under this government on the Lisbon Treaty. If …

ANDREW MARR:

I thought …

WILLIAM HAGUE:

… if it is ratified, then we're in a different and new situation and we would spell out in our general election manifesto …

ANDREW MARR:

Ah!

WILLIAM HAGUE:

… what we would do. I think that would be the reasonable thing to do.

ANDREW MARR:

Sorry, I thought David Cameron said that you would have a… you would now have a referendum under all circumstances, even if it had been ratified by the Irish and so on.

WILLIAM HAGUE:

No, he hasn't said that…

ANDREW MARR:

Okay.

WILLIAM HAGUE:

No, if you look at all of his statements recently, he's entirely in line with what I've just been saying.

ANDREW MARR:

Okay.

WILLIAM HAGUE:

Of course what we want is a general election because we have… I think Gordon Brown has now achieved the impossible: he's made the cabinet even more dysfunctional and divided than it was before with this latest reshuffle. So we have a weakened Prime Minister and a weakened cabinet and the country is crying out there for the general election so that they can choose the Prime Minister and the cabinet. That's what everybody in this country now wants to be able to do.

ANDREW MARR:

You say "a weakened Prime Minister". Is he a Prime Minister that you actually would like to keep in place for the time being? I was watching Prime Minister's Questions this week and I wondered if David Cameron was slightly pulling his punches.

WILLIAM HAGUE:

Well we can't really control the Labour party's internal divisions. We're happy to take any of them on and we want to get rid of them all. So we don't really have a view about who should be the Leader of the Labour party. All we can see is a government that is consumed with its own affairs. They're not doing any actual governing. This is all about them and not about the country. Not about the recession, not about the country's political crisis.

And so now apparently the Prime Minister will stand up this week and lecture us all about National Democratic Renewal or something like that, but he's put so many lords now in his cabinet he's drifting back into Victorian times in terms of less… less accountable and less democratic government. So it just underlines the need for a general election.

ANDREW MARR:

William Hague, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

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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