An interview with William Hague

BAGEHOT sat down with William Hague, the retiring Conservative leader of the House of Commons, in his parliamentary office on March 24th. A former foreign secretary and Tory party leader, Mr Hague had just attended the coalition government’s last cabinet meeting, one of the last obligations of his three-decade-long political career. He began by delivering an encomium to the coalition’s record.

William Hague: It is remarkable that out of the 397 pledges in the coalition agreement 362 have been met and nearly all the others are under way. It is quite rare for a government to be in that situation. There was a very nice atmosphere at the meeting. We had a special coalition ale from the prime minister’s constituency and Yorkshire crisps from the deputy prime minister’s constituency.

Bagehot: So you had a drink?

WH: No no! Not at that time! We all walked off with our bottles of beer! There was a very positive atmosphere actually. It has been a very pleasant government to serve in in that sense. It has been a pleasure to come to work which isn't always the case in politics. Even though we would much prefer not to have been in coalition, on a personal level, relations have been good between the Conservatives and the Lib Dems. Also within the Conservative leadership—it's been a most extraordinary and exceptional period. I can't think of a historical equivalent of the strength of the relationships at the top of the party in the ten years since David Cameron became leader.

Bagehot: The key ones being between the prime minister, the chancellor and yourself?

WH: Well, yes. We have different sorts of relationships among ourselves, but, yes, we've had a really good team among those three. I remember the night we got into the cabinet room, five years ago, and realised we were genuine personal friends. There was no rivalry between us. It's very different to how it is normally at the top of government: all the previous governments I've ever served in or been in the opposition to.

Bagehot: Have you had no considerable disagreements?

WH: No, not really. I mean every morning we debate things. David Cameron's not the sort of leader who discourages debate. So, we have met every morning, though not so much when I was foreign secretary because I was out of the country a lot. But even then twice a week, I would think, first thing in the morning. So we've always discussed things, we don't have any hesitation in disagreeing with each other, including with the prime minister. But we've not had any fundamental disagreements, we’ve not had any rows. That would have shown through, it would have been obvious. On the direction of the government, or on foreign or economic policy, it has been very straightforward to agree those things.

Bagehot: What was your biggest area of disagreement in foreign policy—something you would not have done or would have done more forcefully, or less forcefully, than in fact you did?

WH: We haven't had a disagreement on foreign policy. We've institutionalised formal decision-making in foreign policy, as you know, in the National Security Council. So it's very different than under the previous government. And there can be a vigorous discussion there. But I think you mean something else by disagreement, and there hasn't been that, even within the coalition, actually, on foreign policy. Some of the most difficult decisions we've taken, you know, about military action, in Libyia in 2011, or the time we were defeated in the Commons on Syria in 2013. There we've had disagreements in Parliament, with members of parliament, but, after discussion, the coalition has been very united about those things.

Bagehot: You have become a rather grand old man of British politics at a remarkably tender age. How well do you think the parliamentary system is bearing up?

WH: It bears up pretty well, is the answer. It has to continue to evolve and there is undoubtedly a serious loss of trust and faith in politics in Britain and in most Western countries. But I think the answer to that doesn't so much lie in the system. I don't know if you need a fundamental change in the system. What it relies on is people having faith that governments will do what they say they are going to do. Elections matter. It matters that governments deliver on their commitments. I therefore see this government, and what we've done on the economy in particular, as hopefully the beginning of turning around public trust in politics. And people may agree or disagree with us on public spending. But we have done what we said we were going to do, quite dramatically, in the economic turnaround of the country. If people experience that for several parliaments there will less debate about the system, because the system is responsive and in this parliament it has been.

Bagehot: Responsive to disaffection?

WH: No, to what the country needs and voted for. You know, people voted for change, they were very worried about the economy and, OK, they got a coalition, so we've not been able to do everything that was in the Conservative manifesto, but as I was just mentioning earlier the coalition leaders can go into this election saying they've done the great majority of what they promised to do. That is really the antidote to the loss of trust in politics. It's not that we need to redesign our entire parliamentary system. Nevertheless there needs to be a continuing and steady evolution.

Bagehot: If you look at the shrinkage of political parties, it seems some of the disaffection is structural…

WH: Well, that's my next point, there needs to be a steady evolution to a more local and responsive and accountable decision-making. Because part of this is people just not knowing any more what lever you pull to effect something their concerned about in their lives. So many layers of governments, so many elections and I think we've started out in that direction now and for the Conservative party that is a big change from 20 years ago, even 10 years ago. There are 14,000 neighbourhoods, with 6 million people living in them, that have adopted a neighbourhood plan, decided locally, saying where their local development is going to be. These have been adopted in local referendums. It's too much to call it a quiet revolution, but a very big change is quietly happening in that regard, and that is also part of the answer. And the sort of city deals we've done. And I hope more cities and city regions, not just cities, can follow Manchester and what we've been doing there. That decentralisation is a major part of answering the disaffection of politics.

Parliament will also need to continue to change, but we mustn't throw babies out with bathwater. Parliament’s got to be made far more accessible, with new technology. One of the things we've sorted out in my brief tenure as leader of the House is the e-petition system, which allows people to petition government and parliament together, and when an e-petition gets to so many signatures, it gets debated in front of all the house. Millions of people are participating in e-petitions and quite a lot of government policies have been changed as a result of e-petitions leading to debates in Parliament. So that makes it somewhat more accessible.

Bagehot: You say it would have been much better if we'd had a majority government rather than a coalition, but to almost anybody outside the Tory party this coalition has been a stroll in the park. It has been no blueprint for the messy coalitions we may have in the future.

WH: Obviously there are things we've not been able to do with the Lib Dems. Much as I was praising the coalition we haven't been able to pursue all the welfare policies we might have done. We haven't been able to pass important legislation on national security, communications and data and so on

Bagehot: Actually, there's not much you haven't been able to do, is there?

WH: Well, one of those things is very important economically and the other is fundamental to national security. Those are from my perspective pretty important. We haven't been able to pursue all the tax policies we would have liked either. As a Conservative, I hope we get back to having a majority government.

But even if we do, as I hope we will, Parliament will go on being more independent because of the factors you describe. And I think that is part of the evolution, about having to adapt to changed political and public circumstances. MPs are much more reliant for their election on networks of people than on small party membership, so they need to be in touch with many different interests and issue groups. That trend will continue. Parliament has become a less collegiate place, so there's less peer pressure. The way we spend our time in parliament has changed dramatically. With the changing hours, changed working conditions, different offices, extra staff, email, all those things mean that MPs spend much less time together, all stuffed into a smoky room together...

Bagehot: Gossiping...

WH: Well yes, but that's also where they used to discuss politics, all through the night.

Bagehot: And that change alone weakens the bonds of the political party?

WH: Yes, of the tribe. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. I think it is something that should be indulged. The biggest steps towards the development of Parliament in a more independent direction that I have seen, at least since select committees were established at end of the 1970s, is that in this Parliament we have started to elect the chairs of those select committees. It’s a huge change. It sounds obscure to those not familiar with parliament, but that change in power from government appointment to election by Parliament is an immense change here.

Bagehot: The periphery that has always sustained a strong centre, the prime minister’s office, has been weakened and devolution and e-technology are not going to fix that. Voters are becoming less tribal and constituency MPs are finding themselves more answerable to then. So Parliament’s not going to get easier to control...

WH: No it isn't, no I agree with that. But I think that's a positive trend in dealing with the disaffection you were asking about.

Bagehot: So you think we can be positive and relaxed about these fundamental changes without necessarily knowing where they’re taking us?

WH: Coalition and more independent MPs are not necessarily the same thing. They have come together in this Parliament and that second trend will continue. We shouldn't conclude from that that we're in for long periods of coalition government. I remember in the 1970s there was much discussion, in the Liberal revival of that time, that there wouldn't be long periods of majority government again. But actually we then had eighteen years of Conservative government and then the huge Labour majorities under Tony Blair, so these things can be hard to forecast. The greater independence of MPS, the decentralisation to local areas, local decision making, those are perfectly healthy things which gives me a lot of confidence in the British constitution.

Bagehot: What’s the biggest change that you've seen in your 26 years in the House?

WH: How the average MP spends his time. Which is a product of many many things. You can see it in the plummeting death rate of MPs, which isn’t often written about that. The number of by-elections instigated by a death has fallen dramatically...

Bagehot: Perhaps because MPs are not drinking so much?

WH: It was physically exhausting when I first came in, the all night sittings, right up to the early hours of Friday morning. Then you'd go out to your constituency, you didn't have much of an office. You'd spend a lot of time in committees, all through the night, in smoky rooms with your colleagues. That has changed. We've even had to invent new, almost artificial, times with your colleagues. Retreats. I invented them, to take all our MPs away together because they didn’t even know each other. That sounds like it's just a change in the hours of the MPs but actually it’s a part of the fragmentation that's taking place in the political system. It's not a bad thing. We shouldn't have exhausted law makers.

Bagehot: Do you think MPs work less hard now than they did then?

WH: No, I think they work in a different way. They spend much more time dealing with constituency cases, so there’s probably the same amount of work, but the distribution of work is very different. That's changed the nature of Parliament. And then when you add to that, the election of committee chairs, MPs can carve out their own role much more freely than before. Which has got to be good for the diversity of Parliament and vigour of debate. So I'm not pessimistic about Parliament and I found one of the interesting things in my brief tenure in this role being at the opening of the youth Parliament—a place for young people. It was one of the most encouraging and inspiring experiences—in their reverence for and their enthusiasm for parliamentary institutions and methods, and actually in their quality.

Bagehot: I'm sure you saw your youthful self in their enthusiasm…

WH: I did, I rather thought a young William Hague would have loved to sit in here as a teenager.

Bagehot: Before I draw you onto foreign affairs and policy, where do you think you leave the Tory party? You were in some ways an early architect of the modernisation programme which I suppose continues. What's your critique of how that has gone?

WH: It's speeded up a lot. We were too slow to get that going. As so often throughout political history, you know you've got to change but you don't realise how big the change has to be. It's quite common. That was true of the Conservative party of my time.

Bagehot: So what would you have done differently if you'd had your time again?

WH: I would have gone faster on things like selecting women candidates, we made a start on that, but we could have gone further. Also, in building up in local government and opening up to more BME candidates. I think we should have pressed harder on the accelerator, even at the cost of getting more pushback in the party, which would have dramatised the change more. But it has happened.

Bagehot: You wish you'd had more of a fight with your party over such things?

WH: Well, I wish I'd pushed them harder. We started out in the right direction. But I think we needed a lot more change in the composition of the Conservative party than we appreciated at the time or than the party allowed at the time. We really are getting there now. It looks and is quite different.

Bagehot: What about on issues, things you might have pushed that could have addressed the reputational failings of the Tory party? Switching the debate away from Europe wouldn't have been a bad thing at any time…

WH: I don't know that I have many regrets. We had to have the debate about Europe because the party had got itself into such a state on Europe. It was an important part of my task as leader to say: there is going to be a single party line on Europe and everybody who's in the shadow cabinet or the future cabinet is going to subscribe to it. And indeed the Conservative party has changed over that period to a naturally Eurosceptic party, which it wasn't universally in the mid-1990s. There was no escaping having that debate. It was an important change of the party’s orientation. But I think we didn’t get the credit for putting a new emphasis on issues like equality. Inequality has diminished under the current government. All measures show that that is the trend. It's quite hard for the Conservative party to own that because of the historic perceptions of the Tory party. But I think there have been many progressive developments in Britain backed by the Conservative party. When I look back on my career as a Conservative politician, what is my proudest legislature achievement? The Disability Discrimination Act that I designed and took through Parliament in 1995. What are some of the issues I'm known for in foreign policy? The preventing sexual violence initiative, or the success of the arms trade treaty, and so on. That may not be how people see the Conservative party, but actually the Conservative party is broad enough to pursue all of those things. That's one of the things I point out to people on my tours of the country.

Bagehot: So why have you failed to shift public perceptions of the party to such a great extent?

WH: I think these things are very deep rooted and some historic perceptions have got reinforced in the 1980s, even though that government was very successful at doing what it needed to do. I can see that in the north, in this election, it's quite a striking thing. The clearest, most coherent thing for the north of England is the Northern Powerhouse initiative offered by the Conservative party. It’s the clearest, most purposeful initiative we've had in the north for decades. Labour never did anything like that in government and that will give us a really compelling message in the north of England in this coming election.

Bagehot: Does it work in Yorkshire?

WH: It will work, but attitudes will only change over a much longer period. Does it mean in Rotherham, where I was born, that everyone will suddenly turn around and vote Conservative? Well, we'll work at it but it will be difficult. But over time attitudes do change and therefore the Conservative party has to pursue these things over the long term consistently.

Bagehot: What's your biggest political regret?

WH: I don’t think I made any calamitous mistake on any issue. I also think that we were saying a lot of things in the mid-1990s that were before our time. Most of our predictions about New Labour and what it would do were right, but there wasn't really a hearing for that at the time.

Bagehot: You mean its profligacy?

WH: Yes, I predicted there would be four stages to New Labour: fascination; admiration; disillusionment; contempt. Now it's arrived at contempt for New Labour even in the Labour Party, but the sun was shining on it very brightly in the late 1990s. I think any regrets I have would be about that period when I led the party. I don't regret taking on the leadership, or giving it up. Somebody had to do it then. For me life has worked out perfectly. I don't have a sort of career regret for doing that at all, but I do wish we had got a clearer, more consistent message, carried out change within the party faster. There were some things we could have done better at that time.

Bagehot: In terms of the profile of the party the number of women, the number of non-white candidate?

WH: We moved a lot from one initiative to another. I recognise this in Ed Miliband in opposition: you can move too quickly from one issue to another without getting an overall coherent message across. I think our political tactics and strategy weren't as good as they could have been. We started out in the right direction. There was great faith within the Conservative party, for the reasons that I was giving a moment ago. I think it's remarkable how many issues you can pursue and what you can achieve in the Conservative party. But showing that breadth is the next challenge. It really is open to everybody and you can pursue issues as diverse as some of the ones I've been pursuing.

Bagehot: But why on earth are almost none of them getting talked about in this campaign?

WH: Well, wait for the manifesto to see what all the issues are, but you can't do any of the things I'm talking about unless you have a strong economy. That is the overwhelming choice in this election: a government that has turned around an economy and an opposition that hasn't learnt much from when it nearly ruined the economy. So it's bound to be the main issue of the election.

Bagehot: How do you think you did as foreign secretary?

WH: That's not for me to judge. It's the best job in the world, although I think it can only be done for four or five years in the modern world in a big country because it is so intensive. I hope I've left, I believe I've left, the Foreign Office as a more confident institution. It was deeply lacking its confidence in many ways when I arrived there. It was quite shocking to me to begin with.

Bagehot: Give me an illustration of that.

WH: Oh, there were many. On the first day there I asked for the line to take on an issue, and I was told, “Oh, we'll have to ask the Cabinet Office about that”. I said “No. In future you will not ask the Cabinet Office. We are the Foreign Office. The line to take on foreign policy comes from the Foreign Office, not questions but answers should come from the Foreign Office.” Also, I must say the first attempt to draft a new National Security Strategy was not impressive. We had to sit there and write it in my office.

Maintaining this progress will depend on future foreign secretaries and future prime ministers. I had the great advantage of a prime minister who wanted the Foreign Office to be a strong institution, which not all Labour prime ministers in recent times necessarily wanted. I tried to put in the necessary building blocks, a new diplomatic academy, a reopened language school. I couldn't recreate everything that the vandals before me had destroyed, like the library. But I've shown that we can increase our diplomatic presence around the world, even on a lower budget—though not so dramatically a lower budget as some people think.

Not everybody notices that the World Service moved off the Foreign Office books, and that's equal to most of the reduction of the Foreign Office budget. It's moved into the BBC license fee budget. Also, the previous government removed the exchange rate protection of the Foreign Office, leaving the British Foreign Office in the bizarre situation of having to reduce its budget when the pound fell and increase it when it rose. No other major foreign minister is in that situation. Day one, I said that is coming back and within a few weeks George Osborne and I had agreed that the Treasury should take the exchange rate risk. So the Foreign Office had more certainty and could make longer-term plans. We've since opened twenty new embassies and consulates and are closing very few. As a result, the link between economic and foreign policy has been restored, with a far more commercial emphasis on trade which I think if you believe, which is obviously true, that the economy is at the heart of everything else, should be the case.

Bagehot: There is a criticism of you that your instincts were absolutely right and you restored confidence to the Foreign Office, but you didn't make the fundamental changes you set out to make. The language school is still much much less than it once was. There's less money available for teachers. And the language skills of mid-level diplomats are still way below what they should be. It seems there’s also some confusion between that economic emphasis you mentioned and the restoration of traditional, political skills that you also set out to manage.

WH: I don't agree with those things. The language school will have greater resources in the future and most of the diplomats who I've spoken to are happy with it. The number of diplomats learning Latin American Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic has dramatically increased. Of course it will take a long time for the effect of these things to show. I also don't think the economic emphasis is at loggerheads with the traditional view of diplomacy. I think it’s a vital part of it.

Bagehot: Talking of your commercial push, how do you deal with the weakness of UKTI, which many people complain of? Should it become part of the foreign office?

WH: Well, I don't think so. I don't think we should fiddle with organisations all the time. I think our creation of new British chambers of commerce in about twenty countries is an excellent idea, more on the German model of how trade is promoted overseas. If those twenty are shown to be successful, that is the right sort of direction to go into for the long term. Just as within the country actually, local enterprise partnerships have been more successful than the old regional development agency. You need that business leadership and ownership.

Turning to our relationships in the world, I thought we were really neglecting vast areas of the world. It was as if foreign policy was about America and Europe. I mean it often is to a large extent. But no Labour foreign secretary had ever visited Australia in their whole thirteen years in government, for example. Latin America felt Britain was pulling back from it. We have changed all of that. We have reorientated Britain to the southern hemisphere, with traditional friends like Australia and New Zealand, and new friends like Indonesia and many Latin American countries. Britain is expanding again, in terms of commercial effort, ministerial visits, members of embassies and consulates and we've done all that at this time of austerity. I thought the previous government was blind to half the world which was just astonishing.

Bagehot: Because foreign policy was run by the prime minister?

WH: Well I don't know what the foreign policy was then. It certainly wasn't very active. They didn't seem to have enough ministers in the foreign office to have ministerial visits. You know they didn't have a minister for Africa, or if they did it was combined with other positions? So we have really reheated a lot of important bilateral relationships. And the other thing we succeeded in doing was pushing forward important multilateral initiatives. Those were sometimes treaties, such as the arms trade treaty; or sometimes humanitarian initiatives, such as the preventing sexual violence initiative.

Bagehot: Let's turn to Libya. We've walked away from it and it's a catastrophe.

WH: No, we haven't walked away from it. But I also don't think I will accept that the situation there is as a result of what happened in 2011.

Bagehot: That sounds a bit like covering your own back. The truth is, when we intervened we didn't claim ownership in the same way as we did Iraq in 2003, but we took a measure of responsibility for the outcome of regime change in Libya, and we now accept no responsibility for the ghastly situation there.

WH: I wouldn't say at all that we accept no responsibility. We have made a great effort to break the political deadlock in Libya. That hasn't been widely trumpeted all the time but we and several countries have had envoys working on that. And we have offered tens of millions of pounds of assistance, which is ready to help rebuild the Libyan state. The Libyans have never wanted an occupation. The moral purpose in 2011 was to save lives and if we hadn't acted to save Benghazi from being overrun by Gaddafi, who knows what the situation would have been?

Bagehot: Who knows, but there's no reason to suppose it would have led to a worse loss of life than there’s been subsequently in Libya.

WH: Oh, there is absolutely every reason to think that. I think the loss of life would have been far greater.

Bagehot: What could we have done better on Libya than we have done?

WH: I haven't heard anybody put forward a better idea than what we've been doing for the last few years. You do hear criticism but I haven't heard a single constructive alternative. And the world will have a lot of problems like that. The world will be less stable than it has been in the last 20 to 30 years. It is becoming systemically less stable.

Bagehot: But we surely cannot accept failure as a reasonable outcome.

WH: No, no. But we can accept it will be difficult and that we're not going to go and occupy a place, as if it were Germany or Japan after the second world war. There will be a long struggle, with ups and downs, where we refine and develop for each country how you helpfully intervene. This is really my point about Somalia and Mali. Neither problem has been solved, but they're being edged in the right direction. And with Libya we're continuing to find the right way of doing that. But they'll all be difficult, and it would be a mistake to think in that systemically less stable world that suddenly you pull the switch and the following year you have stability in a country.

Bagehot: I quite understand. But it feeds into a big criticism of this government, that it has engaged with the world, but not stuck with its engagements. In Afghanistan, we've gone from a lot to a very little in a very short period. Similarly in Libya, we committed enough force to make a huge difference to Qaddafi’s chances of survival, but then basically stood back. Having got Parliaments approval to be involved in northern Iraq, we are now doing less there than the Australians…

WH: That's not true

Bagehot: OK, our share of the air strikes may be the second highest, but the number is very small nonetheless.

WH: That is a criticisim we hear, but some of it is complete rubbish. We are a bigger contributor to the air strikes than in both the Gulf wars. The RAF is flying every day. So I don’t agree with you.

Bagehot: There is certainly a lot of disquiet in Washington, at least among the think tanks and pundits, about our shrinking military might and wilting willingness to use it.

WH: That is a hangover of Gordon Brown's legacy. We took over a nearly bankrupt country. We had to sort out the defence budget and we have sorted out the defence budget. The prime minister has said the equipment budget will rise every year in the next parliament, that there’ll be no further reductions in the regular armed forces. We’re about to spend £160 billion on defence equipment and produce a lot of very good kit. I'm not sure in another five years’ time you will see those anxieties in the United States. These things go in a cycle, related to our economy. As for Afghanistan, it was definitely right to set a time to withdraw, because there would never have come a point when the Afghans took responsibility unless you set a deadline. So it's been absolutely right to make that clear and to walk back from Afghanistan or we would have been there for decades.

On many issues Britain is consistently applying itself. On Somalia, the Philippines and all over the world, British foreign policy plays a consistent role, applying sanctions, being involved in negotiations to defuse some of the world's most dangerous situations. The worse experience for us was with Syria, with the loss of the vote. That was my worst time as foreign secretary. That has inhibited how we’re able to approach the Iraq and Syria situation. But we're making a big contribution in Iraq, and successfully.

Bagehot: On the Russia-Ukraine issue, you were not visibly at the forefront of the international effort. Why?

WH: Britain's role has been to keep Europe strong enough. Without Britain, the sanctions there could have been seriously weaker. That is an important role for a country to play.

Bagehot: But why didn't you go to Kiev in that first European foreign ministers’ mission?

WH: You can't be everywhere. There have got to be different groups who deal with different things. And Britain has been consistently involved.

Bagehot: We've consistently passed up opportunities to be seen negotiating alongside our European friends and allies…

WH: There is a role that tries to keep Europe strong and coordinating well with the United States. And that is where the UK has been on Ukraine.

Bagehot: But the Americans would have much preferred you to have been in Kiev with the French, Germans, Polish.

WH: Some countries have played different roles and in any case, on Russia-Ukraine, it's Russia that is creating the problems, and it will pay the price.

Bagehot: You’re said to be a pragmatic Eurosceptic. If that’s correct, what does it mean?

WH: Hmm, is that how I'm described? It's probably a fair description. It certainly means no more powers transferred from the national to the European level and it means pushing overall reform that will benefit the whole of Europe. Europe is falling behind in the world, the fact that we've created more jobs in Britain in this period of government than in the whole of the rest of the European Union put together shows that.

Bagehot: Is there any easily imaginable circumstances in which you would want to leave the EU?

WH: Well there should be a referendum…

Bagehot: No, that's' not an answer

WH: And when the referendum comes I will offer my own advice on how people should vote. But the default setting, if you listen to what the prime minister says, and I agree with this, is that we want to be able to stay in and reform Europe. But that will depend on what reform is achieved.

Bagehot: What did you learn as foreign secretary about the EU?

WH: Its institutions are horribly remote. In this age where we need more decentralisation and more local decision-making, those buildings in Brussels are so far, in thinking and physical contact, from the businesses, the individuals of Europe. It really is horribly remote.

Bagehot: Mr Hague, thank you very much.