Every Tory leader needs a William

20 May 2006

William Hague tells Fraser Nelson that the Tory party has changed completely since he led it — and that the best advice he has given David Cameron is dietary

But he comes with all the brainpower of Hague I and has lost none of his brilliance at the dispatch box. He is, according to one Labour MP, ‘the only man you’d return to the chamber to hear’. But there is an element of camera-shyness in his make-up. ‘I’m better at giving speeches than appearing on television,’ he concludes. As his speeches fetch up to £10,000 on the after-dinner circuit, this is not as modest as it may sound. His job now is to forge a foreign policy for a party which, for years, has not been taken seriously enough to need one.

Hague is a hawk. Unlike Michael Howard, he says that he would still have voted for the Iraq war, knowing what he knows now. ‘Can we say it was wrong to remove Saddam Hussein? No, I don’t think we can.’ And he has no emollient words for Iran. ‘I disagreed with Jack Straw saying that military action in Iran was “inconceivable”,’ he says. ‘I’m not advocating it, but he was going too far and unnecessarily weakening our position.’

Euroscepticism is stamped in Hague’s DNA and that of the Cameron Conservatives — but Hague suspects that the argument is won and the Middle East will be the main foreign policy issue for the next Conservative government. It will, he says, ‘face the same dilemmas’ as Tony Blair does today. Indeed, on Iraq, Iran, Africa, Afghanistan and America — on almost everywhere apart from Europe — the only differences are in emphasis. Hague makes no apology for this. ‘It would be a fundamental error in foreign policy to go about looking for reasons to disagree with the government.’

Indeed, he says that Hilary Benn, the International Development Secretary, has not received enough credit for his work in Darfur. ‘He was out there dictating part of the peace agreement a few days ago,’ he notes with admiration. ‘Something important has changed in the Conservative party. When I was leader, we used to sit down every morning and ask, “How will we embarrass the government today?” because we were in that guerrilla warfare stage. Now we sit down and ask, “What would we do if we were the government?’’’