Isabel Hardman Isabel Hardman

Liam Fox interview: Tories have to get a free vote on the EU ‘in the end’

Liam Fox started his political life under a majority Conservative government, and finally he’s back under one. He was elected in 1992 after John Major’s surprise election victory, and is enjoying the surprise of his colleagues once again after David Cameron’s surprise win last month.

But the former Defence Secretary is not personally enjoying the spoils of majority government: he has not been promoted to a ministerial post, even though there are more spaces free following the exit of the Lib Dems. He was rather stung to have only been offered a lowly minister of state job in the last reshuffle, and turned it down. But while he says rather pointedly now that ‘I have always said I’d be very happy to serve again in government’, he’s not hunkering down for a five year sulk.

‘Actually for the moment it suits me quite nicely to be able to roam across a whole range of issues rather than be restricted to one,’ Fox says. ‘And given you that you have got all these big issues on the economy, on defence, on Europe, all issues that I care very passionately about, being able to speak my mind will not be an unpleasant task.’

The MP for North Somerset says this very cheerily, but speaking his mind will have rather unpleasant consequences for David Cameron. Fox has long been classified as a Tory big beast, with all the potential to wound a party leader, or at least encourage some sort of stampede against him. The issues he lists, while attacking a pasta salad with some gusto on the House of Commons terrace, are ones which stir up many more Tory backbenchers than just Fox.

But one issue seems to be troubling him that isn’t mentioned so much. It’s whether the Conservatives have been allocating their spending pledges wisely during their election campaigning. Fox is worried about intergenerational fairness, and he’s got a good eye for these sorts of things. When he stood against Cameron for the party leadership in 2005, he pledged to mend the ‘Broken Society’, something Iain Duncan Smith then picked up on as his key agenda.

He points to the generous protections for pensions, saying ‘I also look at young families who are in some cases finding it difficult to balance their budgets, finding it difficult to make ends meet and I wonder how we can justify to them why those who are retired automatically justify at least a 2.5 per cent rise in their pension every year.’

The pension triple lock, he says ‘will be one that will come back as a very big cost, an unexpectedly large cost’. He adds ‘we have made the commitments we’ve made, but I find it difficult to explain sometimes why these are set in stone and when you look at some of the relative spending, you will see that we are spending more on the elderly heating allowance this year than on GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 combined’.

The Tory manifesto may have featured giveaways for pensioners, but it wasn’t quite so generous to the intelligence services or our armed forces. Fox is particularly agitated about the failure to commit to maintaining defence spending at 2 per cent of GDP, saying it undermines the country’s ‘moral authority’ if it fails to meet this target, after ‘lecturing for such a long time other countries on their needs to meet their commitments’.

He hopes the Strategic Defence and Security Review concludes in the autumn that the panoply of international threats that have grown significantly since 2010, along with essential updates to equipment, will mean Britain ends up sticking to the 2 per cent target anyway. But Fox also makes clear the government will have to deliver its promised £12bn of welfare savings in full – ‘there will be a strong view that you don’t reduce the security of the state to preserve the welfare state’. And he takes a swipe at Cameron’s continued commitment to international development spending, saying ‘increasing or protecting the aid budget while decreasing the defence budget doesn’t sit will with the instincts of most Conservatives’.

On defence, everything will be fine until the party comes back in the autumn, Fox predicts. But on Europe, Conservatives are rather confused about whether or not ministers will be able to campaign for an ‘Out’ vote without having to resign from the government. Fox argues that ‘I think it has to [be a free vote] in the end’ – with that ‘in the end’ suggesting that he supports suspension of collective responsibility at the end of the renegotiation and before the campaign begins. He adds:

‘I think we will have to come back and unite as a party by the 2020 election on the other side of the referendum so conduct ourselves properly and with proper respect and then it will be easier to unite afterwards’.

He also insists that there should not be an early referendum because ‘the last thing you want is for those who are hostile to the European Union feel that they have in any way been sold short because I think that will produce a backlash that will actually worsen the tensions on the issue’.

Before that referendum vote, though, there are already splits in the party over another Europe-related matter: human rights. For once, Fox isn’t on the side of the rebels: in fact, he’s rather ‘frustrated’ at those whose opposition to withdrawing from the European Convention on human rights scuppered Tory plans to include human rights reform in last month’s Queen’s Speech. ‘We have just won an election. What do people not understand about having to deliver on what we promised?’ he exclaims.

‘It doesn’t really help to have an open dispute within a few weeks of coming to power, especially on something so clearly signposted in a manifesto’. He argues this was no small commitment in the manifesto, either, but ‘an essential part of what we believe in’.

Fox is very impressed with Mark Harper, the new Tory chief whip, who replaced Michael Gove who ‘wasn’t so well-known to his colleagues’. Perhaps one of Harper’s first tasks should be to make overtures to Fox, so that, if nothing else, he’s able to keep track of the movements of this Tory big beast.

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