William Hague is charming, but what he says won’t satisfy the Eurosceptics

William Hague has to be one of the most charming men in the Cabinet. Today, rather than attacking his Lib Dem colleagues for being ‘woolly’, as Philip Hammond did, the Foreign Secretary made the case for a majority Conservative government by saying quite politely, at the end of a long list of British foreign policy achievements, ‘And all that in a Coalition: just think what we could accomplish on our own’. Delegates loved that.

But there was one interesting point in his speech that delegates may in time love a little less as its implications become clearer. It was in the section on European reform. Hague told delegates:

'When David Cameron set out his vision for real change in Europe he warned that he’d be denounced as a heretic.