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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Well now, Thursday’s Syria vote was an embarrassment to say the least for the Prime Minister in more ways than one. As well as handing a political victory to Ed Miliband, David Cameron misjudged the mood of his own party, so how can he build bridges with his rebel MPs? I’m joined now by two Conservative MPs, Mark Field who voted with the government this week and Nadine Dorries who abstained from the vote and by the Spectator columnist, Isabel Hardman, a very good morning to you all. Let me talk to you first Nadine, did the Prime Minister get it wrong in terms of his judgement about the mood of the party, did people like you and others feel you were being frogmarched to war?

NADINE DORRIES: Absolutely and I commented immediately that I was not going to cast such a vote in haste. I think to the recall of Parliament was actually I think frankly quite bonkers and he would have had a far different outcome, a far better outcome if he had waited until this week when Parliament had returned, when we could have had a week of debate, when he could actually have canvassed the opinion of MPs far more easily than he could do when many were abroad and all over the country in their constituencies and provided information on what these chemical attacks were, how they happened, who provided the chemical weapons, where they’d come from and what the outcome was going to be. Okay, so we’re going to do this, this is our proposal and if Bashir Assad responds this way this will be our response. We needed to plan so I think it needs to happen in a much slower pace, in a more considered manner. He needs to canvas the opinions of MPs properly, to have a plan – these are the outcomes, this is what we’re looking for. I think if he had approached it like that, in that manner, then the outcome a vote would have been far different.

DM: You still voted for it but you were nodding along there, Mark. It’s hard to know, maybe we will never know, if President Obama would have taken this decision to consult Congress if our Parliament had not taken that course.

MARK FIELD: I think the announcement from President Obama shows that it is far too early to draw any conclusions about exactly what is going on, this is a fluid situation. I have some sympathy with what Nadine said, I wouldn’t necessarily have said it in the robust way she always does. I am someone, I have spoken out, I wrote an article in the Telegraph at the beginning of June, I am against the idea of military intervention in Syria and in fairness, I think David Cameron listened to what a lot of us were saying and that’s why we had a really quite anodyne, watered down motion that talked about bringing the UN to the centre of things, that talked about the idea that we shouldn’t rush into matter but also that there should be a second vote and it was made very clear to me when I spoke to a senior Cabinet Minister and my own whip that I would not vote in favour of military action but I was happy to support the government on Thursday evening.

DM: That was the problem, it was going to be the original motion.

MARK FIELD: I accept that but there was a compromise and therefore the government were listening and, more importantly still, I am very cheered by what I’ve heard both by William Hague on this programme and George Osborne earlier this morning, there is no question, there will not be a further vote for military action but where I think we can play a very important role in the UK if there is to be action after the Congressional vote in the United States is on the intelligence side but also, probably even more importantly, on the humanitarian side. We are spending £11 billion a year as a nation on our DiFID budget, lets use some of that on humanitarian causes.

DM: Coming in there are the broader effect and miscalculation of David Cameron and his team here, there is much more than Syria at play here isn’t there? There is a feeling within parts of the Conservative party that you don’t listen to us, you don’t understand us.

ISABEL HARDMAN: I think Cameron made an honourable miscalculation. Even if you disagree with the principle of intervention, he was acting on honest intentions himself. The problem is, as Nadine says, there wasn’t a plan, there wasn’t even a plan for this very short notice recall of Parliament. The whips could have got to work much earlier, they had notice in June that 85, 86 MPs opposed intervention so they could have got to work earlier, they could have started making calls this week earlier. The recall of Parliament was announced I think on Tuesday I think it was but the whips didn’t start making calls until Wednesday and those calls on Wednesday afternoon were, oh I just want to find out what your position is. It was only on Thursday evening at about seven that they were starting to say well yes, actually we do need your vote because they were starting to realise the numbers weren’t stacking up. So the whipping operation was hugely disorganised.

NADINE DORRIES: The whipping operation is another miscalculation as well and very different from the days of Tony Blair and Iraq because now we have the internet and we have social media and we have channels by which people can let their opinions be known ….

DM: Your constituents in particular.

NADINE DORRIES: My constituents in particular. And I think another miscalculation was made inasmuch as the public opinion and public mood. It is no longer feasible for any leader of any party or government to walk into Parliament and say we’re going to have a vote on this issue and not to take into account public opinion because the public now have a way of letting their voice be heard. 24 hour rolling news, Twitter, Facebook are the ways in which people communicate their opinion and I don't think that any account was taken of the access the public have to their MPs, to the media and to the general public.

MARK FIELD: Also I think there is a fundamental mood change from the public, I think this is something we are going to see in the months and indeed in the years ahead. I think it is partly that they look at Syria and the public instinctively recognise there aren’t any good guys here, there is a bloody awful quagmire and we don’t want to get ourselves involved militarily in any way there. But I do also wonder if, particularly dare I say it for a lot of people under the age of 50 now, they see Britain’s place in the world in a very different light to the way that really the whole political class do and perhaps all of us in the journalistic world in the centre of London do and I think that many of them take the view that actually in a generation’s time we’ll have a similar role in global affairs to the sort of role the Netherlands has today and we can be entirely proud of that, an outward looking trading nation but maybe we’re not going to playing that part. I have some worries about that, my father was in the Army and my grandfather in the RAF, but I do think there is a real change of mind here and I think politically we are paring back on our defence budget year on year on year at the same time as we are borrowing huge sums to continue paying for healthcare and welfare and we’ve got to realise there is a result that comes from that and I think we are going to change.

DM: What I want to ask you Isabel is are there real problems storing up now for Mr Cameron? We don’t know where the issue might come from but we’ve seen it before and we really saw it on Thursday, a considerable rebellion on the issue of going to war or limited military action anyway. A Prime Minister defeated, in part by his own party, what could come next? And what about Europe?

ISABEL HARDMAN: I think the difference between the Europe rebellions we’ve seen in this Parliament and the Lords rebellion as well, partly those were about going out to kick Cameron, there is a cohort of Tory MPs who hate his guts and they were quite happy to see him humiliated. I think this vote was slightly different. There are obviously still many Tory MPs who dislike David Cameron but I think the problem with this vote is that they didn’t trust his judgement and that is much more serious. This wasn’t a ‘Get Dave’ vote although there might have been a few who abstained or voted against because they don’t like him, it was more that they didn’t trust what he was saying to them in Parliament and that was much more serious on a matter of war.

DM: What do you say to those? He is the Prime Minister, he is going to be your leader in the next election and he is your best hope, don’t you say to your colleagues, you’ve got to get behind him?

NADINE DORRIES: I don’t think you can slate the personal opinion of MPs and what happened. Frankly my personal opinion of David Cameron has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever of whether I voted on that motion but I will not vote on a motion that I am being bounced to vote into, on a whipped vote, on the basis of David Cameron and George Osborne’s judgement. I need more than their judgement to go back to my constituents and say this is why I voted. I needed a plan, I needed an objective, aims and objectives, I needed to know what we were doing and why and we weren’t being given that.

MARK FIELD: The irony was that David Cameron very painstakingly went through, and it was a very good performance actually on Thursday, but he painstakingly went through and it brought all the echoes back of Iraq, saying we can’t be 100% sure on the intelligence but this is my judgement on the intelligence. It brought back all the worries about Iraq and in many ways it meant that the whole Iraq shadow was a spectre over the entire vote.

DM: And the interesting thing on that is that for Ed Miliband it was a chance, which he eventually took, to break that shadow of Tony Blair from his party and hand it over to David Cameron. There, you’re the heir to Blair.

ISABEL HARDMAN: Absolutely and it wasn’t as though David Cameron and George Osborne didn’t want to talk about Tony Blair, they were very keen to bring him up, partly because they thought it would humiliate the Labour party but the problem is they were talking to a Labour party led by someone who opposed the Iraq war so it was slightly more difficult than they imagined.

MARK FIELD: And one forgets that that Iraq War vote ten years ago, remember there were lots of backbench Labour MPs at a time when they were in government with a huge majority, a majority of the backbench Labour MPs even then didn’t support going to war. The liberal interventionist streak of the Labour party really never survived Tony Blair, it emerged during his premiership and died very shortly afterwards.

ISABEL HARDMAN: There is a keenness as well to learn from the mistakes of Iraq. We still don’t have the Chilcott Inquiry which has reported, it has been so painfully slow, and in fact if it had reported again the situation today might be slightly different. I think we need those reassurances and we need to know we are going to go through a due process, that there is a plan, that it is one that we can take to the British people and have their support. We don’t have that yet.

MARK FIELD: That won’t apply to Syria, it will a future …

DM: We must end there. Thank you very much Isabel Hardman, Nadine Dorries and Mark Field, very good to see you all.