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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, until this week the Conservative MP Dominic Grieve was a key member of the Cabinet and a member of David Cameron’s team therefore but he lost his job as Attorney General  for England and Wales in last week’s Cabinet reshuffle. It has been claimed that Mr Grieve got the chop because of his pro-Europe views and because he opposes pulling Britain out of the European Court of Human Rights, something the Conservative party, or elements of it, has been threatening to do.  Dominic Grieve joins me now, a very good morning to you.  Well let’s get straight to that, do you think part of the reason you have left the Cabinet is because you have been advising the Prime Minister about the inadvisability of leaving the ECHR? 

DOMINIC GRIEVE: It’s certainly possible.  It’s been a subject of discussion, it wasn’t the reason given to me by the Prime Minister when he told me he no longer wished me to stay in the office of Attorney General but there has certainly been quite a lot of background to this over some time and indeed some comment in the press during the course of this week.  I make my position clear, I am actually a Eurosceptic, I see many challenges with our European Union membership and our membership of the Council of Europe, which is the body which regulates the Court of Human Rights.  The Court of Human rights has taken some decisions, for example on prisoner voting, with which I very much disagree, the question is how do we best go about tackling these problems and particularly in the context of human rights?  Now we can pull out from the Convention of Human Rights, we have to give six months’ notice.  If we were to do that, we would leave but the problem would be twofold.  One, the reputational damage to the United Kingdom internationally.  You’ve just had the Foreign Secretary on who has come in to talk to you about Russia’s behaviour, Russia is a signatory to the Convention somewhat amazingly but there is no doubt that some moderation on Russia’s behaviour in certain areas has been achieved by virtue of the fact that they are subject to the European Convention on Human Rights.  The signal we would send out if we were to leave the Convention would be a very negative one and viewed negatively not just in Europe but across the world.

DM: What about the human rights of British citizens, would they be less well protected? 

DOMINIC GRIEVE: They technically would.  The government has indicated, at least the Conservative party seems to be taking an interest in the idea of having a home grown Bill of Rights.  I don’t have any difficulty with that, it could be a very good idea.  I did some work for the party before the last general election on this, one of the suggestions in a home grown Bill of Rights is that we should make clear to our own judiciary when interpreting Convention rights, those are the rights in the European Convention, that they should really apply their own jurisprudence and not have too much regard to what goes on at the European Court of Human Rights, that too could be a very sensible decision.  But leaving the Convention has reputational consequences, the other problem is as long as we are a member of the EU, if we are not meeting European Convention norms then the chances are that the European Court of Justice, a completely separate body, will step in and will actually enforce those norms on us and unlike the court in Strasbourg where a judgement is just an international obligation, that has direct effect and has to be applied here.  I went to court last year to try and bat that off in the case of prisoner voting and I was successful in our own supreme court, so that’s a real risk for the Prime Minister if he were to go down that road. 

It has also been suggested that because of that, we shouldn’t go down that road but what we should do in some way is to enact legislation through Parliament saying that we will stay in the Council of Europe, stay signatories of the Convention but actually we will only implement a Convention judgement in this country if Parliament approves it.  I am a believer in the sovereignty of Parliament and Parliament can do what it likes, ultimately Parliament could order your execution this afternoon if they wanted to, but the fact that we live in a country with no written Constitution and only with Conventions means that Parliament should not and the government should not behave in that way and if we were to do that, that would probably be the worst of all options because we would be undermining the rule of law internationally which we are committed to upholding.

DM: We are nearly out of time, Mr Grieve, but do you think this is really driven by politics, the threat of UKIP? 

DOMINIC GRIEVE: It may be driven by UKIP but what’s going to cause the best enhancement of UKIP?  Is UKIP going to do better because politicians make promises which in practice they can’t fulfil?  The last matter I said to you would probably, unless we changed the Ministerial Code, civil servants would refuse to draft the legislation because it is in breath of our own national Ministerial Code, so the simple truth is it is much better to have a reasoned dialogue and I think what is really important is that we should avoid political rhetoric which proves to be either undeliverable or in some way at the end of the day appears to be misleading.

DM: Okay, I’m sorry Mr Grieve we are out of time.  Thank you very much indeed, Dominic Grieve there.