ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now then, David Cameron has another headache on his hands tomorrow in the form of gay marriage. The Bill to make same sex marriage legal was passed by the House of Commons last month but with fierce opposition from the majority of Conservative MPs, tomorrow the House of Lords will debate the Bill. Earlier I spoke to the Conservative Peer, Lord Mawhinney, he was a Cabinet Minister and the Conservative Party Chairman of course under John Major and I started by asking him if David Cameron was making a mistake by forcing through a policy that was so unpopular with parts of his party.

LORD MAWHINNEY: I think it’s against wishes more generally than just the party though you are right to say that most of the people who have been party members for a long time are adamantly opposed to it and indeed a number of them are demonstrating their opposition by simply leaving the party. But if you go right back to your programme network three days before the last election, the Prime Minister said he had no plans to do this and I assume like other people I believed him. Then we get this Bill, the next thing there is to be a public consultation, 500,000 people signed a petition against this Bill, they were told that their individual views would be taken into account and when the government announced its results the petition was taken as one single vote so that the government could claim that 53% of respondents were in favour. Actually 87% of the respondents were against. So at a time when the government should be focusing all its attention on the economy which is what will decide the next election and perhaps on education where Michael Gove is doing a great job, we have this discussion following Lords reform distraction, following alternative vote distraction, this is not a high priority for the people of the country.

DM: Do you not buy into the argument Lord Mawhinney that taking on board all that, this is of symbolic importance for your party to signal how much it has changed?

LORD MAWHINNEY: I am underwhelmed by your argument, Dermot. What people look for in a government is to deliver what is overall best for the country and at the moment sorting out the economy and sorting out education are clearly the high priorities and this government will be judged on those priorities.

DM: You feel, don’t you, Lord Mawhinney, that the advice that Mr Cameron is getting at the moment is let’s say not of the best quality, that what he really needs is an enforcer at his side like a Norman Tebbit to Margaret Thatcher?

LORD MAWHINNEY: Well as you may know, I said something similar on the public record just a few days ago. I think it’s hard to feel that the advice that the Prime Minister is getting is as politically astute as it ought to be and that probably means somebody alongside him who has the influence, who has the public standing and credibility and who has the feel, the sense of the party and were that to happen and were Mr Cameron willingly to accept advice from such a person, then the position of the party in the public opinion polls would probably improve.

DM: Well you know the party inside out, you know the personalities inside out, have you got anyone in mind?

LORD MAWHINNEY: You are very kind Dermot and I have been doing this a long time and one of the things that I learned very early on was not to volunteer an answer to a question like that.

DM: Okay, so you haven’t but you volunteered an answer to this question last year Lord Mawhinney and it is this issue yet again of cash for questions, particularly at the moment in the House of Lords, of Lords being it seems paid money to follow up issues on behalf of lobbyists. Do you think it is just isolated incidents like these or that there is a more systemic problem?

LORD MAWHINNEY: Frankly I know nothing about it other than what I’ve heard on the news this morning. I would be amazed if it was a systemic problem and from what I can gather people were not in this instance being paid, they were simply talking about what might happen. So no, I don’t think it is a systemic problem but that’s no reason for reducing the required standards or not from time or from reviewing the required standards. Those are important to the integrity and to the accountability of the House of Lords, they are important as far as public credibility is concerned and that’s very important to the world of politics in general and to parliament in particular.

DM: But it is one of these issues I suppose that Mr Cameron pre-election was right about, the problems from the lobbyists. They still don’t seem to have been sorted out, what the rules are and people, certainly the public, aren’t very clear about where the lines lie.

LORD MAWHINNEY: Well the rules are reasonably clear, I think the problem the government has got is that it made a commitment through the Prime Minister to address this issue and as a matter of principle it would be very hard to be opposed to that. On the other hand, as a former government minister of reasonably senior standing, trying to draft legislation to handle this I’m guessing is extremely complicated and very hard to do. If that is the case, then for the Prime Minister’s own credibility it would be better for somebody to say so, now we are still committed to trying to do this but actually drafting the legislation is trickier than we thought it would be, but we will persevere.

DM: Lord Mawhinney there, the former Conservative Party Chairman, speaking to me earlier