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ANNA JONES: Now he’s been a Labour MP for over 20 years and held four senior cabinet posts but now Peter Hain is leaving the Commons behind and he joins me now from Neath in South Wales, a very good morning to you.  So why are  you calling time on your time as an MP?   

PETER HAIN: Well I was very active in politics for 25 years beginning with supporting my parents in Pretoria in the anti-apartheid struggle and I will be active in politics after I leave parliament next year.  I was intending to re-stand so this was a bit of a surprise for me but I had a series of discussions with Ed Miliband and we talked about what I might do in the future and I decided to continue to be active in politics, that’s very important, I will continue to be active as I have been in the past, supporting the Labour party, supporting Ed, fighting to get a Labour victory at the next election which I think is vital for the country, I think this government is destroying most of what matters in Britain, but I can do that in different ways and that’s what we discussed and that’s what I have agreed to do but it has been a big wrench, not least stepping down in this wonderful constituency of Neath which has given me so much support and to which I am so committed and from which I am speaking to you now. 

AJ: Peter Hain, you’re teasing us, you’re saying you’re going to stay active in politics but you are not telling us what you’ll be doing, tell us what your next role will be. 

PETER HAIN: Well that’s for the future to decide.  What I am clear about what I’m doing over the next year is that I am going to be campaigning hard for Labour both here in Neath to support my successor when he or she is chosen and then to try and do everything I can to ensure that we win the next general election in Wales and right across Britain because actually if you look at what’s happening to Britain, we’re seeing our public services attacked, the voluntary sector under assault, terrible, terrible deprivation in areas like this for people with a disability and there are not enough decent jobs around and that is why we need a different kind of government that is going to invest in growth and jobs and not in cuts the whole time.

AJ: Ed Miliband has paid tribute to your time in office, he particularly drew attention to your time as Northern Ireland Secretary, do you look back and see that as your highlight? 

PETER HAIN: Probably, I mean it was the most challenging thing to do to bring the old enemies, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Fein, linked of course to the IRA and then on the other hand Ian Paisley and the Democratic Unionist Party who had always said no to every settlement, to bring them together and working with Tony Blair to work on the ten years of work that followed the Good Friday Agreement and actually to get what is now when I look back on it, an historic settlement.  We’ve had seven years of stability and relative peace and tranquillity in Northern Ireland, nobody would have thought that was possible.  You almost take it for granted but it was very, very hard to negotiate  and yes, that was the thing I felt I made most of the contribution, was the most important contribution in my twelve years in government but there were other things, not least of all winning the referendum to get the Welsh Assembly and delivering more powers to Wales through the 2006 Act that I brought in as Secretary of State for Wales.  That and many other things that I feel objectively that I made a difference in government and maybe I can make a contribution in the future which can make a difference as well in all sorts of other ways. 

AJ: You hinted there that you held a number of jobs in government, I’m interested to hear your take, there are rumours of a Cabinet reshuffle due over the next few days, the next week or so, what’s it like to be in government and hear those rumours that jobs are switching around?

PETER HAIN: It’s rather disconcerting because you are involved in what you’re doing and suddenly you can get a phone call from the Prime Minister or his office to come and see him and then you are in a limbo until you find out what you are doing.  In fact when I first went into the Cabinet in October 2002 I was Europe Minister at the time, I was sitting around in an office waiting for Tony Blair to call me in and tell me what I was doing, I was in there for quite a long time and I switched on the TV and it had Sky News on, you’ll be pleased to know, and there was Adam Boulton announcing I was going to be Secretary of State for Wales so that was the first time I knew what job I was going to do in the Cabinet or indeed what was happening to me in the reshuffle so it is quite an up and down thing and I guarantee that David Cameron will find with this reshuffle as Gordon Brown and Tony Blair found with their reshuffles, you cannot predict at the start what will come out at the end because sometimes people don’t agree, sometimes people decide to stand down in the middle of it, all sorts of things happen.  One thing you can be certain, this will be unpredictable and it will not finish according to design as David Cameron had planned.

AJ: You say it is unpredictable, I am going to ask you to make a prediction though about the next election.  We saw Labour beaten into third place in the Newark by-election, how confident are you that Labour will win an absolute majority at the general election?

PETER HAIN: Well first of all this was … we were never going to win the Newark by-election, I mean it was not a seat in which we had any chance at all, there was a massive Tory majority so let’s just get that clear.  I think Ed Miliband is likely to be the next Prime Minister and I am not saying that simply as a party drumbeat churning out a line to you.  Why do I think that?  We’re in a situation which I think the country will want changed, they are not going to want another five years of austerity and cuts and all of the consequences because that’s what’s been promised by David Cameron and George Osborne, is more of the same.  They are going to want investment in growth and the beginning to repair our tattered public services and get them more efficient and delivering more but also something else has been happening and it was reflected in the rise of UKIP in the European elections replacing in a way the Liberal Democrats as the party of protest and anti-politics, the Liberal Democrats have completely betrayed their legacy by what they’ve done in government so I think the next election is going to be very hard fought but I think there is a very, very strong possibility of Labour being the biggest party and of Ed Miliband forming a government.  Whether we’ll have a majority, which I will fight for along with every other Labour party member, I don't know because it is very, very hard to win a majority now in British politics because we’re not in a two party system which we had for generations, we’re in a multi-party system and although I don't think UKIP will do anything like as well as they did in the European elections the other Thursday at the general election in May next year I think they will do sufficiently well and there will be other parties including the Liberal Democrats and the Greens around and in Scotland and Wales the nationalists, to make it a much closer contest than perhaps we’ve been used to before, but I think that Ed Miliband is well placed to lead the government in the future and I think that people when they see him as Prime Minister will actually realise that they have elected the right person even if maybe they don’t see that at the moment.

AJ: Okay, Peter Hain, good to talk to you, thank you very much indeed.