ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: The revolving doors of government have turned once again so what does the reshuffle mean for the next two and a half years of coalition government? In a moment I’ll be speaking to two victims of the reshuffle, from the Conservatives the former Secretary of State for Wales, Cheryl Gillan and from the Lib Dems, the former Armed Forces Minister Nick Harvey. A very good morning to you both and if I can start with you, Cheryl Gillan, it was the Cabinet that you were ejected from, how bruised are you still by that experience?

CHERYL GILLAN: First of all can I just say that I don’t see myself as a victim in the slightest so I think your introduction is very unfair. I’ve been a Member of Parliament for twenty years, I’ve been on the front bench for nearly eighteen years of that and I’ve had two and a half great years in government, doing a job which I loved and now the time has passed to hand that on to someone else and that allows me to almost go back to my roots if you like and actually speak out about something which is affecting my constituents and my constituency which is this terrible HST project which I know the Prime Minister and the rest of my colleagues have known of my complete opposition to for a long time.

DM: But you wouldn’t have been able to use that word terrible just one week ago because you were in the Cabinet, bound by collective responsibility.

CG: Quite rightly so. The premise of government is that there is Cabinet collective responsibility and you have to do your duty and you have to adhere to that. Fortunately I’m liberated now so I neither see myself as a victim nor unfortunate, quite the reverse. I actually see this as a very exciting time again in my political life.

DM: Do you think that is why you were moved on because it was well known, your unspoken opposition to high speed rail two and the sense was that you would have resigned if they had gone ahead with it anyway so it was a case of pushing you before you jumped?

CG: Well I think you’ve got to ask the Prime Minister about his reshuffle plans although he made no secret either to me or to anybody else that he would eventually want a Welsh MP, an MP who sat for a Welsh seat doing the job I’m doing, that I was doing, and what has been good for me is of course my Deputy, David Jones, who is very able, has taken over so there is a lot of continuity there but I think you’re putting out the wrong message and if I may say so a lot of the tittle-tattle around this is putting out the wrong message, particularly for women wanting to come into politics. I have had a very exciting career on the front bench, I don’t see myself as a victim, I see myself moving into another stage of my political career and I’m thoroughly enjoying myself.

DM: If I can just pick up on that a bit more, I did want to talk a bit more about HST but you mentioned women in the Cabinet, there is one less woman in the Cabinet now because the Cabinet has expanded in terms of those that are allowed to attend, therefore the proportion of women in the Cabinet is much lower. This is not a positive step for women is it?

CG: I think you can get a little preoccupied with numbers. I think it’s more about capability and I think it is also up to a Prime Minister to choose those people for the jobs that he has in hand and that is what David Cameron’s done. I certainly wish this new reshuffled government all the best and I also want to put out the message very strongly that there is a place for women at the Cabinet table and I think the messages that a lot of the media has been putting out recently are quite off-putting to women in general on politics.

DM: Okay, you’ve made that point, you want to make the point about High Speed Two. You wish this new Cabinet, this reformed Cabinet, this government all the best but what it wants to do is spark growth and part of that is big infrastructural projects of which High Speed Rail Two is one but you don’t want them to do that. Are there many like that within the Conservatives who think like you do and would the Prime Minister have a rebellion on his hands if they pushed forward with this?

CG: Well I think it’s going to be interesting. I mean first of all it would go through a hybrid Bill but it’s not a Conservative project. First of all it is very destructive of the environment and secondly, it’s not good value for money. The cost benefit ratio has been moving out over the past two and a half years, since Labour announced this project, and quite frankly it is so far in the middle distance that it is not going to affect the economic conditions we have now. What we need is we need a plan now for infrastructure, things like the electrification of the main line down to Cardiff and the Valleys lines that I lobbied for and got within government for Wales. We need an aviation plan, not that we have to wait for for another two and a half years but we need …

DM: So the review is kicking it into the long grass?

CG: The review needs to be completed by the end of the year, you can’t tell me that the Department of Transport hasn’t been looking at aviation policy. I think it is quite possible that that could be delivered by the end of the year, I think we need an integrated transport policy and I think we need much more attention put to fixing our existing infrastructure and our existing networks.

DM: Do we need the third runway at Heathrow?

CG: I think we’ve got to see what they come up with. I haven’t seen the outcome…

DM: But your own view?

CG: I would affected by the third runway at Heathrow but I want this economy to succeed and let’s say this about my own constituency in Chesham and Amersham, it would benefit by a third runway at Heathrow much more than it would benefit from a high speed rail link going right through an area of outstanding natural beauty with no stops in Buckinghamshire whatsoever.

DM: It’s been said about the new Cabinet, the government, the Cabinet in particular is much more, on the Conservative side of it, is much more conservative, that there was a bit of a move to the right, I don't know if you entirely agree with that. Do you think then that there’s going to be more differences, and I want to bring in Nick in a moment or two, there is going to be more differences with your Lib Dem colleagues over issues which are the core of the Conservative right, things like Europe and the European Court of Human Rights and issues like that? Are the Conservatives really going to dig in on these issues now?

CG: I make no bones of the fact that I am hugely supportive of this government and I know that our two parties came together for absolutely the right reasons but I do think that we are spending an awful lot of time working to a Liberal Democrat agenda, much of which includes a lot of time wasting, as I’ve seen it, on constitutional matters.

DM: AV, House of Lords?

CG: AV, House of Lords reform. I mean I even ran a referendum in Wales because I delivered on all three parts of our coalition agreement in Wales, and I don't think that that’s what we need at the moment. We don’t want more constitutional reform, we need a government that works together, that is joined up and focuses entirely on one thing – improving the economy – and all these noises off, all these peripheral subjects that keep coming up and constitutional tinkering is not what my constituents want and not what the people I know want.

DM: This is why you came here. So let’s turn to Nick Harvey on that then, do you think there is too much tinkering at the margins on the constitution and other things like that that don’t really matter to the economy?

NICK HARVEY: Well I have to say that Cheryl says we have spent the last two and a half years following a Liberal Democrat agenda, I’d like to think that that was true and I’d like to think that we’d spend the next two and a half years doing so. It hasn’t always felt like that, I have to say. I think looking at the next two and a half years, there will be tensions, of course there always are in a coalition but if we begin to see the economy picking up, there will be some difference of view as to who the beneficiaries of that should be. I think the big programme of welfare reform that the Department of Work and Pensions are involved in still has quite a lot of scope for tension, for I think public controversy about some of the implementation of that and I think you touched on it just then, when you look at the changes in line up at the Ministry of Justice and the possible assault on the human rights regime, poor old Tom McNally, the Liberal Democrat Minister at Justice, is going to have a very different working relationship with his new colleagues I suspect than he did with Ken Clark before this happened.

DM: In terms of those policies and those issues dear to Liberal Democrat hearts, I mean your removal from the Ministry of Defence means that there are no Lib Dems in there. I know that David Laws is meant to be overseeing that but he has got an awful lot to do with education and sitting in the Cabinet as well so things like Trident then, the Trident Review, which I know you were looking at, that moves on without proper oversight do you feel?

NH: The review continues, it’s a Cabinet Office review and I understand that David is going to oversee that and I’m …

DM: He’s got an awful lot on his plate hasn’t he?

NH: Well that’s the point, he’s got an awful lot else he’s going to be doing, he’s already got a foot in two government departments, the Cabinet Office and the Department of Education. He is a very able man, he has got a very empirical mind but I hope that that isn’t going to suffer from having somebody not actually on the case and there are other issues coming up on the international agenda which Lib Dems are going to have to work very hard now without a Minister either in Defence or the Foreign Office to keep abreast of. Getting the withdrawal from Afghanistan right is absolutely vital and we don’t want to cut corners in order to save a few bob and then have the whole thing go horribly wrong. Equally there is all the unrest with Iran and the possibility of Israel or the US taking steps against Iran. I think that having a Lib Dem in the two international departments would have given us a say in framing the agenda that we won’t now have but of course the bigger decisions do come to the National Security Council and across Nick Clegg’s desk as Deputy Prime Minister but to my mind it would have been better to have a foot in the Cabinet.

DM: A question I asked Cheryl Gillan at the start and I’ll ask you now, how bruised were you by the experience? Presumably you didn’t want to leave government and leave those gaps inside the Department, you didn’t want to go did you?

NH: To be candid, I hadn’t seen this coming so I was rather knocked for six by it, nobody likes this sort of thing happening to them. That said, of course, the process of government is much bigger than individuals and like Cheryl I will continue to support the government. It came together in difficult circumstances with a testing agenda and at the halfway point obviously any government is perhaps in difficulty and at the moment everything hinges on the economy. There are actually some encouraging signs coming now, we are seeing the beginnings of industrial …

DM: Green shoots?

NH: Well it’s not for me to say whether they are green shoots or not but I think over the next year or so, if things do begin to pick up, we will look back at this mid-point and say well all governments go through this.

DM: You’ve got a knighthood on its way to console you, did you ask for that and do you feel it is a little bit premature given what’s been said just a few weeks before about the nature of honours for politicians?

NH: Certainly I did not ask for it but within hours of my removal from the government I was offered this, it was made clear that it was in recognition of my political contribution over the years. Frankly I think it would have looked very churlish and petulant to have turned it down and I am pleased to receive an unexpected recognition of the work that I’ve done.

DM: How about you, Cheryl Gillan, can you see going to the Lords as a Baroness?

CG: I saw you turning to me … What is wonderful about being the Prime Minister of this country is that you can make those decisions and you can make those recommendations and I think you should address all those comments to our Prime Minister.

DM: But if asked, would you take it?

CG: I think you should address all those comments to the Prime Minister. I am very focused, as I think is quite obvious, on making sure that what I have been doing behind the scenes on protecting the interests of my constituents and fighting HS2 is now going to be in the open and I think that’s very important.

DM: There has been a lot of speculation about the Honours, there has been a lot of speculation about what the Prime Minister was doing when he dealt with your position and I know you don’t want to be asked about that but can I ask do you feel – and I know you had a life outside politics before you got in there – do you feel that as the Chief Executive, so to speak, of UK Politics or whatever we want to call it, he handled it very well? There are ways, aren’t there, that big corporations teach their Chief Executives and Executives on dealing with people who are being downsized or let go?

CG: Can I just say that all this focus on the trivia of the reshuffle I think is not helpful to what this country is facing at the moment. What I think is true is what Nick was saying, there are some quite encouraging signs there. We have created over 900,000 jobs in the private sector since this government took office. We have held our interest rates low which is very significant to everybody that has a mortgage. We are trying desperately to free up the borrowing of money so that our businesses can fly and we are also trying to have a tremendous drive abroad on trade and industry and I think that that is really important and worth focusing on.

DM: Lastly Nick, in terms of the coalition dynamic we’ve been talking about, are there people within the Liberal Democrats who are going to start concluding that this Conservative side of the coalition is becoming more right wing and they feel less comfortable within it and are you one of them?

NH: Nobody pretends that the process of coalition is comfortable in the first place, I think both sides would agree on that. I don't think anybody will worry themselves overly what the line-up of personalities is, it will all depend on the political agenda and I think there are areas where there will be tensions and the Liberal Democrats will continue to make the contribution that we have made, with a greater emphasis on environmental issues, a greater emphasis on looking after the people at the bottom of the pile and as a result of the sort of things that we have focused on, bringing up the tax threshold, people on low and middle incomes will be £550 a year better off by next spring and I don’t believe that would have happened without our involvement in it.

DM: Okay, well a point that will have to be explored at a later date. Thank you very much Nick Harvey and Cheryl Gillan, very good to see you both.