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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now this week parliament voted of course to approve the Prime Minister’s timetable for Brexit.  Theresa May plays to trigger Article 50 as you know by the end of March next year.  Only 90 MPs voted against that motion of which only one was Conservative, he was of course Ken Clarke.  He joins me now from Nottingham and a very good morning to you Mr Clarke and let me ask you this, is there part of you that feels the UK might not actually in the end actually leave the EU?

KEN CLARKE: Well I think politically it is fairly obvious that like Andy Burnham, people have had a kind of conversion like St Paul on the way to Damascus and they are now converted to the idea of change which they were resisting before and I think I’m resigned to the vote that Parliament is going to vote to leave the European Union.  The most important thing is what are we going to do next, what are we going to do instead?  And the main point of that debate, the main point of my vote apart from the fact that I’d be a terrible hypocrite if I voted on the basis that I thought it was in British interests to leave the European Union – I don’t – but what is most important is that when the government has got a policy on what it proposes to do in our relationships with Europe and the rest of the world, they should put a White Paper before parliament, they should seek a vote.  The June 23rd referendum didn’t announce the end of parliamentary democracy, we don’t have a dictatorship in this country of the executive, we do have accountability to the people’s elected representatives and then those representatives who given their views at the last election, if they want to be re-elected they defend the judgements they’ve exercised whilst they’ve been in parliament.

DM: Do you think that the timetable though will be the one that Theresa May at this point envisages?  There are an awful lot of spanners, legal spanners, being thrown into the works.  We know about the Article 50 decision coming imminently from the Supreme Court and now we hear today about another potential challenge about leaving the single market and the European Economic Area.
KEN CLARKE: Well I’ll leave the legal issues, the constitutional issues, to courts, I’m pretty confident the courts will uphold parliamentary democracy but I’m not sure about the arguments being put forward by Mr Wilding and others in this latest action.  What matters in the end is we have a political democracy and what happens in the end is what the majority of people in parliament are prepared to approve when the government puts before it a strategy: what are the objectives, are we staying in the single market, are we staying in the customs union, do we object to people coming from Europe and taking jobs that we can’t otherwise fill, sometimes with skills we haven’t trained enough people for, as long as they live lawfully here?  Once we’ve got a policy we can move on but the timetable is tight.  Already more than half the time between June 23rd and the end of March has gone and there are some very big issues that not only has the government not announced a policy, it’s quite obvious it’s extremely difficult, they are starting from scratch and they are going to be hard pressed to have a sufficiently thought through policy by the end of March to have anything very sensible to put before the other European countries.

DM: And what’s your analysis of the way Theresa May, the Prime Minister, is handling this and in particular handling the divisions within the Conservative party?  We saw at the conference that tough speech she made about Brexit and its effect on the pound, is that to position herself so she’s trusted by those that are more keen on a hard Brexit or do you think that she secretly believes it?

KEN CLARKE: Well I think obviously she was surprised like everybody else that the government fell, she formed a new government in July, she found herself Prime Minister long before probably she hoped to be Prime Minister – she had perfectly reasonable hopes of being Prime Minister – and she has a blank sheet of paper in front of her which she has now got to agree with the new Cabinet she’s formed and they have got an enormous range of views.  This mess isn’t Theresa’s fault, I’m quite prepared to give her a chance.  She’s a tough lady and we are going to need a tough lady in charge but in the end what matters, how far her government is capable of getting its head round all this and what it’s going to put forward first to parliament and the British people about what our overall aims are when we start this negotiation and then years of negotiation are going to take place before every aspect to our European membership has been reviewed because in all sorts of areas of policy, not just trade and the economy, our own policies have interacted with those of the European Union for more than forty years.  

DM: A quick thought, Mr Clarke, about one of the few posts you never did hold in government, about the Foreign Secretary, about Boris Johnson.  How do you feel about him and his deft diplomatic touch, or lack thereof?

KEN CLARKE: Well actually I thought what Boris said about Saudi Arabia and Iran I rather agree with and I hope the government are consulting their lawyers very closely about how much longer we can carry on without querying some of the things the Saudis are doing in the Middle East whilst we’re supplying them with weapons, that’s a serious point.  Throughout the referendum campaign it was all the Boris and Dave show as far as the national media was concerned and Boris’s personality was always going to emerge and he is different in his style as a Foreign Secretary but I think the criticisms of him are pretty silly and they are just a bit of light relief really from the serious issues which I hope Boris, who is a very intelligent man, is engaged with as closely as Theresa May.  I would point out, unlike Andy going on about free movement of labour and sounding a bit like a paler version of Nigel Farage, Boris has never been anti-immigrant.  Boris does realise that the economic interests of Britain are helped if we have free access to the biggest open market in the world.  Boris won’t argue he is in favour of free trade but is in favour of pulling out of a market of 500 million people, so I look forward in the real world to Boris making a positive contribution to discussions inside the government and with the governments we’re going to have to deal with.

DM: And just finally, a question about the B word, I’m not going to use it on a Sunday morning programme but back in the 90s John Major used that word to describe some of those who were making his life difficult within the Conservative party, it has now been used against you, Mr Clarke.

KEN CLARKE: Well there’s a tone in politics that has really been damaged by the referendum so fortunately I don’t have anything to do with social media and my office tell me that the favourable ones from relieved remainers to find somebody still sticking to his principles do outnumber the extraordinary abuse sad people hurl on anybody they disagree with now.  I don’t often vote against my party, I haven’t over the years, my views have been those of the Conservative party, my pro-European views, that’s been mainstream Conservative policy for the last 50 years throughout my political activities, my adult life.  Apparently they changed on the 23rd June but until I know what the new policies are, I shall stick to my principles.  When I know what the new policies are, I shall make the best judgement of them I can.

DM: Ken Clarke, thank you very much indeed, good talking to you.