In an interview on Constitutional Reform

Your next book is also about Europe, A Stranger in Europe by Stephen Wall. He worked for you when you were foreign secretary, didn’t he, and I believe eight other foreign secretaries?

Yes, and two prime ministers. This is a very remarkable book because again it’s an insider’s account, trying to be objective. I say trying to be – I mean, he’s a friend – he’s godfather to one of my children, but actually we disagree on Europe. Now I think it’s the only way we can go in politics these days. There are genuinely differences on Europe across political parties, across families, and I think you have to learn to live with it. You have to learn to be civilised about it. But I think it’s an extraordinary insight.

It only starts from 1982, it covers the Thatcher years and it goes through the Major years, and then somewhat hurriedly towards the end it also covers the Blair years. So this is a man who has watched those three prime ministers very carefully and knows them well. And, more importantly, has been the permanent representative in Brussels at these frequent meetings of so-called ‘permanent representatives’. Which is really the vehicle – you could almost call it the Cabinet – certainly if you think of the Commission it’s not really the Cabinet…anyway, it’s the Whitehall equivalent, pulling together the really key civil servants from each country, who co-ordinate the process, and it certainly makes the machine work.

What do you get out of the book? I mean, Thatcher, Major and Blair all approached Europe from very different directions, and yet I think he suggests they end up with remarkably similar approaches.

I’m not sure he does. I think he’d be much more understanding and committed to the approach of John Major, and I personally agree with that. I think that Thatcher’s approach was, at times, very successful. I think she had to stand very firm on writing an…equality, really, in the settlement we made when we went in under Ted Heath in 1973, and insisted on the rebate as the only way to stop what was a runaway train of British contributions going far above any other member state. But I think she took it too far, and of course eventually it was her undoing: she was got rid of by the Conservative MPs in part because of her total disregard for that section of pro-European feeling within the party.

I think his point, that I believe to be the case, is that the Maastricht Treaty was an extremely fine piece of negotiation by John Major on behalf of Britain, and on behalf of Europe. And if we’d kept it, if we’d kept the pillared structure of the Maastricht Treaty, we’d be far better now. And one of the tragedies, of course, was the continued misrepresentation of the Maastricht Treaty by the outers and closet-outers of the Tory Party.

Now we have this Lisbon Treaty, which I suppose one has to say is Tony Blair’s hallmark. And what a dreadful hallmark it is. So I personally think that Tony Blair’s negotiating stance in the ten years he was prime minister was little short of disastrous. He gave up the Thatcher rebate, a significant portion of the Thatcher rebate, in 2006, really in order to manoevre and manipulate himself to be a candidate for the European presidency of the Council.

I mean, he advocated it in government single-handedly. He pushed it through the British Government, he pushed it through the constitutional treaty. Initially it was rejected by people who didn’t like intergovernmentalism, and then they saw the great opportunity: that eventually they envisage joining together the president of the Commission and the president of the Council, and bingo, in one step you have a European state.

With Tony Blair at the head.

With Tony Blair at the head. I mean, in any public company, to behave like this would be considered utterly disgraceful and actually would run into the regulations. Here’s a man who was prime minister and, rather like Thatcher, was removed by his own MPs. Can we really believe that it would have been democratic to have appointed him to be the president of the European Council? I think that this is a post that has potentially great dangers for anybody who is against a federally integrated single state.

And you think he pushed all that through because he envisaged a job for himself?

I know this! I know people who were there when he first made the proposition! And they laughed, and they smiled to themselves, and they thought, ah – this is his retirement job. And it was perfectly clear, right throughout the next few years, that that was going to be his design, and he pursued it utterly relentlessly because he is intent on trying to establish a legacy, trying to overcome the mistakes and dangers and damaging results from his policy on Iraq.

It’s a co-coordinating job, and it’s trying to do some of the footwork which has previously been done by heads of government, but in a way it ought to be done still as part of a grouped number of countries holding the presidency. There is, in the Lisbon Treaty, capacity to what the Europeans call double-hatting posts. The British Government denies it, but the Dutch Government believes that the wording of the Lisbon Treaty allows at some future date, by a majority decision, to merge the two roles of the president of the European Council and the president of the Commission. And remember, the president of the European Council is appointed by a majority decision, not by unanimity.

OK. Well, another element of constitutional reform that you’re interested in is reform in the House of Lords. You’ve chosen Donald Shell’s The House of Lords.

Yes, this is a short, and I think an extremely good book. It comes from Manchester University Press. It’s a fairly academic, objective look. It tries to be up to date – it’s pretty up to date, with an addendum of changes that took place. It seems to me that all one needs to do if one’s interested is to understand the history of the House of Lords and to look at the issues, and then make up your own mind. And that book, I think, allows somebody to see the set-up and then think it through.

I mean, I’m not objective, I’ve long believed that it should be democratically elected. I don’t believe it is legitimate to be a legislator, to create laws, just because of your being appointed. The House of Lords is simply stuffed with appointed people. As I view it, when people stand up you know where they come from, you know why they’re there.

And sometimes it's for honourable reasons, sometimes it's for reasons no better than that they have stepped down before an election in order to make available a safe seat for somebody who is the prime minister’s appointee. Sometimes the people are literally the appointees of the prime minister because they’re friends. Sometimes they are the appointee for the prime minister because they’ve given money to their political party.

The thing reeks, and yet they are tremendously proud of the House of Lords, and in many ways rightly so. It’s a group of people who are capable of suggesting amendments, and I do think you need a second chamber, but they also are – increasingly, actually – legislators. Increasingly because the state of the legislation that comes to the House of Lords from the House of Commons gives them very much more scope to legislate.

Well, we’re with that now, and I think it’s got to have legitimacy and it doesn’t have legitimacy. And I think it should be reformed.