Click here to listen to extracts of the interview in MP3 format

Question: What do you think of current attempts to strengthen parliament, I’m thinking of things coming out of the modernisation committee like the introduction of topical questions late last year?
 
Ken Clarke: I am impressed that the modernisation committee is addressing some of these. I think there is a general sense on all sides of Parliament that it has weakened and lost some of its ability to hold government properly to account, and therefore I follow with interest all the proposals to come out and attempts to reform it.

The latest excursion into topical questions I remain open-minded about. I think in principle it's an extremely good idea, but all it's actually producing is a less scripted exchange of questions between members and ministers which I'm not sure has really added to the topicality of what's being raised. But it really does enable you to see which ministers are on top of their brief, so it’s probably an improvement on the over-scripted arrangements we had before.

Then we have the arrangements for topical debates. I welcome that, and the taskforce has put forward proposals in some detail about how we might have more topical debates on the subject. I think it's very important that we do, because firstly it would increase public interest in Parliament and make people more aware of what Parliament is doing on their behalf, but secondly I think it's important for Parliament to be able to debate things when events are moving on, and at a stage when the outcome of events might still be influenced by Parliament. Governments have a habit of delaying any debates on difficult complex crises until the whole thing's been resolved and they can present it to Parliament, submitting themselves to the judgement of the outcome as it were.

I don't think the modernisation committee’s proposal for topical debates is working because it has one fatal flaw: The leader of the house decides what is topical and what the subject matter for debate should be. Sometimes this has blatantly been some latest press release or new initiative by the government which she presents as topical or worthy of discussion. Certainly so long as a member of the cabinet proposes what the topical subject should be, she is obviously going to have to avoid putting forward things which are causing the government great problems or embarrassment at the present time.

She does her best to avoid all the topical subjects that might get the government into trouble, or which might give the minister a problem in explaining what he is thinking of doing. Our taskforce said that we should have topical debates by making available to the opposition the power to demand immediate Parliamentary time for topical debate on a subject in place of the present supply debates and the time that's allocated to them. We also said chairmen of select committees should be able to demand time on the floor of the House, for presentation and discussion of reports they wish to consider. I think it's also open to argument that chairman of select committees should be allowed to require time on the floor of the House at short notice on subjects which are of particular importance which are current issues in their Committee’s areas of responsibility.

We set out in some detail how this might be done; the key thing is we would like the subject of topical debates and the precise timing of topical debates not to be completely under the control of the government of the day.
 
Question: When Gordon Brown became prime minister there was a lot of talk about constitutional reform and his respect for parliament - do you think that's been borne out?
 
Ken Clarke: It hasn't yet. I try to avoid being too cynical but I will really not be persuaded that this is Gordon's high priority until he demonstrates rather more what he has in mind. My unworthy suspicion is that in his first few days Gordon was striking a series of attitudes designed to give himself the right public image as a new prime minister. He and his advisers were trying to tackle directly what they perceived to be weaknesses in his public image and the perception of him by the outside world.

For example Gordon was always regarded as a control freak, someone who could not delegate, someone who could not stand criticism, a somewhat autocratic figure with difficult relations with his colleagues. The first few months of his premiership therefore saw lots of announcements about Gordon being the national leader, who wished to put himself inside a big tent with all kinds of non political people around him. Gordon presented himself as an enthusiast for Parliamentary reform and a more open democracy, insisted he was going to revive cabinet government and so on.

Now politics has moved on a lot since his first few months and he's lost control of his public image, but I still need to be persuaded this wasn't all a public relations thing and that it has any real substance. Judging Gordon by his reaction at prime minister's question time I think he would actually hate it personally if anything was done to make Parliament more powerful or him more accountable to it.   He can't stand criticism and he's far too sensitive to any criticism of his position. He gives me the impression of someone who regards parliament as a bit of a nuisance in his timetable. Now I will be genuinely quite prepared to be proved wrong.  I don't know whether Gordon has any convictions on Parliamentary government and how strong they are, so I would be happy to retract my criticisms if we saw any sign he was doing anything.
 
Question: By the same token, I think you acknowledge that some of the changes to transfer power from the executive to parliament would need a “spirit of restraint” on the part of an incoming conservative government. Would David Cameron find it easy to let go of these powers?
 
Ken Clarke: Well that's what I keep trying to get David to bind himself to. The taskforce is giving advice to David Cameron.   We don't make policy any more than any of the other policy groups do. The arrangement is that David and the shadow cabinet will then, over the course of the next couple of years, decide how much of this to take on board as policy, how much to make commitments about.

I do accept that I'm asking a leader of the Opposition to commit himself to some binding constraints on his power and subjection to greater accountability than any of his recent predecessors have been prepared to put up with. The reason I took the job on is I think David is genuinely, instinctively of my views on the need to reform and improve Parliament and on cabinet government and the other things we've talked about, and I keep pressing him to tie himself down with some commitments on the subject, and I still believe that he probably will
 
Question: Moving to the taskforce's specific recommendations, you've talked about putting the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments on a statutory footing and introducing sanctions for disregarding its advice. That suggests you think there's some evidence of ex-crown servants or ex-ministers ignoring its advice?
 
Ken Clarke: The problem we have at the moment is people are expected to consult, and I think the present prime minister takes the view that he would expect his colleagues to consult, but the present arrangements leave it quite open to the individual to decide whether or not to take any notice of the advice he gets… and we think that needs tightening up...

There always have been problems with the civil service, I have always been troubled by the sheer volume of civil servants who move from the Ministry of Defence or the armed services into the defence industry with which they've previously been dealing, and I've always been troubled by the number of people in the Department of Health who move from dealing with pharmaceutical issues in the department to work for the giant pharmaceutical companies, I had experience of the second one during my time at the Department of Health.

I have no evidence of any direct impropriety but I do think that at the very least there should be a considerable pause between someone dealing on behalf of the government with some outside industry and then moving to work for exactly the same people that he's just been regulating or negotiating contracts with.

It may be perfectly proper but there's always the uncertain question as to whether someone is consciously or subconsciously influenced by their desire to make their future career inside the organisation they're supposed to be dealing with at arms length on behalf of the public. These are mere suspicions; it's fuzziness about conflict of interests and so on. Now all that could be sorted out by having the committee look at them properly and giving the committee some proper powers, and then it keeps the party clean and puts it beyond doubt that there could be no suggestion of any impropriety it if the committee gave it the OK.
 
Question: One of the taskforce’s reports said that prime minister's questions should "not be considered immutable", suggested it fosters a football crowd mentality, and said that the prime minister might want to look at ending it - do you think that could ever happen?
 
Ken Clarke: Well every prime minister I've ever known and every leader of the Opposition I've known - with the exception of David, I actually don't know his view - have always thought the whole thing was a complete waste of time.  It is an appalling Punch and Judy circus and it's one of the things that gives the public the impression that politics is a lot of yah boo rather childish people deliberately making jokes at each other's expense and trying to score points off each other. Having said that, no one's ever felt able to do anything about it since Tony Blair surprised everybody by changing it to one half-hour session a week.

The fact is it's the only part of the parliamentary procedure that the media take any notice of, almost, and it does have considerable public following. It's only public importance I suppose is just to show MPs and journalists and the public what the frame of mind and the general level of confidence is in he main participants.  You can see whether they're tired or not tired. You can see whether their confidence is up or they're going through a period of rather low morale. You can see whether they're buffeted or not. It's just an exercise in slightly macho mental and physical tussling with each one having to show that he is more bright as a button, more on the ball and more full of vigour and go than his opponent. The political content is virtually nil, but because of its standing our report had to be rather vague.

I don't think any member of the taskforce thought that prime minister’s questions made the world a better place. On the other hand I think most members of the taskforce realised that it's highly unlikely that anybody would ever have the nerve to change it again. The public are quite ambiguous, more of the public like watching it than anything else to do with Parliament, and then most of the public tell you how terrible it is and how appallingly the MPs behave there.  It is just part of the political circus and I can't really be very optimistic that much is going to be done to improve it in the near future.
 
Question: What's it like being in the Treasury during a crisis like Northern Rock?
 
Ken Clarke: The best job I had really was as Chancellor of the Exchequer, because the Treasury's a very strong department and you really have a position which involves you in just about every aspect of government policy. I ran it in my own way.  I used to enjoy a constant atmosphere of debate with my officials and everybody else concerned with it. In a strange way I used to enjoy the crises in every department I was in. In a way one would like to avoid all these shock horror headlines and the sense that events are taking over and so on.

In fact I used to tell myself that the adrenalin runs faster when there's a crisis. So obviously there is the satisfaction of a crisis well dealt with and the sheer horror of one that's going wrong and threatening to overwhelm you. But although one has to take every crisis and every problem seriously and responsibly, the fact is I could never avoid a sense of real excitement when we had a big crisis on hand.

The Treasury itself? Intellectually and in terms of general all-round ability the best department in Whitehall while I was there, its one difficulty being that I did think a lot of the people were somewhat out of touch with the real world. I used to tell my officials that it almost reminded me of the atmosphere at an Oxford or Cambridge college, full of bright young men arguing with each other, all slightly out of touch with reality.
 
Question: Are they a match for the bright young things at Goldman Sachs do you think?
 
Ken Clarke: They were in my day, I have no reason to think they're not. One thing that took us 20 years to achieve is that there is fortunately a lot more going backwards and forwards than there used to be. When I first became a minister which was a long time ago now, senior civil servants were deeply shocked by the suggestion that they should recruit people into the civil service who'd been working in the private sector, and it was thought that any civil servant who left the public service to join some private company had somehow brought disgrace on the good name of the department.

When I and many other Thatcher ministers used to argue that it would be useful to have an interchange between the two cultures and that people would be developed by having experiences in both private and public sectors it was very hard going to get the mandarins to agree. It's now transformed I hope, and it's quite expected that people will go backward and forward at different stages of their career.  It must be useful for a senior civil servants to have some experience of working for a large company or private sector organisation. Things change very rapidly, the Treasury is now - thanks to Gordon Brown's attempt to run the entire government from the Treasury in competition with his prime minister - the Treasury now employs vastly more people than it ever did in my day.
 
Question: You've made some fairly well-publicised contributions to the debate on the EU treaty, is your party's position at the moment sustainable and is it doing the party any good?
 
Ken Clarke: The majority of the party are obviously determined to try to stop this treaty being ratified and that's entirely consistent I suppose with the policy of the party for the last 10 years since we went into opposition. I happen not to agree with it. I think you can only give the treaty the reading they give it if you believe that the European Union is some kind of monster conspiracy where they're all agreeing to sacrifice their own powers as nation states in order to deprive the British of their powers as a nation state.

As I don't share that view, I tend to find I have difficulty in understanding the reasons they give for being against it. In my opinion the treaty follows the reform which was quite obviously required once we enlarged the union to its present 27-nation membership, we do need to improve the decision-making procedure to make sure that decisions can be taken at all. I approve of making the European Commission smaller. I approve of stopping the business of having six month presidencies of the Council of Ministers, and I approve of the extension of qualified majority voting to stop one small nation blocking progress on things that matter to us like climate change or energy security.

So I support the treaty. I can't help but think that, had we been in office, a Conservative government would have been very pleased to have negotiated this treaty, and it would not have contemplated a referendum on it.

I'm against referendums on all subjects.  I share the view which 90 per cent of MPs had until 10 years ago that referendums are just a way of getting round parliamentary government and a way of avoiding the House of Commons. I think Parliament should be stronger not weaker.  Nothing would make Parliament weaker than taking major decisions out of its hands and going for direct democracy by an opinion poll.

I think all the major parties have considerable difficulties explaining where they are. The government cannot explain why the present treaty is so different from the Giscard treaty that it does not need the referendum that they promised. The Conservative Party finds it quite impossible to explain that this treaty is so different from the Single European Act and Maastricht that it is necessary to have a referendum on it when we never had a referendum on those treaties.

And the liberals find it quite impossible to explain why they're against a referendum on the treaty but for some extraordinary reason want a re-run of the 1975 referendum on whether we should be in the European Union at all. So I therefore sat throughout the debate and listened to the bits on the referendums finding the official policy position of all three political parties almost incredible.
 
Question: What about the idea of a post-ratification treaty?
 
Ken Clarke: That means we all cast a considered vote as MPs saying in the national interest we should ratify this treaty. Then we hold a referendum and we're told as a result of the triumph of the Sun and the Daily Telegraph that we can't, so we're all meant to vote against our own opinion of the national interest for something that we don't believe in. When Harold Wilson held his silly referendum I remember causing a fuss at the time by making it quite clear I wouldn't change my vote whatever the referendum said.

I owe my constituents my judgement and they can throw me out if they don't agree with the results of it every time I submit myself for re-election. I'm not going to vote totally contrary to my own judgement of the national interest because some opinion poll says the newspapers have persuaded people to disagree with me. That's why I always agreed with Margaret, that referendums were the great instrument of dictators; Napoleon and Mussolini were very fond of using them. So I hope we're going to get this over.  Europe has had a poisonous effect on politics for many years and House of Commons debates always take an extraordinary turn every time Europe is mentioned.

With any luck we can get this treaty ratified and then get on with the serious issues in Europe, which are things like economic reform, energy security, foreign and security policy, particularly relations with the Russian Federation, and so on. I think practically everybody in Western Europe is fed up to the back teeth with institutional reform.

The other point I would make is that if you go to a referendum and it says ‘no, you shouldn’t ratify’, what do you then? I'm not sure that the opponents of the Treaty know what they would do if they succeeded in Parliament and stopped it. The idea that the other 26 government would immediately say we're wrong, we'll abandon the treaty we've just negotiated and we will start renegotiating a new treaty along the grounds that the British would want is preposterous.  They wouldn't do that.

I find when I meet European politicians they're absolutely astonished by the extent to which concessions have been made to the British government already to try to make it palatable for the right wing press in Britain.  I think if we were not to ratify the treaty, it would cause despair amongst our friends across the European Union, but they would not allow us to lead them into another institutional crisis as we tried to alter the institutions again. Our enemies across Europe would point out that the new treaty has a provision for countries to leave the European Union if they wish.

Our enemies in Europe would no doubt invite us to open negotiations on some association agreement, to see if we could get as good terms as Iceland and Lichtenstein in our continuing association with the single market. So you may gather I very much hope it is ratified and we do not have too much political nonsense on the way.

This article has subsequently been amended by ePolitix.com, with the agreement of the interviewee (Ken Clarke), to reflect the fact that the cabinet secretary found that David Blunkett had acted entirely properly when taking up share options whilst out of government in 2005. Neither ePolitix.com nor Ken Clarke intended to suggest any wrongdoing on the part of Mr Blunkett and we apologise for any offence this may have caused.