Question: Do you think that London has a realistic chance of hosting the Olympics in 2012?

Sir Gerald Kaufman: I haven’t the faintest notion. It is in as a contender, it's number three on the shortlist and obviously it has to come up to number one on the shortlist if it's to win.

Question: Is the government doing enough to support the bid?

Sir Gerald Kaufman: My view throughout this has been that if you’re making a bid of this kind there should be a minister solely in charge of it in the way that other countries have done.

I am not in any way criticising Lord Coe, but he doesn’t have his hands on the machinery of government and I think that’s what is required.

Our select committee has recommended both with this and other bids, the appointment of a minister to be specifically in charge.

They put Ian McCartney in charge of the bid for the Commonwealth Games, which led to an extremely successful outcome.

We’ve had no government response to our recommendation. What we’ve got is this rather complex machinery and I don’t think it's the way to go about a bid of this magnitude.

Although I think the government is wholeheartedly behind the bid I just don’t think they have set it up in the right way.

Kaufman on the BBC

Question: In the past you have said that the case for privatising the BBC was becoming "unanswerable". After Hutton is it time to abolish the licence fee?

Sir Gerald Kaufman: It’s a bit premature for me to comment on that because we’re in the middle of our enquiry into BBC charter renewal.

We’ve got a lot of evidence still to take and it will be some months before we complete our enquiry and it would be jumping the gun for me to state an opinion before we’ve completed that.

Question: Is the BBC neglecting its core role and wasting too much money on things like satellite channels and websites?

Sir Gerald Kaufman: This is something the committee has considered before and there is criticism that very large sums of money are being spent on things like News 24, for example, which has scarcely got an audience at all.

The other BBC digital channels have numbers of viewers so minute it’s pretty well impossible to count them.

It is a lot of money to spend and if there is a licence, then licence payers have got a right to expect to get best value for their money.

But we do have a new administration, we’ve got a new chairman and a new director general and they have to be given a chance.

Question: Should the BBC lose the Parliament channel?

Sir Gerald Kaufman: It’s a public service I suppose and I doubt that it costs that much money to produce. After all there are no real production costs.

Question: Is the date for analogue switch off realistic?

Sir Gerald Kaufman: The government has just changed the date for the switch off because they recognised that the previous switch off date was not realistic at all.

The BBC themselves saw that after Mr Grade and Mr Thomson came in to the committee. They thought it should be delayed by two years and that’s what the government have decided to do.

Kaufman on press intrusion

Question: For a long time you’ve advocated the introduction of a press privacy law. In the wake of the coverage of David Blunkett’s private life is the pressure growing for an end to self regulation?

Sir Gerald Kaufman: These stories about David Blunkett we don’t know if a word of them is true.

People should have the right to criticise David Blunkett and hold him to account for his job as home secretary but I don’t believe that any of us, you me, the newspapers has the right to intrude upon his private life unless his private life intrudes upon his ability to do his job.

As far as I can see none of these people in the newspapers making these, so called, revelations have said for a moment that his private life impinges on his job as home secretary.

There is also the other person alleged to be involved. I can’t see that it’s any business of anybody except herself, and those who are closely connected with her, what she does in her private life.

Roy Greenslade had a piece in the Guardian saying he believed the coverage breached the press code. I just think it's terrible that these things are done.

I can’t think of any other country, except the United States, where this kind of thing happens.

I can’t believe that in mainland Europe the private life of a Cabinet minister would be subjected to this kind of intrusion.

I think it’s absolutely terrible that any public or private person for that matter should be subjected to this kind of intrusion and it is time for something to be done about it.

Kaufman on parliament

Question: As an opponent of hunting how do feel about the fact that after seven years of a Labour government parliament has not yet decided on the issue?

Sir Gerald Kaufman: I'm reasonably hopeful that parliament will be given the opportunity to express its view on the subject, not in the next parliament but in the next session.

I very much hope so and I would be very disappointed if it went beyond what is likely to be the final session of this parliament.

Question: You sat on the Royal Commission that considered House of Lords reform. How do feel about the current arrangements and what kind of second chamber would you like to see.

Sir Gerald Kaufman: I think that the government would have been well advised to have accepted our recommendations as soon as we published them. The problem would have been settled by now. As it is the government havered because Robin Cook had a different agenda.

In the end they’ve ended up basically accepting our recommendations five years later. If only the government had bitten that bullet at the time this problem would be out of the way.

Kaufman on Israel

Question: You have described Israel as a pariah state. What is your assessment of the current situation and do you think Tony Blair could do more to influence the situation through the Americans.

Sir Gerald Kaufman: I think that the current situation is appalling and even more to blame than the Israeli government is George Bush.

What has happened in the last few days with this terrible person Condoleezza Rice, sitting down and specifically approving settler expansion is an outrage.

It exposes the hypocrisy of the Bush administration. They say they support the Road Map and then they connive in the breach of it.

British influence is all well and good but the problem is with this US government is that it is the most avaricious administration I’ve ever come across, in that it takes everything it can get but it doesn’t give anything back.

Britain does have a special role but we don’t use that role as effectively as we might.

Question: You voted for the invasion of Iraq. Given the absence of weapons of mass destruction and the continuing insurgency do you still think it was the right thing to do and is the aftermath being properly managed?

Sir Gerald Kaufman: I never believed that weapons of mass destruction were the issue.

I believed that Iraq being in breach of security council resolutions was the real issue.

The government was rather stupid to have gone wider than that. If it had just stuck to resolution breaches specifically it wouldn’t have got into the jam it did.

I warned against having a war two years ago and I don’t think for a moment that it was absolutely the right thing to do, but it happened and there’s no point in repining in what happened.

The aftermath has not been properly managed at all and I warned about that as well.

Kaufman on Gordon Brown

Question: If the PM goes for a full third term will he need a major reshuffle, moving Brown out of Treasury in order to consolidate his position?

Sir Gerald Kaufman: Tony Blair will carry out a major reshuffle before the election. Assuming the election is next year and Labour win there will obviously be a reshuffle after the election, there always has been.

The prime minister will do whatever he wants to do and I think it is inevitable that Gordon Brown will be moved out of the Treasury.

If we win the next election he will have been chancellor for eight years, he’s an excellent chancellor but eight years is a very long time to be in that job.

Whether he’d accept any other position, who can tell? You’d have to ask him, I don’t know his mind, I’ve never discussed it with him.

Question: If Labour do win that third term is it time for a return to core Labour thinking?

Sir Gerald Kaufman: I think we have core Labour thinking. The national minimum wage, the New Deal, trade unionism at GCHQ, money transferred from the assisted places scheme to primary schools, we’ve had a huge amount of core Labour thinking.

It’s just that there are people who liked what the Labour party was doing when we lost four elections in row and don’t like it now.

Well I believe the first part of core Labour thinking is to be in power, without that all your thinking is a waste of time.

Question: Do you think Whitehall is overmanned?

Sir Gerald Kaufman: I’ve not the slightest idea. What I do think is that ministers should be much firmer in the lead they give to civil servants. I think that far too often ministers do what civil servants want done rather then the other way around.

Question: Will you be standing again, what else would you like to achieve in politics?

Sir Gerald Kaufman: I was reselected a couple of years ago, beyond that I will see. I’m just at the point now where I just help my constituents, that’s my main job now.