Top 15 William Hague Quotes

I don’t envy the remaining Tory MPs. It was a hard job in 1997 and this time it will be even tougher. There's a moment when you understand you face the challenge of your lifetime, but that's a sign you’ve only just begun to grasp it. For the Conservative Party, the next big move can start a recovery or bring extinction.

Those of us who have been in public life have all had the privilege of meeting extraordinary people — soldiers who kept fighting when injured, Paralympic athletes who triumphed, small businesses that learnt from failure to succeed — and have seen the power of moving on without rancour or self-pity. Political leaders would do well to aspire to those attributes and to shoulder their own share of responsibility. If you became prime minister, with a majority behind you and a decent term in front of you, but were overthrown amid chaos, there is indeed someone to blame. It’s you.

Labour looks less alarming than under Neil Kinnock but it is also a lot less exciting than under either him or Blair. The party is not the wave of the future, as it was in the early days of New Labour. Sir Keir Starmer's team are currently interesting because they are judged to be close to power, rather than being close to power because they are judged to be interesting. And excitement doesn't even come into it.

In the distant days when I was Tory leader I had a private rule never to appeal for party unity. This was mainly because, if your request as a leader for unity is promptly followed by more infighting, you look even less credible and in charge than before you asked. It was also a recognition that unity is seldom produced by calling for it. Unity arises from a leader creating the conditions for it.

[On the history of former prime ministers and their successors] Now think of Boris Johnson. All of these feelings will apply to him. He is going to be [Edward] Heath with jokes added in, and [Margaret] Thatcher with consistency taken out, all rolled into a bundle of resentment, denial, attention-seeking and attempted vindication that will be a permanent nightmare for the new prime minister.
That he wants revenge on Rishi Sunak is already apparent, but if Liz Truss is elected, she will face the identical problem. The chances of her loyalty to him being repaid are close to zero. Boris lives his life as a performance, and he will want the next act to fill every seat in the theatre of British political life.
The Conservative Party had no choice but to remove Johnson from office. His standards of governance and veracity had fallen below what reasonable people could defend. The downside is that the party will always have the problem of what he will say next.

[The Chequers Brexit proposals are] the most that can be achieved within the inevitable and inescapable constraints

Imagine going back to the people of this country and saying 'you got this wrong in the referendum, you may have turned out in record numbers and most of the country voted to leave but nevertheless we think you got it wrong and we are going to run it again'. Imagine the hate-filled campaign that would divide this country. I do not think that is a price worth paying.

[<nowiki/>Philip Hammond] has evidently been trying to persuade his cabinet colleagues that we should be seeking to stay in the EU single market and customs union during a transition and 'implementation' phase lasting to 2022, followed by a free trade deal with our former partners after that. This is seen by longstanding advocates of leaving as a 'soft' position or a climbdown. But in reality it is a plan to rescue Brexit from an approaching disaster.

[There is potential for Brexit to become the] greatest economic, diplomatic and constitutional muddle in the modern history of the UK, with unknowable consequences for the country, the government and the Brexit project itself

The electorate voted to leave the EU, and therefore we leave. What is more, the number of people who voted to do so was higher than the number of votes cast for any government in our history. To me and many of my former colleagues in government who preferred to remain, the argument was over.

If you are less influential in crafting the overall approach of the EU you end up with less influence in the rest of the world.

Any [<nowiki/>Brexit] deal is bound to be full of compromises which one group or another in Parliament finds difficult to stomach.

To end up destroying the UK and gravely weakening the European Union would not be a very clever day's work. So, even as a long-standing critic of so much of that struggling organisation, I am unlikely in 2016 to vote to leave it.

There has never been any doubt in my mind that we should have an embassy in Tehran if the circumstances allowed

We are determined to reach a diplomatic settlement to the Iran nuclear crisis.