by Paul Goodman and Mark Fox
William Hague was in his mid-thirties when he left Government and the Wales Office behind him. By the time he returned to the Cabinet table and entered the Foreign Office, he was almost 50 - an age he reached earlier this year. In between, the public world of this gifted, witty, highly intelligent, rather old-fashioned House-of-Commons-man politician - for whom nothing in life had previously ever really gone wrong - was turned upside-down. Under his leadership, the party made next to no progress in the 2001 election: in the plain kind of language that is associated with his native Yorkshire, it was stuffed.
The man born to be Prime Minister became a man who has had his time. Hague left the front bench, wrote books, learned to play the piano, joined the after-dinner speaking circuit, went on Have I Got News For You. A question posed earlier this year, when he uncharacteristically released details of his and his wife's struggle to have children, was: has he lost his mojo? A more pertinent one perhaps is: did he ever get it back? Did he recover from the electoral humiliation of 2001? Has the right-winger who warned that the Britain was in danger of becoming "a foreign land" settled for living as a centrist, for seeing out his time as a great servant of his party?
Government certainly suits him: as immaculately turned-out as ever, he rises cheerily to greet us in an office so vast as actually to have an echo. On a shelf near his desk, a big picture of Ffion, his wife, is balanced out by one of the three men at the top of the Conservative Party: David Cameron, George Osborne, and himself. Let's try him on a matter that preoccupies our readers: the EU. The Prime Minister recently told the Spectator that the crisis in Europe gives "opportunities for Britain to maximise what we want in terms of our engagement with Europe". The magazine read that as code for the repatriation of powers. Is that right, and if so which powers? How much do we want back?
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