Hague stays vague on EU renegotiation details

William Hague stayed remarkably jovial throughout his two-hour appearance before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee today, chuckling happily away even when he was asked to imagine what he’d do if the European Union had never existed.

But the Foreign Secretary was considerably less revelatory than he was cheery, offering no new details at all on his party’s position on renegotiating Britain’s relationship with the EU or on a subsequent referendum. He told a slightly disappointed-looking John Baron that ‘it’s too early to speak of red lines [for a negotiation]… we don’t publish our red lines: that doesn’t necessarily help bring about a successful negotiation.’ He did tell Rory Stewart that when assessing whether the renegotiated relationship would win support from the British public in the referendum when it did come, the government would ‘be able to say that the European Union in future will be more democratically accountable, that power will be able to flow to nation states… that it is being operated fairly to all concerned, including those outside certain structures such as the eurozone’ and that the negotiation has ‘done what we need to do to allow us to compete’.