Hague in the Foreign Office: merging party differences

William Hague, the new Foreign Secretary, says he and Prime Minister David Cameron have long espoused “Liberal Conservatism” in foreign affairs – meaning encouraging freedom, human rights and democracy while espousing a hard-headed approach to the national interest.

So maybe it won’t be such a problem to merge, or fudge, the Tory blue and Lib Dem yellow files which Foreign Office civil servants have been juggling for the last few months.

The Tories will have to retreat from the outer edges of Euroscepticism; the Lib Dems are unlikely to get through their ideas of publicly discounting military action in Iran, and pressuring Israel on the blockade of Gaza.

A new National Security Council will meet for the first time today. Chaired by the prime minister, it will bring together the Foreign Office, Defence, the Home Office, DFID and critical departments such as Energy. The idea is that all these issues are indivisible – a potential terror attack requires the attention of all. Sir Peter Ricketts, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, will become National Security Advisor.

We’re likely to see power swing back towards the Foreign Office – Prime Ministers Brown and Blair insisted on managing foreign affairs themselves, but Mr Hague is a senior figure in the Tory party, with more experience than David Cameron, so he’s expected to be much more prominent in the cabinet and on the world stage.

The big question: how can the most Eurosceptic and most Europhile parties work together? The answer is that in many ways the decisions – most importantly, signing up to the Lisbon Treaty – are in the past, and revisiting them isn’t high on even the Tories’ agenda.

Nor do the Lib Dems want more treaties – it’s a question of working with Europe on cross border issues such as justice and immigration. Civil servants can make anything routine, and that’s what most decisions will be.

Which leaves the question of tone – how Eurosceptic will Mr Hague sound as he represents Britain around the world? These days it’s hard to put out one message for your recalcitrant back-benchers and a different one for everyone else.

Maybe the presence of Lib Dems in the coalition will make it easier for him apologetically to spurn the anti-Europe tendency. He has said that he has no desire to provoke a confrontation with European partners.

Funny how the differences talked up in the election campaign can seem so easy to play down when needs must.