My guest is Dominic Grieve.

Dominic Grieve is a former Attorney General of England and Wales, former MP and a barrister.

Welcome to the podcast, Dominic.

Thank you. It's great pleasure to be with you.

I thought we'd start, Dominic, by talking about the Conservative Party and what's happened to when it comes to Europe, the party that

took the United Kingdom into Europe and the Ted Heath's premiership, the party that championed the

single market and pushed very much for enlargement of the EU. It doesn't seem like the party

we see today. So what did, how do you describe and how do you explain the evolution of the party along this path?

I'm afraid the party has failed in what I would have seen as one of its primary missions in the last 30 years,

which was to improve the United Kingdom's influence and its economic well-being by participation in Europe.

Of course, some of the problems that came to the fall with the Brexit referendum have been around

within the Conservative Party for a long time.

I've got to remember there was a significant element within the Conservative Party that was against

joining the EEC in the 1970s, but they were very much marginalised and they were a minority.

What we've seen in the last 15 years is the growth of a measure of anti-European populism, and it certainly grew, I think,

quite considerably in the post-2008 period after the financial crisis. And whilst some of the

elements doing this were outside the party, you can see Mr Farage and his UK Independence Party as one manifestation of it.

It was also quite present within the Conservative Party itself.

I was aware of this when I was an MP when I looked at the membership of my own constituency

association and their views.

They tended to be Eurosceptic.

That's to say that they saw the European Union as too bureaucratic and holding Europe and the United Kingdom back by over-regulation.

...