With 99 days to go until a general election in Britain, the former leader of the ruling Conservative Party told CNBC that the race was "one of the closest" he can recall.
"It's one of the closest, (looking at) current opinion polls," William Hague, leader of the House of Commons and former foreign secretary, told CNBC Wednesday.
The Conservative Party, which rules in a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats and is led by Prime Minister David Cameron, is marginally ahead of the rival Labour party in opinion polls.
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Hague said the party, which he led between 1997 and 2001, was not in talks with any other parties about forming another coalition after May's election.
"We're going for a majority Conservative government…to implement our long-term economic plan and to take it to success, we need a Conservative majority," he added.
UKIP coalition?
Faced with an increasingly euroskeptic British public, the Conservative Party has promised a referendum on European Union membership by 2017, should they win the election.
Such a move has raised the possibility of Britain leaving the regional trade and political alliance, a policy promoted by the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP).
Asked whether the Conservatives could consider governing with UKIP in a coalition, Hague said it would be "difficult" to imagine such an alliance working.
"It was not clear from day-to-day what their (UKIP's) policies actually are," he said. "For instance, their policy on the National Health Service (NHS) has changed several times over the last few weeks and I don't know how you'd make a coalition with a party like that."
Deficit reduction
Cameron and his party have presided over a period of economic recovery in the U.K. that has outpaced its euro zone neighbors. Unemployment stands at a more-than six-year low and economic growth remains resilient. In the fourth quarter of 2014, the economy grew by 2.6 percent year-by-year, data released Tuesday showed -- the strongest annual growth since 2007.
"We want the debate to be about the deficit, we have cut the deficit dramatically," Hague said. "We plan to further reduce and eliminate that deficit in the next three years."
He added that no other party could deliver that "at all," and that the Labour party would send the deficit "skyrocketing" again.
On its website, however, the Labour Party insisted it would cut the deficit every year and "balance the books" if elected.
'Burning building with no exits'
With European Union membership forming an important part of the political debate in the U.K., Hague said that the election of left-wing anti-austerity party Syriza in Greece last weekend was indicative of a "great deal of discontent across Europe."
"We're seeing in the euro zone a failure to generate the economic growth and creation of jobs that we're seeing in the U.K.," he added.
Hague called himself a long-standing critic of the euro and, in 1999, called the single currency project a "burning building with no exits."
He said that this sentiment was now reflected in some other euro zone countries, like Greece, and that the euro zone had "very serious flaws."
- By CNBC's Holly Ellyatt, follow her on Twitter @HollyEllyatt.