Our diplomatic war of words with Iran is brewing nicely. Last week the foreign secretary, David Miliband, condemned as “disturbing” the Ahmadinejad regime’s “lack of restraint” in its treatment of pro-democracy demonstrators. Tehran’s response was not long in coming: it retorted that “Britain will get slapped in the mouth if it does not stop its nonsense”.
Ooh, it’s handbags at dawn ... or it would have been if Miliband had decided to fire back a further volley. I would have enjoyed something along the lines of: “Please consider our statement about your ‘lack of restraint’ as withdrawn. What Her Majesty’s foreign secretary meant to convey was that your murder, torture and punitive sodomising of dissidents is everything we have come to expect from a corrupt clique of depraved and power-crazed weirdos. We apologise if our earlier statement did not make this clear.”
Perhaps the invective department of the Foreign Office (if only it existed) was too busy dealing with the latest spat with China: last week also produced a diplomatic démarche over the fate of a Briton, Akmal Shaikh, executed by the Chinese authorities for smuggling heroin. After the Chinese government refused to listen to Gordon Brown’s pleas that Shaikh’s sentence be commuted, our prime minister declared himself to be “appalled and disappointed”, while Ivan Lewis, the Foreign Office minister, summoned China’s ambassador to tell her that her country had “failed in its basic human rights responsibilities”.
As a keen student of the ancient Chinese art of diplomatic insult, I felt let down by the unexpectedly mild response from the Chinese foreign ministry: “We express strong dissatisfaction and opposition to the British government’s reaction.” Come on, surely they could have done better than that, especially given their country’s vivid historical recollection of the opium wars against the British.
I remember, while visiting Chris Patten when he was governor of Hong Kong, his stunned amusement at the insults lobbed at him by mainland officials furious with his attempts to introduce democracy: “serpent”, “old whore”, “criminal of a 1,000 generations” and — worst of all — “tango dancer” were among the imaginative descriptions they provided of the amiable former Tory chairman.
Perhaps China’s mild response to the fulminations of British ministers over the execution of a drug smuggler stems from the fact that it had nothing to be afraid of (it definitely did have something to fear from Patten’s attempts to introduce the democratic virus into the Chinese bloodstream). So far as we can tell, its own public was to a man behind the decision to execute Shaikh; indeed, there would have been outrage if this foreign heroin trafficker had been spared the sentence which would have been meted out to any Chinese convicted of the same offence.
The government’s decision to make such a public attempt to persuade the Chinese to intervene provides a most instructive illustration of the flawed nature of new Labour’s conception of what foreign policy should be. For the fascinating aspect of our reprimand to the Chinese ambassador was that we did not complain that a Briton had been treated in a way that no Briton should, instead that China had “failed in its basic human rights responsibilities”. This has nothing to do with defending British interests, but everything to do with the notion that the objective of our foreign policy should be to advance the entire planet towards a state of grace and enlightenment roughly similar to that existing in Islington or Hampstead.
Some will object to this characterisation of new Labour’s foreign policy, citing the example of Tony Blair’s support of George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Yet the former prime minister saw this venture as part of the strategy to elevate British foreign policy above the constraints of mere national interest. This was made excruciatingly clear by the British ambassador to Washington at the time, Sir Christopher Meyer, in his evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war. Meyer said Blair consistently failed to pursue British interests in his dealings with Bush, even to the extent of failing to exert any pressure on the US president to give the British exemption from (illegal) steel tariffs, imposed at the same time as Bush was seeking our support for his plans to remove Saddam Hussein.
As papers released last week by the National Archives demonstrate, the contrast with Margaret Thatcher’s way of dealing with the US could not have been starker. Despite the closeness of her political bond with Ronald Reagan, she was single-minded in defending purely British interests even when they clashed with Reagan’s most cherished policies.
For example, she waged a ferocious behind-the-scenes battle against US plans to penalise companies — such as Rolls-Royce — supplying equipment for a Soviet gas pipeline from Siberia to western Europe. The Americans were astounded, given Thatcher’s hatred for the Soviet regime, that she fought tooth, nail and handbag to block their sanctions against the pipeline. She even went public, telling a television interviewer in September 1982 that she felt that Britain would be “deeply wounded” if the American sanctions were to take effect. Two months later, the US abandoned the idea of sanctions against the Siberian pipeline contractors.
When I asked Meyer last week why it was that the new Labour government had been so unwilling to press the British national interest in its negotiations with Bush, he replied that it thought the whole idea of the national interest was “passé”. To put it most charitably, new Labour believed that in a “globalised” world, foreign policy could no longer be about anything other than “global” issues — and that Britain should be a leader in promulgating the appropriate “global” policies.
Hence its long-standing obsession with being the “leader in the battle against climate change” — a presumption that met a devastating rebuff in Copenhagen last month, when it was brought home to the government what a colossal exercise in vanity and hubris this was on its part: surprise! China, India, Brazil, South Africa — make your own list — will not be lectured on their responsibilities to their own generations as yet unborn by affluent, middle-class eco-moralists from Whitehall.
The most telling critique of this delusional foreign policy comes in regular instalments in the form of a blog by the former British ambassador to Poland, Charles Crawford. It’s called CharlesCrawford.biz and if you want to know just how much in despair many of our diplomats are, this is the place to look. In a recent dispatch, Crawford lamented: “Who gives the impression of thinking that power exists, and is there to be deployed in the national interest? Or having any national interest at all?”
One would hope that the Conservative party is taking Crawford’s advice but there is not much sign of it. There was silence from the Tory front bench about the government’s Copenhagen delusions — mainly because David Cameron shared them down to the last detail. Indeed, he even prevailed upon the normally no-nonsense William Hague to make a long speech about the “challenge of climate change” in which the shadow foreign secretary praised “the EU’s effective leadership in tackling climate change” and said “the promotion of a global low-carbon high-growth economy is one of the Foreign Office’s strategic priorities. It will remain so if we are elected to serve as the next government”.
I suppose, given Mr Hague’s renowned rhetorical skills, the only thing we can look forward to is a better class of insult towards whichever nation fails fully to appreciate the fact that we act solely for the interest of the entire planet, ungrateful though it might be.
dominic.lawson@sunday-times.co.uk
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Dominic Lawson writes a weekly column for the Sunday Times and also contributes book reviews and interviews. He won many awards as a newspaper and magazine editor and in his spare time wrote an acclaimed book about Grandmaster chess, The Inner Game.
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