Four British Foreign Secretaries have resigned since Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister. Three of them, William Keegan writes, were honourable men:
[Lord] Carrington resigned over the way the Foreign Office had mishandled the prelude to the invasion of the Falklands by Argentina in 1982 by sending misleading signals about our attitude towards retention of those remote islands in the south Atlantic.
Sir Geoffrey Howe resigned in 1989 on the not unreasonable grounds that Thatcher’s attitude to – guess what – Europe had rendered his job impossible. Entering into negotiations was, he declared in a scintillating resignation speech, “like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain”.
Robin Howe resigned over British participation in the invasion of Iraq. He had the odd misadventure while foreign secretary, and in fact had moved on to become leader of the house when he resigned. His was an honourable resignation on an extremely important issue.
He died young, but his resignation speech still reads like one of the great political speeches of the postwar years, and he goes down in history with his reputation intact. By contrast, Tony Blair’s reputation looks as though it will never recover from his having misled the nation with the “dodgy dossier”. This is a tragedy on several levels, the most recent manifestation being that few people take his pronouncements on Brexit seriously, although he talks perfect sense when saying that the best Brexit deal is to remain where we are, and forget the whole idea.
Not so with Boris Johnson. He wreaks of ambition, not principle:
Johnson put his crazed ambition to be leader of the Conservative party and prime minister above the national interest. Taking advantage of his charismatic appeal to the nation – which has always amazed me: he is basically what we used to call a twerp – he opted, against what we are told was his better judgment (always assuming he has any), to be the most prominent leader of the Leave campaign, during which, characteristically, he lied continually.
We are cursed these days with more than our share of men like Johnson. Something to think about as Trump meets Putin.
