William Hague’s foreign office era: subdued and subservient

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/15/william-hague-foreign-office-era

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The progressive collapse of the Libyan regime is the epitaph on William Hague’s era as foreign secretary. It has been an age without a theme, rhetoric without content. When he took office he boasted that Britain would have a new “global reach and influence”. He left as the emblem of that “reach”, a new Libya, fell into anarchy.

Hague was a Yorkshire outsider whose star shone in the 1990s, not unlike Boris Johnson’s today. Yet he never recovered from leading his party to defeat in 2001. A brilliant and witty speaker, bursting with Euroscepticism, became curiously subdued under David Cameron. He adhered to the first task of a foreign secretary: never to speak unless spoken to by Downing Street. It meant an end to his facility for “speaking human” and a lurch into the cliches of diplomacy. A Hague speech became a Foreign Office dirge, awash in wars on terror, wars on want, wars on rape and a world of “unacceptable” regimes.

Cameron, and therefore Hague, took their cue not from Thatcher’s robust individualism abroad but from the eerie subservience of Tony Blair to the Washington neo-cons. The agonising retreat from Iraq and Afghanistan and the reckless intervention in Libya suggested an inability to articulate a world role, a Foreign Office desperate to “punch above its weight”.

This outlook guided an empty belligerence towards Libya, Iran, Egypt, Syria and Russia, and a kowtowing to the Gulf states and China because of their economic might. Buying carriers implied a global role that was then denied by defence force cuts. London passed public judgment on any and every world event, from atrocities in Nigeria to killings in Palestine. Megaphone became a policy substitute.

Hague’s job was to bring a Foreign Office institutionally pro-European and sceptical of American entanglements to serve a prime minister whose inclinations were the opposite. His final act was to negotiate Cameron’s fixation with stopping Jean-Claude Juncker’s appointment as EU president. In this he failed. In all these matters, whatever might have been a Hague personal view was obscured by his loyalty to his boss. Finally, the one service he might have performed his country, of building a more settled relationship with Europe, was denied him. He never did have his referendum.