Choose your weapons : the British Foreign Secretary : 200 years of argument, success and failure

425 Pages·2011·2.7 MB·English

by  Hurd

Praise for Choose Your Weapons
‘Douglas Hurd has done the impossible. Together with his co-author, Edward
Young, he has produced a page-turning book about the history of British foreign
policy’ Denis MacShane, Independent ‘One of the great achievements of this
thoughtful and elegant book is to emphasise the thread of continuity running
through British foreign policy from the age of Napoleon to the cold war … a
book of great authority and insight’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times ‘Highly
readable … I enjoyed Choose Your Weapons immensely, particularly the
magnificently colourful account of the Bevin and Eden years … Any future
Foreign Secretary would be well advised to read this engrossing book on their
first day in office’
Jack Straw, Observer ‘A highly readable fusion of archival scholarship and
personal experience, mixing vivid portrayals of the personalities and private
lives of their chosen protagonists with cool analysis of the policy choices they
made’
John Campbell, Mail on Sunday ‘Full of wry, unillusioned wisdom. There are
some delicious apercus … All Douglas Hurd’s characters are portrayed
sympathetically, even when they fail’
Bruce Anderson, Independent ‘That Douglas Hurd was once Foreign Secretary
lends piquancy to his elegant account of that office … a very canny, diplomatic
book’
Scotland on Sunday ‘This elegant examination of the contrasting strands of
British foreign policy from the Napoleonic wars to the Suez debacle … is an
entertaining book, enriched by the insights of an experienced practitioner’
Economist ‘Elegant, stimulating and shrewdly perceptive’
Sunday Business Post (Ireland) ‘This is a fascinating book’
David Owen, Guardian
For Judy

CHOOSE YOUR
WEAPONS
THE BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY
200 Years of Argument, Success and Failure DOUGLAS HURD
and Edward Young
CONTENTS
Praise for Choose Your Weapons
Dedication
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Prelude
1. Castlereagh and Canning
2. Aberdeen and Palmerston
3. Derby (and Disraeli)
4. Salisbury
5. Grey
6. Ramsay MacDonald and Austen Chamberlain
7. Bevin and Eden
Epilogue
Bibliography
Notes
Further Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A literary partnership (this is my third) needs strong foundations. Edward Young
and I had worked strenuously together on my biography of Robert Peel. We
formed the habit of pooling historical ideas and impressions, a haphazard
collection at first, which gained gradually in coherence and bred much fierce,
enjoyable argument. We divided the writing, but each was conscious that the
other stood at his elbow.
This process advanced a stage when my wife, Judy, and I went to a conference
at Knowsley organised by Professor Charmley of the University of East Anglia.
The theme of the conference was appeasement as a continuing strand in
Conservative foreign policy rather than as a term of abuse. The hero of that
occasion was John Vincent because of his brilliant editing of the diaries of
Disraeli’s Foreign Secretary, the 15th Lord Derby. I was fascinated by Derby’s
intelligent but resolutely inactive approach to foreign policy, and wanted to
know more.
Shortly after this, Ed Young enjoyed two years at Yale on a Mellon
Scholarship from Clare College, Cambridge. He was wafted up into the heady
heights of the Grand Strategy program at Yale under the benevolent gaze of
veteran prophets and grand viziers such as Paul Kennedy, John Gaddis, Charles
Hill and Ted Bromund. As part of that exercise, the participants enacted as
triumphs of theatre their analyses and solutions to the world’s main problems. In
quieter moments Ed wrote an essay about Castlereagh, Canning and the tension
between their different concepts of British foreign policy.
Other influences came to bear. I had always been fascinated by Anthony
Eden, who was Foreign Secretary when I joined the Foreign Service. The
contrast between his successes as Foreign Secretary in 1954 and the disaster of
Suez two years later still grips and cautions me today. Ed and I both read Ferdy
Mount’s stimulating novel, Umbrella, about the sad, mild, Lord Aberdeen,
whose passion for conciliation we already knew from our work on Peel. Other
fragments of knowledge and argument began to form a pattern in our minds.
Some of the issues were well to the fore in public discussion as Britain and
America digested the awkward lessons of the Iraq War.
It was, I think, during a visit to Saudi Arabia with a quite different agenda that
we decided to pull our thoughts together into a book about eleven British
Foreign Secretaries. Having divided the work, we had to immerse ourselves in a
mass of already published material. Copious lists of reading suggestions came
from Yale. I must in particular thank again the Library of the House of Lords for
the speed and efficiency with which they gathered what I wanted, and their
patience in letting me keep it until the pressure from the next customer became
overpowering.
But we also needed to tackle primary material in archives, particularly to
glean telling facts which previous historians had passed over, and partly to equip
ourselves to make shrewder judgement of the published material. I twice visited
the great archive at Hatfield and am grateful to Lord Salisbury and his archivist
Robin Harcourt-Williams for their welcome and hospitality. Judy, Ed and I spent
two nights at Harewood House in Yorkshire, Lord Harewood having arranged
that the Canning papers could be brought there for consultation from their usual
home in the West Yorkshire Archives. We are grateful to Lord and Lady
Harewood for their hospitality and to Lynn Tungate, Terry Southern and the
staff of the Archives for all the trouble they took in carrying out this manoeuvre.
Likewise, we thank Lord and Lady Derby for putting us up at Knowsley, as well
as the staff of the Liverpool Record Office, for their cooperation in guiding us
through the Derby papers. The archivists at the Special Collections in
Birmingham University were particularly helpful in making available what we
needed from the Chamberlain and Eden papers. The Public Record Office at
Kew and the British Library gave indispensable help on Edward Grey, Ramsay
MacDonald and Ernest Bevin.
We need to thank many individuals for their generous cooperation: the
Countess of Avon discussed with me Anthony Eden’s method of working, along
with his distaste for jacket covers on books. Philip Bobbitt nobly agreed to have
lunch with us on his birthday where he educated us about Castlereagh and the
rule of World Law. Niall Ferguson also offered energy and insight over a
Travellers’ Club lunch, while Max Hastings, Denis MacShane, Andrew Adonis,
David Marquand and the Foreign Office Chief Historian, Patrick Salmon all
gave wise advice at various intervals. Ted Bromund led us to fascinating
material by John Kent on Bevin’s African ideas; Nick Humfrey was an
intelligent source of help; Rebecca Jackson displayed patience, perceptiveness
and fast typing skills; Martha Varney, Naomi Wiseman, Fiona Petherham and
Tom Corby all clubbed in with assistance at crucial points. Meanwhile, across an
ocean, Evan McCormick had subtle thoughts on Clausewitz and Thucydides.
The Master of Davenport College at Yale provided Ed with a congenial
apartment for his learned visit there after leaving Yale, while the Arthur Vining
Davis summer research grant provided funds which helped Ed to prepare the
original submission.
It was exceptionally good of Sir Michael Howard, John Jefferies of Warwick
School and my son Nick to read the text for us and provide valuable, searching
comment. As before, we have depended on the wise encouragement and advice
of Michael Sissons, our agent, and Ion Trewin, our editor at Orion. We are in
debt to the whole team at Orion, in particular Bea Hemming who took charge of
much of the spadework of production and Linden Lawson who examined our
text with her usual scrupulous care. We were fortunate to find in David Smith an
illustrator of rare talent who turned an underlying notion of ours to good effect.
We warmly thank Chatham House for their generosity, and in particular Camilla
Seymour, for all her hard work in organising our launch party.
The book was written partly by me in longhand, partly by Ed on his laptop.
The task of pulling the results together into an intelligible whole fell largely on
Pauline Glock; we are deeply in her debt for many long and hard hours. She and
I work together for Hawkpoint, the independent financial advisory firm at 41
Lothbury, behind the Bank of England. Hawkpoint kindly tolerated my decision
to turn my office there into a writers’ studio, permanently littered with papers
and the occasional bottle. Through 2007 and 2008, Ed and I met there in the
evenings to compare ideas and drafts. We also wrote at weekends on the long
medieval table in my library at Westwell. Ed, who has a full-time job, often
laboured through the small hours in the flat which he shares in St John’s Wood,
unloading on me the next day what he was pleased to call the wisdom of the
night.
We spent two weekends, separated by fifteen months, at St Deiniol’s, the
library founded by Gladstone close to his home at Hawarden in Flintshire. St
Deiniol’s provides a magnificent library and simple welcoming atmosphere for
all kinds of study or relaxation, being frequented alike by exhausted rectors in
need of a rest, eager theologians and Liverpool football fans. We are most
grateful to the staff there for their encouragement.
On our last visit to St Deiniol’s, I was allotted Room 15, the Lindisfarne
Room. An attractive book by my bedside about the Lindisfarne Gospels told me
that there are two mistakes of calligraphy by the Anglo-Saxon monk who copied
and illustrated the texts – deliberate mistakes designed to underline the truth that
only God can achieve perfection. We hope that any mistakes in this book will be
forgiven on the Lindisfarne principle.
This book is dedicated to my wife Judy, who was a staunch and perceptive
companion through twenty-six years and the making of many books; who knew
exactly when to criticise and when to encourage; whom I greatly miss; who took
the last chapter into hospital with her in October 2008 but sadly was not given
time to read it.
DOUGLAS HURD
London, June 2009
PRELUDE
‘In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing
the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities
of mankind’
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France
This is a book written not in despair, but certainly in disquiet. Despair would be
foolish when in its time the human race has overcome so many difficulties which
at one moment seemed overwhelming. But disquiet is in order, as we see a world
apparently adrift among many simultaneous threats. Climate change, shortages
of food, water and energy, pressures of population, financial collapse, in many
places political chaos, bitterness and war all crowd the agenda. Because the last
of these groups has been our particular study and experience we concentrate
upon it. Within the wide range of bloody disorder between and inside states, we
focus upon one country, our own. Within the British story, we select one period
of a century and a half between 1807 and 1956 during which Britain climbed to
its peak of Empire and became for a few decades chance guardian of the globe.
Within that period, we focus upon a selection of those who held just one office,
the British Foreign Secretary.
We have chosen eleven British Foreign Secretaries who varied greatly in fame
and effectiveness. Some, like the 15th Earl of Derby and Austen Chamberlain,
we have rescued from virtual oblivion because we think them in their own way
remarkable. Some Foreign Secretaries found themselves relegated to the side of
the stage by their own Prime Minister. During our period, this happened mainly
in wartime. Since then, in an age of summits, this relegation has become almost
normal, though the story of Prime Ministerial essays in foreign policy from
Lloyd George through Chamberlain, Churchill to Blair has been one of effort
rather than success.