I have the perfect Christmas stocking filler for the prime minister – a copy
of Dale Carnegie’s inspirational bestseller How to Win Friends and Influence
People, the gran-daddy of all business self-help books. Success, Carnegie
believed, is 15% due to professional knowledge and 85% to “the ability to
express ideas, to assume leadership and to arouse enthusiasm among people”.
In Lisbon last week Gordon Brown wasn’t winning many friends or arousing
enthusiasm. That, he can live with. But was he influencing people either?
To assure the folks back home of his sneaking eurosceptical sympathies, the
prime minister had snubbed the ceremonial signing of the revived European
constitution, or treaty as it is now called, by pleading a prior engagement
with the Commons liaison committee. But to prove that he is also a
pragmatist, he turned up after lunch to sign the treaty alone in a backroom.
Not so much sneaking as sneaky, then.
Speaking as a sceptic, I would dearly like to think his behaviour was prompted
by a guilty conscience. Brown has broken Labour’s promise to give us a
referendum on the con-treaty. But, alas, it’s not true. An overdeveloped
sense of guilt is not one of the prime minister’s weaknesses. His behaviour
was an act of calculation. Did it come off?
Peter Mandelson, the EU trade commissioner and a long-term enemy, sneered:
“You don’t win an argument by putting yourself on the back foot.” Brown
likes to apply his front foot to the seat of Mandelson’s trousers so that
particular intervention had already been factored in. Brown’s European
partners had low expectations too. His boorish reputation, earned while
attending dull Ecofin meetings of finance ministers as chancellor, will have
preceded him.
In Britain both anti and pro-Euro-pean zealots fumed. The first lot don’t want
any treaty signed, the latter can’t bear the insult to their beloved
Brussels. But both minorities can be conveniently ignored. What then of the
vast majority of voters who share Brown’s mild contempt for all matters
European, but are too apathetic to do anything about it? Did the prime
minister’s show of truculence impress? I doubt it. It wasn’t inspiring, it
didn’t show leadership.
We expect our leaders to turn up on time and mind their manners abroad even
when we want them to say no, nein or non to our partners. When it is a
matter of getting our money back, like the famous episode of Margaret
Thatcher’s billion, we accept a bit of argy-bargy: shouting at foreigners
makes sense – their English isn’t very good. But we don’t like the prime
minister of the United Kingdom to be lead player in a farce. That’s the job
of Boris Johnson.
Brown could have stayed away and let his foreign secretary sign the treaty as
Thatcher would have done. Or like Tony Blair, he could have pumped the hands
of Sarkozy, Merkel and co and smiled. Instead we saw his crablike approach,
his bizarre late arrival at a party long after the plates had been cleared
away. The PM put his right foot in, his right foot out. In, out, in, out, he
shook it all about. Brown’s foreign policy finally revealed itself to the
world: the hokey cokey.
Tough luck on David Miliband, the youthful foreign secretary. With Brown for a
partner he is dancing the diplomatic waltz with a hippopotamus. In Brussels
last week poor Miliband was reduced to shaking hands with Verena Schubert, a
mere usher rather than a head of state. He grinned hugely but as a
pro-European it can’t have made him happy.
Miliband is not having an easy ride. An old Foreign Office hand recalls the
arrival in 1977 of another young Labour foreign secretary, Dr David Owen. He
had one real advantage: “We weren’t only afraid of his fierce-ness and his
intellect but also his direct line to prime minister James Calla-ghan.”
Though Miliband was cool on some of Blair’s visionary policies, he is still
TB’s former No 10 policy unit chief and is regarded as a king in waiting by
many Blairites. For Brownites that makes him a marked man.
A foreign secretary’s lot is not a happy one in any case, despite all the
glitter and travel. Prime ministers have become more presidential and want
to hog the limelight on the international stage. Brown, like Blair and
Thatcher before him, enjoys the limelight, too, but it isn’t clear what he
wants to do when he gets there.
To be fair, the prime minister faces genuine difficulties in adapting Blair’s
interventionist foreign agenda to a postIraq period of disillusionment. His
predecessor had a grand, almost Churchillian vision of Britain acting as a
bridge between Europe and America. Before the wheels came off, TB put on a
rattling good show. Now Brown has to clean up after the parade.
The prime minister, it can argued, takes a more realistic if modest view of
what this country can achieve in the world. Again, here he is in tune with
the majority of British people. A staged withdrawal from Blairism, however,
calls for a rhetoric that translates intoa vision other than abroad is
bloody.
The prime minister, for instance, wants to send a signal to his party and the
country that he is not an American poodle like Tony. However, he knows he
can’t realistically upset the sole superpower in the world, our most
important ally and the arsenal of democracy. The left, and even many in the
Conservative party, would rejoice to see a Love Actually moment as in the
film when prime minister Hugh Grant stands up to a bullying US president and
tells him publicly to get stuffed. But it ain’t gonna happen.
So he tried to be too clever by half. On his first visit to Washington as
premier he kept it strictly formal. No “Yo, Brown” for Gordon. He also
appointed as a Foreign Office minister, Mark Mal-loch Brown, a former UN
diplomat and a sworn enemy of George Bush’s neocon chums. Get the hint?
Alas, Mal-loch Brown has the diplomatic equivalent of Tourette’s syndrome.
Soon hackles were raised in Washington. In the meantime Sarkozy of France
was received with pomp at the White House and even the Bush-sceptic David
Cameron was given a warm welcome. No friends won, nobody influenced. Nobody
impressed back home.
In Iraq, Brown is slowly withdrawing our forces, saving some blood and
treasure – a popular but hardly glorious move. In Afghanistan, however, he
put his right foot firmly in. This is what Brown in his Guildhall speech
called “hardheaded internationalism”. British and Nato credibility are on
the line after we stepped up our commitments there, for good or ill, two
years ago. “2006 was a near disaster for us,” says one military observer.
“In 2007 we fought well to get back to a military stalemate.”
Our own efforts to train up the Afghan army have run into enormous problems.
Every village was instructed by President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to
send somebody to join. “That’s all very well,” say British army cynics, “but
they all sent us the village idiot.” The target is to get a native army of
70,000-80,000 men. Many military analysts say you need 200,000 to hold down
the country.
Last week the prime minister confirmed our commitment to Afghanistan. Much of
what he had to say about observing the lessons of Iraq was sensible. Yes,
you have to weaken your enemy by detaching his allies. But as his critics in
the military and Conservative party point out, if you want to fight half way
across the world there are big bills to pay. Chancellor Brown kept well away
from the Ministry of Defence and kept it starved of funds.
Our poor bloody infantry cannot go on fighting at second world war pitch as
they have these last two years within existing resources. The government
talks of a real rise in defence spending but if we are going to fight a long
campaign in Afghanistan, something has got to give. In a real war you cannot
play the hokey cokey. You are either in or out.
As our poll reveals today, the Conservative lead over Labour is widening and
the prime minister’s personal ratings are plummeting. Brown has tried to
detach himself from Blair’s negatives but he is not winning any friends
abroad. And he is failing to give any positive reason to support him at
home.
