AN IMPRESSION has spread and needs to be questioned. It is that the new leadership of the Conservative Party has slid towards the centre in all things. I believe that in matters of foreign and defence policy the opposite is true. Here, and on Europe, I think the instincts of the party’s new leadership have shifted the Opposition to the right. Those of us inclined to see David Cameron and his friends as moderate and consensual in every sphere, domestic and foreign, may be in for a surprise.
Listen to this: “England is going back to sleep. And little wonder when we’re told every day by sages in our national media that the War on Terror is misconceived, that the terrorist threat is exaggerated, that what we’ve done in the last three years has only made matters worse, and that the Iraq war was a ghastly mistake that is best forgotten . . . There are few voices to be heard putting the other view: that the terrorists pose a fundamental threat to our way of life, that fight them we must, that Iraq was part of that fight and that we are winning.”
This is taken from an article that appeared in The Spectator only 22 months ago. Its author did not realise that within little more than a year he and his friend David Cameron would be the two most powerful figures in the Conservative Party. Or that in time they would be odds-on to form the next government.
“We did not choose the War on Terror,” George Osborne continued, beneath the headline “While England Sleeps”, “it chose us. We could try to walk away from it now. We could distance ourselves from America, say the Iraq war was a mistake . . . But it would not save us. For remember the words of the Madrid bombers before they set out to kill 200 innocents on their way to work: ‘We choose death while you choose life.’ With people like that it can only be a case of them or us.”
Eleven months after that article was written, suicide bombers struck in London. To what extent this was an al-Qaeda plot is debatable, but Osborne today is unlikely to think his view of the world unsupported by what happened then. The thought, sentiment and fervour behind his article are of a clever, thoughtful neoconservative: more Wolfowitz than Bush, more egg-head than jar-head, but neocon nonetheless.
His column puts me in mind of another right-wing thinker and writer familiar to readers of these pages: Michael Gove. If you had to identify what you might call Michael’s abiding passion in politics, you would find it in a consistent, intelligent rage against what he would see as the unwitting appeasement of wicked and violent men by flabby, woolly-minded liberals. Now in Parliament, he is part of the small group of Tories, somewhat mis-named the Notting Hill Set, in control of the higher brain functions of that great and ancient political beast, the Conservative Party.
Here, then, are two men close to the pulse of the remade Opposition, one of them, as Shadow Chancellor, right alongside its new leader. But how about the portfolios where neoconservatism has most to say: foreign affairs and defence?
As Shadow Foreign Secretary, Cameron chose William Hague. Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Michael Ancram, both experienced pragmatists in international relations, both doubters on Iraq, were overlooked. There were good reasons for choosing Hague, but perhaps because of these, and because he is an affable chap, I suspect analysts overlooked this distinct rightwards foreign-policy lurch.
Like Osborne, Hague is a passionate Atlanticist. It was perhaps Liam Fox, Cameron’s Shadow Defence Secretary, who (speaking in Washington this February) put their approach to the “special relationship” best: “Britain and America trust one another because we look at the world in the same way. We share the same roots, nourish the same aspirations, thrill to the same ideals.”
And Hague would cheer that to the echo. No less than Osborne, Hague has brooked no hint of doubt about the wisdom of the Iraq war. The way Cameron Conservatism has hardened, not softened, opposition support for Tony Blair on Iraq deserves more attention. Michael Howard said he would have voted against the war if he had known what he knows now.
Hague, Fox and Cameron have ripped that from the Tory songsheet. In August last year, describing the fight as “a truly noble cause at a time of trial”, Hague made a rather extraordinary speech, comparing jihadism with the Nazi threat in the 1930s.
“The parallels with the rise of Nazi-ism go further . . . If only, some argue, we withdrew from Iraq, or Israel made massive concessions, then we would assuage jihadist anger. That argument . . . is as limited as the belief in the Thirties that, by allowing Germany to remilitarise the Rhineland or take over the Sudetenland, we would satisfy Nazi ambitions.
“ . . . We’re all in this together . . . standing with those brave democrats in Iraq who are trying to rebuild their nation . . . Should representative government . . . take root in Iraq, [jihadists] will not only have been defeated in one key battle, they will also find that an alternative path has been established in the Middle East which gives its people the hope, prosperity and freedom they deserve.”
This stuff is pure Pentagon. And the Conservative front bench have applied the thinking with enthusiasm, with Fox appearing to suggest that a lack of clarity about the role of British forces in southern Afghanistan might be remedied by sharpening the role and reinforcing the troops.
Concluding his “neo-Nazi” assessment of jihadism, Hague went on to talk about problems with the European Convention on Human Rights. “We must will the means to the end that we desire and amend the Human Rights Act or, if necessary, leave — perhaps temporarily — the ECHR,” he said.
Which brings us to a second string to Cameron Conservatism’s Atlanticist bow: a visceral irritation with continental Europe. Search the archive of keynote speeches on defence or foreign affairs since the new leadership arrived: you will hardly find an opportunity taken to praise, or an opportunity missed to kick, the European enterprise— kicks mostly at the shin rather than the groin. A picture emerges of the EU as a pesky but (for the moment, anyway) irremovable nuisance.
Here’s Fox again, speaking in Washington, on Iran: “It was wrong for the European Union’s foreign affairs spokesman, Javier Solana, to rule out the use of force. It is wrong for Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, to echo him.”
Space does not permit me to pitch in to the argument about Cameron’s promise to remove Conservative MEPs from the European People’s Party. No doubt it was opportunistic, but I get no sense at all that Cameron is a Euro-moderate posing as a sceptic. I have sensed that, like his foreign and defence spokesmen, he is genuinely scornful, both of the ambitions and of the competence of the EU.
Fox and Hague have made plenty of speeches, largely unreported; but the picture is anything but muzzy: it is lyrically Atlanticist, irritably unsympathetic to the EU and almost belligerently interventionist in the wider world. Cameron himself has said almost nothing. The media (I suspect) think he leaves them to sound off, but is personally rather mellow on foreign affairs.
There is no reason to believe this. I make no comment on the merits but simply point to something we may not have noticed: that we could be just a few years from a Cabinet in which the Prime Minister, the Foreign and Defence Secretaries and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, are to the right of Margaret Thatcher in their view of Britain’s place in the world.
