British Foreign Secretaries Since 1974

Kevin Theakston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• eBook ISBN: 9781135766375
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyses the changing role of the British Foreign Secretary and presents biographical case studies of all the individual holders of that post, the policies they persued and the issues they faced, since 1974. The work of the British Foreign Secretaries from James Callaghan to Robin Cook is examined in the context of the foreign policy-making machinery, the changing environment of British foreign policy, and the internal and external political forces with which they had to contend.Using a biographical case study approach, the chapters examine the careers, personalities, policies and influence of successive Foreign Secretaries to increase our knowledge and understanding of the work of the government, and the development of British foreign policy over the last thirty years. British Foreign Secretaries Since 1974 casts light on the hitherto shadowy and understudied role of personality in international relations and on how ten very different personalities helped to shape the detail and the articulation of British foreign policy.

1
The Changing Role of the British Foreign Secretary

Kevin Theakston

To become British Foreign Secretary is to enter big-time politics. It is one of the great historic offices of state, held usually by a senior and ambitious politician. The incumbent works in the largest office of any Cabinet minister – it is larger than the Prime Minister’s office – and the other perks of the office include a grand official residence in Carlton Gardens, London, and a country house at Chevening in Kent (used for entertaining and for private meetings with visiting foreign ministers).¹ As a globe-trotting statesman, the Foreign Secretary is regularly ‘door-stepped’ by the world’s media. He heads a department staffed by some of the cleverest and smoothest officials in Whitehall, and is at the hub of a worldwide diplomatic and intelligence apparatus, which is the envy of most of his foreign-minister colleagues in other countries. His days are filled with international travel and meetings with foreign statesmen, his in-tray with ‘flash’ telegrams on diplomatic crises and top-secret intelligence briefings. George Brown (Labour Foreign Secretary in the 1960s) said that, more than any other ministry he worked in, the Foreign Office brought home to him the exciting, but also the frightening, responsibility of power.² This is ‘a job most politicians want’, says David Owen (Foreign Secretary, 1977–79).³

It is also a daunting job, with more pressing limitations and constraints than was the case in earlier periods. John Major (Foreign Secretary for four months in 1989) complained that it was an ‘impossible’ job: ‘There’s a world full of 150 countries, always exploding into bits and pieces, there are boxes full of stuff about places I’ve never heard of. And I am expected to take decisions about that!’⁴ More than in any other department, Foreign Secretaries are at the mercy of outside events and face an intractable environment. It is also, day in and day out, one of the most demanding jobs in government, the Foreign Secretary being one of the most overburdened ministers. In the 1940s and 1950s, the post was still regarded as the number two position in the government – but the job of Chancellor of the Exchequer nowadays carries that status and clout. Prime Ministers have increasingly moved into foreign affairs, limiting the Foreign Secretary’s independence by taking charge of key policy areas, attending international summits and conducting one-to-one diplomacy with other heads of government. A Foreign Secretary can become merely ‘a bag carrier for the Prime Minister’, claims a former Cabinet minister.⁵ Furthermore, with Britain’s reduced power in the world, and locked into a system of shared decision-making in Europe, there is, it has been said, ‘less room – or need – for vision, and a greater need for tact, collegiality and the tolerance of compromise and disappointment’. Of all departments, it has been argued, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) ‘is the least ideological, the least amenable to change and the least hospitable for a politician wanting to make his mark in Westminster’.⁶

The job of Foreign Secretary has changed in several ways over the last 30 or so years. ‘The single most important change … is obviously the European dimension and the increasing globalisation of diplomacy’, a former Foreign Secretary said in interview.⁷

The old restraints on travel have gone and the nature of foreign relations has changed – these used to be largely bilateral and dealt with by traditional means (ambassadors, telegrams and so on). That has changed fundamentally. The foreign ministers of the European Union (EU) states are now caught up in an almost constant process of collective discussion and coordination … It isn’t exactly a common foreign policy, but there is a high degree of collaboration and coordination. The changes have reached their highest extent in the EU, but if you add in NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organisation], the WEU [Western European Union], the transatlantic angle and the far east too, Foreign Secretaries are really part of a global system of diplomacy.

A senior diplomat agreed in interview that British entry into the European Community had revolutionised the Foreign Secretary’s job:

From 1973 onwards, the European dimension has completely transformed the life and work of the Foreign Secretary. His life becausehe spends an enormous amount of time now at EU meetings – whether the monthly meetings of foreign ministers, the informal six-monthly foreign ministers’ weekends, the European Councils to which he goes with the Prime Minister, or the great network of bilateral meetings he has with colleagues, and all the third-country EU fixtures like the EU–Africa summit. So this has completely transformed the way their day is filled but it has also, of course, transformed the work they do because not only has it turned them back into actual negotiators – having to negotiate at meetings at which there are only ministers (such as the European Council or over lunch at the Foreign Affairs Council) – but it has also meant that they have a much greater say, responsibility and interest in a large number of subject areas which the Foreign Office of the 1950s and 1960s probably had very little to do with, like the environment or agriculture or trade policy or whatever it is. Not of course that the Foreign Secretary has become the lead in all of these, but because of the fact that you do many of these things on a European basis and he is definitely the leading minister, under the Prime Minister, who deals with Europe – with the possible exception of the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his area. The Foreign Secretary necessarily becomes rather knowledgeable about trade policy, about the environment – which a Foreign Secretary of the 1950s would not have dreamed of doing.

Consultation and coordination, both at home (in Whitehall) and abroad, have become more important because of the EU angle and the changing content of foreign policy. International political, security and defence issues are still important, but the Foreign Secretary now also has to deal with a more wide-ranging, technical and complex policy agenda than before. Foreign and domestic policies increasingly interact and impact upon each other. As Lord Carrington once put it: ‘issues which can be classified as pure foreign policy, of no immediate interest to any other government department, are now the exception rather than the rule. On most important matters of policy, our decisions need to reflect the balance between international and domestic considerations … There has been a qualitative and I would guess permanent change in the extent to which a Foreign Minister needs to talk to, and listen to, his colleagues in other government departments in order to do his job.’⁸ The Foreign Secretary has thus been brought into wider fields of public policy, but at the same time can no longer claim a monopoly over his own field. In the days of the powerful Ernest Bevin (1945–51), other ministers were wary about infringing what one of them called ‘the Foreign Secretary’s three-mile territorial waters’.⁹ But nowadays, with foreign or external affairs impinging upon and affecting virtually all departments of government, Foreign Secretaries frequently ‘find themselves defending a broad foreign-policy picture against the special pleading of ministries in whose world external affairs are only one dimension’.¹⁰ In Brussels, in particular, policy issues cannot be handled in isolation, says David Owen, and the role of the Foreign Secretary in EU negotiations is to ‘horse-trade across issues’ and to know where to stand firm or give way in the pursuit of a balance of interests.¹¹

The job of Foreign Secretary has become ‘much, much more hectic’ and pressured than it was 30 to 40 years ago, say veteran diplomats. Changes in the technologies and speed of communication and travel have intensified the demands on foreign-policy office-holders. The modern mass media add to the pressures. A senior diplomat described ‘the speed of events’ as a key change over recent decades, together with ‘the inability rarely now to have time to make an informed judgement – you’ve got to be seen to be instantly reacting, instantly active, and that wasn’t the case in the days of Selwyn Lloyd and Alec Home in the 1950s and early 1960s. They had time to be sure of their facts, to think about problems … and the media were less obtrusive and persistent’. Another former official agreed that ‘the presentational side has changed beyond all recognition – the amount of time the Foreign Secretary spends with the media now far surpasses anything that Selwyn Lloyd used to do, for example. And there’s a much greater need to be attuned to and responsive to public opinion.’

This chapter surveys the changing role and position of the Foreign Secretary in British government since 1974 in nine stages. First, it discusses the background, appointments and careers of foreign secretaries in this period. Next, it compares and contrasts the foreign secretaryship with other ministerial positions before going on to analyse the heavy demands placed on the Foreign Secretary. The fourth section examines the relationship between the Foreign Secretary and officials in the Foreign Office, discussing also the assistance given to the Foreign Secretary by the junior ministers and special advisers appointed to the department. The role of the Foreign Secretary in relation to the security and intelligence services is the subject of the fifth section. The role and power of the Foreign Secretary can only be understood in the context of the relationship between him and the Prime Minister, and the ups and downs in that crucial relationship since 1974 are analysed in the next section of the chapter, leading in to a discussion of the Foreign Secretary’s position in the Cabinet. Before concluding, the chapter discusses the role of the Foreign Secretary in Parliament.

Table 1.1: British Foreign Secretaries since 1974

FOREIGN SECRETARIES: BACKGROUNDS, APPOINTMENTS AND CAREERS

The data in Table 1.2 show that Foreign Secretaries are, unsurprisingly, usually very experienced parliamentarians (it is worth noting that as a peer Lord Carrington had been politically active for nearly 30 years before appointment as Foreign Secretary, receiving his first junior ministerial job in 1951) and experienced ministers (having held, on average, four previous ministerial positions). John Major, David Owen and Robin Cook stand out from the norm – Major because of the way in which he was catapulted into the job after only ten years as an MP and service in low-profile and junior jobs (as a whip, a Social Security minister, and then Chief Secretary to the Treasury); Owen for being the youngest Foreign Secretary since Anthony Eden in the 1930s; and Cook for being the first Foreign Secretary since 1924 to have no prior ministerial experience at all (though he had served for 17 years on the opposition frontbench). Owen at least had some relevant international experience from having been minister for the Navy and a junior minister in the FCO, and Cook had spent three years as shadow Foreign Secretary, but Major had to start from scratch with, as one official put it, ‘a bundle of briefs in one hand and an atlas in the other’.¹² Compared to their predecessors in the 1945–74 period, Foreign Secretaries since 1974 are slightly younger (average age on appointment, 1945–74, 59 years; since 1974, 54 years) and marginally less experienced in Parliament average of 20.3 years as MPs on appointment, 1945–74; since 1974, 18.9 years) and as ministers (average of 9.5 years’ prior ministerial experience, 1945–74, 8.1 years since 1974).

Table 1.2: Foreign Secretaries’ career data

Modern Foreign Secretaries conform to the established British ministerial pattern and are usually ministerial generalists, with only three (Owen, Hurd and Rifkind) having previously served as junior ministers in the FCO, while Carrington had been number two to ‘Rab’ Butler in the Foreign Office in 1963–64 while also serving as Leader of the House of Lords. Back in the 1940s Attlee had insisted that politicians with an economics background ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1 THE CHANGING ROLE OF THE BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARY
• 2 JAMES CALLAGHAN: FOREIGN SECRETARY 1974–76
• 3 ANTHONY CROSLAND: FOREIGN SECRETARY, 1976–77
• 4 DAVID OWEN: FOREIGN SECRETARY, 1977–79
• 5 LORD CARRINGTON: FOREIGN SECRETARY, 1979–82
• 6 FRANCIS PYM: FOREIGN SECRETARY, 1982–83
• 7 GEOFFREY HOWE: FOREIGN SECRETARY, 1983–89
• 8 JOHN MAJOR: FOREIGN SECRETARY, JULY–OCTOBER 1989
• 9 DOUGLAS HURD: FOREIGN SECRETARY, 1989–95
• 10 MALCOLM RIFKIND: FOREIGN SECRETARY, 1995–97
• 11 ROBIN COOK: FOREIGN SECRETARY, 1997–2001
• 12 BRITISH FOREIGN SECRETARIES FROM CALLAGHAN TO COOK