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Friday 9 May 2008

Sir Malcom Rifkind's sick irony

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I choked on my metaphorical cornflakes this morning when I heard Sir Malcolm Rifkind on the Today programme attacking Gordon Brown for not meeting the Dalai Lama.

Of course Mr Brown should. That, surely, all of us can agree on.

But to hear Sir Malcolm sounding forth on the need for 'values' and taking Mr Brown to task for not following through on an ethical foreign policy is a pretty sick irony. Sir Malcolm and Lord Hurd made for a disgusting double act in office. As Nick Cohen writes, in a review of Brendan Simms' superb Unfinest Hour: How Britain Helped to Destroy Bosnia:

The conviction that Britain had a superior knowledge of the futility of reforming a wicked world pushed Whitehall into a kind of madness. Only the possession of an unhinged mind can explain how Malcolm Rifkind, a Defence Secretary who had never seen combat, could bellow 'you Americans don't know the horrors of war' at Senator Bob Dole, who lost an arm in World War II. 'Your guys were usually so refined,' an American diplomat said of the Washington Embassy. 'But they were going crazy on this.'

Rifkind's ravings - Senator John McCain came close to slapping him at one meeting - will surprise readers in a Britain where snobbery gives an unwarranted benefit of the doubt to patrician conservatives.

The politicians who dealt with Bosnia were gentlemen of moderate temperament; sophisticates with breeding and manners, who were a cut above the rabble-rousing Thatcherites. Yet Hurd out-Thatchered Thatcher, who honourably opposed Serb aggression, when he declared that 'there is no such thing as the international community'.

He then sank to a depth I can't remember Thatch reaching when he effectively closed Britain's borders to Bosnian refugees. 'The civilians have an effect on the combatants,' he explained. 'Their interests put pressure on the warring factions to treat for peace.' You have to read this disgraceful passage several times before you realize that Hurd was denying sanctuary to the victims of the Serbs (and of his diplomacy) so he could use their misery to force Bosnia to cut a deal with the ethnic cleansers.

There are many reasons to be glad that John Major lost office in 1997. But his government's record in the Balkans stands at the top. There are even more reasons to rejoice that Lord Hurd, who managed the remarkable double whammy of being a disgraceful Home Secretary and a contemptible Foreign Secretary, is now a figure from the past and Sir Malcolm a worthless bankbencher.

UPDATE: It's only fair for me to flag up the comment which Sir Malcolm has left below, in which he says that Brendan Simms' story is nonsense. 

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