Just a few months ago, almost everyone thought that David Cameron was a goner. That he was about to go down in history as a one-term Prime Minister who failed to win against a bad Labour leader in 2010 then lost to a worse one in 2015. During this period, Anthony Seldon spoke to a long line of well-placed people for his biography of David Cameron; people who would have imagined they could talk freely because his book would be an autopsy. As a result, the former Master of Wellington College seems to have drawn plenty information from people who perhaps regret their candour now.
David Richards, the former head of the military, is candid about how he believed that the Libyan project was a disaster – embarked upon primarily to assuage the Prime Minister’s friends in Notting Hill. (Remember, Richards’ daughter used to work in Cameron’s private office, so he’ll have his own means of corroborating that thesis). We also learn that Tony Blair tried to intervene on Gaddafi’s behalf in the final stages of the Tripoli bombing campaign, a disclosure which seems to have caused outrage (splashing The Times today). I’m not sure why: as Christina Lamb argued so eloquently in The Spectator, lives and nations can be saved if a dictator agrees to hop it.
Obama tried to persuade the Ivory Coast’s strongman, Laurent Gbagbo, to step down in favour of a post at Boston. He turned it down and, in his three further months of power, killed 1,300 people. Exile is an alternative. Idi Amin, who ruled Uganda for eight murderous years in the 1970s, lived out his final decades in the top two floors of the Novotel in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. It might have been galling to see such a monster enjoy a luxury retirement, but it almost certainly saved thousands of lives. And exile may still be an option for Gaddafi.
If Blair had reason to believe that Gaddafi might choose exile, then it would have been his duty to put this to the Prime Minister. The scandal is not that he did so, but that no one followed up this – out of a desire to (as Seldon puts it)
“avoid ‘doing anything which might be seen to give the Libyan leader succour”.
Parliament’s foreign affairs committee is looking into the Libya debacle now, and ought to establish the truth behind the matter. As Simon Jenkins argues in the Spectator this week, military intervention has had a pretty bad record when it comes to successful regime change. Persuading dictators to go into exile is an option that deserves to be given more thought than it seems to have been in this instance.
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