James Forsyth James Forsyth

The British Foreign Secretary gets stood up

Jason Cowley’s profile of David Miliband in the New Statesman is an engaging read. But one line in it stood out to me:

“we waited for a group of Indian politicians to arrive for dinner (in fact, only two of the expected nine turned up)”

How did it come to this, a British Foreign Secretary, and we are after all a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the fifth largest economy in the world, is not considered worth turning up to dinner with?

This is more worrying than anything else that I’ve heard about Miliband’s (disastrous) India trip. It suggests a decline into irrelevance.

PS I’ve put in a call to the Foreign Office to see if they can shed any light on why so many guests didn’t show, I’ll update when I hear back.  

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