Debate on the Address

Many Members have spoken about the situation in the middle east. I want to concentrate on the Government’s overall foreign policy record over the past nine years. Although I said the Government’s foreign policy, it has actually been the Prime Minister’s foreign policy because, more than any Prime Minister since Neville Chamberlain, he has imposed his own will, probably disregarded the views of his own party and persisted in whatever view he has taken. The comparisons with Neville Chamberlain may be even more appropriate than either he or the Prime Minister would be comfortable with: both started from a position of great dogmatic certainty; both adopted a position of great moral rectitude; both had a touching belief that, as a result of their personal efforts, cruel tyrants could be persuaded to change their policies; and both have seen their foreign policy end in failure. Of course, Margaret Thatcher often intervened in foreign policy, but there was a considerable difference compared with this Prime Minister. She was always more concerned with the realities of power than with the rhetoric, and was wise enough to appoint as her Foreign Secretaries people such as Lord Carrington, Geoffrey Howe and Douglas Hurd, who could speak with great weight and authority and often curbed some of her enthusiasms. The Prime Minister has pursued a proactive foreign policy over the past nine years, often involving the use of our armed forces. It has been a sort of modern gunboat diplomacy policy but, unfortunately, at a time when we are severely short of gunboats. That is part of the difficulty, because there was a failure to realise that defence is the handmaiden of foreign policy. As Frederick the Great once said:"““Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments.””" Many of the Prime Minister’s speeches adopt a high ethical tone and as a consequence his foreign policy has been one of humanitarian interventionism, starting with Sierra Leone, then Kosovo and now, for all practical purposes, Iraq, where it is no longer defended on any grounds other than the ending of Iraqi tyranny. The problem that the Prime Minister faces is that he has approached those matters with a combination of Atlanticist fervour, muscular Christianity and political vanity. With the possible exception of Sierra Leone, a relatively minor intervention that was widely endorsed around the world, the other approaches have been severely defective.