How sad that Margaret Beckett will not end her Cabinet career with a burst of angry candour
MATTHEW PARRIS Ishould start with a correction and an apology. The apology is owed to Margaret Beckett. I asserted in this column two weeks ago that the Foreign Secretary had made no protest at Saddam Hussein's execution.
In fact Mrs Beckett did (sort of) protest at the hanging, shortly after it had taken place and before the particularly revolting details had become known. But she also said that justice had been done (in her words 'he has now been held to account'). Here in full is the relevant part of her statement, which her office has sent me: 'I welcome the fact that Saddam Hussein has been tried by an Iraqi court for at least some of the appalling crimes he committed against the Iraqi people. He has now been held to account. The British Government does not support the use of the death penalty, in Iraq or anywhere else. We advocate an end to the death penalty worldwide, regardless of the individual or the crime. We have made our position very clear to the Iraqi authorities, but we respect their decision as that of a sovereign nation.'
In the range of bulletins I heard or read, reporters had only quoted the 'held to account' remark. I should have asked the Foreign Office for the full text but it did not occur to me that, having responded to a hanging with the remark 'he has now been held to account', someone might then go on to complain about it. Journalists were more interested in Mrs Beckett's expression of satisfaction, with which she seemed to associate herself personally, than in her rather muted reminder of the British government's general and formal position on capital punishment.
Her third point, about respecting the decision of a sovereign government, is rather odd, and I wonder whether any FCO lawyer pointed this out to her. The sovereignty of nations does not (according to any doctrine of which I am aware) debar them from protesting in the strongest of terms against each other's activities. Britain often protests about barbarities committed by foreign governments. We certainly do not have to respect the decisions of other sovereign states; we only have to respect their right to make them. The distinction may sound Jesuitical but is of the last importance. Many of the executions for which Saddam himself was responsible when we recognised his government in Baghdad were ordered by a sovereign government, but we did not respect those decisions, and were later pleased to see him put on trial for them.
In the event, the British media showed little interest in these parts of the Foreign Secretary's statement. That 'held to account' was what reports picked up on does not surprise me, and (I suggest) may not entirely have surprised Mrs Beckett. She was trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and I related only half the story. I apologise.
Which brings me to what I would have written if I had been aware of the awkward balancing act in which the Foreign Secretary seems to have become engaged I start from the supposition that Margaret Beckett is not personally happy about Britain's entanglement with US foreign policy in the Middle East, will have heard news of the hanging of Saddam with some (personal) distaste, and more generally thinks that British foreign policy has gone adrift in many ways. This is only speculation, but she does not appear happy in the job and I doubt this is because she is not up to it. Mrs Beckett is an unusually competent minister whose talent to master a brief, then command it in a confident manner, has never before been questioned. It is her great skill.
Nor do I accept (what some say) that she is one of those politicians who have no political feelings of their own: a mere apparatchik. I hardly know her well but have known her slightly for decades (we were both Derbyshire MPs) and watched her closely throughout my journalistic career. I have always liked her. I like her amiable and low-key way of dealing with controversies. I like her civility in conversation. I like her occasional sharpness. I like her lack of vanity. I like her loyalty to her husband and her disdain of pose and posers. I like her instinct to ratchet things down rather than up.
I see in her extraordinarily long political career not (as some claim) the story of a mistress of expediency and Vicar of Bray, but of a clever, well-judged and capable person who started (like many of her generation) on the left, has moved gradually to the centre-left, and has found her metier in the world of fixing and running things, and sorting things out — coping, dealing, reconciling, chairing, coordinating — rather than in position-staking and vision-peddling. It is insulting and wrong to think people like this have no ideals; they have simply made a practical decision about how and where they perform best. That someone is discreet and inclined to make the best of a bad job does not rule out fierce but quietly held beliefs.
All such capabilities, however, spring from the native hard-headedness with which I certainly would credit Mrs Beckett. Well, what does hard-headedness tell her now? Surely that she will shortly be finished. She has travelled nearly the full extent of her usefulness to Labour governments, latterly Tony Blair's, and will soon have to yield to a new leader with people of his own to promote, and no need of her. Her career is almost over. She turned 64 last Monday. She has nothing left to lose.
How sweet those words should sound to someone beginning to wonder what the point of it all is any more. Nothing can now take away from Margaret Beckett the remarkable honour of a ministerial career spanning three decades — she was first a minister in 1974 — in two centuries, including the job of Labour Leader, and culminating in the post of Foreign Secretary. What charge can ever be laid against her — except this: that as a politician she was a little dull?
So why not demolish that charge — and go out in a burst of light? Why not confound the sneers she has endured all these years, and dare her Prime Minister to sack her, in a glorious Indian summer of actually saying what she thinks? Why not leave the Foreign Office — for so long abused and humiliated by Tony Blair — with the cheers of diplomats and staff ringing in your ears? Why not, in short, be remembered as valiant?
But she won't. In truth, Mrs Beckett is valiant, but valiant in a way the campfire storyteller never cares to recount. The classic tale of the careful woman who nobody thought would ever say boo to a goose, who finally, moments before leaving the pantomime, said a very big boo indeed, and to a goose of a prime minister, is a tale which could impress and amuse generations to come, sitting around the fire as the flames flicker.
But it never will. We act in our natures.
Matthew Pan-is is a columnist for the Times
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