A MOST UNDESERVED REPUTATION

Mr Douglas Hurd, the darling of the Tory establishment, has a remarkable capacity for escaping the consequences of

his consistent lack of judgment, argues Noel Malcolm

SEVERAL TIMES during discussions of the Tory party leadership in recent months I have heard a curious expression: `The smart money is on Douglas Hurd.' It always turns out to mean rather less than it seems to. If one challenges the person who says this with the question 'Would you put your money on him?', the challenge is declined. If one asks which smart people have placed this particular bet, the answer is evasive. What the speaker meant, it turns out, was not that he had heard better-informed people making this judgment, but that he had been listening to other people who were also just repeating the phrase 'The smart money is on Douglas Hurd.'

Of course it isn't. But the phrase is eminently repeatable, because of all the other things that are conventionally said about Mr Hurd. He is the Tories' ultimate 'safe pair of hands'. He `never puts a foot wrong'. He is the only real `statesman' in the Government. He is the personification of `decency' and 'dignity'. To crit- icise Mr Hurd is not just to show faulty judgment, but to commit an error of taste like being rude about Anne Frank or the Queen Mother. And to ask, as I occasionally have done in a spirit of pure inquiry, what Mr Hurd has actually achieved or what, if anything, he has ever got right is to be met with incredulity and distaste (though not, in my experience, with an answer).

Some of the reasons for this warm glow of admiration are obvious. The Foreign Secretary certainly looks as if he knows what he is doing. He is cool under fire, he speaks well in Parliament and he always turns in a high-quality performance in the television studio. Journalists like him, with good reason: he takes trouble over them, tries to answer questions directly, some- times even admits that the Government has problems, seems without 'side' or resent- ment, and contributes a steady flow of arti- cles, book reviews and short stories to their newspapers. Despite his air of the states- man-politician of yesteryear, he is in fact one of the most media-friendly and media- conscious people in the Government someone who operates much more like a modern American politician than like an old-fashioned Tory grandee.

The method works. The calm, statesman- like performances are remembered; the gaffes, misjudgments and spoilt opportuni- ties are brushed aside. Who now would recall all unprompted the extraordinary episode in September of last year when Mr Hurd, speaking on Australian television, casually applied a sledgehammer to Britain's relations with China, by attacking Peking's claims to be considered for the Olympic Games? (Some criticism of China's human rights record was well over- due, but to make it a matter of supporting Manchester's forlorn Olympic bid — or, rather, supporting the Prime Minister's equally forlorn populist campaign on that issue — was a strangely pointless and inef- fectual way of going about it.) Or who would remember Mr Hurd's signal failure in New York last month, when his opportu- nity to respond to Gerry Adams's publicity coup with some hard-hitting counter-argu- ments about terrorism was fumbled and lost?

The idea that the Foreign Secretary has a `safe pair of hands' is too firmly established to be dislodged by any evidence to the con- trary. Last year, for example, the greatest single parliamen- tary humiliation suffered by the Government came when it was obliged to admit that it had repeatedly misled the House of Commons. It had said that the Maastricht Treaty could not be ratified if the Maastricht Bill were amended in such a way as to exclude the treaty's Social Protocol; but when it saw that the Commons might pass that amendment, it conveniently discovered that the Social Protocol did not matter after all. When Mr Hurd carried out this embar- rassing volte-face, he received nothing but praise for the `dig- nity' of his performance. Somehow it would have been bad taste to point out that he, as Foreign Secretary, bore direct responsibility for the false advice which had emanat- ed from his own department of state.

In the discussions leading up to the

Maastricht conference, Mr Hurd had taken a stand on two issues in particular: the extension of the legislative powers of the Strasbourg Assembly and the proposal that `Europe' might concern itself with defence. Both of these ideas he opposed. On both of them he was defeated. But no one remem- bers the Maastricht Treaty as a defeat for Mr Hurd, who is well known to be a master negotiator.

Nor is Douglas Hurd the first name that springs to mind in any discussion of the ruinously expensive fiasco of Britain's membership of the Exchange Rate Mecha- nism. Anyone with a passing interest in recent political history would probably lay the blame for our entry into the ERM at the feet of Lords Lawson and Howe, who 'ambushed' Mrs Thatcher before the Madrid summit in 1989, forcing her to set out Britain's intention to join the mecha- nism. When she made that statement, how- ever, she attached a number of conditions for joining which remained visibly unful- filled. The decision to join was pushed through in the following year by a different Chancellor (John Major) and a different Foreign Secretary: Douglas Hurd. As Lord Ridley later recalled, 'Margaret Thatcher confirmed to me in September that she had decided to give way to the Chancellor and Douglas Hurd, who had put heavy pressure on her once more.' When Britain eventual- ly paid the cost of this blunder in Septem- ber 1992, however, no one thought of connecting it with Mr Hurd, whose judg- ment is known to be faultless.

Indeed, the Foreign Secretary has a Macavity-like ability not to be there when the consequences of his policies come to light. As Home Secretary he set in train the drafting of legislation which eventually appeared as the Criminal Justice Bill of 1990. The main purpose of this Bill was to reduce the prison population by such means as changes in sentencing policy (for example, forbidding courts to take into account the previous record of the accused). It was left to a later Home Secre- tary, Kenneth Clarke, to deal with the con- fusion and anger which this caused among the judiciary; and the blame by then was fastened not on the originator of the policy but on the man who had steered the Bill through Parliament, Kenneth Baker.

When Mr Hurd arrived at the Home Office he had left behind another example of Macavity politics, the Ango-lrish Agree- ment: a scheme which he had helped to devise as Northern Ireland Secretary but which, as it happened, was signed a few months after his departure from that office. There are plenty of people in the Conser- vative Party who will admit that this Agree- ment was a failure. But there are few who would think of pinning any direct blame for it on to Mr Douglas Hurd —even though he now seems set on repeating the exercise with another equally doomed 'initiative'. (In the Queen's Speech last November, it was noteworthy that the Government's Irish pblicy was treated under the heading of Foreign Office business.) But there is one area of policy where the errors committed by Mr Hurd are so gross, and their potential consequences so far-

reaching, that he will be unable to escape the judgment of his contemporaries — let

alone of history. It is his policy in Yugoslavia and the Balkans, and the inti- mately connected matter of his policy towards the former Soviet Union. History

will certainly judge Mr Hurd, but now even his former colleagues are beginning to do so too. Only last week the former Defence Secretary Sir John Nott made an outspo- ken attack on Mr Hurd's Yugoslav policy, published in the Evening Standard under the heading 'The Weak Man of Europe'. 'British foreign policy is in disarray,' wrote Sir John. 'The Foreign Secretary has become a liability.' In Hans Christian Andersen's story, it was just a little boy who pointed out the true nature of the Emperor's new clothes. But here was a respected senior courtier remarking, so to speak, on our Emperor's new green loden coat.

Although a popular misconception (much promoted by the British Foreign Office) has it that the destruction of Bosnia was caused by a German policy of 'prema- ture recognition', there is an abundance of evidence which shows that the war in Bosnia was already planned by the Serbs and would have been started anyway. What ensured the destruction of Bosnia was not the West's recognition of Bosnian indepen- dence, but the arms embargo it maintained against that country, which prevented the Bosnian government from defending its people from attack. The chief supporter of the embargo was Mr Douglas Hurd. It was Mr Hurd who, when the American and German governments both expressed a desire to lift the embargo in February 1992, rushed off to Bonn and Washington to per- suade them to change their minds. During his visit to Bonn he explained to the press that 'a balance had to be struck' between 'the German view that a supply of arms to the Muslims was the only fair way of allow- ing them to defend themselves, and the danger of escalating the fighting'. He did not explain, unfortunately, why persuading the Germans to conform with the second of those two utterly contradictory views should be described as striking a balance between them.

Other distortions of truth or logic were also required in order to maintain this posi- tion. From the outset of the Bosnian con- flict it was clear to most observers that this was a war against Bosnia planned, instigat- ed, directed and supplied by a neighbour- ing state (Serbia), and aimed at the conquest of most of the Bosnian territory and the eventual incorporation of that con- quered land into a Greater Serbia. The Foreign Secretary, however, steadfastly described the conflict as 'a civil war' — a piece of obfuscation aimed at preventing people from drawing any comparisons with the case of Iraq and Kuwait. 'This is a war with no front line,' he said repeatedly, while maps showing the front line of Ser- bian conquest were being printed almost every day in the newspapers.

At the same time, however, the Foreign Secretary felt obliged to go along with the policy adopted by other western countries, which was to put pressure on Serbia (through economic and other sanctions) to end the war. Blithely, Mr Hurd maintained these two lines of explanation side by side: that it was just an internal Bosnian civil war, and that the way to stop it was to act against the neighbouring state which was causing it. The contradiction was no doubt eased by the trust and affection with which Mr Hurd, like so many Foreign Office men before him, regarded the idea of sanctions. So trustful was he that 14 months ago he assured Mr George Soros that the Serbian President would 'soon' be toppled by the popular discontent which sanctions were causing — a staggering misjudgment. (Sim- ilarly, he had advised Mrs Thatcher in September 1990 that sanctions 'might suc- ceed' against Saddam Hussein.) The assumptions which underlie Mr Hurd's disastrous Yugoslav policy reflect

his deformation professionnelle as a one-

time career diplomat. There is the classic Foreign Office belief in the notion of 'sta- bility', which confuses stability with famil- iarity, and assumes that a strong regional power (Serbia — or, in another context, Russia) will be a stabilising influence, no matter how that regional strength is acquired or maintained. There is the love

of diplomacy per se, a diplomacy which

never recognises the limits of its own power and always prefers setting up new initia- tives and 'processes', believing that the world is full of reasonable men who will agree on reasonable solutions. And above all there is a kind of pseudo-realpolitik which thinks it can interpret every problem not on its own merits but as a move in some more elaborate power-play. Thus Mr Hurd's deepest objection to lifting the arms embargo on Bosnia was that it might lead to a situation in which different western and eastern powers were 'backing' different combatants, disturbing the post-Cold War harmony in Europe and the United Nations. The disturbance of harmony has come about, however: almost every country is now out of tune with Britain. Mr Hurd's policy has earned us the impatience of the Americans and the open contempt of the French. In January the Dutch foreign min- ister described Britain's policy, on the record, as 'disgraceful'. And in Germany our position is viewed with resentment bor- dering on real hostility: many German offi- cials and commentators believe (wrongly, I think, but understandably) that the main aim of British policy in the Balkans has been to thwart Germany's own policy objectives in that region. It takes an effort of will now to remember that in the winter of 1990-1, when Mr Hurd was finally given free rein over British foreign policy after the departure of Mrs Thatcher, the cre- ation of a new epoch of Anglo-German amity was the main aim he adopted in Europe. As for the other parts of the wreckage of our foreign policy, they include the widespread hostility to Britain's Bosnian policy throughout the Muslim world, a hostility of which Dr Mahathir of Malaysia is merely the leading exponent.

But there is one government with which relations have improved. When the Rus-

sians moved their troops to Sarajevo, and Mr Hurd praised their action as a 'con- structive' move, they had reason to believe that this was no empty compliment. They had strengthened his hand against a west- ern policy which, a few days earlier, he had lacked the strength to block on his own.

And for their own part the Russians can feel grateful to Mr Hurd for his previous foot-dragging over Bosnia, which has estab- lished a useful precedent for any future actions they may take in outlying parts of the former Soviet empire. Douglas Hurd was always against the break-up of the Soviet Union ('We have no intention or wish to undermine the stability of the Sovi- et Union,' he said in February 1991, when its 'stability' was already past all possible repair). Three months ago he even co- authored an article with the Russian for- eign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, in which he stated that armed conflicts in ex-Soviet republics were 'a source of legitimate con- cern to the Russians, who are worried by clashes close to their borders'. The fact that many of these conflicts were being actively stirred up by Russia for its own strategic

purposes (as Rossiiskie Vesti admitted only a few weeks later) was of course conve- niently ignored.

It is hard to think of any time since 1956 when Britain's foreign policy was in such a shambles. Even during the Suez crisis we had allies whose support was more valuable than that of the unpredictably crumbling Russian government today. But the main difference is that in 1956 the country knew that its foreign policy was a mess; today it persists in thinking — despite all the evi- dence to the contrary — that it rests in a safe pair of hands.