Former diplomat can finally be less diplomatic

Abstract

Leadership: Lessons from a Life in Diplomacy, by Simon McDonald. Haus Publishing. 258 pp. £20 After a successful Foreign Office career lasting more than forty years, the final five of them as head of the diplomatic service as Permanent Under-Secretary (PUS), Simon (now Lord) McDonald has produced a mixture of memoir and reflections on leadership. He is, happily for his readers, less than diplomatic in his assessments of some of the politicians, ambassadors and other senior officials with whom his path crossed. For good measure, he devotes a lengthy final chapter to the constitutional reforms he would like to see in Britain. McDonald doesn't mince words when disposing of Boris Johnson. He delivered his book manuscript just as Johnson was being succeeded by his no less irresponsible, but much less influential, successor, Liz Truss. He quotes an unnamed official who aptly remarked that ‘Boris Johnson is the third prime minister to be brought down by Boris Johnson’. McDonald writes that those he knew who worked closely with that unreliable journalist-turned-dodgy-politician found it ‘damaged most of their reputations in the end’, for ‘Johnson as prime minister was undermining the institutions that define the United Kingdom: Parliament, the Civil Service, the judiciary, the Union itself, and the UK's unwavering respect for international law’. The last ‘unwavering’ claim may be overegging the omelette. The deceit involved in the British-French-Israeli collaboration in the attack on Egypt in 1956 was not exactly compatible with ‘unwavering respect for international law’—and most international lawyers regarded, and continue to regard, the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, with British support, to be a breach of international law. That is not to suggest that McDonald is unaware that both those adventures were discreditable and wrong. Tony Blair's team, he observes, ‘fed him the supporting evidence he wanted to read and helped him to make the worst foreign policy mistake since Suez. Robin Cook's resignation speech was not only magnificent oratory, it was also right in all particulars’. McDonald adds, ‘Apart from Blair personally, I know almost no one who supported the Iraq War at the time (who is not Israeli) who still thinks UK involvement a good idea’. McDonald's frankness extends to his assessment of some of his more senior colleagues in the Foreign Office before he himself reached the topmost position in that department. The PUS when he first joined the service, Sir Antony Acland, was ‘Patrician,, diligent, and foul-tempered’; the ambassador in whose British Embassy in Saudi Arabia he served, Sir Derek Plumbly, was pusillanimous in his response to the Saudis when they falsely and absurdly accused McDonald of supplying bombs to British ‘terrorists’ in their country; and, criticising leaders who take themselves too seriously, ‘encouraging (or at least accepting) deference from their colleagues’, he suggests that one of his predecessors as Ambassador to the Federal Republic of Germany, Sir Christopher Mallaby, exemplified this tendency, with Embassy staff expected to stand ‘whenever he swept into the room’. MI6 does not escape his critical scrutiny. Noting its head's ‘misplaced confidence in intelligence over Iraq’, he adds that ‘MI6 is still recovering from the wounds inflicted by Richard Dearlove's working methods’. McDonald is rightly critical of the accretion of power in the office of prime minister, and observes that ‘Constraints that remind leaders they are not masters of the universe are a good idea’. Yet, even he is too accepting of the absurdity of giving one person the power and right to take umpteen decisions personally—rather than collectively with colleagues of independent standing. Of the role of prime minister, he writes: ‘You will juggle twenty different subject matters in any given day. You will need plausibly to act as if you are the best informed participant in any meeting if you are to persuade other participants that you deserve to sit in the chair. You will achieve that only by unrelenting hard work’. Of those three sentences, only the last makes sense. Even a hard-working prime minister, as distinct from a Johnson, who spent much of his time on the road or in the air to that day's photo-opportunity, would be unwise to claim more knowledge than he or she possessed and to insist on having the last word on everything of governmental consequence. Doing so merely results in other people in the prime ministerial entourage assuming some of the power concentrated in 10 Downing Street and becoming the de facto decision makers at the expense of departmental ministers. McDonald himself notes the tendency for ministers to be presented with a peremptory ‘Number Ten wants…’, and Jack Straw's entirely appropriate response, ‘Who in Number 10? The building doesn't have a view’. McDonald wishes to rebalance the relations between prime minister and departmental ministers by returning to secretaries of state the powers they exercised until mid-twentieth century to select their own junior ministers rather than have the prime minister's choice imposed on them. On legislative and electoral reform, McDonald does not favour a move to any form of proportional representation in elections to the House of Commons, for which he remains firmly in favour of first past the post, but he has an element of proportional representation in mind for the House of Lords. He proposes a rather complicated reform of the Lords, starting with a much-needed reduction in its bloated size to a maximum of 400 members. That would reduce it by more than half and, instead of having a larger membership than the Commons, the upper house would have about a third fewer legislators. The most straightforward part of McDonald's proposal is implementation of the overdue removal of the remaining hereditary peers. Culling 300 life peers is more difficult and McDonald wishes to soften the blow to their self-esteem by doing this gradually. For the future, he would impose a maximum of twenty years’ membership. His aim is to preserve the useful part the Lords play in the scrutiny and revision of legislation, while preserving the primacy of the Commons. Things get more complicated when he proposes two categories of membership of the upper house (both with the title of peer)—voting and non-voting members, the latter to be drawn from the ‘regions’, with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland each designated as a region and England divided into seven regions. McDonald would have the prime minister still appointing ‘working peers’ from his or her own party and the House of Lords Appointments Commission would become wholly responsible for ‘nominating public service peers’. To read the remaining detail of McDonald's proposal is to be reminded that the Lords survives in its present form partly because of the near-impossibility of reaching consensus on an alternative. It survives also, in large part, because prime ministers find it an invaluable way to reward allies, MPs past their sell-by date, donors and courtiers. More respectably, it persists because the Lords, in spite of the absurdity of its size and composition, has enough people with expertise, experience and sense to improve legislation and to offer cogent criticism of the executive. There is a strong case for another wave of constitutional reform, which should include a check on the creeping presidentialism of the office of prime minister. For that very reason, it will have to be pressed upon an incoming Labour prime minister, for ‘what Number Ten wants’ is usually more power in Number Ten. Such reform requires a lot of collective deliberation, but Simon McDonald's proposals are, at least, worth adding to the mix. Archie Brown is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford and author, most recently, of The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War