At the Rabbi Jonathan Sacks memorial lecture at the LSE this week, David Miliband ‘broke his silence’ after days of intense speculation that he will soon be announced as Andy Burnham’s Foreign Secretary.
Unfortunately, I think Miliband as foreign secretary would represent at best stale continuity and at worst a disaster
We shall have to wait and see whether he gets the call-up. But his speech will have further convinced his admirers that he has both the intellectual heft and unusually extensive experience to make a great success of the role. To his detractors, the speech, which focused on countering ‘democratic backsliding’, was further proof of his stale liberal internationalist outlook characterised by an unwavering commitment to the ‘Rules Based International System’ whose time is up.
Given the instability of British politics, in my 11 years as a Foreign Office official I served under no fewer than nine foreign secretaries. Spreadsheet Phil (Philip Hammond) was boring though conscientious, taking his lunch at his desk. Boris never stuck to script but loved the sense of history and grandeur of the role, choosing to do his all-staff addresses in the old India office’s Durbar Court, staff craning their necks out of the encircling balconies from where Peggy Ashcroft once called out to John Gielgud in a famed performance of Romeo and Juliet.
