Stephen Pollard
In my four decades in and around Westminster, I have met plenty of wrong ’uns and seen lots of scandals and disastrous appointments. But I can say with utter certainty that the appointment of Ed Miliband as Foreign Secretary by Andy Burnham is, by a very long way, the most nauseating appointment of my lifetime. It is genuinely sickening.
The appointment presents two possibilities, both of which are worrying
Miliband is the man who, as Labour leader in 2013, effectively vetoed British military action against Syria’s dictator president al-Assad by whipping the Labour party against it. It was the single most amoral decision of any mainstream party leader in living memory.
It had emerged in August 2013 that al-Assad had murdered over 1,400 people, using sarin nerve gas to kill them. Earlier that year, US president Barack Obama had announced a supposed ‘red line’ which he would not allow Assad to cross: the use of chemical weapons. In the wake of Assad’s use of sarin, prime minister David Cameron agreed to join the United States (and France) in military action to destroy as many of Assad’s chemical weapons as possible.
