We’ll need a slice of luck to survive our current crop of hopeless leaders

Boris Johnson and Liz Truss have taken to grandstanding on the world stage in recent weeks. A cynic might say this has more to do with domestic popularity than foreign policy.

We could find an apparent historical parallel. In October 1989, the Cold War was coming to an end and the West had won. Back in the UK, there was little good news on the home economic front, so Tory ministers preparing their speeches for the Blackpool Party Conference had a problem in finding grounds for optimism. Whatever their domestic responsibilities, they sought a way to clap-lines and standing ovations – by plundering Eastern Europe. The then Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, was especially eloquent on that subject, to the alarm of the new Foreign Secretary, John Major, who saw his own themes turning up in everyone else’s texts.

In retrospect, that was all harmless fun. No diplomatic harm would result from post-Cold War triumphalism. But matters are different today. Boris Johnson knows that however unpopular he may be at home, he is guaranteed to be cheered in Kyiv and that Volodymyr Zelensky is more enthusiastic about him than any of his cabinet colleagues, with the possible exception of Nadine Dorries. So there is an obvious temptation to get on a plane and revel in the applause.

There is an equally obvious danger: that the Ukrainians, over-estimating the amount of support they might receive from the West, will be lured towards an unsustainable intransigence. The war in the Ukraine will end either in compromise or in catastrophe and the route to the right outcome lies through realism, not photo-calls.

While the PM is using Ukraine as a catwalk, the Foreign Secretary has taken to China-bashing. It is not clear whether Truss is on leadership manoeuvres or whether she just enjoys world-stage strutting. Whatever her motives, she has been telling Xi Jinping to restore Hong-Kong’s freedoms, or else. Has she discovered a magic wand?

There is a difficulty in making such points. Caution can easily sound like cowardice. Those who argue that our power to resolve international disputes is nothing like it used to be can encounter unwelcome allies among the surviving remainers, happy to gloat over the UK’s weakness and insist that we have to work with the EU. Equally, the crushing of Hong Kong is terrible. If only we could have prevented it. Yet there was no means of doing so.

China leads on to Taiwan. There, who can tell? The willingness of brave Ukrainians to sacrifice their lives for their country may not liberate the Donbass, let alone Crimea. But it may have made Taiwan safer. The Chinese must surely be pondering recent events. Even across a common land border, it is not easy to invade a country whose population is willing to fight. A hundred-mile sea crossing brings a host of difficulties. That said, megaphone diplomacy is no help. It just makes our government seem silly.

With China, the West will need “strategic patience”, a phrase of George Kennan’s from the late 40s, about dealings with the Soviet Union. There is another objective which may now be harder to achieve. Henry Kissinger has pointed out that as a result of Richard Nixon’s overtures to Mao, it was possible to encourage the Russians and the Chinese to discover their differences with one another. That is likely to be much harder now.

Over the weekend, tearing myself away from the cricket, I read an excellent book by Richard Crowder: Aftermath – The Makers of the Post-War World. The author understands that history is written backwards but lived forwards. We know that the West was successful. From the later 40s onwards, at the price of abandoning the Eastern Europeans, we could ensure that Western Europe could rebuild and that the Cold War never turned hot. But Crowder makes it clear that this was a damned near-run thing. Another point emerges clearly. One reason why the West prevailed was the quality of leadership, both of politicians and officials. Truman, Marshall, Acheson, Harriman, Kennan, Clay, Vandenberg and many others: the United States was never better served since the days of the Founding Fathers. In the UK, at least in foreign affairs, Attlee could not be faulted and Bevin was a titanic adjutant, while Keynes worked himself to death in keeping the economy afloat.

Where are the equivalents today? Just when we need strength, we have weakness. Just when statesmen are required, we must make do with clowns and dotards. To survive our present rulers, we may need luck.

Yet luck also played a crucial role in that earlier dangerous decade. Roosevelt’s second Vice-President, Henry Wallace, was an ultra-liberal full of illusions and naivete about Russia. As he was unpopular with conservative-minded Democrats, FDR dumped him from the ticket in 1944. His replacement was a Mid-Western Senator called Harry Truman, not particularly well-known and with no apparent claim to greatness. In office, he earned one. God knows what sort of mess Wallace would have presided over.    

Thoughts of mess require an antidote: humour. As Foreign Secretary, Ernie Bevin grew very fond of Lady Diana Cooper, the daughter of a Duke and the wife of Duff Cooper, a former Tory Minister who was then Ambassador to Paris. His wife’s charms may indeed have extended Duff’s tenure in Paris, with Bevin resisting pressure to replace him with a more appropriate representative during a Labour government.

One night, Lady Diana suggested to an obviously over-refreshed Foreign Secretary that he might call it a night. He seemed to agree, though not in her sense. In the lift, he flung his arms around her and offered a kiss. She said afterwards that it was “like trying to resist a mountain-weight of lava.” The Ambassadress did not complain. She wrote in her diary that “there’s life in the dear old dog.” He had “courage and character and humanity and a lot of other nice things.”

So does Christopher Pincher.