LONG-SERVING U.K. MINISTER
LAST SURVIVING MEMBER OF CHURCHILL’S CABINET
Lord Carrington, the House of Lords member who served six U.K. prime ministers and was the last surviving member of Winston Churchill’s administration, has died. He was 99 years old.
The House of Lords website said he died on Monday.
Carrington became one of the Conservative Party’s most influential policymakers through the 1970s and 1980s after beginning his political career as a junior agriculture minister in Churchill’s government in 1951. Best known as Margaret Thatcher’s foreign secretary from 1979 to 1982, he later headed NATO for four years as the Cold War drew to a close.
“Patience, consistency, knowledge and, if you want to be successful in the end, a great big slice of luck,” Carrington said of the requirements for successful diplomacy in a 1984 interview with University of California Television.
Carrington became defence secretary under Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1970, and briefly held the newly created post of energy secretary to counter the supply challenges caused by the 1973 oil crisis.
As foreign secretary, he oversaw the 1979 agreement that led to Rhodesian independence, ushering in Robert Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s first prime minister. Carrington was also considered the last U.K. minister to resign honourably after taking responsibility for the nation’s failure to foresee Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982.
In a 1982 interview with the U.K.’s Independent Television News, Thatcher said of his resignation: “He’s been a marvellous foreign secretary. I’ve been with him on so many occasions. He’s a sturdy and bonny fighter for Britain, a very gallant officer and we shall miss him.”
As a Conservative who nurtured ties with workingclass Britons, Carrington was known to have a frosty relationship with Thatcher, who took on the nation’s unions in her first term as prime minister. The former foreign secretary said the differences of opinion with Thatcher didn’t affect their ability to work together on world affairs.
“It may be a defect in my temperament that I find it much more natural to like than dislike people I work with or for,” he said in his 1988 memoir, Reflect on Things Past. “I may be irritated by characteristics but I generally sympathize with perceived difficulties and challenges.”
Peter Alexander Rupert Carington was born June 6, 1919, in Aylesbury, a town in the English county of Buckinghamshire. The spelling of his family surname differed from his House of Lords title. He became sixth Baron Carrington of Upton in 1938.
The Carington family was part of a dynasty of bankers and land owners who produced several Conservative politicians.
Carrington attended Eton College in Windsor, Berkshire, and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, before serving in the Grenadier Guards during the Second World War. He was awarded the Military Cross in 1945 after capturing a bridge in the Dutch city of Nijmegen. Having taken over the seat that his father vacated in the House of Lords, he was later invited to join Churchill’s administration.
He entered DouglasHome’s Cabinet as a minister without portfolio and as leader of the House of Lords in 1963. Carrington then served Heath until Labour Party leader Harold Wilson won office in 1974, before spending two years as chairman of General Electric Co.
His tenure as secretarygeneral of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization coincided with a thaw in Cold War relations, marked by armscontrol agreements between then U.S. president Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Having advocated a 50-per-cent reduction in strategic nuclear weapons while in the post, Carrington later lamented that the end of the Cold War had extinguished a discipline imposed on world diplomacy.
“If the Cold War had still been going on, Yugoslavia would never have broken up because people would have been too frightened,” he said. “Saddam Hussein would never have invaded Kuwait. Afghanistan would never have happened.”