Falklands last straw for principled politician
Three days after Argentina invaded the Falklands in 1982, Lord Carrington – who has died aged 99 – resigned as British foreign secretary, despite prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s strenuous efforts to dissuade him. He bore little blame for the government’s failure to avert the calamity, but ‘‘the nation feels there has been a disgrace’’, he wrote in his autobiography. ‘‘Somebody must have been to blame. The disgrace must be purged. The person to purge it should be the minister in charge. That was me.’’
His resignation won him praise, not obloquy. It was seen as an honourable act by a principled
Lord politician and it was one of the
Carrington last times the doctrine of ministerial Politician responsibility b June 6, 1919 was observed. d July 9, 2018 Subsequent ministers preferred to blame others when things went wrong, or brazen them out.
Carrington was a throwback to an earlier age in other ways too. He was one of the last surviving British politicians to have served in World War II, and the last survivor of Winston Churchill’s 1950s government. He was a patrician, paternalistic ‘‘one-nation’’ Tory of the old school. He considered pragmatism a virtue, distrusted ideology and believed in selfless public service. He was so self-effacing that his memoirs failed to mention that he won a Military Cross for his wartime service. ‘‘Pot luck,’’ he told an interviewer who asked about the decoration.
He was, to misquote Churchill, a modest man with little to be modest about. He only once stood for an election, for Buckinghamshire county council, but held office under six prime ministers. He never went to university, but served as foreign secretary, defence secretary, energy secretary, leader of the House of Lords, First Lord of the Admiralty, chairman of the Conservative Party, secretary-general of Nato and high commissioner to Australia. By the time of his death on Monday he was the oldest member of the House of Lords, and the second longestserving member of the Privy Council after the Duke of Edinburgh.
He shared 67 years of his life with his wife, Iona, who died in 2009. They renovated a semiderelict 18th-century house on his ancestral estate, and created six acres of exquisite gardens. ‘‘She doesn’t really talk English. She talks Latin,’’ Carrington would joke of his wife’s encyclopaedic knowledge of botanical names.
Peter Alexander Rupert Carington (the family name has only one ‘‘r’’, the barony two) was the son of the 5th Baron Carrington and the Hon Sybil Marion. His forebears had mostly been Liberals until one generation found David Lloyd George so loathsome that they switched parties. He inherited his title in 1938.
He spent most of the war in Britain, before joining the invasion of Europe in June 1944. He won his MC for holding a bridge at Nijmegen with his tank. Given a few days’ leave in August 1944, Carrington and two fellow guards joined US troops as they liberated Paris, driving down the ChampsElysees and staying at the Ritz.
The fighting over, he took his seat in the House of Lords. He sat on Buckinghamshire county council until, in 1951, he returned from a day’s shooting and received a call from Churchill in Downing St. ‘‘Would you like to join my shoot?’’ the prime minister asked, and Carrington duly became junior agriculture minister with responsibility, among other things, for combating a new virus called myxomatosis that was killing rabbits.
He moved to the Ministry of Defence, where he served under three ministers in quick succession, then spent three years as high commissioner in Australia. He had that essential political requirement, luck; he left the MoD a month before the Suez debacle.
After a spell as First Lord of the Admiralty, he joined Alec Douglas-Home’s cabinet as leader of the House of Lords, before Labour’s victory in 1964 left him in opposition. He then began a business career, becoming chairman of the ANZ Bank, and sitting on the boards of Barclays Bank and Cadbury-Schweppes.
The Conservatives returned to power under Edward Heath in 1970, and Carrington became defence secretary, where the blemish on his record was Northern Ireland. He staunchly defended the British soldiers who shot dead 13 unarmed civilians on Bloody Sunday in 1972, writing in his memoirs that ‘‘the troops made what in any other country would be regarded as a pretty restrained effort in defending themselves’’. That myth was debunked by the Saville inquiry in 2010, and for years the injustice served as a recruiting agent for the IRA. Carrington was accused by Labour of taking the decision to use torture on detained IRA suspects.
He backed Heath when Thatcher challenged him for the Tory leadership, and expected to be dropped from her shadow cabinet. By his own admission, he was not ‘‘a convinced fellow-devotee’’ of Thatcher’s and found the Conservative Party to be ‘‘never at its most attractive . . . when trying, out of character, to be ideological’’.
Thatcher liked him, however. She wrote that he had ‘‘great panache and the ability to identify immediately the main points in any argument; and he could express himself in pungent terms. We had disagreements, but there were never any hard feelings.’’
After her victory in the 1979, she made him foreign secretary, where his crowning achievement was the resolution of Rhodesia’s civil war. The low point was the Falklands war. He received no intelligence reports of an imminent invasion, but warned the cabinet several times that the situation was dangerous and privately urged the US to restrain Argentina. But the invasion took place, and Carrington fell on his sword.
He never returned to government, becoming chairman of the General Electric Company until 1984, then secretary-general of Nato. He also published his memoirs, which were notable for their lack of malice or scoresettling. Those he found ‘‘disagreeble’’ he simply omitted, he said. Of his career, he wrote: ‘‘It is office that has satisfied rather than the game of parliament or party. It is office which gives the chance to do things, to steer things perhaps very slightly, almost certainly very gradually and, sadly, often most impermanently, towards what a person believes right.’’ – The Times
He was so self-effacing that his memoirs failed to mention that he won a Military Cross for his wartime service. ‘‘Pot luck,’’ he told an interviewer.