Why is Cameron betraying the Queen’s pride and joy?
DAVID CAMERON was too diplomatic to show his irritation yesterday at having to fly to Malta to join 53 other world leaders for the Commonwealth Conference summit meeting. Coming on top of the crisis over Syria, and in the wake of the controversial Autumn Statement from the Chancellor, the weekend’s event in the Mediterranean would have seemed to him a vexatious interruption.
Not so for the Queen. To her, the Commonwealth represents the summit of a life’s work — and she has been the central reason for its remarkable success.
In Malta, she is the talismanic figure at the heart of events. Everyone wants to talk to her. She has attended every Commonwealth conference, bar one (no more longhaul travel meant she didn’t go to Sri Lanka two years ago) in the past 60 years.
She knows almost every Commonwealth leader personally. Many of them have become friends of long-standing. When she met the new Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, this week, she told him she remembered him when he was in short trousers (his father was Canada’s PM in the Seventies).
The facts tell their own astonishing story. Almost two billion people, around a third of the world’s population, live in Commonwealth countries. Every continent is represented, and every great world religion.
More than half of its citizens are under the age of 25, and it comes cheap, too. The cost of British membership amounts to barely 20p per head — a tiny fraction of the £60 paid on average by each of us annually to the European Union.
THE Commonwealth ought to be a wonderful asset to Britain, yet heartbreakingly, David Cameron refuses to realise this. His government treats it with contempt. Here is one disgraceful example. Every year, in the second week of March, there is a Commonwealth ‘service of Observance’ at Westminster Abbey.
The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh always attend, as do most senior members of the Royal Family. Commonwealth leaders frequently travel thousands of miles to join the congregation.
David Cameron has never once undertaken the five-minute journey from Downing Street to Westminster Abbey to pay his own respects.
And this neglect sends out a message. Whenever I meet a member of a Commonwealth government, I always ask about how Britain regards them. They tell me how much they love Britain and treasure the Commonwealth. Then they tell me how bewildered they are by this British attitude I describe.
Frequently, I hear horror stories. On one occasion, George Osborne flew to New York for a conference at the International Monetary Fund. The Commonwealth finance ministers met for a simultaneous meeting, yet the Chancellor didn’t want to know.
It is normal for Commonwealth ministers to meet in the organisation’s magnificent headquarters at Lancaster House in Central London. Downing Street or the Foreign Office sometimes can’t be bothered to dispatch a minister across the park to attend.
When they do turn up, they are concerned only with selfish British interests.
The most glaring offender is the International Development Secretary, Justine Greening.
The Department for International Development (DFID) ought to work hand-in-glove with Commonwealth countries — yet, believe it or not, the wretched Greening is not even in Malta this weekend. As far as DFID is concerned, the Commonwealth might as well not exist.
To be fair to David Cameron, Tony Blair was equally bad. Indeed, when Cameron became Prime Minister he promised to remedy matters. David Howell, father- in- law to Chancellor Osborne, was appointed Minister for the Commonwealth, with a mission to repair relations.
However, Howell was soon sacked (reportedly, in a phone call from his son-in-law) and the Government forgot all about the Commonwealth.
Here is the problem. The Foreign Office is obsessed with the European Union, while Downing Street is slavishly subservient to the U.S.
Progressive, modern- minded officials and politicians tend to think of the Commonwealth as an archaic survival of Empire. I believe the politicians and officials are wrong.
Whether or not Britain leaves the European Union after the referendum of 2017, the EU is economically sclerotic. Britain will fail, too, if we continue to regard Europe as our principal trading partner.
BY CONTRAST, several of the Commonwealth nations — India, Nigeria, South Africa, Singapore, Canada, Australia — are some of the most dynamic in the world. We share a common culture, a common legal system, a common language. Commonwealth countries, too, tend to be remarkably welldisposed towards Britain — as this weekend’s event in Malta proves.
With the slow collapse of the European Union, and the gradual fading of the influence of the U.S., we are moving away from a world dominated by a handful of Great Powers, towards a more informal system of independent, but interrelated nation-states.
It may be rooted in British imperial history, but the Commonwealth, with its multitude of informal connections, is perfectly suited to this 21st- century international system.
The Queen is right about the Commonwealth, and the Prime Minister is wrong. Now is the moment to start mending relations with Britain’s greatest asset.