SIR MALCOLM RIFKIND: ME AND MAGGIE
ON THE morning of July 5 1995, Malcolm Rifkind sat behind the foreign secretary’s desk for the first time. As he admired the way the light fell from the tall windows overlooking Horse Guards and St James’ Park, Britain’s first Jewish foreign secretary since Rufus Isaacs’s two-month tenure six decades previously, felt as if he had come home.
The sense of “deep and tranquil satisfaction,” which Rifkind relates in his newly published memoirs, Power and Pragmatism, was probably not shared by Boris Johnson when he arrived at King Charles Street last week. Neither “deep” nor “tranquil” are adjectives often applied to Britain’s new foreign secretary. Beyond their liberal Tory instincts, it is difficult to think of two politicians whose public personas are less alike. When, for instance, Rifkind committed a rare public gaffe as foreign secretary over the then-contentious issue of Britain’s entry into the European single currency, his predecessor and former boss, Geoffrey Howe, refused to accept it as such. Rifkind was so careful with words and clear in thought, Howe suggested to journalists, that he must have intended to say precisely the words he had uttered.
The one cloud on his reputation was the Daily Telegraph and Channel 4 sting, accusing him of accepting money for lobbying, resulting in the Tory whip being withdrawn. Today, Rifkind refuses to condemn the party for the way it treated him. “There was nothing personal about it,” Rifkind argues, “they had a general election coming up and they just wanted to have the issue closed.” He was later exonerated.
Rifkind’s memoirs — which went to press after Johnson had withdrawn from the Conservative party leadership race but before Theresa May sent him to the Foreign Office — do not disguise his doubts about the new foreign secretary. Johnson, he accepts, is “ferociously intelligent, extremely well read and entirely civilised”. A “serious question mark”, however, hangs over his judgment. “Many people would not, at present,” he writes, “be comfortable with Boris as Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Foreign Secretary, or with his finger on the button of our Trident nuclear missiles”.
Now, he says: “I think he could be a good Foreign Secretary but only if he does not aspire to be a celebrity and is content to be a statesman… It would make him less fun but an entirely serious minister. I do not know if he can do it but his political future will depend on it.”
Unlike Johnson — who, despite eight years as London mayor, has never held ministerial office — Rifkind’s promotion to foreign secretary followed 16 years in government and three Cabinet posts. In 1996, Rifkind, Ken Clarke and three of their colleagues notched up a still-unbroken record when they completed the longest uninterrupted ministerial service since Lord Palmerston.
Eleven of those years in government were under Margaret Thatcher. Rifkind happily admits that he was never, in the former Prime Minister’s oft-used phrase, “one of us”, nor did he aspire to be: his memoirs are a paean to the virtues of pragmatism as opposed to the conviction politics which rested at the heart of Thatcherism. And yet, despite later confiding to a friend that her former Scottish Secretary belonged in the Labour party, Mrs Thatcher appointed him a minister after she became Prime Minister in May 1979 and he was sitting at her Cabinet table on the morning eleven-and-a-half years later when she announced her resignation.
Her forbearance of a man she clearly came to regard as an ideological cuckoo in the nest reflected a number of factors: Mrs Thatcher had been impressed by his work as a junior minister pushing her flagship policy of council house sales in Scotland, admired his political skills and later recognised the strength of his power base north of the border. Moreover, jokes Rifkind, “if it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have been in the Cabinet. Not only in relation to me, but in regard to any judgment she made, she was always reluctant to think that she might have got it wrong”.
A self-proclaimed moderate Eurosceptic who nonetheless supported a Remain vote, Rifkind believes that the result of the referendum is a “disaster”. Having observed Mrs Thatcher’s belligerent negotiating style close up, Rifkind does not commend it to Theresa May as she prepares to discuss Britain’s divorce from the European Union. Beyond their gender, he sees little similarity between the two women and reaches instead for the familiar comparison with Angela Merkel: like the new Prime Minister, the daughter of a clergyman, driven by the Protestant work ethic.
Mrs Thatcher, he suggests, may share some of their traits but she was also “charismatic, an extrovert with a strident manner… a oneoff,” he says, not adding whether this is a source of relief or sorrow.
Rifkind’s promotion to Scottish Secretary in January 1986 meant that for an — albeit brief — “extraordinary moment” Mrs Thatcher’s Cabinet contained five Jewish members: Rifkind, his distant cousin Leon Brittan, Sir Keith Joseph, David Young and Nigel Lawson.
It was, believes Rifkind, an “historical aberration” but he recalls that, on appointing him a junior Foreign Office minister in 1982, Mrs Thatcher asked him whether he was Jewish (she suggested the question was provoked by reading an article by him in the JC).
While emphasising that this was not the reason she was appointing him, the former Prime Minister was, remembers Rifkind, “delighted” when he responded that he was: the Foreign Office had a reputation for being anti-Israel, which she was keen to dispel.
Back at the Foreign Office under John Major, it fell to Rifkind to announce Britain’s commitment for the first time to a two-state solution. He is less hopeful now about its realisation than he was two decades ago and questions whether Benjamin Netanyahu is “seriously interested” in pursuing it. “I very much doubt it,” he admits.
If Rifkind is unimpressed by Netanyahu, he shudders at the prospect of Donald Trump in the White House. Does the former Foreign Secretary believe the Republican presidential candidate represents a threat to the “special relationship” and the role America has played in the post-war world? “I think he’s potentially a threat to almost everything. I’m not sure I want to qualify it,” he responds.
He compares Trump to Ronald Reagan, a man many viewed as an “extreme right-winger” when he became president. But, whereas Reagan had “a very full, well thought-out alternative strategy” for dealing with the Soviet Union, Rifkind argues that Trump simply has “a series of mutually inconsistent soundbites, various declarations of his views on Putin, on Mexican walls, on NATO, on China. There’s no coherence, there’s no thought-through strategy and nor does he have any experience at any level of government. Reagan, with all his faults, had been governor of California.”
Rifkind continues: “When you think that whoever is president of the United States is not only the most powerful man in the world but actually has someone walking with him all the time with a nuclear box — which can lead to the whole planet being destroyed — I think we’re entitled to be nervous.”
The former foreign secretary’s confession of nervousness about the Republican presidential candidate — while hardly unique — is powerful precisely because this unflappable, measured and cautious man is neither given to hyperbole nor alarmist rhetoric. In his memoirs, Rifkind writes that Boris Johnson is “not a Donald Trump”. Given his view on the man who would be president, that assessment is hardly reassuring.
‘Power and Pragmatism’ is published by Biteback at £20