Please can somebody tell Lord Cameron he’s not the Foreign Minister of Ukraine?

LORD Slippery of Tripoli proves almost daily that he is the man in this country who is most strongly unqualified to be Foreign Secretary. Last week he annoyed the Americans by telling them to shower money for munitions on to Ukraine. I think Baron Cameron has done this three times since he took on his new post, twice by flying at our expense to Washington DC and once by penning an article for a political website in the American capital.

The main response has been nothing. But last week the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, squelched our former premier by refusing even to meet him. There were immediate sad cries of, ‘What about the Special Relationship?’, but as I keep telling you, there is no such thing. We matter to the Americans slightly more than Bulgaria, and much less than Ireland.

Try to see this the way Americans do. Republican Congressmen are holding up the money for Kiev to try to force President Biden to do something about the collapse of America’s southern border. In truth, American politicians care a lot more about uncontrolled migration than they do about the Ukraine crisis. Just as here, hardly anyone knows what the Ukraine war is in fact about. They have allowed a fanatical faction of foreign policy hawks to entangle the US in it, because they seemed to know what they were doing.

Now they don’t seem to. So more and more ordinary Americans wish it would go away. ‘Not another foreign war,’ they sigh.

THIS is why Lord Slippery misses with both barrels when he goes to Washington to badger Congress. He annoys them by plainly not understanding a major national concern. And he shows enthusiasm for war, which is dwindling there. Imagine if the US’s Secretary of State were a smooth and wealthy member of that country’s elite, and kept flying over here to tell us to rejoin the EU, a rough equivalent. He would get, at the very least, some funny looks. I suspect we would get pretty angry after the third time.

Cameron is not the Foreign Minister of Ukraine. His job is to promote British interests, not those of President Zelensky, who has his own slick public relations machine hard at work in Washington.

The Americans long sought a confrontation with Russia over Ukraine and they have now got one. If they do not want to pursue it any more, then that is their affair. Why is this weak, indebted country, which cannot fix its roads or its schools or its trains or its crime, supposed to be keener on pouring yet more high explosive into a war whose main achievement has been mass deaths and maimings among young men on both sides? What is it with David Cameron and war, anyway?

During his dreadful premiership, his worst action was to embroil this country violently in Libya. Why do this? Libya’s ruler, Muammar Gaddafi, was no worse than several regimes we are even now friendly with. Everyone knew that his strong control of his coastline prevented mass migration from Africa across the Mediterranean. Since Cameron’s war, such immigration has transformed Europe for ever. So why overthrow Gaddafi, blowing small children to bits (yes, we did) with our supposedly smart bombs? Libya has not really had a government since.

The impending chaos was obvious when Cameron and the French President Nicolas Sarkozy rushed to Tripoli in September 2011 for a vain, boastful ‘victory lap’, which now looks especially shameful. This is why I say he should not be allowed anywhere near foreign policy. Maybe there is something else he is qualified for, though I cannot think what it is just now.