Lord Carrington, Churchill’s last surviving minister, dies at age 99

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. Carrington was 99. 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. After holding posts in the Conservative governments of Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home, Carrington became defense 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, the former World War II army major oversaw the 1979 Lancaster House 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 honorably after taking responsibility for the nation’s failure to foresee Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands in April 1982. “If a person says to me ‘it’s a matter of honor and I feel I should go,’ that’s the one ground on which I am not at liberty to refuse,” Thatcher said of his resignation in a 1982 interview with the U.K.’s Independent Television News. “He’s been a marvelous 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.”