Lord Carrington
Veteran Tory statesman and war hero who brokered a settlement in Rhodesia but resigned after Argentina invaded the Falklands
THE 6th LORD CARRINGTON, who has died aged 99, was almost the only statesman in the 20th century to attain high office without ever having sat in the House of Commons; his Westminster career culminated in his resignation as Foreign Secretary in April 1982 after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands.
Salisbury, Curzon and Halifax all began their political careers in the Lower House. Only Lansdowne and Crewe, in Edwardian times, matched Carrington’s achievement – and nobody else did so after the First World War.
Peter Carrington had one of the most extraordinary careers of any postwar politician, serving 30 years in office. A junior agriculture minister in the early 1950s, he became, successively, High Commissioner to Australia, First Lord of the Admiralty, leader of the Opposition in the Lords, Defence Secretary, Conservative Party chairman, Energy Secretary, Foreign Secretary and Secretary-general of Nato. He also served as chairman of GEC and of Christie’s.
Carrington’s greatest political triumph – or so it seemed for a generation – was the Lancaster House constitutional settlement of 1980, which brought UDI in Rhodesia to an end and ushered in an independent Zimbabwe.
The settlement ended 13 years of bitter civil war, but was regarded as a sell-out by some members of the Conservative Party. It was later blamed by some commentators for entrenching the economic power of the country’s white minority, making it impossible for the Zimbabwean government to fulfil the aspirations of black Zimbabweans for land – until Robert Mugabe, who came to power following the agreement, simply seized it for his supporters. Nevertheless, it was hailed at the time as an important diplomatic success.
Carrington’s true métier was diplomacy rather than policy and administration, and his career was marred by errors of judgment that might have finished a lesser-born man. He was closely implicated in the Crichel Down affair and attacked for his role in the Vassall spy scandal. As chairman of the Conservative Party and Energy Secretary, he bore at least some responsibility for Edward Heath’s ill-fated decision to call a general election in February 1974 on the single issue of “Who governs Britain?”
Political nemesis at last caught up with Carrington in 1982 when Argentina invaded the Falklands, taking the Foreign Office – whose intelligence in the run-up to the invasion was inadequate – and the small British garrison in the South Atlantic by surprise. It was a humiliating moment for British foreign policy and Carrington felt honour-bound to fall on his sword.
Argentina had apparently been encouraged by Foreign Office willingness (against the wishes of the islanders) to negotiate on the disputed issue of sovereignty, to conclude that Britain lacked the will to defend the islands.
His resignation, Carrington recalled, “was the most sorrowful moment of my life. But the disgrace had to be purged. I only lost my job; others lost their lives.”
That Carrington always rose above such setbacks was due to a combination of steely inner toughness, self-deprecatory charm and his cunning as a negotiator – Mugabe referred to him as the “old fox”.
Carrington cultivated an air of wry detachment conveyed in a languid drawl, and an unmistakable aura of controlled authority. “His greatest skill,” an unnamed friend was quoted as saying, “is his ability to go into a room with half a dozen people of different views, find the centre of gravity, and then, through winking and smiling and nudging and charming them, get an agreement.”
For all his other qualities, Carrington was no intellectual. His enemies, of which there were many on the Right of his party, often accused him of lacking principle. But despite his patrician manner and “wet” credentials, he got on surprisingly well with Margaret Thatcher. Because he was one of the few of her colleagues who was not after her job, he was perhaps about the only one capable of telling her when to stop talking.
Peter Alexander Rupert Carington was born on June 6 1919, the only son of the 5th Lord Carrington and Sybil, daughter of Viscount Colville of Culross. The Caringtons were originally Smiths, a family of drapers from Nottingham. They came up in the world, Lord Carrington explained, when “one ancestor set up the first bank outside London. We became chums with Pitt and got our peerage.” The Smiths changed their “altogether plebeian” surname to the grander-sounding Carington, with the additional whim of insisting on a single “r” for the family name and a double “r” for the title.
When the family was first ennobled, the entire House of Lords walked out in protest at a common banker being allowed to take the ermine. In no way deterred, the Caringtons became actively engaged in politics. Peter Carington’s great-uncle, the Marquess of Lincolnshire, was the celebrated “Champagne Charlie” who became Colonial Secretary under Asquith and, as a friend of Edward VII, was the man credited with manoeuvring the actress Nellie Clifden into the 18-year-old Edward’s bed.
But, as Lord Carrington explained: “As we got grander, we didn’t like getting our hands dirty making money. So we’re much poorer than we used to be. We sold the family seat, Wycombe Abbey, to a girls’ school.”
His grandfather, Rupert, went to recoup his fortunes in Australia, where he married Edith Horsfall from New South Wales. Peter’s father, “young Rupert”, was therefore brought up and educated in Australia, a country to which Peter felt strongly drawn. “Young Rupert”, in consequence, was not well received by the Carington family when he first came to England; Peter and his elder sister were always much closer to their Colville relations than to the Caringtons, especially as both their father and mother died when they were still comparatively young.
Peter Carington went to Eton where he failed to shine. When he came to leave, his housemaster advised: “For a really stupid boy, there are three possible professions: farming, soldiering and stockbroking.”
He chose soldiering, succeeding his father in the peerage in 1938 while still a cadet at Sandhurst. He became a subaltern in the Grenadier Guards the following year, just before the outbreak of war. His battalion was long enough in England for him to marry, in 1942, the pretty and intelligent Iona Mcclean (“the most sensible thing I have ever done”).
In 1944, the Guards Armoured Division was in the thick of operations in Normandy, the Low Countries and eventually Germany. When the bridge over the Rhine at Nijmegen, held by the Germans, was assaulted by his battalion, Carrington drove his tank on to the bridge, which was heavily mined, and held off the defenders on the opposite shore, knowing that the bridge could easily be blown up underneath him. It was, he said, all “rather disagreeable”. For this gallant act he received a MC, but some believed it should have been a VC.
He left the Army in 1946 in the rank of major. Back in England he and his wife moved into the semi-derelict Manor House at Bledlow, Buckinghamshire, once a Carington property lived in by the eldest son but rented by tenant farmers for the previous 100 years. There they took up farming and began to restore the seven-acre garden.
But Carrington had long felt drawn to politics. Just after the war, there were few young peers available to take duties on the opposition benches of the House of Lords, but he was one of them. His competence marked him out as potential ministerial material and in 1951, when the Tories took office, he was an immediate candidate for an under-secretaryship.
He was given Agriculture, where the bucolic and popular Captain Thomas Dugdale was the new minister. Carrington was out shooting when Churchill telephoned for him. “How was your shoot?” the Prime Minister asked. “How would you like to join mine?”
All would have been well had it not been for the Crichel Down affair. Crichel Down was part of a large area of land in Dorset compulsorily acquired as an experimental bomb site by the Air Ministry in 1937. In 1950, the Labour government decided that it had no further use for the land, but the Ministry of Agriculture was interested in it and the site was simply transferred from one department to another, an arrangement that Carrington approved when he came into office.
The scandal blew up when the original owners of the land, citing pre-war assurances, applied to repurchase it and were bluntly refused. Carrington told Dugdale, on official advice, that the former owners could be ignored. The matter was handled badly by the ministry, which was unwilling to admit fault until a tribunal ruled that it had acted in an arbitrary manner.
Dugdale resigned, but when Carrington and his fellow minister Richard Nugent tried to follow him, Churchill refused their resignations. Carrington, thinking himself partly responsible, felt so bad about the affair that he became physically ill. His wife and local doctor saved him, but his faith in himself had been shaken.
This would not be the last demonstration of his fallible judgment, or of his charmed political life. On at least three occasions Carrington erred but recovered his position, when an unluckier man might have seen his career come to an end.
None the less, in 1954 Sir Winston Churchill, advised by Lord Salisbury and undeterred by Crichel Down, made Carrington Under-secretary at the Ministry of Defence. There he had his initiation in a department that always engaged his profound interest. Two years later he received a greater boost to his shaken morale when Anthony Eden offered him the High Commission in Canberra.
Carrington’s three years in Australia were some of the most successful of his career. His Australian grandmother stood him in good stead and his direct and trenchant manner appealed to Australians. Sir Robert Menzies, the Australian prime minister, thought the world of him, and he was as popular in Sydney and Melbourne, in Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane, as he was in Canberra.
Reports of his success as Britain’s representative soon reached London and were noted in government circles. In 1959 he was brought home and appointed First Lord of the Admiralty.
In that office, Carrington had another narrow escape. In 1962 the Admiralty clerk John Vassall was charged under the Official Secrets Act with removing and photographing secret documents over a long period and sending them to Moscow. In the ensuing scandal, Tam Galbraith, Civil Lord of the Admiralty, resigned following the disclosure that he had written a postcard to Vassall, who was homosexual.
Carrington, too, was accused by sections of the press of incompetence in his handling of the affair and – libellously – of having deliberately concealed from Harold Macmillan that there was a spy in the Admiralty. He was not implicated in the scandal itself, but showed poor judgment in his dealing with it. Once again he escaped scatheless.
When Sir Alec Douglas-home became Prime Minister in 1963, Carrington entered the Cabinet as Minister without Portfolio and Leader of the House of Lords, and remained leader of the Opposition in the Lords after Home’s government was defeated in October 1964.
He also widened his experience by moving into the world of finance, becoming in due course chairman of the Australia and New Zealand bank and a director of Barclays and of Hambros. He also joined the boards of Schweppes, Amalgamated Metal and, at a later stage, Rio Tinto Zinc, which had important Australian interests.
Edward Heath thought highly of Carrington. When Heath won the 1970 election he made him Minister of Defence, an appointment that delighted the leaders of the Armed Forces, who found Carrington sympathetic, down to earth and practical in his handling of their problems.
However, this harmonious and productive relationship was interrupted at the end of 1973 by the industrial and political crisis that followed Heath’s decision to stick unyieldingly to his incomes policy and refuse the miners’ wage demands.
The miners went on strike and energy supplies, already strained by a Middle East war, were at risk. Heath considered whether to seek the country’s support for his firm line through a general election. Since 1972 Carrington had been chairman of the party, as well as Minister of Defence, and his advice was therefore crucial.
He came down in favour of an election, provided that Heath struck while the iron was hot. Perhaps if Heath had heeded Carrington’s advice, he might have won. But he procrastinated and brought in the unpopular three-day week, which chilled and depressed the electorate. Meanwhile, Carrington was given the thankless portfolio of Secretary of State for Energy.
Carrington was deeply depressed by the outcome of the election, which produced a minority Labour government. He was resentful that Heath had not taken his advice, but felt also – and not without reason, the hard-hearted might say – some responsibility of his own for the debacle.
For a time after this defeat, Carrington was so dejected that he considered abandoning politics altogether. But he soldiered on, leading the Opposition in the Lords, resuming his life in the City and attending to his farm and his estates.
When, early in 1975, Margaret Thatcher challenged Heath and ousted him as Conservative leader, Carrington’s feelings were torn. On the one hand he blamed Heath not only for his handling of the miners’ strike, but also for his behaviour afterwards. On the other, he had been close to Heath and had no wish to accuse him, or to be accused, of disloyalty. But when Heath embarked on a vendetta against Mrs Thatcher, Carrington gave his full support to the new leader.
His ambition was to be Foreign Secretary. It was also an ambition held by Lord Soames and Francis Pym, but when Mrs Thatcher won the 1979 election she did not hesitate. Carrington went to the Foreign Office, enabled by his membership of the Upper House to travel and concentrate on foreign affairs with a freedom denied to all his predecessors since Lord Home by the constant necessity of attendance in the Commons. He did, indeed, travel frequently and far.
He scored an immediate and resounding success by settling the Rhodesian problem, which had defeated all and sundry for 13 years. The Queen helped, Mrs Thatcher helped, the Commonwealth prime ministers helped; but in the last analysis it was Carrington who, after 14 weary weeks of negotiation at Lancaster House, secured an agreement that was acceptable to the Rhodesian nationalists as well as to most of the country’s white citizens. The way was thus paved for the rapid establishment of an independent Zimbabwe.
Between the Lancaster House agreement and his resignation over the Falklands in 1982, Carrington notched up several important diplomatic achievements. He led the European countries in their solid opposition to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan; he gave Britain a new standing in the European Community while at the same time, firmly supported (and hectored) by Mrs Thatcher, winning the battle to reduce the British contribution to the Common Market budget; he resolved a Franco-british dispute over the independence of the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu); he patched up a quarrel with Saudi Arabia; and he lowered the temperature with Spain in the longstanding dispute over Gibraltar.
At the same time, his calm good sense, refusal to panic, firmness of purpose and engaging sense of humour won him the devoted admiration of the Foreign Service. Yet none of this would save him when Argentina, encouraged by cuts to the Royal Navy and ambivalent signals from the Foreign Office, invaded and captured the Falkland Islands. After a historic Saturday debate and a torrid encounter with the Conservative backbench 1922 Committee, Carrington felt that he had no alternative but to resign.
Two years after his resignation, another illustrious appointment came his way: in 1984 he became Secretary-general of Nato, earning international respect for his emollient handling of East-west relations at a critical time.
On his retirement, he was appointed chairman of Christie’s, the auctioneers, and of the Australia and New Zealand Banking Group’s International Board of Advice. In 1990 he became a director of the Telegraph plc.
In 1991 Carrington’s reputation as a negotiator led the Irish Government, supported by the Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Brooke, to propose him as a candidate to chair talks on the future of the province. His nomination was, however, angrily rejected by the Unionist parties.
He got further, but had no more luck, as chairman of the peace conference set up by the EU to stem the bloodshed in the former Yugoslavia. Though he managed to broker a ceasefire, fighting between Serbs and Croats broke out almost immediately afterwards.
Lord Carrington was showered with honours both in Britain and abroad. He was appointed KCMG in 1958 and made a Companion of Honour in 1983. He became a Knight of the Garter in 1985, and was appointed GCMG in 1988. He served as Chancellor of the Order of the Garter from 1994. After the House of Lords Act in 1999 he was given a life peerage.
Peter Carrington married Iona Maclean in 1942. She died in 2009. They had two daughters and a son, Rupert Carington, born in 1948, who succeeds him in the peerage.
Lord Carrington, born June 6 1919, died July 9 2018