Attlee advocate aiming to make foreign policy work for Britain
AN influential figure in the Downing Street policy unit, John Bew has long been expected to deliver a shake-up of Whitehall in his wide-ranging review.
The respected historian and author was last year confirmed to be carrying out a cross-government examination of the UK’S world standing.
It included the administration of the £15.2 billion aid budget, with rumblings that one recommendation would be the merger of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Department for International Development.
The challenges facing Britain have been set out by Prof Bew – a history and foreign policy specialist at King’s College London – in published work. In 2018, he said the tectonic plates of the modern international order were shifting, leaving Britain operating in a more competitive global system.
“If ‘global Britain’ is to be more than rhetoric, it will also depend on how the UK navigates an international system in which soft consensus – predicated on overwhelming Western power – is giving way to fiercer competition,” he wrote in the New Statesman.
“This may require more hard choices and risk taking than we have grown used to in recent times.” His views on modern statecraft and diplomacy were further borne out in the 2015 book Realpolitik, where he suggested Britain’s foreign policy had been coloured by “idealism” and was increasingly outdated when rivalries with the likes of Russia and China were emerging.
It is expected his review – originally due in October – will seek to bring a more hard-nosed approach to Britain’s foreign policy, centred on how it can be used to promote the national interest.
Prof Bew’s other work has made him something of a contemporary to the man leading the Government. But while Boris Johnson’s admiration for Winston Churchill is well known, Prof Bew has more interest in his successor, Clement Attlee, winning the Orwell Prize for his 2016 book Citizen Clem.
‘If “global Britain” is to be more than rhetoric … it may require more hard choices and risk taking’