A skilled strategist and diplomat who blazed a trail for black Americans

Colin Powell was a great American, a great soldier and diplomat, and, simply, a wonderful human being. Had he wanted to, he could have become the first African-american president of the United States. It speaks volumes for his values that he declined to do so because of his concerns for his family.

Like every serviceman or woman who has served on the front line, Powell had no romantic illusions about the “glory” of war. Two tours in Vietnam as a young officer left him appalled by what he saw. He was wounded and survived not one but two helicopter crashes. Like his close friend, and deputy as secretary of state, Rich Armitage, also a military veteran, Powell had contempt for those urging war on the president who had, in Armitage’s redolent words, “never smelt cordite”.

When Powell was appointed US secretary of state in January 2001, he enjoyed the rare distinction of unanimous confirmation by the US Senate. I got to know him a few months after that, when I was appointed foreign secretary in June 2001. The summer months of 2001 were quiet, internationally. Then 9/11 happened and the world changed.

One of the many consequences was that Powell and I went from polite acquaintanceship to a deep and lasting friendship, as we sought, with some success, but not enough, to deflect our respective bosses from too belligerent an approach to the threats to the US, and to the whole of the civilised world.

Powell used to get very frustrated by what he felt to be the undermining of what he thought he’d agreed with President George W Bush by vicepresident Dick Cheney, and defence secretary Don Rumsfeld. In August 2002, he had me make an entirely private trip to where he was on holiday in the Hamptons to discuss how Bush could be persuaded to go down “the UN route” with Iraq, and use the Security Council to secure international agreement about the danger which Iraq posed.

In that, Powell succeeded. A tough UN Security Council Resolution, 1441, was passed, without a vote against, in November 2002. It provided a ladder for Saddam Hussein to climb down. Tragically for him, Iraq, and indeed for the reputations of the US and the UK, he declined to take it.

Powell is better remembered for a Security Council meeting a few months later, on Feb 5 2003, when he presented detailed evidence of Saddam’s holdings of chemical and biological weapons – evidence that was believed by the US, the UK, and most of the world at the time. Powell had spent two days at the CIA HQ at Langley going through the intelligence; discarding any he thought tendentious. Given what the world subsequently learnt, Powell was mighty sore at both the intelligence failure, and the damage to his reputation. But I think that history will judge Powell more kindly than he feared. He was an immensely skilled military strategist and diplomat who resolved many potential international flare-ups by dogged negotiation.

He was also well aware that he had carried the torch for black Americans, managing against all the odds to break through discrimination in the US to achieve the highest offices in the military and the Department of State.

I mourn, with my wife Alice, not only a giant of American public life, but a good friend with whom we had remained in close touch until the end. He had a wonderful sense of humour; Alice nicknamed him the “other man in her life”, because of his frequent late-night telephone calls. Powell had not been in good health for a while, though he bore this with extraordinary fortitude. It was treatments for multiple myeloma and Parkinson’s which made him more susceptible to Covid, which ended his life.