Deciders meet deliverers

On 4 April 2013 David Cameron was “winched from a helicopter onto HMS Victorious, one of our Trident nuclear submarines” to quote from his own account later that day. According to a local newspaper, the Lennox Herald:

Mr Cameron joined the submarine at sea as it finished an 88-day mission and spent time with crew members on board the giant strategic missile submarine and visited the vessel’s operations room, messes and living spaces.

Photographs of Cameron on board HMS Victorious at the end of the 100th Trident patrol appeared in the national press the following day (see above).

Then on 8 April the death of Lady Thatcher started a flood of media articles in the days before the funeral on 17 April. One was by Angela Huth in the Daily Mail on 11 April:

Back in 1986, a producer friend at the BBC suggested that a book I had written, The English Woman’s Wardrobe, would make a good documentary film. The book was not about fashion, but about women’s feelings about their clothes. Princess Margaret was the star of the printed version: we wanted Mrs Thatcher to take that role in the film. Amazingly, she agreed.

At Number 10 the PM

… led us into the sitting room. There, some 20 different garments were hanging before us on a long clothes rack. She had abandoned her lunch break to heave them from her bedroom into the sitting room. … Mrs Thatcher remembered the history of everything on the rack, and described each one with merry recall. She pointed to a severe beige suit. ‘This we wore on a visit to the Polaris missile,’ she explained, with a touch of nostalgia. The ‘we’ she referred to meant, I think, she and her dressmaker.

The beige suit is probably the garment fourth from the right below.

A clue to “Polaris missile” can be found on the Margaret Thatcher Foundation’s (MTF) excellent website, which has recently made available her private files for 1982:

On 31 July MT paid a visit to HMS Resolution, one of the four Polaris submarines carrying Britain's strategic nuclear deterrent, a visit held so secret in advance that her appointment diary was left blank for the day: we only have timings for it because she kept the tiny engagement card she received each morning detailing the appointments for the day ahead. (Generally those cards do not survive.) Admiral Fieldhouse accompanied her and afterwards she wrote to him (10 Aug):  

It was a marvellous experience - made wonderful by the superlative and yet modest qualities of the commander and crew. The feeling of comradeship and yet discipline and respect were marvellous to see. We are fortunate indeed in the high personal qualities of our ordinary folk - if ordinary is the word to use: they all seem so able to demonstrate extraordinary qualities when called upon to do so. …

A couple of aspects of this seem noteworthy. Firstly, the somewhat de haut en bas reference in 1984 to “ordinary folk”, although qualified, and the use of a regal “we” to Huth in 1986 suggest that Mrs Thatcher’s feet had lost contact with the ground earlier than indicated by some of the accounts of her despatch in 1990 by her exasperated colleagues. The well-known “We have become a grandmother” was in 1989. Secondly, and more interestingly, it raises the question of how many other Prime Ministers have taken the trouble to visit Polaris or Trident submarines. Why should they? Peter Hennessy devotes a whole chapter of The Secret State Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010 to “The Human Button: Deciders and Deliverers” and makes the point:

… the premier [with the Chief of the Defence Staff (CDS)] makes up the first of the pairs that comprise the firing chain from the prime ministerial bunker to the Royal Navy Trident submarine on patrol. (page 358)

The Royal Navy became “Deliverers” at the start of the first Polaris patrol in 1968 since when there have been eight “Decider” Prime Ministers, four Conservative and four Labour. Of the Conservatives we know for certain that Cameron and Thatcher have been on board HM submarines carrying the nuclear deterrent. John Major may have been – he visited the Faslane base in August 1996 and made a speech at the ceremony to mark the decommissioning of the last Polaris submarine, HMS Repulse, by which time the first two Trident submarines were operational. Whether Ted Heath made such a visit in the Polaris period between 1970 and 1974 is uncertain. Margaret Thatcher was Heath’s education secretary so the MTF is making papers from his government available on-line. One is a record of a conversation between Heath and President Pompidou in November 1973 indicating the former’s interest in future nuclear cooperation with France rather than the US (page 8/9). So perhaps not.

Again, it is yet to be established whether or not any of the four Labour PMs (Wilson, Callaghan, Blair and Brown) visited a Polaris or, in the case of the latter two, Trident submarine. Of course, not doing so, or not wanting it to be publicised if they did, does not mean that they failed to take their Decider responsibilities seriously. Hennessy records Lord Guthrie’s comment on his briefing when CDS of Tony Blair as to the Trident force and its capability:

He was quite quiet when he actually heard what was at the country’s disposal. (page 310)

In France, a country which embraces égalité (but is run by élites) and where a Socialist President is unencumbered by a left wing with unilateralist tendencies, the Decider can go to sea early on in his time in office to mix with les gens ordinaires who are ready to do the delivering (François Hollande on Le Terrible in July 2012, below).

UPDATE JULY 2017

Well, don't the years go by! Another French president made a visit to the same submarine (as reported by BBC News, Emmanuel Macron aboard France's Le Terrible nuclear submarine) on 4 July apparently.

Will Theresa May follow in her predecessor's footsteps?  Too much else going on one would have thought.

On age advantage in general elections

There have been 20 elections in the UK since the end of the second world war. A recent post looked at the vote share of the two main parties (Conservative and Labour) in these elections. Another, perhaps less well-grounded, updated the remarkable record of graduates of Oxford university being the winners – now 18 times out of the 20.

Yet another, but not altogether serious, statistic about elections which is easily captured is the age difference between the contenders (Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition), shown for the post-war period in the chart below.

The green shadow indicates where the election generated a change of governing party. 1945, following the wartime coalition led by Winston Churchill, and 2010, leading to a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition led by David Cameron, are assumed to be changes of party. Eight of the 20 elections were then of this kind. In the four elections from 1966 to 1974 the age difference between the contenders was insignificant, Harold Wilson being born in March and Edward Heath in July 1916. For this reason, no conclusions can be drawn about the 1970 and February 1974 changes of government. However, in five of the remaining six elections in which there was a change of party, the successful challenger was younger, on four occasions by 10 years or more. The only older successful challenger was in 1951, when, having failed to displace Clement Attlee in 1950, Churchill returned to the Prime Ministership.

In the 12 continuity elections (ie with no consequent change of governing party), Wilson’s successes against Heath in 1966 and October 1974 are as before insignificant as far as age differences are concerned. Cameron’s success in 2015 against Ed Miliband, who was three years younger, and John Major’s in 1992, when a year and a day older than Neil Kinnock, are probably best regarded as inconclusive as well. In the eight remaining continuity elections, three of the victors had an age advantage of more than 10 years and two were more than five years younger. Three were older, Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of Kinnock in 1987, when more than 15 years older, being easier to understand than Harold Macmillan’s of Hugh Gaitskell in 1959 when more than ten years older.

Is there any underlying significance to all this? It could be that for the electorate to move a party from opposition to government, there has to be an appetite for change and the case for fulfilling it can be made more convincingly by a younger person – Wilson in 1964, Margaret Thatcher in 1979, Tony Blair in 1997, Cameron in 2010.

And what should the two parties’ strategies be for the next election if they were to take age advantage seriously? Labour would, it seems, be more likely to succeed in selling change to the electorate with a much younger leader than Jeremy Corbyn, 68 but now not easily dislodged. It is worth noting that while Cameron at 43 in 2010 was the youngest PM since 1812, Justin Trudeau became Canadian Prime Minister in 2015 at the same age and Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France this year at 39. Labour might well want to wait for the Tories to move first but ought already to be considering that their man or woman should be much more than five years younger than Boris Johnson or Amber Rudd (both currently 53) and significantly younger than Michael Gove (49, going on 60) or Sajid David (47). The Conservatives (on the assumption that Theresa May is no longer PM by then) should aim to nullify any future Labour leader’s age advantage by choosing someone in their early forties. It would also be to the Tory’s advantage to play it long and keep Labour waiting.   Oh, and if they'd been to Oxford ...

Anyone thinking of starting up a new party under, say, David Miliband, should remember that he is 52 next month. How time passes.


Update 27 June 2017 

On 25 June, the Sunday Telegraph carried an article by Ben Riley-Smith, Tory plot to skip 'toxic' generation and install younger face as next leader.

Tory MPs and donors are plotting to “skip a generation” and install a younger MP as their next leader after concluding the front-runners to replace Theresa May are too toxic. A growing number of Conservatives believe that Boris Johnson and David Davis have “had their day” and only younger faces can revive the party’s fortunes.  

… Hopes are now turning to the “golden generation” of Tory MPs first elected in 2010 to win back younger voters who voted for Jeremy Corbyn en masse at the election.  Sajid Javid, the Business Secretary, Dominic Raab, the Eurosceptic justice minister, and Priti Patel, the International Development Secretary, are all being talked up by colleagues.  Other ministers from the 2010 intake such as Jesse Norman, Brandon Lewis and Jo Johnson - the brother of Boris - are also mentioned as possible contenders.  

Supporters of the plan point to how David Cameron, the last Tory to win the party a majority, was barely known when he joined the leadership race in 2005.  

“If and when this happens, we need Year Zero – a real radical revolution,” said one 2010 MP about a leadership switch.  “We need an equivalent to Ruth Davidson [the Scottish Tory leader] – someone completely counter-intuitive. She is a lesbian kick-boxer who doesn’t fit the mould. When she first got elected she didn’t have much cut through. But because they are new and different it will gather stream [sic].” 

One veteran MP warned that “all the front-runners are contaminated in one way or the other". Another younger MP said: “They’ve had their day and it hasn’t worked. For the current lot – Boris and the rest of them – their time is up.

Raab is 43; Patel, 45; Norman, 55; Lewis and Jo Johnson, both 46.

The Oxford Incumbency continues (just)

It was back in October 2013 that I posted about the very high proportion of elected British Prime Ministers who were Oxford University graduates. The table I produced then is due for an update following the general election on 8 June 2017:

As are some the points which I made:

In 18 of the 20 general elections since 1945, the winning Prime Minister was educated at Oxford.

Of the 11 elected Prime Ministers since 1945, nine went to Oxford; of all 13 PMs since the war, ten went to Oxford.

On only one occasion, 1951, did an Oxford-educated incumbent, Clement Attlee, lose to a non-Oxford person –the “Former Naval Person”, Winston Churchill.

In only one election, 1992, had neither candidate been to Oxford.


Notes 

(1) Harold Macmillan did not graduate from Oxford, his studies having been interrupted by war service.

(2) Known as University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire in Neil Kinnock’s time there.

(3) Cameron, a Conservative, led a coalition from 2010 to 2015.

Those two impostors

When the Sunday Times ran an exclusive on 22 January 2017 about a Trident missile having “experienced an alarming failure after being launched from a British submarine off the coast of Florida in June last year”, they went into the “What did they know, and when did they know it?” mode much-beloved of investigative journalists. Readers of the story, which derived from “a senior naval source”, were told that

The incident happened shortly before Theresa May became prime minister but she omitted any mention of the failed test when she persuaded parliament to spend £40bn on new Trident submarines in her first big Commons speech on July 18. The revelations are likely to cause a political storm. MPs will want to know why such important information … was withheld …

As Cameron remained PM until 13 July, this line was not exactly supported by

The source had told this newspaper that the test took place at the end of June – about the time of the Brexit vote on June 23.

or by a story in The Times the next day, US urged Britain to keep Trident blunder secret:

Officials from the Obama administration asked David Cameron’s government not to comment on the malfunction during a test of the Trident nuclear deterrent in June, it is understood.

The Sunday Times returned to their story on 29 January, sticking with “the serious malfunction [having] been covered up by Downing Street” but shifting the emphasis to “problems with the gyro within Trident’s guidance system” and US documents, backed up by “A source close to the US military”.

Neither of the Sunday Times reports made anything of the closeness of the British Trident test (actually on Monday 20 June – see below) to the date of the EU Referendum. A post here last year looked at the opinion polling in the days leading up to the Referendum and any impact of the death of Jo Cox MP and suspension of the campaign on Thursday 16 June. Parliament was recalled on 20 June and campaigning resumed the following day. At this point Remain seemed to be doing better in the polling than hitherto, or as it turned out, on the day.

The Sunday Times’s political editor, Tim Shipman, has written in depth about the Referendum in a highly-regarded book, All Out War.  At the end of a chapter on the aftermath of Cox’s death, he records:

… Another senior figure in the campaign described Jo Cox’s death as ‘a disaster’ for Stronger In: ‘That weekend , I bet the papers would have splashed on a five-point Leave lead in the polls, and I think on Monday and Tuesday the markets would have crashed. We would have had a cycle which was much closer to Scotland. Actually it took the sting out of the campaign. It meant that the bounce back to the status quo never really happened. That was something we were banking on happening”. 

Cox’s death also meant Mark Carney’s final intervention on the day of her killing received almost no publicity. ‘He was just wiped off the news agenda, and that was devastating from our point of view’, a Tory source said. … (page 388)

The next chapter of Shipman’s book deals with the final ‘Great Debate’ of the campaign held at Wembley on Tuesday 21 June. By then the news of the test failure would have reached Whitehall - which raises an interesting point: what effect, if any, the news might have had on the campaign.  In so far as it could appear to the public as being a loss of face for the government and the prime minister, it might have been considered as unhelpful to the Remain side and even as undermining its authority. 

Two other, albeit less intriguing, points about timing lurk in all this. Firstly, if the story didn’t break surface last summer soon after the event, why should it emerge in January, seven months later? Perhaps it should be noted that President Obama’s period of office ended on Friday 20 January and the new Trump staff in the White House would have had no interest in responding to The Times’s story on Monday 22nd, if they were even aware of it.

Following the Sunday Times story, a Labour MP, Kevan Jones, put down an Urgent Question on 23 January:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence if he will make a statement on the test firing of a Trident nuclear missile in June 2016.

The Defence Secretary, Sir Michael Fallon, responded:

In June last year, the Royal Navy conducted a demonstration and shakedown operation designed to certify HMS Vengeance and her crew prior to their return to operations. It included a routine unarmed Trident missile test launch. Contrary to reports in the weekend press, HMS Vengeance and her crew were successfully tested and certified as ready to rejoin the operational cycle. We do not comment on the detail of submarine operations, …

Lines which he continued to take in response to questions. Another MP, John Spellar (Labour Minister for the Armed Forces, 1999-2001), asked:

Will the Minister confirm that in Lord Hennessy’s book “The Silent Deep” there is a full description of a previous firing?

Spellar could have asked the book’s author who must have been in Westminster, for later the same afternoon in the House of Lords, Earl Howe, Defence Minister, repeated the statement Fallon had made earlier (although the words “In June last year” were replaced by “On 20 June”) and Lord Hennessy would speak:

My Lords, I declare an interest in that I witnessed the launch in question from the survey vessel two and half miles away from where the missile came out of the sea. I put it to the Minister, with great respect, that it would make it much easier for those of us who very powerfully support the independent deterrent, and the building of the four “Dreadnought” submarines in the successor class, to make the case generally in the country when we are interviewed in the media if the Minister could assure us that a full analysis has been successfully made of whatever went wrong—I have no knowledge at all of the nature of what went wrong—and that remedies have been put in place. I understand that every particle of a D5 missile is riddled with the highest security classifications, but in this case, such an assurance could be possible and would be very welcome.

Earl Howe replied:

My Lords, the most important assurance is the one that I have already given: this is a system in which we have absolute confidence. It has never been the practice of government to give Parliament details of submarine operations or of the systems and subsystems that are tested during a demonstration and shakedown operation. But I hope I have said enough to reassure noble Lords about our deterrent and its reliability.

Peter Hennessy, as well as witnessing the June 2016 launch, had been present at launches in May 2009 and October 2012 (The Silent Deep, page 638). By yet another near coincidence of timing, the paperback edition of his book had come out on 2 June 2016. The Submarine Service seems to have embraced Hennessy as warmly as the civil service used to in the days when his books on Whitehall would admiringly recount how “down these mean corridors a man must go”. But perhaps he shouldn’t book his flights to Florida for 2020, say, too soon, in view of Fallon’s response to Spellar’s question above:

… I have already made it clear that, of course, earlier Governments in different circumstances took different decisions not to share details with Parliament, but to release information publicly about the completion of tests. We have to take our decision in the light of the circumstances that prevail at the time and the national security considerations.

And if 2020 turns out to be the next year a British submarine tests a Trident missile, do not expect it to take place before 7 May!

Fallon must have been left wishing that in the past others had adopted the reticence implied in Kipling’s advice:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster  

And treat those two impostors just the same

"Maybe reality is a simulation"

I don’t watch that much television, news and politics shows mostly, and I’m certainly outside the target 16-34 year-old audience of comedy programmes on UK’s Channel 4, which even one of its former Chief Executives considered had an "obsession with adolescent transgression and sex". Nonetheless, when this week’s New Yorker ran a long article by Giles Harvey about “Charlie Brooker, the British satirist who is now a television auteur” I thought I should read it. (In versions of the magazine his article’s title is Worst-Case Scenario, and on-line The Speculative Dread of “Black Mirror”).

Harvey concentrates on Brooker’s showrunning of the “prophetic TV show”, Black Mirror, which Harvey describes as an “acclaimed and eerily clairvoyant series about the unintended consequences of technological innovation”. Its interest to most of the New Yorker’s readership probably derives from the fact that:

The show, which first aired in Britain, on Channel 4, in 2011, became an international hit, with licensing rights sold in more than ninety territories. In 2014, Netflix acquired exclusive U.S. streaming rights for the first two seasons. Last year, Brooker and his longtime collaborator Annabel Jones signed a contract with Netflix to make twelve new episodes. The deal was reportedly worth forty million dollars.

But my British eye was caught by this passage:

In “The National Anthem,” the show’s début episode, set in a fictional Britain, Princess Susannah, a popular member of the Royal Family, is abducted. Her release hinges on a single demand: the Prime Minister must have unsimulated sex with a pig on live television.

Harvey goes on to describe the origins of this episode, how Channel 4 came to give it the go-ahead and a description of some of the story of how this imaginary story ricochets around the media, for example:

Throughout the episode, the screen pulsates with news crawls and graphics, polling results, tweets.

For me, as no doubt as for other UK readers, there was something familiar about all this, as Harvey reveals later:

“The National Anthem” first aired in late 2011. Last year, an unauthorized biography of British Prime Minister David Cameron quoted an anonymous member of Parliament who claimed to have witnessed Cameron during his student days at Oxford placing “a private part of his anatomy” inside the mouth of a dead pig during a hazing ritual for an exclusive social club. Twitter did what Twitter does with such material, but the BBC and other traditional news organizations initially resisted covering the story. The situation plays out in an almost identical manner in “The National Anthem.” Even the Twitter hashtags that appear in the episode—“#PMpig,” “#trottergate”—showed up on the actual Web. 

“Who’d have thought the pig-f****** [my *’s] episode would be the most accurate one?” Brooker said. “I didn’t know anything about that, by the way. I’d never heard the rumor. So when that story broke I was quite weirded out and genuinely worried for a short period that maybe reality is a simulation designed to confuse.” He exhaled. “I hope it doesn’t happen again.”

The unauthorised biography Harvey refers to is Call Me Dave by Michael Ashcroft and Isabel Oakeshott, published in October 2015, and the passage he describes is on pages 73/74. The “anonymous member of Parliament”, described by the authors as “a distinguished contemporary of Cameron's at Oxford” is their only source for the story. He is reported as having made the allegation on three occasions in 2014, finally claiming that photographic evidence was in the possession of a named individual. “This person failed to respond to our approaches.”

In the absence of anything else, the authors conclude possibly a little lamely that:

Perhaps it is a case of mistaken identity. Yet it is an elaborate story for an otherwise credible figure to invent. Furthermore, there are a number of accounts of pigs' heads at debauched parties in Cameron's day. …

Though they name only one:

The late Count Gottfried von Bismarck, an Oxford contemporary of Cameron … reportedly threw various dinner parties featuring pigs' heads.

So it seems that Brooker’s reputation, at least as seen by Harvey, for prophesy and clairvoyance depends largely on the National Anthem – Call Me Dave succession (putting the differences between a live pig and a dead pig’s head as sex objects aside as too distasteful to pursue). This does seem to raise two points to bear in mind:

Cameron graduated from Oxford in the summer of 1988, 26 years before the reported date of the MP’s allegations in 2014. Are New Yorker and Call Me Dave readers right to assume that Ashcroft and Oakeshott would have made reference to any rumours prior to 2014 if they had heard of them?

There is no mention in Call Me Dave of the Black Mirror National Anthem episode which had been screened less than three years before the MP’s allegations.

The "Digital News Microclimate"

Are the Brexit Remainers creating an echo chamber? 

I haven’t seen any reference in the UK media to an article which appeared in the New York Times Magazine on 8 May in print under the title, The Storyteller and the President, and on their website as The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru. It is a lengthy profile by David Samuels of Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser for strategic communications in the White House, 38 and described by Samuels as “The Boy Wonder of the Obama White House”:

He is, according to the consensus of the two dozen current and former White House insiders I talked to, the single most influential voice shaping American foreign policy aside from Potus himself … in addition to the two to three hours that Rhodes might spend with Obama daily, the two men communicate remotely throughout the day via email and phone calls. … On the largest and smallest questions alike, the voice in which America speaks to the world is that of Ben Rhodes.

Perhaps in the UK we are all too wrapped up in the forthcoming referendum on EU membership, but it’s worth remembering that Obama was here on 22 April telling us that we would be at the “back of the queue” in any trade deal with the US, if the country chose to leave the EU. Private Eye caught the tone of his message when their cover captioned the Obamas’ photo-opportunity with the young Royals:

If Samuels is right, Rhodes is very likely to have been involved in formulating Obama’s messaging in London – if nothing else, as a fan of CS Lewis and George Orwell he would be aware of the usage of “queue” here rather than “line”. Samuels emphasises how close Rhodes is to Obama:

Part of what accounts for Rhodes’s influence is his “mind meld” with the president. Nearly everyone I spoke to about Rhodes used the phrase “mind meld” verbatim, some with casual assurance and others in the hushed tones that are usually reserved for special insights. He doesn’t think for the president, but he knows what the president is thinking, which is a source of tremendous power. One day, when Rhodes and I were sitting in his boiler-room office, he confessed, with a touch of bafflement, “I don’t know anymore where I begin and Obama ends.”

Although Rhodes’ background is Eng Lit/creative writing not foreign policy/international affairs:

Like Obama, Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics but is often quite personal. He is adept at constructing overarching plotlines with heroes and villains, their conflicts and motivations supported by flurries of carefully chosen adjectives, quotations and leaks from named and unnamed senior officials. He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama’s foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president’s will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies. His lack of conventional real-world experience of the kind that normally precedes responsibility for the fate of nations — like military or diplomatic service, or even a master’s degree in international relations, rather than creative writing — is still startling. 

Having recently spent time working in Hollywood, I realize during our conversations that the role Rhodes plays in the White House bears less resemblance to any specific character on Beltway-insider TV shows like “The West Wing” or “House of Cards” than it does to the people who create those shows. And like most TV writers, Rhodes clearly prefers to imagine himself in the company of novelists.

But it seems that Rhodes’ skills are now the relevant ones (my emphasis):

Price [Rhodes’ deputy, Ned Price] turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administration’s well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from “senior White House officials” and “spokespeople.” I watch the message bounce from Rhodes’s brain to Price’s keyboard to the three big briefing podiums — the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon — and across the Twitterverse, where it springs to life in dozens of insta-stories, which over the next five hours don formal dress for mainstream outlets. It’s a tutorial in the making of a digital news microclimate — a storm that is easy to mistake these days for a fact of nature, but whose author is sitting next to me right now.

Because, according to Samuels, we are in “the soft Orwellian vibe of an information space where old media structures and hierarchies have been erased by Silicon Valley billionaires who convinced the suckers that information was “free” and everyone with access to Google was now a reporter”:

The job he was hired to do [in 2007], namely to help the president of the United States communicate with the public, was changing in equally significant ways, thanks to the impact of digital technologies that people in Washington were just beginning to wrap their minds around. It is hard for many to absorb the true magnitude of the change in the news business — 40 percent of newspaper-industry professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade — in part because readers can absorb all the news they want from social-media platforms like Facebook, which are valued in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars and pay nothing for the “content” they provide to their readers. You have to have skin in the game — to be in the news business, or depend in a life-or-death way on its products — to understand the radical and qualitative ways in which words that appear in familiar typefaces have changed. Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”

A long section in the article is an account of how the nuclear deal with Iran was sold in the US, so not particularly relevant to the UK, although one extract is interesting:

Rhodes “was kind of like the quarterback,” running the daily video conferences and coming up with lines of attack and parry. “He was extremely good about immediately getting to a phrase or a way of getting the message out that just made more sense,” Kreikemeier [one of the team] remembers. Framing the deal as a choice between peace and war was Rhodes’s go-to move — and proved to be a winning argument.

Interesting because of Cameron’s speech on Brexit on 9 May at the British Museum in front of an audience which included the US ambassador:

The serried rows of white headstones in lovingly-tended Commonwealth war cemeteries stand as silent testament to the price that this country has paid to help restore peace and order in Europe. Can we be so sure that peace and stability on our continent are assured beyond any shadow of doubt? Is that a risk worth taking? I would never be so rash as to make that assumption.

So the Brexit Remain campaign might be expected to follow Rhodes’ approach:

“We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”

Today, five former NATO secretaries-general have written to the Daily Telegraph, warning that it "would be very troubling if the UK ended its membership of the European Union” and The Times has a letter from 13 former US secretaries of state and defence and national security advisers telling us “The special relationship between our countries would not compensate for the loss of influence and clout that the UK would suffer if it was no longer part of the EU”.

Samuels’ article, which seems to have created a small storm inside the DC Beltway, is well worth reading in full. Some of it probably needs to be taken with a pinch of salt:

[Rhodes’] New York City prep-school-kid combination of vulnerability, brattiness and passionate hatred for phonies suggests an only slightly updated version of what Holden Caulfield might have been like if he grew up to work in the West Wing.

Obama won’t be President for much longer, and Rhodes will probably be persona non grata to the next White House incumbent, whoever “she” may be:

He [Rhodes] referred to the American foreign-policy establishment as the Blob. According to Rhodes, the Blob includes Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and other Iraq-war promoters from both parties who now whine incessantly about the collapse of the American security order in Europe and the Middle East.

But political messaging has probably changed for good:

Rhodes has become adept at ventriloquizing many people at once. Ned Price, Rhodes’s assistant, gave me a primer on how it’s done. The easiest way for the White House to shape the news, he explained, is from the briefing podiums, each of which has its own dedicated press corps. “But then there are sort of these force multipliers,” he said, adding, “We have our compadres, I will reach out to a couple people, and you know I wouldn’t want to name them — ” 

“I can name them,” I said, ticking off a few names of prominent Washington reporters and columnists who often tweet in sync with White House messaging. 

Price laughed. “I’ll say, ‘Hey, look, some people are spinning this narrative that this is a sign of American weakness,’ ” he continued, “but — ” 

“In fact it’s a sign of strength!” I said, chuckling. “And I’ll give them some color,” Price continued, “and the next thing I know, lots of these guys are in the dot-com publishing space, and have huge Twitter followings, and they’ll be putting this message out on their own.” 

This is something different from old-fashioned spin, which tended to be an art best practiced in person. In a world where experienced reporters competed for scoops and where carrying water for the White House was a cause for shame, no matter which party was in power, it was much harder to sustain a “narrative” over any serious period of time. Now the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why.

On this side of the Atlantic, my guess is that the Conservatives might be ahead of Labour in appreciating what’s involved in the new spin, though if Number 10 has a Rhodes equivalent, he or she seems to have been too busy with Brexit to take on the Mayor of London campaign.  Although Seamus Milne, Corbyn's spin doctor, may be politically well to the left of his New Labour predecessor, Alastair Campbell, he too comes from a traditional newspaper background.  Whether by 2020, Labour will have a new leader, mind-melded to someone versed in these new arts, remains to be seen.

The Top Brass (retd) Brexit Letter

On 24 February the Daily Telegraph published a letter from 12 retired very senior military officers addressing the security aspect of Brexit (as the more dramatic possible outcome of the June referendum on the UK’s leaving the European Union is known). Key extracts:

As former military officers, we think that it is time to consider the broader strategic issues. Between us we have led the Royal Navy, Army, and Royal Air Force, or held other senior positions in the military. … we are particularly concerned with one central question: will Britain be safer inside the EU or outside it? 

… Britain’s role in the EU strengthens the security we enjoy as part of Nato, adds to our capability and flexibility when it comes to defence co-operation and allows us to project greater power internationally. In a dangerous world it helps us to safeguard our people, our prosperity and our way of life. We therefore believe strongly that it is in our national interest to remain an EU member.

Originally the letter had 13 signatories. After its publication, various newspapers, for example the Guardian, explained that the letter had originated from Number 10. It was also revealed that Downing Street had had to apologise to one general for adding his name without his consent.

The word “military” tends to be misunderstood as referring solely to the Army, but correctly it is applicable (as in the letter above) to all three services. It is interesting, therefore, to consider the breakdown of the signatories by service (for the ranks see the note below):

The table raises two points. Firstly, I pointed out here five years ago that “One asset which British defence seems to possess in abundance is a large cohort of senior officers of all three services, serving and retired, …”. How big a cohort might that be? Well, in service currently there are about 100 men (mostly) of rank known as “three star” and above. Assuming that on average these people are in post for about three years, then retire at 60 and die at 80, it follows that for each one now working (and there were rather more than 100 a decade or two ago), there are six or seven predecessors enjoying their retirement. So Number 10 should have been able to call on, by my guesstimate, about 700 sound chaps but only alighted on 12.

Secondly, these “about 100” top posts have always been shared almost exactly among the three services, yet in the letter there are seven Army former top brass to one RAF. That is to say, only one RAF retiree among well over 200 who might have been approached. Odd, but then the referendum is becoming an increasingly odd business producing unlikely alliances. There is even one school of thought that whether the result is leave or remain, Boris Johnson will become the next leader of the Conservative party and therefore Prime Minister with hands then on so many levers of power. For example, the Daily Telegraph reported on 22 January that:

A senior RAF officer who commanded Britain’s 2011 intervention in Libya has been chosen to be the next Chief of the Defence Staff. Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach will take over the post as head of the military later this year after beating candidates from the Army and Navy. Sir Stuart was a surprise choice after being chosen ahead of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir George Zambellas, and Gen Sir Richard Barrons. The Prime Minister is believed to have met all three candidates in recent weeks to choose a replacement for the current Chief of the Defence Staff, Gen Sir Nicholas Houghton.

Johnson’s biographer, Sonia Purnell, has long held the view that:

I think he is the most ruthless, ambitious person I have ever met. (Introduction to Just Boris: A Tale of Blond Ambition, 2011)

Whether under Boris’s affable exterior, there is a man with a long memory for his friends and for his enemies, I don’t know, but the RAF, typically shrewdly, seem to have kept their distance. As for the argument expressed in the letter, there are other views. For example, those of General Sir Michael Rose, who would have been the 13th man and who told Sky News:

I have doubts about the wisdom of using military officers for a political campaign. I happen to believe sovereignty and security are intrinsically linked and in recent years we've seen the EU erode our sovereignty.

Notes on the Table

Anyone really interested in the breakdown by rank will probably understand the “Star” and "NATO Equivalent" column headings and can study the signatories’ titles in their letter. But this might help:

OF8, 3 Star: Vice Admiral, Lt General, Air Vice Marshal
OF9, 4 Star: Admiral, General, Air Marshal
OF10; 5 Star: Admiral of the Fleet, Field Marshal, Marshal of the RAF.

The 5 Star rank is no longer used for Chiefs of the Defence Staff who are now 4 Star like the individual service chiefs. However, they seem to be given the higher rank on an honorary basis on retirement – only the Brits …

Royal Marine officers are probably counted as part of the RN for these arcane astronomical purposes.


UPDATE 29 February

The Times today has a pro-Brexit article, Don’t count on the EU to protect us. Nato will do that, by a retired Rear Admiral and in the Sun two former Major Generals and a Commodore are opining under the heading Falklands heroes call for Britain to leave the European Union. So the Notes above need to be extended:

OF7; 2 Star: Rear Admiral, Major General, Air Vice Marshal
OF6; 1 Star: Commodore, Brigadier, Air Commodore

There are probably more than 70 OF7s and 200 OF6s currently in post, so the total retired cohort (using the rule of thumb above) could be as many as 2000. And there are 115 days to go before Referendum Day!


UPDATE early March

The big guns seemed to fall silent, at least temporarily, in late February following a withering barrage from a former Royal Marine “OF7 2 Star”, Major General Julian Thompson, in the Daily Telegraph: I fought for Britain and I know how the EU weakens our defences, The myth that leaving the EU would harm British national security must be destroyed once and for all.  He attacked what he regards as four common myths which obscure understanding of why “membership of the EU weakens our national defence in very dangerous times”.

The other road to 2020

I posted here last month about the prospects for Jeremy Corbyn (Labour’s new Leader of the Opposition), out to the 2020 general election by looking at some of the statistics relating to his 13 predecessors in the last 60 years. Of course, not all Prime Ministers begin as Leaders of the Opposition. If a Prime Minister dies or resigns, his or her party chooses a new leader who succeeds to the Prime Ministership. Their challenge is to legitimise themselves by winning the next general election.

Looking back at the 2015 election, apart from the dismal performance of the opinion polls and the prediction machines which fed off them, there were two striking features of the outcome: the rise to dominance of the SNP in the Scottish constituencies and the collapse of the Liberal Democrats, particularly in SW England. But a third aspect of the campaign is likely to become almost as significant. In March during an interview in his constituency home, David Cameron told James Landale, the BBC’s deputy political editor that:

"There definitely comes a time where a fresh pair of eyes and fresh leadership would be good, and the Conservative Party has got some great people coming up - the Theresa Mays, and the George Osbornes, and the Boris Johnsons. 

"You know, there's plenty of talent there. I'm surrounded by very good people." 

He added: "I've said I'll stand for a full second term, but I think after that it will be time for new leadership. "Terms are like Shredded Wheat - two are wonderful but three might just be too many."

Perhaps in years to come we will find out whether there always was a long-term plan to make this intention clear prior to polling day. On the other hand, I do wonder whether Cameron would have been quite so forthcoming if it hadn’t been Landale, a man with the unusual characteristics of being both an Old Etonian like Cameron and being taller than the PM. From personal experience I know that, if you are well above the average male height, the occasional encounter with someone who looks down at you is disconcerting and Cameron I estimate as around 6 feet 1 inch (1.85m).

Anyway, back to the statistics. The table below shows the six PMs who had greatness thrust upon them, rather than having to take on the worst job in British politics first. The data is so sparse that conclusions are even more difficult to draw than in the previous post – apart that is from the Tories seeming better at this particular evolution than Labour.

Looking at the successors to Cameron mentioned above and elsewhere, as far as age is concerned Teresa May could be at a disadvantage and John Major would be a good precedent for George Osborne. On the other hand, President Hillary Clinton and Jeremy Corbyn would both be in their early 70s in May 2020.

As to when the take-over should be, 2018 might be the year to bet on if the Tories maximising their chances of success is the determining factor. But the outcome of the EU referendum might bring things forward to 2017 or even 2016.

Former Prime Ministers – some statistics

What uncertain times these are. In the Independent on Sunday on 18 January, Iain Dale, political commentator and former Conservative politician, provided his prediction of the outcome of the May general election (his website is the primary source). It was based on a painstaking consideration of the circumstances of each of the 650 constituencies in the UK parliament, after drawing together whatever local knowledge, polling evidence and so on that he could find. This approach had served Dale well “when I got the European election results bang on and made the most accurate predictions in Cameron’s Cabinet reshuffle”. On the same day in the Sunday Times, Peter Kellner, political commentator, president of the pollster YouGov and husband of a Labour politician provided his forecast (now on YouGov). Their data is in the table below, my additions in italics:

Of course, both men may choose to revise their forecasts in the coming weeks and who knows how robust such predictions would be in the event of, say, a terrorist outrage days before the election. But in both neither of the two main parties is expected to achieve an overall majority, which would suggest that some form of coalition is likely. However, according to Kellner, David Cameron will be leader of the largest party whereas Dale implies that  Ed Miliband, the leader of the Labour party, will be Prime Minister and heading the coalition.

So we may have four former Prime Ministers, with Cameron joining John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Or perhaps there will still be three at the end of May. This set me thinking about the number of ex-PMs over the years, hence the chart on the left from 1870 to the current day.



It turns out that for most of the last 100 years, the presence of three or four ex-PMs has been the norm. There only being one, as was mostly the case from 1945-55, was unusual. Only in Gladstone’s final administration was there none, for four years following Disraeli’s death in 1881.  Prime Ministers tend to be long-lived – only one born since 1800 died under 70, Bonar Law, who died soon after leaving office in 1923. The only PM to die in office was Campbell-Bannerman in 1908 at the age of 71.



The mean age at death of the 21 deceased PMs born since 1800 has been just over 81 years, but for the five born and deceased since 1900, just over 88. The latter include one woman, Margaret Thatcher, who died at 87, bringing the average down, contrary to actuarial expectation. Presumably to get the job at all requires a good constitution, but comparison should be made with the life expectancy of upper middle class males (mostly) over 40, not males in general at birth.

On average PMs have lived for 14.8 years after leaving office for the last time (Wilson, Churchill, and Baldwin are among those who returned to office). This becomes 17.2 years if Campbell-Bannerman (see above) and Chamberlain and Bonar Law, who both died within six months of leaving office, are excluded. (The arrows are for Major, above Blair, both to the left of Brown, all on-going of course).

The longest lived was Rosebery – more correctly Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, probably the most interesting PM statistically. At 45 he was the youngest person to become PM until Blair and later Cameron. His period in office was only 15 months and his estate is thought to have been the largest –so far. The younger they enter office, as has increasingly been the case, the younger PMs will be when they leave:

As far as the next election is concerned, there would be nothing surprising about either outcome as PM in terms of the consequent number of ex-PMs.  However, it seems very likely that the number will go up over the decades ahead. As the table below shows, despite the impression of premierships having become longer, over successive three decade periods, there have been about the same number of office-holders:

However, if the leaving PMs are getting younger and they live to about 90, there will, before long – probably the late 2020s, be six or even seven ex-PMs to be invited to lunch or dinner with the sovereign!

NOTES 

1. Dates of birth, death and office are from Wikipedia.
2. The “quick and dirty” method for dates before 1900 in Excel was used.
3. Photograph at top, 1985: PM Thatcher, ex-PMs Callaghan, Douglas Home, Macmillan, Wilson, Heath (left to right).
4. Second photograph, 2012: PM Cameron, ex-PMs Major, Blair, Brown (left to right), Thatcher was too ill to attend.
5.  Any errors will be corrected if provided as comments.

As others see us

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us 
To see oursels as ithers see us! 
It wad frae mony a blunder free us, 
An' foolish notion: 
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us, 
An' ev'n devotion! * 

I thought this item from The Times** PHS column (£) (Patrick Kidd’s Times Diary) on 6 October was worth capturing. Is it about the way David Cameron is perceived or something wider about the way the UK is viewed now?

Cameron is the punchline

Gerard Baker, editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, told an after-dinner joke last week that’s doing
the rounds in Washington. God summons the leaders of the US, China and Britain and tells them the world will end tomorrow and they must prepare their people. So Barack Obama goes on TV and says: “My fellow Americans, I have good and bad news. We were right about the existence of God, but the world is about to end.” Xi Jinping then tells the Chinese: “Bad news and worse news. We were wrong about the existence of God and the world is about to end.” Finally, David Cameron goes on the BBC.

“I have great news,” he says. “God thinks I’m one of the three most important people in the world.”

* And would some Power the small gift give us 
To see ourselves as others see us! 
It would from many a blunder free us, 
And foolish notion: 
What airs in dress and gait would leave us, 
And even devotion! 

Robert Burns, To A Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady's Bonnet at Church

** The Times is one of the three titles owned by News UK which is wholly-owned by News Corp. Another asset of News Corp is Dow Jones & Company which owns The Wall Street Journal.

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 'Hard Choices'

After the author’s enigmatic “Will I, won’t I be running in 2015?” smile on its cover, the next thing to strike me about Hard Choices was that a 654 page hardback , printed in the UK with 48 colour plates, had been delivered to my house for £9, presumably with a margin of profit for all concerned. Disconcertingly, on 20 June the FT’s reviewer of Hard Choices, Edward Luce, had concluded:
me about

Hard Choices is something of a paradox. On the one hand it shores up the view that Clinton would make a good president – she is a tough, hard-working and very experienced figure. On the other, it is a dull affair. From the point of view of the reader it is an easy decision. Reviewers read Hard Choices so that you don’t have to.

So why would anyone persist? It might be firstly to discover any insights Hillary Clinton, having been responsible for US foreign policy for four years as Secretary of State, might offer the rest of us about the prospects for a complex and riven world and, secondly, would the book’s contents reveal anything about her fitness to be 45th POTUS? It soon becomes apparent that Clinton is not aiming to rival Henry Kissinger when it comes to providing a strategic view of geopolitics and that there is some guff to be waded through on the way. Perhaps a bit of folksiness is to be expected of a presidential candidate, but it makes for hard going even on page one:

Why on earth was I lying on the backseat of a blue minivan with tinted windows? Good question.

Not really, because obviously:

I was trying to leave my home in Washington, D.C., without being seen by the reporters staked out front. It was the evening of June 5, 2008, and I was heading to a secret meeting with Barack Obama.

then on page 2:

By the time of our meeting I had known Barack for four years, two of which we spent debating each other.

but on page 3:

We stared at each other like two teenagers on an awkward first date, taking a few sips of Chardonnay.

Oh come on! But leaving that sort of thing on one side (and there is more, for example Chelsea’s wedding), the problem a reader of Hard Choices often meets is revealed in this early paragraph, the only one about New Zealand:

[Australia’s] neighbor New Zealand presented more of a challenge. For twentyfive years, since New Zealand prohibited all nuclear vessels from visiting their home ports, the United States and New Zealand had had a limited relationship. However, I thought our long friendship and mutual interests created a diplomatic opening for bridging the divide and shaping a new relationship between Wellington and Washington. On my visit in 20L0, I signed the Wellington Declaration with Prime Minister John Key, which committed our nations to work more closely together in Asia, the Pacific, and multilateral organizations. In 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta would rescind the twenty-six-year ban on New Zealand's ships docking at American bases. In global politics, sometimes reaching out to an old friend can be as rewarding as making a new one. (page 44)

Taken individually, none of these six sentences can be faulted – not surprisingly given the high-quality help (an awful lot of it) listed in the Acknowledgements. However, while the element of self-aggrandisement in the second sentence is forgivable in a memoir, up to a point, there is no mention of her predecessor as SecState, Condoleeza Rice, having visited New Zealand in 2008, nor of the Free Trade Agreement the two countries had been pursuing for some time.

At which point it should be dawning on even the most naive of souls that Hard Choices is a sort of grown-up’s LinkedIn entry - all about making the most of what you have done with an eye to what job you want to do next. This model makes some sense of the book’s content but has three inherent weaknesses. Firstly, as in other countries, US foreign policy is based on enduring national self-interest:

America will always do what it takes to keep our people safe and advance our core interests. (page 361)

So much of the time, successive Secretaries of State will have to pursue similar and unoriginal objectives. Secondly, Clinton visited many countries as FLOTUS (some as First Lady of Arkansas, between 1979 and 1992) so her account frequently leaps back to long before 2009, leading to daft remarks like:

Since my 1995 visit, Mongolian democracy had endured. (page 63).

Thirdly, in certain areas of the world, there have been significant developments since 2013 and she has felt it necessary to add appropriate material. This is the case with the chapter on Russia (see below) which has been supplemented to cover the Crimea/Ukraine developments this year. On the other hand, the latest complexities of Iraq, the self-proclaimed Caliphate and Iran have arisen since printing.

Hard Choices consists of 25 chapters and an Epilogue, grouped into six Parts. Part One, A Fresh Start, is the shortest and covers Clinton’s getting the job and her introduction to the State Department. Part Two of the book, Across the Pacific, addresses Asia and the Pacific following the adoption by the US of the strategic pivot. Clinton shows little hesitation at claiming credit for this concept:

Over four years, I delivered a series of speeches explaining our strategy and making the case for why the Asia-Pacific deserved greater attention from the U.S. government. In the summer of 2011, I began working on a long essay that would situate our work in the region in the broader sweep of American foreign policy. The war in Iraq was winding down, and a transition was under way in Afghanistan. After a decade of focusing on the areas of greatest threat, we had come to a "pivot point." Of course, we had to stay focused on the threats that remained, but it was also time to do more in the areas of greatest opportunity. 

Foreign Policy magazine published my essay in the fall under the title "America's Pacific Century" but it was the word pivot that gained prominence. Journalists latched on to it as an evocative description of the administration's renewed emphasis on Asia, although many in our own government preferred the more anodyne rebalance to Asia. Some friends and allies in other parts of the world were understandably concerned that the phrase implied turning our back on them, but we worked to make clear that America had the reach and resolve to pivot to Asia without pivoting away from other obligations and opportunities. (pages 45/46)

So it's presumably no accident that the map of the world at the start of Hard Choices has the Pacific at its centre and the Atlantic bisected to left and right. But at the time of reading, with the crisis in Georgia unresolved and Iraq’s existence in doubt, the concept looks a little simplistic. However, these current problems do not lessen the ever-increasing importance of China, and I hoped Clinton’s two chapters within Part Two relating to China to be of value. Unfortunately there is little of real interest. One chapter turns out to be a lengthy, but promptly forgettable, description of the way a Chinese dissident, Chen Guangchen, could have derailed important talks and how this was avoided. I was hoping for some insight into the relationship between the Chinese military, with its rapidly expanding capabilities, and the rest of the Party – is the Chinese hierarchy a monolith, or are there internal tensions? All that is on offer is a reference to:

… more hardline elements in the security apparatus. (page 89)

As to another fascinating uncertainty about China – will it be able to break through the $10,000 GDP/head barrier which seems to be an insuperable developmental barrier for some other countries – doubtless Clinton is aware of the issue but she doesn’t address it.

Another chapter in this Part, Burma: The Lady and the Generals, reports Clinton’s visits to Burma (she does not use Myanmar) in 2011 and 2012, with much feel-good stuff about Aung San Suu Kyi. Clinton describes Suu Kyi’s visit to the US in 2012 to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, but somehow forgets to mention that it was awarded during George W Bush’s administration in 2008.

Part Three is devoted to Af-Pak and portentously titled War and Peace as if those possibilities don’t arise elsewhere. There’s plenty about Zero Dark Thirty as it was seen from the White House Situation Room end of the telescope, but nothing about two particular elephants (Elephas maximus indicus, of course) in the Af-Pak room: India’s interest, selfish but no less real for that, in any Afghanistan outcome (for Kissinger’s views, see here) and Pakistan’s custodianship of nuclear weapons.

Part Five being given over to the Middle East, Part Four, Between Hope and History, might just as well have been called Best of the Rest, ie Europe, Russia, Latin America and Africa who get a chapter each, Europe’s subtitle being Ties that Bind. British readers should find pages 207-208 interesting. On David Miliband the adjectives pile up:

David proved to be an invaluable partner. He was young, energetic, smart, creative and attractive with a ready smile. We found our views on how the world was changing remarkably similar.

And quite keen on William Hague, too:

We both started off a bit cautiously with each other, but, much to my delight, I found him a thoughtful statesman with good sense and good humour.

On David Cameron:

President Obama and Cameron took to each other right off, starting with a private meeting before Cameron’s electoral victory [sic]. They had an easy rapport and enjoyed each other’s company. Cameron and I met together a number of times over the years, both with and without President Obama. He was intellectually curious and eager to exchange ideas about world events, …

which does little to dispel Cameron’s reputation as not being able to cope with intelligent women of ability (Hague and Miliband not so, indeed having married them). The French get only a few lines less than the British, Clinton observing of Sarkozy that:

Most leaders are quieter in person than they appear to be on the stage. Not Sarkozy. He was more dramatic – and fun – in person. Sitting in a meeting with him was always an adventure. [etc] (page 209)

Alain Juppé, mayor of Bordeaux in SW France and Sarkozy’s foreign minister, is described as a consummate professional. Sarkozy reappears during the Libyan crisis, when Clinton, the Illinois Methodist, encounters “the French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy:

Finally, around 10 p.m., Jibril [Libyan rebel leadership] arrived at the Westin in Paris accompanied by Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had helped arrange the meeting. They made quite a pair, the rebel and the philosopher. Hard to tell who was who. Jibril appeared more like a technocrat than a firebrand. He was small and bespectacled, with thinning hair and a stern demeanor. Lévy, by contrast, cut a dramatic and stylish figure, with long wavy hair and his shirt open practically down to his navel. He has been quoted as saying, "God is dead but my hair is perfect." (To that I'd say, I think God is alive, but I'd love to have perfect hair!) (page 368)

Pivoting or not, Clinton, reassuringly for us Europeans, gives pages 211 to 213 over to NATO (remembering Canada is also a member). This leads her on to the EU and then Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, which the US envisages as a European state:

None of our relationships in Europe needed more tending than Turkey, a country of more than 70 million people, overwhelmingly Muslim, with one foot in Europe and one in Southwest Asia. (page 214)

Though this section ends:

Erdoğan’s support in more conservative areas of Turkey remains strong. Turkey’s future direction is uncertain. But what is certain is that Turkey will continue to play a significant role in both the Middle East and Europe. And our relationship will remain of vital importance to the United States. (page 218)

Later, in the context of Libya, Clinton does not omit:

There were already tensions between Sarkozy and Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan because of France’s objections to Turkey joining the EU. (page 373)

I found the chapter on Russia, Reset and Regression, one of the most interesting, ignoring the reset button malarkey. It gives some of the background, “a modern-day version of the “Great Game”, to the Northern Distribution Network used to support the US military in Afghanistan (pages 237-8).

Part Five, Upheaval, is the longest Part and, to my mind, mostly better written than the others. It is worth noting that the first and last of its seven chapters are about Israel and Palestine and could have been combined for an audience focussed on foreign policy. But Clinton, as one might expect of a possible US presidential candidate, has no intention of joining the ranks of Israel’s critics. Related considerations probably led to one of the longest chapters in the book, Benghazi: under Attack, which deals with the death of the US ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, on September 11, 2012. This is a forensically-written account of events, presumably intended to block off attempts to make Clinton’s responsibilities at the time an issue in a future presidential election campaign. Otherwise, so great are the upheavals in the Middle East that much of what Clinton tells readers about relations between the US and Iran or Syria is being overtaken by events. 

The final Part, The Future We Want, rounds up what might be called supra-national, or supra-regional, issues that don’t fit in elsewhere, like human rights and the internet. It seems odd to have put Climate Change and Energy in separate chapters, Energy being addressed alongside Jobs – American ones, primarily. It’s in this chapter, rather than Part Two, that the tensions between the US and China over “state capitalism” are exposed. One of the shortest chapters gets the longest title: 21st-Century Statecraft: Digital Diplomacy in a Networked World.  The unsurprising conclusion is that Twitter, Facebook etc are fine and help support “smart power”, a concept which Clinton had “embraced” back on page 23 and “had been kicking around Washington for a few years”, but Wikileaks and Snowden are not.

Then, in the Epilogue on page 595, we come to the crunch: “Will I run for President in 2016? The answer is, I haven’t decided yet”. Not even having a vote in a US presidential election, my views are less than worthless, but I feel after 600 pages entitled to express a view! Firstly, just how effective was Secretary Clinton in terms of gaining domestic political support? Days after her book’s publication, this chart appeared on the FiveThirtyEight website. I’ve added the details of the administrations and Clinton’s term:

However, there is a general pattern here of trust being acquired when in opposition and lost when facing global realities in office.

Secondly, having been born in the same year as Clinton, I feel I can comment on her age. The chart below shows the ages of the US presidents in office since 1913 (notes below):

If Clinton were sworn in as POTUS in January 2017, she would be only a few months younger than Ronald Reagan was when he entered office in 1981. Four presidents in the last 100 years, all male, have lived into their nineties (all being well, Jimmy Carter will be 90 on 1 October this year). So, if her health is good, why not? But some stories in the press, like this one, will need to be countered, and, if I were a US voter, I would be looking for assurance from any candidate, given the demands of the Presidency, that their health was well above the average for their age, sex and class, and rather more than:

Over many years of travel I’ve developed the ability to sleep almost anywhere at any time – on planes, in cars, a quick power nap in a hotel room before a meeting. … (page 47)

The same press source quotes Bill Clinton as saying:

[Obama]’s convinced himself he’s been a brilliant president, and wants to clone himself — to find his Mini-Me. He’s hunting for someone to succeed him, and he believes the American people don’t want to vote for someone who’s been around for a long time. He thinks that [Hilary] and I are what he calls ‘so 20th century.’ He’s looking for ¬another Barack Obama.

And it’s certainly the case that US presidents often appear as if by magic from some nowhere far beyond the Beltway – as did Bill himself. In the case of the Clintons, will it be this desire for “clean skins” or a feeling that one bite of the cherry is enough, given their current wealth, that will be Hillary’s undoing? Hillary Clinton told ABC News on 9 June:

We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt. We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea's education. You know, it was not easy. Bill has worked really hard — and it's been amazing to me — he's worked very hard. First of all, we had to pay off all our debts, which was, you know, he had to make double the money because of obviously taxes and then pay off the debts and get us houses and take care of family members.

Well we’d all like to do that, of course, but most of us can’t – except people like “our old friend Tony Blair” (page 30)!

Summing up, I found Hard Choices had its good elements but the omissions that a potential presidential candidate has to make detract from the book’s interest. To have added more on China and Af-Pak would almost inevitably have risked offering future hostages to fortune in the Oval Office, but a discussion of Turkey without any reference to the Kurds seems hollow, particularly by June 2014.

It is, however, salutary for someone who lives in a country which merits four paragraphs in one chapter in one Part of this book to be reminded just how totally global a power the USA continues to be, as the UK once was. The responsibilities of POTUS, even without the domestic burden, are almost supra-human and one has to admire the unusual people prepared to take them on. Nothing in Hilary Rodham Clinton’s book made me think she was unfit for the job, if she wants it, and she’s probably more able than many men have been.


Notes on the Ages chart above 

1. The black circles indicate the deaths of former Presidents over the age of 90 (Hoover, Ford, Reagan) and of deaths in office (Harding, Roosevelt, Kennedy).
2. Harding’s successor, Coolidge died in 1933 at the age of 60, four years after leaving office. When they told Dorothy Parker, she is supposed to have asked “How could they tell?”
3. All dates of birth, death and office have been taken from Wikipedia. For dates of birth before 1900 in Excel I used a “quick and dirty” method as before here. As always, please advise any errors.