The Foreign Secretary William Hague is getting it in the neck for the chaos, and indeed the buck must stop with him. He has, however, reportedly been spending the day passing it to his officials who are said to have been carpeted. Well, Hague can’t totally get away with that: it was he who said, falsely and irresponsibly, that Gaddafi had fled to Venezuela (although presumably that nonsense was in turn fed to him by his officials). The fact is though that, ever since he arrived at the FCO, it has been widely remarked that Hague has appeared alarmingly detached and uninterested – and maladroit. There is much speculation about this, but no-one seems to know what the reason is. But even if there is a particular issue there, most of the problem at the FCO is surely not down to Hague himself. Part of it at least is most likely bound up with the consistent wrong-headedness of the FCO’s whole geopolitical mindset – most egregiously displayed by the way it sucks up to the enemies of the west in the Arab world (a chicken which has now come home to roost with a vengeance) while attacking the west’s one reliable strategic ally in the region, Israel. The FCO, as becomes ever more frighteningly plain, suffers from the diplomatic equivalent of auto-immune disease. And where there is such epic wrong-headedness, the banality of incompetence is never far behind. But there’s surely even more to it than this – and it’s a problem which goes far beyond the FCO. There is clearly now a fundamental malaise throughout the whole British administrative class. When government virtually imploded through gross dysfunctionality during the premiership of Gordon Brown, it was the ‘psychologically challenged’ Labour Prime Minister who was blamed. But the problem surely was – and is – far deeper. UK PLC has experienced nothing less than a kind of systemic administrative nervous breakdown -- the result of years of political interference and bullying, demoralisation, the intellectual corruption or worse of the political class, the decline of the ethic of public service, moral fracture and, most important of all, educational collapse. You can see it in the serial failures of the police, the scandals of neglect and cruelty in the NHS. You can see it when you speak to Whitehall and other officials, including those at the FCO. Sure, there remain some sterling individuals amongst them. But too often you find yourself speaking to civil servants who are incapable of independent thought and speak merely in a kind of Orwellian infantilised gobbledegook – and that’s just the ones with first-class Oxbridge degrees. As a direct result of the obsession of the entire political and intellectual elite with ‘equality’ and ‘anti-elitism’, which has resulted in the replacement of excellence by the rule of the lowest common denominator, Britain’s once Rolls-Royce administrative class -- you know, the one that once ran the e*p*re and bestrode the world and has accordingly been dismantled to punish it for its colonialist crimes -- now couldn’t organise the proverbial knees-up in a brewery. And into this roaring vortex of cultural decline, evisceration and collapse has stepped a government of wet-behind-the-ears political tyros. Off flew David Cameron to grandstand round the Arab world pretending to be a World Statesman lecturing the natives about democracy and the rule of law, while back home the man in charge of the clattering train, deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, was about as visible as ...well, as a British embassy official in Libya. As the Mail reports: When asked who was in charge, Mr Clegg, who is on a skiing holiday in Switzerland, said: ‘Yeah, I suppose I am. I forgot about that. I’m holding the fort but I'm hoping to take the end of the week off with my kids. Someone else will have to do it then. It sounds more haphazard than it probably is.’ Carry On Up the Maghreb, or what?
Carry On Up the Maghreb?
A huge amount of criticism has erupted today over the farcical incompetence of Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office in its efforts to evacuate British nationals stranded in Libya. While these terrified Brits faced marauding mobs and dwindling supplies of food, British embassy officials weren’t even answering their phones; while other countries were busily airlifting their people out in successive plane-loads, the British government was scurrying round trying to find an airline company to replace the flights designated for the rescue mission which had been cancelled.
Friday, 25 February 2011
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