Soft power is not, inherently, a stupid concept. But it can swiftly become so in the wrong hands – and as hands go, they don’t get much more wrong than Britain’s foreign policy establishment.
The real sort of soft power has, broadly, two bases. First, there is that which arises from very particular historical conditions, such as Ireland’s special relationship with the United States. More commonly, there is that which flows from being a rich and powerful nation; one can speak with a soft voice if carrying a big stick.
Whitehall’s conception of soft power, on the other hand, is more akin to the social cachet of a bad poker player with deep pockets. They get invited to all the matches – it doesn’t get much more #impact than that.
Thus, the Chagos deal. It isn’t just that it’s a bad deal, although it is. It’s just so embarrassing.
In summary, we are going to pay Mauritius a hefty sum to give them a territory we already paid them to keep; we have a 99-year lease on the island housing a very important military base, but Mauritius is now free to lease the others to whomever it pleases; all on the basis of a completely non-binding judgement by an international court:
“Israel is not the only state to suffer from an abuse of the ICJ’s power to issue advisory opinions. In 2019, in the context of a long-running dispute between the UK and Mauritius, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion stating that the UK’s continuing administration of the Chagos Islands was wrongful, even though the UK did not consent to its dispute with Mauritius being settled judicially.”
The only uncertainty about the fate of the Diego Garcia (before today) was the risk that a hapless British government would give it up. Mauritius had no case and, more importantly, scant leverage; the claim that yesterday’s announcement ‘resolves’ the question would carry weight only if leaving it unresolved (i.e. having Port Luis continue to be mad at us) mattered, which it did not.
(Meanwhile the native Chagossians feel “betrayed” by the decision, if that matters to anyone.)
If you want a real idea of the ‘soft power’ that accrues to a country which allows itself to get mugged by Mauritius (twice), it looks a lot like Members of Parliament getting deported from mighty Djibouti. (One shudders to think quite what France, Djibouti’s former colonial ruler, must think of all this whilst it quietly owns an entire Latin American country with no global outcry whatsoever.)
Labour must ultimately carry the can for the final decision. But the Conservatives cannot evade a big share of the blame. It was Boris Johnson who first indicated that the UK was open to negotiations (before denouncing said negotiations in the Daily Mail, because of course), and Liz Truss who took the fateful decision to actually open them.
Those were stupid decisions taken by unserious people; our Party’s credit for finally killing the process does not outweigh the guilt for starting it.
It also makes life difficult for James Cleverly, who had been riding high from what was widely viewed as a strong showing at this week’s Party Conference. As Truss’s foreign secretary, it was he who was tasked with opening negotiations, and who said at the time that he hoped to have them wrapped up by last year.
That made his decision to go in studs up on the Government’s announcement understandable, on one level, but nonetheless what Sir Humphrey might have described as “courageous”. Nor was this helped when Grant Shapps, his campaign chairman (not manager, as I erroneously tweeted) stepped in to say that he blocked the deal as defence secretary; if the deal was blockable, why was it not strangled at birth inside the Foreign Office?
There’s no reason to think the facts of the matter will make much of a difference. If you as a Tory member were invested in the issue of the British Indian Ocean Territory, the facts above will have been known already; if not, it seems unlikely the fate of a distant outpost will decide your vote.
It does, however, show how government experience can be a two-edged sword. Opposition allows a party a lot of freedom of manoeuvre – but there is always the danger of driving into a minefield laid in office.
What will rank-and-file members make of it all? Watch this space: on Sunday we will, as promised, be publishing the results of our post-conference leadership survey.
