William Hague stood down as foreign secretary on Tuesday but, emotionally, he had retired from politics in 2001. That summer, four excruciating years as Conservative leader ended in electoral rout, graceful resignation and, at the age of 40, a voracious hunger to taste life outside Westminster. He threw himself into speech-making, book-writing and travel, while still doing his duty as member of parliament for Richmond in Yorkshire, a constituency that has fitted him like a glove since 1989. It will elect a new representative at next year’s general election.
He accepted the role of shadow foreign secretary when David Cameron won the Tory leadership in 2005, but more out of duty than any itch to return to the fray. The new leader was young, his running mate George Osborne, now Chancellor of the Exchequer, even younger. They needed Hague’s wisdom (in Britain’s cult of youth, a man born in 1961 counts as an elder statesman) and it has not failed them. Since taking over the Foreign Office in 2010, he has hardly erred. Nobody disputes his technical competence, his facility with a brief, his easy but authoritative style of management.
He cultivated bilateral relationships that had atrophied under the previous Labour government, which tended to pursue its foreign policy via multilateral bodies. The Japanese were among those who appreciated his attentiveness and availability. At the same time, he began the onerous work of persuading the diplomatic corps that promoting British economic interests abroad is not some kind of below-stairs vulgarity.
On top of all this, he achieved the superhuman feat of charting a sane course between the zealous euroscepticism of his party and cold diplomatic realities. He, like Cameron, wants to remain in a reformed European Union (EU). This policy is nebulous and will probably end in an existential rupture of the Tory party when its fanciful expectations are dashed. However, given the torrential pressure applied by the eurosceptic movement to go much further much earlier, it is a serviceable holding position. The right has come to resent him as an ideological sell-out, a man suspiciously at ease with Brussels summitry and the language of compromise. This says more about their stridency than any wishy-washiness on his part. They will appreciate his successor, Philip Hammond, until he too evinces the first symptoms of euro-pragmatism.
For all Hague’s deftness and professionalism at the Foreign Office, his tenure may not turn out to be very memorable. There was no Hague Doctrine, no attempt to build a post-Blair foreign policy from first principles. This shortage of vision is not by itself a failure — the Iraq war is a sad example of what happens when there is an excess of vision. But it does mean that Hague was a less historic foreign secretary than, say, Robin Cook, who oversaw humanitarian interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone around the turn of the millennium. Had Hague been a Cold War statesman, he would have prospered in the detente phase, bringing prudence after a period of disastrous overreach and privileging stability over all else.
Over the last year or so, Hague’s interest in the world outside pure politics has run away with itself a little. Like a charity or non-governmental organisation, the Foreign Office has made a big show of putting its name to celebrity-backed campaigns against various global depredations. These are serious matters — sexual violence, for example — but serious matters deserve an actual policy. Pointing at bad things and saying how bad they are is not a policy. Too often, the British government has given the impression that it believes human rights abuses in war zones began about three years ago and will stop if “awareness” is raised in our “networked world”. You can almost hear Lord Palmerston muttering his disdain.
The Foreign Office is sensitive to this line of criticism and Hague is said to be prouder of his work on such campaigns than he is of anything else. However, when he took a kicking from the press for hosting a summit with Angelina Jolie, at a time when Ukraine and the Middle East were going through dreadful convulsions, it was hard not to see the sun setting on his time in the job. The only surprise is that his departure is taking place this year and not next.
Hague’s political career, like his four-year stint at the Foreign Office, is a story of qualified success. There was the prolonged shambles of his leadership, when his youth, his maladroitness and even his appearance became subjects of vicious satire. An early stab at modernising the Tory party gave way to an unseemly phase as a nativist tub-thumper, a guise that jarred with the reality of this emollient McKinsey man.
However, count the achievements since then. Hague has run a great department of state very well. He has served as counsel and rudder to the current prime minister and chancellor. He has bettered everyone of his political era as a parliamentarian, which is why Cameron is letting him see out the next nine months as leader of the House of the Commons. And most MPs in most parties regard him as a class act, even if they also find him an inscrutable personality.
Has he changed the country in his quarter of a century in politics? Not really. But he has served it well enough. He has also shown that a politician can get somewhere near the very top of this pitiless game while retaining some humanity and in fact gaining some. That defeat in 2001 helped to teach this political monomaniac — a teenage reader of Hansard, a student union plotter, an MP at 27 — what a small thing politics really is. Too many in Westminster have never had that epiphany.
— Financial Times
