Jonathan Powell: Virtue Imperialist?

 

October 24th. How does one craft British foreign and security policy when one knows how weak, divided and broke the country is? What trade-offs must be made and at what cost? What is the balance to be struck between pragmatism and ideology? How does one present the management of decline as responsible statecraft?  Those are the dilemmas Sir Keir Starmer’s National Security Advisor, Jonathan Powell, confronts daily. Powell certainly has form.  As Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff for a decade he was intimately involved in the Northern Ireland Peace Accords back in the 1990s and the Iraq War in 2003.  More recently he has been front and centre in the Chagos Islands sell-out, the EU reset, and kowtowing to Xi’s Beijing which has culminated in the China Spy Case fiasco.   

During his wilderness years Powell wrote an interesting book which not only revealed Powell’s view of power, but also his many contradictions. Entitled, "The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World" there were times reading it when I thought the title should have been "The New Utopia: How to Give Power to Others in the Modern World".  In the book Powell wrote, “[Machiavelli] was the first writer to consider power and how it could be used and retained in a utilitarian rather than a utopian way”.  And yet it is precisely a form of virtue signalling globalist utopianism that is (it is not science) the essence of his statecraft.

Normally, I avoid writing pieces ad hominem, but Powell IS British foreign and security policy at present such is the dearth of talent in the Starmer administration. Whilst I do not know Powell, we were contemporaries at University College, Oxford.  We both read Modern History, and we even had the same Senior Tutor, the brilliant Dr L. G. Mitchell.  There our similarities end.  Powell was a couple of years ahead of me and whilst he went to the posh King’s School, Canterbury I went to the bog standard Castle Comprehensive School, while Powell was Establishment spawn, I was an oick from the sticks, why I still believe in Britain as a Power, Powell together with much of the British Establishment, does not.  

It is the issue of class which is the difference between us and which is unique to Britain.  Powell’s Establishment class have failed and they know it.  They believe Britain is finished and no longer able to compete in the world.  Petits bourgeois like me reject such nonsense as the basis for policy.  Whilst I accept that Britain is no longer a world power it is still a European power of some weight and can compete if led well. 

Powell’s weakness is the absence of leadership, something he shares with his boss in Downing Street.  This absence of leadership is strange because one of his brothers, Charles Powell (King’s School Canterbury and New College, Oxford), and Baron Powell of Bayswater, was Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy advisor.  The consummate Establishment insider ‘Pole’ (as he pronounced his surname) did believe Britain was still a power of some weight albeit fading.  Like his formidable and at times over the top boss he also believed it could be applied to effect in pursuit of a clearly understood British interest.

Perhaps Powell did once believe such things.  He was, after all, an architect of Tony Blair’s Liberal Humanitarianism in which British virtue and power became a forced marriage of convenience. When Blair over-reached trying to shape US policy post-911 in Afghanistan and Iraq Liberal Humanitarianism seems to have morphed into the vacuum of Virtue Imperialism. It is as though Powell was so bruised by the experience of the Iraq fiasco that he went from an advocate of British over-reach to the under-reach self-evident in what passes for Virtue Signaller-in-Chief Starmer’s statecraft.  

Given Powell’s provenance it is perhaps hardly surprising Virtue Imperialism has become the final tragic manifestation of British imperialism. Which brings me to the paradox at the heart of Powell’s statecraft: for all the Establishment’s declinism and defeatism they still remain arrogant enough to believe that if Britain leads the way across the Hard Yards of Virtue, the world will follow. It will not. 

Powell is in essence Mephistopheles in the forging Starmer’s Faustian Pact with Virtue. This is why Britain is paying Mauritius to take the Chagos Islands off Britain’s hands, even though Diego Garcia is a strategically vital asset for both the UK and US. It is also why much of the Cabinet Office and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (or whatever it is called these days) is so keen to make Britain the new Hong Kong, China’s offshore European island.  For much of the Establishment China can do anything to indebted Britain so long as Beijing keeps London politically and financially afloat.

Powell would tell me that he can see the books and knows Britain’s dire financial reality, whilst I do not. In fact I do but that is no excuse for the policy Powell is crafting. A policy that pretends it is committed to multilateralism and institutions such as NATO, talks a lot about increasing Britain’s fighting power to strengthen Alliance deterrence, but in fact does little to turn words into deeds.

It is not all Powell’s fault. Working in this Downing Street Powell is all too aware that many in the Labour Government believe patriotism is a form of mental disorder and that ‘virtue’ is an end in itself for a country so burdened by the guilt of its imperial past.

Ultimately, Powell and the British Establishment have become so wedded to managing Britain’s decline that it has become an end in itself.  They exaggerate British weakness, confuse weakness for virtue and ‘law’ for power to avoid an uncomfortable truth: Britain cannot hide from its residual power. Power breeds responsibilities however hard London tries to replace hard interests with meaningless virtue.

Machiavelli wrote "The Prince" to curry favour with the virtue-less Medici who never confused virtue with interests.  He understood that Sixteenth Century Florence was to the other city-states in Italy what Britain is to the contemporary world.  As such he saw real virtue in the application of clever statecraft that strengthened Florence’s relative position.  As Machiavelli said, “it is better to be adventurous than cautious”.   Powell?

Julian Lindley-French