Cameron is wrong to suck up to Bush and ignore the issue of rendition
David Cameron has ruthlessly dumped Tory baggage on almost every pressing issue: tax, the economy, the environment, health, education, welfare, the legacy of Margaret Thatcher. There is, however, one exception. On foreign policy he has moved surprisingly sharply to the Right. In Europe he has broken with the centrist EPP and placed Conservatives uncomfortably alongside a miscellaneous collection on the semi-fascist fringe. More notable still, David Cameron’s Tory party is moving fast to improve links with the White House and the Republican party.
Domestically, David Cameron may have felt moved to renounce Margaret Thatcher. But internationally, he is sucking up to George Bush. This is an amazing state of affairs, so jaw-dropping in its apparent absence of all political logic that I am still wondering whether it can really be the case. Yet the evidence is compelling.
Consider first David Cameron’s conduct during the controversy over ‘extraordinary rendition’, which gained momentum with a hostile Council of Europe report this week. This document claims that the CIA has repeatedly been involved in the transfer of suspected terrorists to shady interrogation camps in countries where the use of torture is customary. In some cases the suspects appear to have been snatched from the streets of Europe and sedated before making their journey to these secret prisons. Tony Blair and the foreign secretary Jack Straw deny British knowledge and involvement. There are, however, strong grounds for suspecting that the British government has been complicit, at least to the extent of allowing CIA ‘ghost flights’, with their cargo of ‘rendered’ prisoners, to refuel at airports in the UK.
For months the extraordinary rendition controversy has been growing in Europe and the United States. It now threatens to inflict political damage on George W. Bush ahead of this year’s mid-term elections. It should be emphasised that, despite massive circumstantial evidence, nothing has been proved. There are nevertheless numerous legitimate questions to be asked: this alleged outsourcing of torture is exactly the kind of issue where a vigorous opposition such as David Cameron’s Conservatives has an overriding duty to seek clarity from the government.
But Cameron has been silent. He seems to have been happy to let the Liberal Democrats make the running. Charles Kennedy, to his lasting credit, was blazing away on this issue right up to the day of his resignation. Menzies Campbell has been industriously asking questions since as long ago as the autumn. The Conservative Foreign Affairs spokesman William Hague, in sharp contrast, raised the matter for the first time last week, and then without much enthusiasm.
The inertia from David Cameron and his front bench is all the more culpable because Andrew Tyrie, a Conservative backbencher, was the first British parliamentarian to explore the issue. He has since pursued the matter with such painstaking integrity that he is now regarded as a leading international expert on extraordinary rendition, emerging as a public figure of sorts in the United States. But Tyrie, who managed Kenneth Clarke’s failed leadership bid, has received no encouragement from the Conservative front bench. It is the Liberal Democrats who have benefited from Tyrie’s passion, insights and ideas and made the issue their own.
On the face of things, this is a grievous piece of carelessness by David Cameron. He knows very well that the Conservative party has had to pay a heavy electoral price for its unqualified support for George W. Bush and Tony Blair over the Iraq invasion. Campaigning on extraordinary rendition would not just have been the moral and correct course to take. There would also have been strategic benefits. It would have provided David Cameron with the perfect mechanism for distancing himself from Bush’s and Blair’s badly flawed anti-terror strategy, without repudiating the original Conservative support for the war. And yet David Cameron turned his back on this opportunity. There is a ready explanation for this failure of judgment. Cameron is paying the price for surrounding himself with the three most senior members of the British neoconservative faction.
Next month these high-ranking members of David Cameron’s shadow Cabinet — George Osborne, William Hague and Liam Fox — fly to Washington. This trip seems to be part of an attempt to repair the relations with the Bush White House which were so badly damaged when Michael Howard’s Conservatives criticised Tony Blair’s conduct of the Iraq war. This interesting venture follows suspiciously fast on the publication of a paper on 6 January by the Heritage Foundation. The paper, by Nile Gardiner and John Hulsman and called ‘Britain’s Conservatives Must Reclaim the Anglo–American Special Relationship’, is of intense interest because it suggests that US neoconservatives believe they have all but captured David Cameron’s resurgent Tory party.
Bleakly noting that ‘Blair’s days as Prime Minister are numbered, and the British government’s pro-American outlook may not last beyond his premiership, which could end as early as 2007’, Gardiner and Hulsman observe that ‘the appointments of William Hague as shadow Foreign Secretary and Liam Fox as shadow Defence Secretary bodes well for a renaissance in the transatlantic conservative alliance’. They urge that ‘The Bush administration must increase its dialogue with British Conservatives, despite the likelihood of strong opposition from both Downing Street and the Foreign Office.’ William Hague will be hopeful of seeing Condi Rice on his forthcoming visit, while George Osborne is making efforts to meet his treasury counterpart, John Snow. Liam Fox, who spent time with George W. Bush and his pollster Karl Rove on a recent visit to the United States, is making valiant efforts to meet Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.
George Osborne, William Hague and Liam Fox have long been deeply impressed by the Republican Right. They are allowing their enthusiasm to warp their judgment. There are no votes and even less purpose in going to see members of the present administration. President Bush is not just the least popular political figure in Britain: he will be out of power by the next general election. Students of contemporary American politics concur that the next American president, even if he is a Republican, is most unlikely to be an associate of Bush’s. Distasteful though it may seem, Messrs Osborne, Hague and Fox would be much better advised to meet Hillary Clinton than Donald Rumsfeld. Earlier this week George Osborne attended a breakfast hosted by Sir Ronnie Grierson for Mark Warner, Governor of Virginia and a likely candidate for the 2008 Democratic nomination. That was a sensible, forward-looking, pragmatic thing to do.
In the meantime there is reason to believe that the US government continues to lift terror suspects off the streets and fly them illicitly to their shadowy torture centres. Last Tuesday morning I turned on the Today programme and heard Nick Clegg of the Liberal Democrats asking questions and demanding answers. I hope that if David Cameron and William Hague also heard Clegg, they felt a twinge of shame.
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