POLITICS
The dead hand of Mr Hurd guiding us from one compromise to another
NOEL MALCOLM
If Mr Major thinks that foreign policy wins votes, he should think again. War and the threat of war can win votes, and lose them; but not since Mr Gladstone intro- duced the Eastern Question to the voters of Midlothian has any British election hinged on a foreign policy issue which did not involve the use, actual or potential, of British troops. It is true that Mr Major had a good coup (I am referring to the Russian one, of course), looking serious on televi- sion, at ease in Kennebunkport and ahead of the crowd in Moscow; and it is true that the latest Mori opinion poll puts the Conservatives ahead of Labour for the first time since April. It is also true that the last two weeks have seen an unusual run of fine, sunny weather. Statistically speaking, one might just as well attribute the opinion poll ratings to the weather, or the weather to Mr Major.
In the pro-Conservative press there is an unremitting campaign to present the Prime Minister as a visionary statesman and world leader, someone who thinks and cares deeply about global issues. This is an image his admirers are keen to project even when they disagree with him on specific points; the Daily Mail reported that when he was challenged to justify his trip to Peking, he said that he had to live in the real world, and 'his eyes flashed angry fire'. Although it is not impossible to picture this (it helps if you think of one of those moments when Clark Kent switches to X-ray vision), I feel that it is not necessary to make people do so in order to garner votes for the Tory Party. More votes were surely gained by the news that Mr Major's eyes lit up when he saw the sign of the Happy Eater outside Doncas- ter.
If there is one senior British politician whose domestic standing really depends on the principled stands he takes on interna- tional issues, it is Mr Paddy Ashdown. He too has had a good coup, commenting far more sensibly - and frequently - on events in the Soviet Union than the Labour leader. But the opinion poll rating of his party shows no sign of benefiting from this; on the contrary, it continues to drift gently downwards, just as the Tory rating drifts gently upwards. That is not a coincidence. It is a rough but fair generalisation to say that throughout the year the Labour Par- ty's rating has stayed the same (at about 41 per cent), while those of the Tories and the Liberals have been fluctuating mirror- images of each other, the one rising as the other falls. What this means is that whenever the Labour Party succeeds in scaring floating voters away from the Con- servatives on an issue such as the NHS, those voters take temporary refuge with the Liberals; then, when the scare has died down, they drift back to the Conservatives again. The present rise in Tory support probably owes more to Mr Robin Cook's summer holidays than it does to all the death throes of a superpower. Mr Major has had plenty of international limelight, of course, and it has done him no positive harm. But the brightness of the beam which has focussed on him is partly a trick of the light, a consequence of the fact that the other Western players on the world stage have been skulking in the shadows. Mr Bush, having been widely criticised at home for foreign policy hyper- activity during June and July, adopted a surprisingly non-committal approach to the Soviet coup and its aftermath. 'They get a new guy in charge of the public works in downtown Kiev and you want to know whether I support it . . . I say let them sort it out.' That reference to Kiev was a giveaway, however; it was in the Ukrainian capital, just three weeks before the coup, that Mr Bush made his strongest statement in favour of the federal nature of the Soviet Union and against the drive to independ- ence - what he mistakenly called 'the hopeless course of isolation'. The non- committal appearance of Mr Bush's policy in the last two weeks conceals the reality, which is that the policy to which he had in fact committed himself has unexpectedly collapsed, and he cannot decide what to put in its place.
The EEC has fared little better. The response there to the Soviet crisis was, to put it mildly, varied, with M. Mitterrand angering even the Left-wing French press with his untroubled reference to 'the new leaders' in Moscow. The Germans are already touting for huge new injections of funds into the Soviet Union, undeterred by the lack of any visible effect so far from their own grant of 20 billion marks. (Never mind that roughly half of the 'emergency' food aid granted by the EEC in December last year has still not left the warehouses, because of the Soviet authorities' refusal to let the EEC supervise its distribution.) In the circumstances it is not surprising that Mr Major, as transatlantic pig-in-the- middle, has been less unimpressive than his allies on both sides. Compared with Mr Rush, he comes across as more positive, more active, more full of ideas; compared with the aid-obsessed EEC leaders his greater scepticism and his desire to look to the long term seem reassuringly statesman- like. But is the British position essentially anything more than a compromise between two different forms of paralysis? No one is more skilled than Mr Douglas Hurd at dressing up a compromise as a break- through, and the dead hand of Mr Hurd has been guiding us from one compromise to another for the last fortnight. Take the recognition of the Baltic states, for example. For many months, Mr Hurd has been saying that we would grant recognition only when the Baltics had peacefully and fully negotiated their own departure from the Soviet Union. Im- mediately after the coup, when they all pleaded for recognition, we sat on our hands; then, when negotiations with Mos- cow became possible again, they made no attempt to negotiate and after a short delay we recognised them. Why the delay? Be- cause it had been decided to make their recognition a joint EEC operation. Mr Hurd came out of that EEC meeting insisting that the Baltics were a special 'de jure' case, carrying no implications for any other republics in the Soviet Union or elsewhere; but since two EEC members (Holland and Spain) did previously ack- nowledge Soviet rule de jure in the Baltics, the reasons accepted by the EEC for this decision must be applicable to other repub- lics too. Our policies are beginning to resemble a new sort of Russian dolls, with one compromise cleverly tucked inside another.
If this were a tactic forced on the Government by the pressures of electoral politics, one could understand and accept it; but the independence of the Baltic states cuts little electoral ice in Britain. The only explanation seems to be that the Foreign Office still weaves its old spell, a spell compounded of inertia, Euro-piety and the Hurd instinct. And that bodes ill for the next test of Mr Major's statesmanship, in. Maastricht later this year, when the issue will concern the independence of Britain — a subject about which at least some members of the British electorate still care.
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