The appointment of someone who is no longer an MP to be our new foreign secretary sounds to me like trying to scrape beyond the bottom of the barrel. I was surprised that former Prime Minister, David Cameron, wasn’t already a member of the House of Lords but apparently he had to be appointed to that posthaste in order to legitimate his new role.
As I recall, he left politics under something of a cloud – an unhappy coalition with the Lib Dems to get into power, the ushering in of years of austerity politics, several strong suggestions of undue lobbying linked to personal gain and, perhaps most critically, the miscalculation of the Brexit poll. Instead of putting the matter of Europe to bed for a few years, it poured on petrol and set fire to the bed we had to lay on. That doesn’t sound like a triumph in the field of foreign policy as every indication was that Cameron was pro-European.
Could it be that Sunak is trying to reclaim the middle ground (difficult, as Starmer seems determined to come across as very average despite his strong background) or is it just that the Conservative party is getting increasingly desperate and willing to shove just about anybody anywhere in order to try and cling onto power? We could do with an early General Election next year, a change of power and ideally, another look at trying to change the system so people feel represented rather than polarised, whoever sits in the majority.