Yo, Cameron!

Cameron stands encircled by zealous Anglo-neocons

An influential coterie of Tory MPs is bent on a foreign policy driven not by Britain's interests, but those of the US and Israel

Geoffrey Wheatcroft

Thursday March 22, 2007

The Guardian

Last September, David Cameron queried Tony Blair's unwavering (and unrewarded) loyalty to the Bush administration. The speech made Cameron unpopular in Washington, but that should have done him no harm with the British electorate, given what most of them think of George Bush. Yet however welcome Cameron's apparent turn in foreign policy might be with the public, he has a problem with his own parliamentary party. For years past the Tories have been infiltrated by Anglo-neoconservatives, a species easily defined. Several of the younger MPs are fanatical adherents of the creed with its three prongs: ardent support for the Iraq war, for the US and for Israel.

You might think that the first of those prongs was dented after the disaster which has unfolded. What would have happened if the Tories had opposed the war is one of the more fascinating "ifs" of history; but they didn't, and the moment has passed when they could have adroitly dissociated themselves from the war because of the false claims on which it was begun and the incompetence with which it was conducted.

Even then, Iraq might have made Tories hesitate before continuing to cheer the US, but Stephen Crabb does just that. The MP was in Washington at the time of Cameron's speech, where, he said, there was "disappointment expressed". Many would have taken that as a compliment, but not Crabb, who says in best Vichy spirit: "We do need to be careful about how the Americans see us."

In most European countries there is a party of the right whose basic definition is its attachment to the national interest of that country. Only here is there a Conservative party, and Tory press, largely in the hands of people whose basic commitment is to the national interest of another country, or countries.

There was once a vigorous high Tory tradition of independence from - if not hostility to - America. It was found in the Morning Post before the war, and it continued down to Enoch Powell and Alan Clark. But now members of the shadow cabinet, such as George Osborne (whom even Cameron is said to tease as a neocon), vie in fealty to Washington - and this when US policy is driven by neocon thinktanks and evangelical fundamentalists, with whom Toryism should have nothing in common.

Attempts by younger Tories to justify their allegiance to Washington and Israel are curious. One more from the latest vintage is Douglas Carswell MP, who insists that "it is in our national interest to support Israel". He would never wish to say anything critical of Israel, "because I believe they are a front-line ally in a war against people who wish to destroy our democratic way of life. Others may take a nuanced view. I don't."

This is extreme, but not unique. The Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) are a successful force, now claiming a large majority of Tory MPs as members. It is frankly perverse for Charles Moore to complain in the Daily Telegraph that the Conservatives have gone awry since the good old days, when the natural Tory outlook included "a greater sympathy for Israel than for those who were trying to destroy her", since if anything the change has been the other way round.

When does he think that greater sympathy for Israel was ever a distinctively Conservative position? In the days when I attended Tory conferences, you could be entertained one evening by the CFI, with the late Duke of Devonshire in the chair, but on the next by the Council for Arab-British Understanding and such luminaries as Ian Gilmour and Dennis Walters. Going further back, AJ Balfour was the Tory premier and then foreign secretary who signed the eponymous declaration in 1917 favouring a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and came to favour a Jewish state (as with many gentile Zionists, his attitude to Jews was highly ambiguous; he described privately how uneasy he once felt at a dinner party where "Hebrews were in an actual majority").

And yet his successor as foreign secretary took the opposite view. That highest of high Tories Lord Curzon deplored the Balfour declaration. He thought that a Jewish homeland could only mean a grave injustice to the inhabitants of Palestine. It would inflame hundreds of millions of Muslim subjects of the British empire. And as to the Jewish people themselves and the idea of transporting them to the Levant, "I cannot think of a worse fate for an advanced and intellectual community," Curzon said.

In his day Curzon might have seemed the truer Tory than Balfour, and it's only recently that his spirit has been stifled in his old party. That is all the more so with the arrival of MPs such as Crabb, Carswell, and the egregious Michael Gove, the Times columnist and MP for Surrey Heath, a copy of whose Muslim-bashing diatribe Celsius 7/7 is given to every lucky person who joins the CFI.

Despite these Anglo-neocons, many people would say that endorsing every US action has damaged British interests. As to Carswell's "in our national interest to support Israel", the words are plainly absurd, and his "frontline ally" comment is terrifying. Cameron himself is "proud not just to be a Conservative, but a Conservative Friend of Israel," he says; but does he share Carswell's belief that the British army in Basra and Helmand is fighting on behalf of Israel? And does he imagine that our troops want to be told that? They have enough problems as it is.

What Cameron might by now have grasped is that the position represented by those zealous Anglo-neocons on his benches doesn't actually enjoy much popular support. No US president has been more disliked in this country than Bush the Younger, no adventure more regretted than the Iraq war. Most British people are neither enemies of Israel nor "friends" in the CFI sense. They hope for a just settlement and deplore needless violence: during the bombardment of Lebanon last summer, one poll found that only 22% thought the Israeli response was justified. When Crabb says that the Anglo-US alliance has been "the single most important foreign policy relationship since the second world war", he could also recognise that never since then has the British electorate felt less enthusiastic about it.

No one expects Cameron to become the Hugo Chávez of Notting Hill. But if he's serious about winning an election, he could at least begin to forge a foreign policy which, unlike Blair's, is based on the national interest of this country and not another, and which expresses the views of the British people.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of Yo, Blair!

wheaty@compuserve.com