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Boris Johnson and the Foreign Office are a perfect fit

Boris Johnson
Boris Johnson, the new Foreign Secretary

Theresa May’s appointment of Boris Johnson to the great post of Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs has caused stupefaction around the world.

An email from a German friend said that it would have been better to appoint Mr Bean. Another from a top political commentator in the US simply said “Whaaa????”

Before he has even started, a phalanx of EU foreign ministers has already condemned him as the enfant terrible of diplomacy.

This shows the mountain that Mr Johnson will have to climb to be taken seriously as Foreign Secretary. But if he can convert his inner Prince Hal into Henry V, this could turn out to be an inspired appointment – imaginative, clever, bold and offering Britain just the voice it needs at a time of major rebalancing of our foreign policy. 

For it is imperative that we make clear to the world that Brexit does not mean shrivelling into a crabbed little island off the north-west coast of Europe.

Britain’s foreign policy has always been driven by the tension between its European and blue waters vocations. Dealing with the former will be David Davis, the new Secretary of State for Brexit (and a veteran Foreign Office minister, by the way), hacking his way through the jungle of entanglements that bind Britain to the EU. Mr Johnson, with his multinational background and peerless communications skills, is just the man for the blue waters.

I leave it to others, wiser in the ways of Westminster, to interpret the political nuances of Mrs May’s cabinet building and Mr Johnson’s appointment. Yet, certain things are clear.

For years Boris Johnson has been a handful for the Conservative Party leadership. So he would have been for Mrs May as she contemplated who to put where in her first Cabinet.

She could hardly leave such a big beast on the back benches, a potential focus for future troublemaking. Nor could she give him a department soused in domestic detail. The Foreign Office was the obvious job.

On the night of the referendum, before the result was known, I was gossiping in a television studio with Mr Johnson’s father, Stanley. We agreed that King Charles Street was a good fit for his son.

The Foreign Office has become a diminished place in the last two decades, its budget cut to the bone at under one tenth of that for international aid.

There was a time, including under Margaret Thatcher, when it had a dominant voice in the making of policy towards the EU. It has yielded much of that ground to the Treasury and the Cabinet Office. It remains to be seen what input it will have in the Brexit negotiations.

I am told that morale is not great – and this at a time when our diplomats need to exude as never before confidence and optimism about Britain’s future outside the EU. This is no time to hunker down in a defensive crouch. Britain’s diplomats need a shot of adrenaline that only Mr Johnson, with his panache and brio, can provide at this crucial point in our history. 

Certainly, the appointment is not without risk. Doing the rounds right now in the US is a copy of a cable sent by the American embassy in London just before the 2008 mayoral election, which Mr Johnson won. It lists his gaffes and peccadillos.

All over the world news organisations will have done likewise, updated with the incautious utterances of the referendum campaign. Mr Johnson cannot erase the past. At some point he may find himself having to a murmur an apology to the Turkish President for the lewd limerick he wrote about Mr Erdogan’s sexual proclivities.

Similarly, if the wheels of the British/American relationship are to turn smoothly, he might have to express regret to Mr Obama for an injudicious reference to the President’s Kenyan ancestry.

But for the rest, the page turns with his assumption of office. If Mr Johnson, backed by an experienced team of junior ministers and officials, can make a gaffe-less success of the Foreign Office, past utterances will fade from memory.

I remember asking a top adviser of the newly-elected President George W Bush whether Tony Blair’s close relationship with outgoing President Bill Clinton would be held against him. “By your works shall ye be known,” came the reply, quick as a flash. It is a good motto for Mr Johnson.

Sir Christopher Meyer is a former British Ambassador to the US and Germany

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