Lord Carrington Obituary - A Brilliant Politician
OBITUARY
Lord Carrington obituary
Lord Carrington, one of the last surviving British politicians to have served in the Second World War, was the oldest member of the House of Lords at the time of his death
Three days after Argentina invaded the Falklands in 1982, Lord Carrington resigned as foreign secretary, despite Margaret Thatcher’s strenuous efforts to dissuade him. He bore little blame for the government’s failure to avert the calamity, but “the nation feels there has been a disgrace,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Somebody must have been to blame. The disgrace must be purged. The person to purge it should be the minister in charge. That was me.”
Carrington’s resignation won him praise, not obloquy. It was seen as an honourable act by a principled politician and it was one of the last times the doctrine of ministerial responsibility was observed. Subsequent ministers preferred to blame others when things went wrong or brazen them out.
Carrington was a throwback to an earlier age in other ways too. He was one of the last surviving British politicians to have served in the Second World War, and the last survivor of Winston Churchill’s 1950s government. He was a patrician, paternalistic “one-nation” Tory of the old school. He considered pragmatism a virtue, distrusted ideology and believed in selfless public service. Not only was he honest and courteous, he was so self-effacing that his memoirs failed to mention that he won a Military Cross for his wartime service. “Pot luck,” he told an interviewer who asked about the decoration.
Lord Carrington was, to misquote Churchill, a modest man with little to be modest about. He only once stood for an election, for Buckinghamshire county council, but held office under six Conservative prime ministers. He never went to university, but served as foreign secretary, defence secretary, energy secretary, leader of the House of Lords, First Lord of the Admiralty, chairman of the Conservative Party, secretary-general of Nato and high commissioner to Australia. By the time of his death on Monday he was the oldest member of the House of Lords, and the second longest-serving member of the Privy Council after the Duke of Edinburgh.
He shared 67 years of his remarkably full life with his wife, Iona, who died in 2009. They renovated a semi-derelict 18th-century house, Bledlow Manor, on his ancestral estate in Buckinghamshire, and created six acres of exquisite gardens. “She doesn’t really talk English. She talks Latin,” Carrington would joke of his wife’s encyclopaedic knowledge of botanical names.
In old age the couple would proudly show visitors around those gardens, trailed by various dachshunds that they called the “tubes”. They owned many of those dogs over the decades, all named after prime ministers: Winston, Harold, Clement, Sir Edward Heath and, of course, Margaret Hilda.
Peter Alexander Rupert Carington (the family name has only one ‘r’, the barony two) was born in 1919, the son of the 5th Baron Carrington and the Hon Sybil Marion, daughter of the 2nd Viscount Colville. His forebears had mostly been Liberals until one generation found David Lloyd George so loathsome that they switched parties.
After what he described as an “uneventful, a happy and dull” boyhood in rural Devon, Carrington went to a prep school in Surrey and then to Eton. He was no sportsman, but he enjoyed the officer training corps, once lining the route to Windsor Castle for King George V’s funeral procession. His father sent him not to university but to Sandhurst as a gentleman cadet.
In 1938, during Carrington’s final term, his father died and he inherited the title, but enlisted nonetheless in the Grenadier Guards. Although war was looming, the officer commanding gave his new recruit two orders: “On no account are you to marry until you are 25; and you are to hunt in Leicestershire at least two days a week.”
His battalion sailed for France a month after war broke out, but left a furious Carrington behind because he was under 21. He spent the next few years in Britain and, in 1942, married. His bride was Iona McClean, daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Francis Kennedy McClean, who had learnt to fly with the Wright brothers and founded the Fleet Air Arm. With characteristic reticence Carrington failed to record in his autobiography how he met his fiancée, only that marrying her was “far the most sensible thing I have ever done”.
Iona spent much of the next two years sneaking into Carrington’s billets, once posing as a taxi driver’s wife. In 1943 they had their first daughter, Alexandra, later a school governor and magistrate. In June 1944 he moved to France as a tank commander in the Guards Armoured Division and spent the rest of the war driving the enemy back across northwestern Europe. “We encountered a few German rearguards and lost a few tanks and men, but on the whole the pursuit was more tiring than dangerous,” he claimed later. He won his MC for holding a bridge at Nijmegen with his tank when the Germans were threatening to cut off his troops from comrades across the Waal river.
Given a few days’ leave in August 1944, Carrington and two fellow guards joined US troops as they liberated Paris, driving down the Champs-Élysées and staying at the Ritz. More commonly, he found himself sleeping in a hole beneath his tank with his four crew, who came from poor backgrounds and had suffered hardship during the prewar years. The experience shaped his politics, he said later. “You could not have got a finer or better lot than they were. They deserved something better in the aftermath of the war.”
The fighting over, Carrington, a regular soldier, exercised his right to leave the army to take his seat in the House of Lords. He and Iona moved to Bledlow Manor, where their second daughter, Virginia, was born in 1946. She later married and divorced the 4th Baron Ashcombe; they had been introduced by her friend Camilla Parker Bowles. Their son, Rupert, was born in 1948 and becomes the 7th Baron Carrington.
Carrington began farming 350 acres of the family estate when Britain was short of food, joined the Country Landowners Association and became treasurer of Wycombe Conservative Association. He sat on Buckinghamshire county council until, in 1951, he returned from a day’s shooting and received a call from Churchill in Downing Street. “Would you like to join my shoot?” the prime minister asked, and Carrington duly joined his government as a junior agriculture minister with responsibility, among other things, for combating a new virus called myxomatosis that was killing Britain’s rabbits.
In 1954 he moved to the Ministry of Defence, where he served under three ministers in quick succession: Harold Macmillan, Selwyn Lloyd and Walter Monckton. Alec Douglas-Home, then secretary of state for Commonwealth relations, asked him to become high commissioner in Australia, where he and his family spent three happy years. Carrington had that essential political requirement, luck; he left the MoD a month before the Suez debacle.
In 1959, as the Carringtons were sailing back to England, Macmillan won the general election. He cabled Carrington’s ship in the Far East: “Will you become First Lord of the Admiralty Query Come straight home.”
His term of office was punctuated by two Soviet spy scandals, one at the Portland Underwater Detection Establishment and the other involving John Vassall, a homosexual who had been compromised while working at the British embassy in Moscow and then returned to the Admiralty as a Soviet agent. Carrington called the Vassall affair “one of the most unpleasant episodes of my political life”. He was treated harshly by the press and considered suing the Daily Express for suggesting he had sought to conceal Vassall’s espionage from the prime minister, effectively an act of treason. Vassall was soon eclipsed by a much bigger scandal, the Profumo affair.
Carrington’s career did not suffer. When Douglas-Home succeeded Macmillan as prime minister in 1963 Carrington joined the cabinet as leader of the House of Lords. A year later the Tories lost the election and he found himself in opposition, which is when his business career began. A friend stopped him in a Westminster corridor one day and invited him to join the board of the Australia and New Zealand Bank. “I don’t know anything at all about banking,” Carrington protested. “You’ll soon pick it up,” the friend replied. Within three years he was chairman, and sitting on the boards of Barclays and Cadbury-Schweppes as well.
The Conservatives returned to power under Edward Heath in 1970, and Carrington became defence secretary. His watchwords were “consolidation and stability”. He helped to restore morale after six years of Labour cuts, saving the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, reprieving the Ark Royal and expanding the Territorial Army. He created a procurement executive after a review by Derek Rayner, then head of Marks & Spencer, and oversaw the nationalisation of Rolls-Royce.
The blemish on Carrington’s record was Northern Ireland. He staunchly defended the British soldiers who shot dead 13 unarmed civilians during a demonstration in Londonderry on Bloody Sunday in 1972, writing in his memoirs that “the troops made what in any other country would be regarded as a pretty restrained effort in defending themselves”. That myth was debunked by the Saville inquiry in 2010, and for years the injustice served as a recruiting agent for the IRA. The previous year, 1971, Heath had introduced internment. British troops rounded up hundreds of IRA suspects one August night. Fourteen of them, later dubbed the Hooded Men, were tortured at a secret base. The Irish government took Britain to the European Court of Human Rights, and in 1977 Merlyn Rees, the home secretary, wrote privately to James Callaghan, the prime minister: “It is my view . . . that the decision to use methods of torture in Northern Ireland in 1971/2 was taken by ministers, in particular Lord Carrington.”
In 1972 Heath made Carrington Conservative Party chairman as well as defence secretary, charged with raising the rank and file’s flagging morale after the government’s capitulation to the miners. Amid rampant inflation those miners were soon demanding another huge pay rise. With coal stocks running low, Heath introduced a three-day working week. At the height of the crisis he moved Carrington to a new Department of Energy. Carrington urged the prime minister to call a snap election. Heath finally did so in February 1974, but too late. Labour won. “I did not find this a period of my life which brought great happiness or any sensation of success,” Carrington recalled with typical understatement.
He backed Heath in the subsequent Tory leadership contest. When Thatcher won he expected to be dropped from her shadow cabinet, and wrote to tell her so. As one of those moderate Conservatives who became known as “wets” he was not, by his own admission, “a convinced fellow-devotee” of Thatcher’s and found the Conservative party to be “never at its most attractive . . . when trying, out of character, to be ideological”.
Thatcher liked Carrington, however. As a peer, he could harbour no ambitions for her job. “I had no desire whatsoever to lead the party or be prime minister — nor ever had,” he said later. He alone could intercede, as he once did when she was lecturing some foreign visitor, to say: “The poor chap’s come 600 miles. Do let him say something.” She wrote in her memoirs that Carrington had “great panache and the ability to identify immediately the main points in any argument; and he could express himself in pungent terms. We had disagreements, but there were never any hard feelings.”
After her victory in the 1979 general election she made him foreign secretary, a job far removed from the contentious field of economic policy, but one he described as “the summit of my political ambitions”.
The crowning achievement of his three years in that office was the resolution of the civil war between Rhodesia’s ruling white minority and its black independence movement, a conflict that was dividing the Commonwealth and damaging Britain’s standing in the world.
Carrington realised that any solution would have to involve some form of universal suffrage, negotiations with the guerrilla leaders Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo, and rejection of the so-called internal settlement of 1979 that saw Bishop Abel Muzorewa “elected” as nominal prime minister.
Those were unpopular positions with right-wing Tories, some of whom accused Carrington of betraying “our people”, but he won over the prime minister. He persuaded Ian Smith, Rhodesia’s white leader, to attend talks in London with Mugabe and Nkomo. After many tempestuous weeks he secured an agreement that led to a ceasefire, free elections and Zimbabwe’s independence. He was dismayed when Mugabe won those elections by a landslide, but relieved to have ended a “particularly beastly war”.
The low point of his term was, of course, the Falkland Islands, long a bone of contention between Britain and Argentina. With tensions rising, Carrington failed to persuade the islanders and his party to consider a leaseback scheme that would preserve the status quo while acknowledging Argentina’s sovereignty.
Lord Carrington dances with Katharine Worsley, later the Duchess of Kent, in April 196
He sought to dissuade the Ministry of Defence from sending a signal of weakness by withdrawing the patrol vessel HMS Endurance from the South Atlantic on cost grounds. He received no intelligence reports of an imminent invasion, but warned the cabinet several times that the situation was dangerous and privately urged the US to restrain the Argentine junta. But the invasion took place and Carrington dutifully fell on his proverbial sword. He described the day he resigned as “probably the most sorrowful I had known”.On economic policy Carrington found Thatcher too harsh and uncaring, and disliked her stridency on Europe. “I have never pretended to agree with you on everything,” he wrote in his resignation letter. But, he added: “My admiration for your courage and determination and resourcefulness is unbounded. You deserve to win through and if there is anything I can do to help you have only to ask.”
Carrington never returned to government. He became chairman of the General Electric Company until 1984, then secretary-general of Nato during the last years of the Cold War. In the early 1990s he spent a year as the European Community envoy, striving unsuccessfully to avert war in the Balkans after the break-up of Yugoslavia.
Carrington also published his memoirs, which were notable for their lack of malice or score-settling. Those he found “disagreeble” he simply omitted, he said. Of his career he wrote: “It is office that has satisfied rather than the game of parliament or party. It is office which gives the chance to do things, to steer things perhaps very slightly, almost certainly very gradually and, sadly, often most impermanently, towards what a person believes right.”
Lord Carrington, KG, GCMG, CH, MC, politician, was born on June 6, 1919.
He died on July 9, 2018, aged 99
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