Since there is nothing new under the sun, Lord Carrington, the British politician-statesman who died earlier this month, age 99, will not be the last person to be called the last of his kind, whose like we shall never see again. In Carrington’s case, however, it may approximately be true.
Peter Alexander Rupert Carington, the sixth Baron Carrington and descendant of 19th-century Whigs and Liberals, was the sort of public-minded aristocrat who used to dominate Britain’s Conservative party. Indeed, within living memory, Tory cabinets were bursting with lords of the manor and public-school boys and sons of bishops and ex-subalterns in elite regiments. All that changed in the mid-1960s, however, when Labour broke a 13-year Conservative run in power and the Tories decided to modernize.
From my perspective, the jury is still out on whether that was a good idea. But in any case, the 14th Earl of Home (aka Sir Alec Douglas-Home) was replaced as party leader by Edward Heath, and a half-century later the Conservative party—while still home to more than a handful of toffs—is now a proper meritocracy.
In that sense, Carrington played an interesting role in the transition. His grandfather had been the sort of feckless spendthrift who populates the novels of P. G. Wodehouse; probably in reaction, or perhaps in penance, Carrington’s father picked the Army as his career but died in early middle age. Our Lord Carrington chose to emulate his father, moving from Eton to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (Britain’s West Point) and on to the posh Grenadier Guards, where he distinguished himself in northwest Europe during World War II and won the Military Cross.
At the end of the conflict, like more than a few returning officers from both world wars, Carrington decided to enter politics. As a hereditary member of the House of Lords he had an automatic sinecure in Parliament. But the balance of power in Westminster had long since shifted to the House of Commons—no peer had been prime minister since Lord Salisbury at the turn of the century—and Carrington understood that his prospects might be limited.
It is no great surprise that he prospered in the postwar Conservative party. Gallant ex-officers of noble birth appealed to Winston Churchill, who was one of the tribe himself, and Carrington was the last survivor of Churchill’s second government (1951-55). He was also close to Churchill’s most estimable successor, Harold Macmillan. Yet Carrington was more than an amiable country squire. He early acquired a reputation for smooth competence and integrity in his chosen specialties of defense and foreign policy. Better yet, he was personally popular among the rank and file of parliamentary Tories who rose to power with Heath.
Among them, of course, was Margaret Thatcher, who deposed Heath as leader in 1975. It is sometimes forgotten how audacious and radical her challenge to Heath appeared at the time within Conservative ranks. This was only partly due to her obvious status as the first female leader in British political history: Mrs. Thatcher was also an “ideologue” in a party accustomed to think of governing as a form of noblesse oblige. So it says something about Margaret Thatcher that she chose a largely non-Thatcherite shadow cabinet during her years in opposition. And it says something about Lord Carrington that, as Tory leader in the House of Lords, she should have chosen him as confidant and strategic ally.
Indeed, in her memoirs, Thatcher acknowledged that Carrington was not, by nature or conviction, much of a Thatcherite. But she valued him for his wit, even temperament, courteous manner, wide experience—and, without apology, for his status as a Tory grandee among her middle-class Conservative brethren. Nor were her feelings a matter of expedience: When in 1979 she became prime minister, she rewarded Carrington by making him foreign secretary despite the fact that he sat in the House of Lords and was absent from the rancorous Commons debates.
By any measure, Carrington was an able and successful foreign secretary, nicely balancing power with diplomacy and finessing the transatlantic shift from Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan. In one of the instructive ironies of politics, however, he is best remembered today not for any particular achievement but for his resignation from office.
In 1982, Britain and Argentina were negotiating over the status of the Falkland Islands, and Carrington, while committed to talks with the junta in Buenos Aires, was steadfast in his view that the wishes of the islands’ inhabitants—who had no desire, then or now, to live under Argentine rule—should be paramount.
To that end, he opposed any gesture that might signal to the Argentinians that British sovereignty was negotiable. In particular, he argued against the withdrawal of HMS Endurance from the south Atlantic as part of a program of naval budget cuts. Of course, the inevitable happened: British intelligence counseled that if the Endurance were withdrawn, Argentina would not take action. So the Endurance departed from the south Atlantic—and Argentina invaded the Falklands.
This was a plain, unprovoked act of aggression by an arguably fascist dictatorship against an outpost of British democracy, complicated by a strenuous and embarrassingly prolonged debate within the Reagan administration between Secretary of State Alexander Haig and U.N. ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick (in Argentina’s corner) and the Anglophile Defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, who prevailed.
If any one player in this drama had acquitted himself with prescience and integrity, it was Lord Carrington. But that wasn’t the way he saw it. The (temporary) Argentine conquest of the British Falklands was, as he wrote in his memoirs, perceived as a disgrace, and “the disgrace must be purged. The person to purge it should be the minister in charge.” And so he resigned.
Carrington’s sudden and irrevocable withdrawal from political office was shocking and, over here at least, incomprehensible. No American secretary of state would have stepped aside in similar circumstances: To do so would be seen as an admission that the official in question had been mistaken or incompetent—which Carrington was not—or perceived as a sign of weakness or irresolution. By way of illustration, George W. Bush’s cabinet remained wholly intact after September 11, 2001, while questions of culpability and performance were deferred. Carrington’s resignation on principle dramatized the code by which he had lived and practiced politics, as well as his sense of obligation to duty. He did not quit in protest, which is the usual spur to action, but as a matter of honor.
Honor, of course, prevails in the New World as well as the Old. And Carrington, despite his great age, went on to serve as a genial and effective secretary general of NATO in the years before the breakup of the Soviet Union and chaired an unsuccessful attempt by the European Community to stave off Yugoslavia’s descent into chaos. Well into his 90s, he continued to make himself useful in Parliament and spent his last years puttering contentedly, rewarded for decades of service to the state and remembered for the graceful surrender of power. As Malcolm said of Cawdor in Macbeth, “Nothing in his [political] life became him like the leaving it.”
