First Alistair Darling and now, surprise, surprise, Jack Straw. From the BBC website:
[The] former Labour cabinet member Jack Straw is to step down from his current role, ending 30 years of front-bench politics.The Blackburn MP has held many of the top jobs in British politics, including foreign secretary and home secretary.
Elected to parliament in 1979 as the member for Blackburn, Straw was a campaign manager for Tony Blair’s 1994 Labour leadership bid and then performed the same role again for Gordon Brown in 2007. He was one of only three people to have served in the cabinet continuously from Labour’s victory in 1997 until its defeat in 2010 (the other two being Brown and Darling). He was once described by Sky’s Adam Boulton as “the longest-serving British cabinet minister since Gladstone” and by the Evening Standard’s David Cohen as “the longest-serving cabinet minister since Lloyd George”, but both descriptions, as the Indie‘s John Rentoul has noted, are factually inaccurate.
I can’t say I’m going to miss Straw. Nothing personal — in fact, I’m a fan of his son (and potential replacement in Blackburn?) Will — but, for a start, he is one of the so-called greybeards whom I blame, along with Geoff “I Want to Make Money” Hoon, for wrongly persuading Brown against going to the polls in the autumn of 2007. Labour would have won then, rather than lost in May 2010.
He is also a classic Labour tribalist who was a roadblock to electoral reform during the party’s 13 years in office. I remember bumping into him outside the conference chamber in Brighton in September 2009, after Brown’s speech, in which the then prime minister revealed that he had converted to AV only (rather than full proportional representation, as Alan Johnson, John Denham and other pluralists in the cabinet had been urging him to).
Straw couldn’t hide the smile on his face as he briefed reporters. I suspect that even now, he is delighted at the prospect of Labour campaigning for a No vote in next year’s AV referendum, due to the Lib-Con coalition’s outrageous decision to bundle together electoral reform with the so-called equalisation and reduction in the number of Commons seats.
But there is one issue which, more than any other, will stain Straw’s reputation for ever, and for which I, and others, will never forgive him. From the BBC again:
As foreign secretary, he played a central role in the decision to commit British troops to the US-led invasion of Iraq and in unsuccessful attempts to secure a second UN resolution on the eve of war.
In evidence to the Chilcot inquiry in January, he described his decision to back the 2003 war as the “most difficult” of his career, describing it as a “profoundly difficult political and moral dilemma”.
In his evidence to the Iraq inquiry, Straw also admitted that he could have stopped the war if he had opposed the invasion in cabinet, but he chose to remain loyal to Tony Blair. In recent years, the former foreign secretary has tried to portray himself as some sort of reluctant supporter of the war, if not a sceptic. And yet, as a producer on the Jonathan Dimbleby programme between the years 2002 and 2004, I remember Straw appearing several times on the show to passionately, cogently and, of course, disingenuously promote, support and defend that disastrous and disgusting decision. But it does seem that, in private, he had his doubts (see the Downing Street memo for the Straw quote on the case for war being “thin”). Thanks for sharing those doubts with us, Jack, and with parliament and the UN Security Council.
Oh wait a minute . . . you didn’t. So shame on you. And goodbye.
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