Barton is back.
Sir Philip Barton to give him his proper respect and due.
And he deserves that. I didn’t always think so, but I changed my mind. I took the former position because of an appearance of his before the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and I changed that position long before his return to that arena today, in very different circumstances.
I think it unlikely he’d see the latest of these two outings in terms of ‘revenge’ it’s not really how he works, but let’s just say the cards are formidably in his favour this time, and the last time he was holding a very poor hand indeed.
Arguably the last government dealt that hand to him. However having spoken to him and worked with him he certainly thinks he’d have done some things differently with hindsight.
The evacuation of Afghanistan when the US pulled out and a decade of US and UK blood, dust and death was effectively scrubbed out as worthless sacrifice was not a glorious moment. The very rapid, and frankly far too easy return of the Taliban was a huge embarrassment.
Some will remember the scenes of a man falling to his death clinging to the side of an American Transport plane but being blown free as it took off. They’ll recall crowds of people swelling into a US holding area not built to contain such numbers, and in insanitary conditions waiting, and waiting for the smallest chance to get out. Not for the first time countries with huge military resources were pulling out of Afghanistan after ultimately futile attempts to move it away from its propensity to host even encourage hostile Islamism.
Dominic Raab, the then Foreign Secretary, too much a minutiae man with a serious gym habit and a demanding persona that he extended to himself, bordering on control freakery – but not a bully – had the bad luck to be on holiday at the time. It happens. In modern politics the easiest attack in the world is “why is X on holiday when this is going on”
However events moved very fast, and he wasn’t at his desk. That was just bad timing, but not ‘coming back home to work’ was seen as very much his fault.
This of course is logically absurd. In the FCDO hardly anybody is considered ‘in work’ only when they are in London and King Charles Street. Diplomats expressly don’t work in London; that’s literally the point of them. It extends to a Foreign Secretary.
Because of the time of year Barton, Permanent Secretary at the FCDO was also on holiday, and not only was he slammed in January 2022 by the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, the media, and MPs for not coming home sooner he was specifically castigated for misleading people about the evacuation of dogs!
It was a broadside from both sides: ‘Why didn’t you help the dogs?‘ to ‘why did you bother helping the dogs?‘, either way ‘you are getting thrown to the dogs.’
There were calls for him to resign. Sir Philip however survived. Just.
In the September of that year 2022, I arrived in the Foreign Office as an adviser to the new Foreign Secretary Sir James Cleverly. In the month before, a profile piece had been published of Sir Philip in the magazine Civil Service World, and remembering the problems he’d encountered I suggested to my boss we might need to have an early discussion about whether the Permanent Secretary should actually be permanent.
I think the phrase was “I wonder if he isn’t holed under the waterline credibility-wise after that Select Committee mauling”
History relates much about the extraordinary and mostly damaging seven weeks of the Truss administration but then Chancellor, Kwasi Kwateng’s sacking of Tom Scholar from the Treasury rather put paid to that conversation, and in many ways I’m glad it did.
Very early on Sir Philip took me aside and openly discussed what he described as the ‘worst time of my entire career and my life’ – as ever the truth was not quite the same as the public narrative, some of which could not be revealed under the Official Secrets Act, and whilst never his spoken defence I got the distinct impression he had been politically reassured at the time that the being on holiday was not the problem it subsequently became for him.
When in 2023 we needed to get British nationals out of Sudan which had spiralled into civil war, again, we were in the Soloman Islands, heading towards New Zealand. The 24/7 emergency response team in FCDO did a superb job, and the boss chaired a COBRA meeting from the UK’s government plane somewhere over the Far East. Just being out of the country sent the government machine haywire with Number 10 demanding we return immediately because they didn’t want ‘another Afghanistan’
It was a knee jerk panic reaction to a situation that wasn’t comparable. I spent much of those days, including a rather fractious call in the middle of the night in Wellington New Zealand to staffers in Downing Street with me saying heatedly “this is not Afghanistan, this is not Afghanistan” to people who worried it might look like Afghanistan.
The Sudan operation was not Afghanistan but one of the largest and most successful evacuation of British nationals ever mounted.
By this stage we had worked with Sir Philip for some months and our doubts had faded.
Did he, does he, have the problematic historic prejudices and fixed opinions of the FCDO, probably, yes. But he was an old school civil servant who believed it was his job to facilitate what his political masters wanted, but to protect them from doing anything that might on reflection be crass or – as civil servants are wont to advise – ‘unwise’. He never gave bad advice, even if we argued reasonably that we couldn’t take it. We simply made a counter argument and he’d get what we wanted done.
We took it as a mark of his professionalism that to this day none of us, in that team have a clue as to his politics, I couldn’t begin to guess how he votes.
That’s why today his evidence to the Select Committee on whether, contrary to the Prime Minister’s declaration to Parliament that no pressure was exerted at any stage in the process to appoint Peter Mandelson as US Ambassador is so important.
Labour voices claim there has been far too much focus on it, nobody cares, which is naked self-serving spin, and whilst Mandelson is not the topic of conversation in the Dog and Duck pub outside Westminster as James Crouch writes on ConHome today the Opposition have capitalised on an issue that goes to the heart of Starmer’s judgement, conduct and integrity.
Philip Barton left the Foreign Office eight months before he was due to. He, not Olly Robbins was Permanent Secretary when the entire Mandelson enterprise was discussed and drawn up.
He is in the hot seat again today, a Select Committee appearance that really couldn’t be worse than the one he endured in 2022.
He’s unlikely to grandstand, and may be – predictably I suppose – diplomatic in his language but he really only has to say one thing, if it’s true. If he confirms Number 10 did put pressure on FCDO to get Mandelson appointed, then Starmer misled the House of Commons.
Does a family struggling to make ends meet, care? Probably not, and I understand why, but that’s not the point.
Barton is a straight shooter, who could finally explain that the whole Mandelson saga was not normal, not due process, and not a good idea from the get-go.
No Prime Minister should get away with professing anything other than the truth. A rule Keir Starmer repeatedly declared, himself, before he was one.