Remarks on the presentation to the Carrington family of the Britain-Australia Society Award 2018
15 January 2019
Australia House, London
HE the Hon George Brandis QC, Australian High Commissioner
Lord Carrington, whose illustrious memory we honour tonight, was the quintessential British statesman. He shaped much of the international politics of the second half of the twentieth century. For that alone he will always rank among the greats of British diplomacy. But it is for a different and less well-known reason that we honour him tonight: because of his intimate connection with Australia. For while Lord Carrington was famously a great Atlanticist, he was a great Antipodean as well.
His was a long life. He was born in London the month the Treaty of Versailles was signed. He lived to see the Trump Presidency, a century later. He fought with valour in the Second World War – in his memoirs, he modestly omitted mention of the fact that he had been awarded the MC – and when peace came, turned his back on the leisured life of a landowning aristocrat for the rigours of politics. Although his political roots were Whig and Liberal, various of his forebears had served in the administrations of Gladstone, Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith, he became an active Conservative peer.
He was the last man alive to have held ministerial office under Winston Churchill. Appointed to the modest post of Parliamentary Secretary in the Department of Agriculture after the 1951 election, he would rise, in the decades that followed, to hold increasingly higher offices under every Conservative Prime Minister from Churchill to Thatcher: First Lord of the Admiralty under Harold Macmillan, Defence Secretary under Edward Heath, Foreign Secretary under Margaret Thatcher. In the 1960s and 1970s, he led the Tories in the House of Lords. Although his political roots and outlook belonged to a different and older tradition than Mrs Thatcher’s radical neoliberalism, she nevertheless relied heavily upon his advice. She could trust his loyalty while benefiting from his wisdom.
The dramatic circumstances in which Lord Carrington left Mrs Thatcher’s government in 1982, although a personal setback, came in retrospect to be seen as one of his finest moments. The Foreign Office failed to anticipate the Argentinian invasion of the Falkland Islands. Although nobody suggested that the failure to anticipate the invasion was due to any culpability on his part, nevertheless Lord Carrington considered that, as a matter of honour, he should adhere to the old-fashioned view of ministerial responsibility, and resign. Mrs. Thatcher sought to dissuade him; he insisted.
In his memoirs, he described his reasons simply and unselfservingly:
It was not a sense of culpability that led me to resign. … [T]he whole of our country felt angry and humiliated. I felt the same myself. British territory had, without warning, been invaded… Inhabitants of a British colony – men and women of British blood – had been taken over against their will. …Shock and fury were felt throughout Britain, and in those circumstances… it is right, in my judgment, that there must be a resignation. The nation feels that there has been a disgrace. Someone must have been to blame. The disgrace must be purged. The person to purge it should be the minister in charge. That was me. …The anger of the British people and parliament at the Argentine invasion of the Falklands was a righteous anger, and it was my duty and fate to do something to assuage it; the rest was done by the brave sailors, soldiers and airmen, too many of whom laid down not office but their lives.
This was an act of political nobility which, almost four decades ago, was remarkable for its rarity. It is almost inconceivable that today, a Cabinet Minister would impose such an unsparingly high standard upon himself.
Although Lord Carrington described his departure from the Foreign Office as the saddest day of his life, wisdom and experience as prodigious as his could not be left on the sideline for long. Two years later, he was recalled to become the Secretary-General of NATO. During most of the Reagan years and during the Presidency of the first President Bush, Carrington – with much greater experience than any American or, for that matter, British statesman – was instrumental in shaping the West’s adjustment to the great upheavals which saw the Cold War’s peaceful end. Looking back from the era of President Trump, we think wistfully of the statesmen of those days – among whom Lord Carrington was pre-eminent – and remember it as a time of giants. If ever there was a time when Britain most excelled in its post-war role of playing Athens to America’s Rome, this surely was it.
Throughout all these years, in an unadvertised but important way, Lord Carrington was a friend of Australia at the heart of Britain’s political elite. His Australian connections were deep. His great-uncle Charles, the 3rd Lord Carrington, became the Governor of New South Wales in 1885. Charles’ youngest brother, Rupert – Lord Carrington’s grandfather - migrated to join him three years later. He fell in love and married Edith, the daughter of John Horsfall, one of the wealthiest graziers in the colony. Apparently this Carrington was something of a wastrel and spendthrift; in his memoirs, Lord Carrington relates the story of Horsfall telling one of his friends “My daughter’s going to marry Rupert Carrington,” to which the friend replied : “John, that’s the most expensive ram you ever bought!”
Rupert and Edith Carrington had only one child - a son, also called Rupert, Lord Carrington’s father. Born in Toorak in 1891, he went to Melbourne Grammar, where he was a contemporary of Stanley Melbourne Bruce, a future Prime Minister and High Commissioner, and R G Casey, Menzies’ longstanding rival and a future Governor-General. It was not until the Australian-born Rupert was in his early twenties that he first set foot in Britain, when the family returned from Australia shortly before the First World War. Like so many of his generation, Charles Carrington’s only son died on the Western Front, and the title devolved to his nephew, who became the fifth Baron Carrington on Charles’ death in 1928. Lord Carrington succeeded to the title on his father’s death in 1938.
No doubt it was because of these family connections that when, in 1956, Lord Carrington was offered the position of High Commissioner to Australia, he decided to take a detour from his political career and accept. With his wife and young family, he became the second occupant of Westminster House in Canberra, described in his memoirs as “a white, green-roofed house which resembled a golf club house in the Home Counties.” The years of his High Commissionership -1956 to 1959 - coincided with the golden years of the Menzies government. Predictably, they got on very well. Some years later, after he had returned to active politics in the United Kingdom, Carrington was instrumental in persuading Menzies and the then British Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, to form the Britain-Australia Society, of which he remained the titular president until his death last year. He was a frequent and popular visitor to the Australian High Commissioner’s residence, Stoke Lodge, where he is still remembered fondly by the staff.
I met Lord Carrington only once. It was 2003. I was an eager backbencher, and keen to meet and learn from great figures of the past. I wrote to him, and a warm reply came back, saying that he would be delighted to give me lunch when I came to London.
When I met him at his club, White’s, he was not the intimidating presence I had expected: the first thing that struck me were his cheerfulness and irreverent humour. He offered me a pre-luncheon drink; when he paid at the Bar in cash I said, perhaps rudely, I was surprised there wasn’t an honour system. His face broke into a broad smile. “Dear boy, this is the aristocrats’ club; you wouldn’t trust this lot!” Then over lunch, he gave me an avuncular masterclass on international politics over the previous five decades and the personalities that shaped it.
Shortly after my own appointment as High Commissioner began, I wrote to him to renew the acquaintance. A message came from Rupert Carrington saying that his father was too ill to accept my offer of lunch, but how much he appreciated the fact that I had written to him. He died a few weeks later.
It is a privilege to honour his memory tonight.