A Baroness Trumps A Lord
There comes a point in the downward trajectory of a politicians life, when their support for a contender is the kiss of death. so it appears for Gordon Brown, the beleaguered British Prime minister. After promoting his arch rival for the post of Council President he was forced to accept reality at a meeting of the Socialist Group ahead of the anointing dinner.
Seeing that the group wanted the High Representative and spurned his endorsing of Tony Blair as a big hitter on the world stage, he then went through the list of candidates for the High Representative position. front runner was his current foreign Minister, a man with a good reputation. No good, because Brown didn’t want a by-election in Milliband’s South Shields seat, and when you’re worrying about losing a seat in the Labour heartlands, you’re in a dire position. Secondly was Lord Mandelson. Out. Brown needs him for the forthcoming election campaign and to try to keep his party’s Blairites in check. Next was Geoff Hoon, who was quickly dismissed.
Finally their eye settled on Baroness Ashton, someone who has never held elective office and has foreign policy experience that can only be politely described as thin. However, she has the precious virtue of not holding a seat in Parliament, thus avoiding a by-election and she is a woman, thus helping attain the much wanted gender balance. How little strategic thought went into this decision was displayed by her opening announcement at the press conference when she announced “It is some measure of my surprise that I haven’t got an acceptance speech”‘.
It also leaves the Socialist Group with the embarrassment of promoting a member of the House of Lords and Brown having to explain why he was so strongly advocating a big hitter, that he said the EU absolutely needed, and ended up with someone as well known in the UK as the Belgian Premier.
If that wasn’t bad enough, Lord Mandelson was in Brussels recently, speaking to the Breugel think tank, where he also pushed for a big hitter in the two top jobs saying that the EU needed to stop choosing “safe, uncontroversial choices” and that “going for second or even third best candidates would make us all lose out.” Sadly, that is exactly what Brown, the Socialist Group and the Council have just done.
