PETER, THE 6TH BARON CARRINGTON, 1919-2018: REQUIESCAT IN PACE

"Lord Carrington, who has died at the age of 99, was Margaret Thatcher's first foreign secretary, renowned for the Rhodesia settlement of 1979 and for Britain’s response to the invasion of the Falkland Islands three years later. Rhodesia was the Thatcher government’s greatest diplomatic triumph, the Falklands invasion its worst overseas disaster. Together they form a fitting testament to the vicissitudes of Carrington’s 40 years at the heart of Conservative politics. A hereditary peer whose entire political career was spent in the House of Lords, he was the first foreign secretary for 75 years never to have been an elected MP. His ascent was due to the relationship he established with a succession of Tory leaders, particularly with Edward Heath, yet he was among the few who proved able to transfer their loyalty effortlessly to Thatcher. Born on June 6 1919, Peter Carrington succeeded his father to the peerage at the age of 19. The title was one of William Pitt the Younger’s mercantile creations but the family had become conventional landowners.... Carrington followed the well-trodden aristocratic path from Eton to Sandhurst, serving with distinction in north-west Europe in the last months of the second world war. An articulate voice in the postwar Country Landowners’ Association, he was an obvious choice for junior ministerial office in the Lords when the Tories won power in 1951. Three years as high commissioner in Australia (1956-59) exhibited for the first time in a senior post the characteristic mix of patrician charm, bluff common sense and cool decisiveness that endeared him to successive Tory leaders. In 1959 Harold Macmillan brought Carrington back to London as first lord of the Admiralty; he entered the cabinet as leader of the House of Lords under Alec Douglas-Home in 1963. As leader of the opposition in the Lords throughout the Wilson and Callaghan governments, he used his numerical predominance in the upper house with tact, skilfully exploiting the peers’ residual powers to make mischief with Labour legislation. Carrington’s appointment by Heath as defence secretary in 1970 brought him to the political front rank. He later also served as party chairman".

Andrew, Lord Adonis. "Peter Carrington, former UK foreign secretary, 1919-2018". The Financial Times. 10 July 2018, in www.ft.com.

"Lord Carrington, who has just died, may well have been longer in public life than any non-royal person ever. He took his seat in the House of Lords in 1946 (having already won the MC at Nijmegen in 1944), and never really retired until ill health confined him 70 years later. Hereditary privilege, I suppose, put him in; but what kept him there, giving him office under six prime ministers, as well as making him high commissioner to Australia, secretary-general of Nato etc. The obvious answer would be that, as someone who could not be elected, he was like the eunuch in the seraglio. Certainly prime ministers were disposed to trust him, in part because they knew he couldn’t have their job. Certainly, too, he had a strong sense of public service. But this does not explain his rather unaristocratic tenacity and ambition or his undoubted ability....The Peter Carrington view of the world included a defeatism about the possibilities of civilization which when allowed to run a country--as it did to some extent under Macmillian and Heath--had a quiet bad effect. He tended to confuse democracy with populism, and so to dislike both. He was so accustomed to national decline that he almost welcomed it. His effect on the conduct of the country's business abroad--brisk yet easy, conciliatory yet tough, quick-witted, commonsensical, worldly wise--was benign and yet irreplaceable".

Charles Moore, "The Spectator's Notes". The Spectator. 14 July 2018, p. 9.

”Peter [Lord Carrington] has originality, frankness and gaiety. He’s not like other Foreign Secretaries I have known. He is very natural. He has no pomposity whatever and no political bias or prejudice. He is certainly not right wing. He seems to hold his [Tory] party in about the same degree of contempt as RAB [Richard Austen Butler – former Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and First Secretary of State]. He has the capacity of charming people he doesn’t like. His face falls like Niagara Falls, whenever he wishes to express doubt. He is always ready with a joke. He has time and energy for unimportant people such as drivers, detectives, secretaries…He is of course in a wonderful position at the moment with no constituency – except the whole country. He is acknowledged in the UK at the present time and elsewhere as a colossal success at the job....He also knows enough about the past to be able to give a good analysis of a different problem, for instance of why the popular parallel between 1940 and to-day is inapposite despite Helmut Schmidt’s insistence that it is.”

Nicholas Henderson. Mandarin: The diaries of Nicholas Henderson, 1969-1982. (2000), p. 340. Entry for 9 May 1980.

Peter, the Sixth Baron Carrington bestrode the stage of British high politics and international diplomacy from the mid-1950s to the late early 1990s. Lord Carrington’s style of politics, of diplomacy indeed of humor is not the type that we can imagine seeing again in our lifetimes. It would be accurate to say of Lord Carrington the same mots that Harold Macmillian said of Lord Home in October 1963: "he is an example of the old governing class at its best”. Of course as Charles Moore aptly points out, Carrington was not a colossus akin to say Mrs. Thatcher, Sir Winston Churchill or Lord Salisbury. But he did not have to be any of these things. He merely had to be the ultimate ‘safe pair of hands’. Someone by virtue of his upbringing, education, early life experiences (ten-years as an officer in a guards regiment, six of them during the Second World War), and character was trusted by such different people as Churchill, Eden, Macmillian, Home, Heath and Thatcher. Indeed it is impossible to not be nostalgic about Lord Carrington in the age of Trump. Our Trumpian cauchemar making one all too aware of the fact that individuals of Lord Carrington’s worth and character do not for the most part choose to enter the public arena any longer. And given the degradation of the public mind and the mauvais ton style of politics that has emerged in both the USA and the UK, that is hardly surprising. Au fond one can only remember that not too many years ago, politics was a game played by or for gentlemen. Or those who wished to be seen as a gentleman (A/K/A Edward Heath being a prime example). To-day of course the mere idea that someone is a ‘gentleman’, un chevalier sans pur et sans reproche, is to forever bar one from public office and indeed from public service. To the cost of all us who see that we are ruled by vulgarians of no background and no backbone.