A FORMER head of the Foreign Office has insisted Britain has reached the “end of the game” as a global superpower, insisting its decline on the world stage has been “absolute and relative”.
Simon McDonald, who spent 40 years in the Foreign Office, told the New Statesman the UK is now “mostly a soft power player” and does not have the resources to back up the “hard power game” it’s "still trying to play".
He even said the fact the UK had been the first to supply weapons to Ukraine was still “in the soft power side of life” and insisted Britain would now not have the resources to carry out an operation the size of the Falklands War – an event he entered the Foreign Office on the eve of. For example, it now has fewer than 40 warships when it had almost 100 in 1982.
McDonald said Britain’s global decline has been "both absolute and relative. India, China, Japan, Brazil, Australia – they all count for more than they did 20 years ago."
He said: “We can still be a player, but I think we are mostly a soft power player.
“The problem is that Britain is still trying to play a hard power game, but we don’t have the resources to back that up anymore.”
Asked about Britain’s role in helping Ukraine face up to the Russian invasion, he added: “These all to me feel in the soft power side of life: to draw other people’s attention to something, to galvanise activity.”
Asked if it was the end of the “great game” for Britain, he said: “Yes.”
He said the Falklands showed the UK “doing something by itself, without American approval” and British foreign policy since had been defined by the UK’s eagerness to act in America’s slipstream.
He said for a long time that was balanced by the UK’s role in Europe, but now it has left the EU, McDonald said “our strategic choice has boiled down to one country”.
In the interview, McDonald also blasted the UK’s involvement in the Iraq War saying: “So many people died, for what purpose?”
As an official, McDonald put together a paper suggesting UK withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2010, which did not actually happen until a decade later. He said: “I don’t believe anything extra was achieved by prolonging our stay.”
In the interview, McDonald was also critical of recent foreign secretaries. He said Liz Truss spent a “massive amount of time” on her image and highlighted how ministers without any experience were now being propelled into great offices of state at worrying speeds.
“When I started [in 1981], your typical minister had served quite a long apprenticeship, coming into cabinet with a lot of miles on the clock. Now you can be foreign secretary within a few years of entering parliament,” he said.
On Truss, McDonald added: “Liz Truss spent a massive amount of time on her image. Her social media feeds were something that she curated all the time.
“She was nurturing the audience that eventually voted her to the leadership of the Conservative Party. Maybe as a cabinet minister you should be deeper into the policy implications rather than thinking, ‘I’m in Sydney, what’s the best photograph?’”
McDonald, 62, became known for helping to bring down Boris Johnson last year, when he released a public letter which contradicted Number 10’s account of how much the former prime minister knew about allegations of misconduct by Chris Pincher prior to appointing him as chief whip.
He knew Pincher had been subject to an investigation in 2019 and that Johnson had been briefed about it.
“I was telling a truth no one else could tell authoritatively,” said McDonald.
“For some reason, No 10 decided to say, ‘There’s nothing here. There is nothing to know. And if there is something to know, the prime minister doesn’t know it.’
“The truth matters, and No 10 had forgotten that.”
