Lightweight Lammy outplayed by Beijing over Chagos Islands

Ceding sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Beijing-friendly Mauritius means China will be able to monitor American bombers stationed at Diego Garcia. The US is livid, as is Australia - and rightly so.

The Diego Garcia military base in Diego Garcia. Picture: AFP.

When George Macartney set sail for China in 1792 he took with him gifts for the Emperor Qianlong: a huge planetarium, ornate clocks, telescopes, carriages, sword blades, royal portraits, diving bells, Wedgwood vases and air balloons. The idea was to impress the court with some of the premium products of the British industrial revolution and persuade imperial China to open up to British trade.

David Lammy, the foreign secretary, heads for China this week on a similar mission: to prod Xi Jinping’s regime to contribute to Labour’s plans for rapid, sustained growth. He brings with him a present even more munificent than those laid out by Macartney: Lammy has the Chagos Islands in his baggage.

The Macartney mission floundered partly because of his party’s reluctance to perform a ritual kowtow. Lammy has avoided this by humiliating himself in advance, outplayed by China, which will exploit the strategically inept ceding of sovereignty over the islands in the Indian Ocean to China-friendly Mauritius. When he tried to explain away this unforced error in parliament, he hoped some of his smooth barrister talk (law degree at the School of Oriental and African Studies, master’s at Harvard Law School) would carry the day. The deal, he argued, left Britain with rights to the military base on Diego Garcia for 99 years, preserving the Indian Ocean presence while at the same time defusing a diplomatic row that could cause bad blood in the global south. In fact, he sacrificed hard power for a largely imaginary soft power gain.

Foreign Secretary David Lammy hasn’t made a good start. Picture: Getty Images.

What a way to start as foreign secretary. The remoteness of the Diego Garcia base is one of its strengths. Now that Britain will no longer police the surrounding waters, Chinese surveillance ships, no doubt disguised as fishing fleets, will be able to monitor the American long-range bombers stationed at the base. The United States is livid, as is Australia. A vital brick in the containment of China’s reach into the Indian Ocean has just been tugged out. Britain has let itself be wrong-footed.

That is a failure, of course, not only by a newbie boss at King Charles Street but by the dispirited machine he has inherited. Sapped by a succession of negligent foreign secretaries who treated the place as a pit stop to leadership – Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, obviously, are high on that list – underfunded, racked by feuding between the diplomacy and foreign aid wings, the FCDO has stopped even pretending it’s a purring Rolls-Royce institution.

Lammy has understudied his role since Sir Keir Starmer appointed him shadow foreign secretary in 2021 and wrote a Fabian Society paper last year on reconnecting Britain to the world. His ideas included making the profession of diplomacy less elitist and more mission-driven (British ambassadors are under instruction to chase investment); he wanted more power for the policy unit, a renamed in-house diplomatic academy, even a soft power council. All inoffensively flaccid proposals that do little to compensate for a minister who lacks some of the basic instincts of productive diplomacy.

David Lammy has gifted Xi Jinping the Chagos Islands. Picture: AFP.

His pre-government travels were designed to project the image of a heavyweight but left many listeners feeling he is a bit of a chancer. At the Washington-based Hudson Institute he proclaimed himself a “good Christian” (which, by all accounts, he is) and a “small-C conservative”. This was seen as an attempt to ingratiate himself with Republicans who will, whatever the outcome of the presidential election, play an important part in shaping US foreign policy. Fair enough – a bit of slipperiness comes with the job (see Talleyrand, Metternich, Kissinger) but the old diplomatic foxes were masters of the craft; Lammy comes across as the master of the hedge, a bargain-hunter. His manifesto, set out in a Foreign Affairs article, is an exposition of what he calls progressive realism: being prepared to use force to obtain democratic goals. It promises, he says, “a sharper and more hopeful” role in the world.

But wait. Isn’t progressive realism what neo-conservatism was all about? The underpinning of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003? Look how that ended. And yes, Lammy loyally voted in favour of it as a Blairite MP. His big idea turns out to be a warm-up of a 20-year-old, discredited policy.

One hundred days of government can be a harsh measure of diplomatic achievement. There are a few more foreign policy tests on the immediate horizon, too: the China trip; the slave reparation issue at next week’s Commonwealth summit; a possible Trump presidency ("a woman-hating, neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath”, according to Lammy in 2018); an overdue decision on whether to ban the Iranian Revolutionary Guard; wars without end.

In the meantime, still missing a coherent intellectual core, Lammy makes unforced errors. The first edition of his foreign policy Substack newsletter praised Azerbaijan for “liberating” Nagorno-Karabakh from Armenia, thus tipping his hat to the Azeri dictatorship and effectively endorsing its ethnic cleansing of Armenian Christians. His statements on Israel – mulling over sanctions against politicians, defending the suspension of 30 arms licences – were deemed at best ill-timed by his critics. Some may find his foot-in-mouth moments endearingly frank. Lammy, not short on self-esteem, will be hoping their support carries him through the first Starmer reshuffle. Others, perhaps in the Foreign Office, will hope his gaffes decrease as his expertise grows.

My view is these are serious times and we need a serious diplomatist at the helm. Not lame Lammy.

The Times