Hurd success story

IT is not surprising, in the light of the Prime Minister's decision to

force a leadership election, that Douglas Hurd should choose yesterday

to announce his decision to stand down as Foreign Secretary at next

month's reshuffle.

He has been signalling for over a year that it was his intention to

quit when the time was right, saying yesterday that he had told Mr Major

of his wish in the spring of 1994, and had reaffirmed his intention in

February.

The problem has been that the signals tended to get confused.

Sometimes he was going, sometimes he was staying. Since he was defeated

by Mr Major in the leadership contest, following the fall of Margaret

Thatcher, he has been one of the Prime Minister's most loyal supporters

and one of the few successful Ministers in the Government.

He has safe hands, that rarest and most precious possession any

politician can have. The Eurosceptics may detest him and all his works,

but the deals done over Europe at Maastricht, and in endless meetings of

the Foreign Ministers' Council in Brussels, owe a great deal to him.

But Europe has also provided him with some of his biggest headaches

and earlier this year officials were making clear that he felt it was

time to pay attention to the rest of the world. Europe and the

associated squabbles had just taken up too much time which could have

been better used on other more productive things.

While his part in tackling the Yugoslav crisis may not rank among his

finest hours, it has provided nobody with a finest hour and he is

certainly highly regarded by his peers around the world.

Those contradictory signals about his plans tended to come when a Hurd

departure could have been seen as desertion, causing the Prime Minister

unwanted problems when it came to a replacement. Hurd in place and the

distinctly unseaworthy Major ship, which is why things have come to the

present pass, could sail on a little longer.

In January, when the signals that he would go this summer were loud

and clear, I went on a trip with him to Bangladesh. The week before I

had written about the trip and set out the reasons why he was likely to

retire this summer.

The sources were sound enough, although the one source I did not have

was the ever discreet Mr Hurd himself. I told the Head of News that the

feature, which was partly based on a briefing he had given about the

reasons for the trip, had appeared earlier than I had expected -- the

New Year holiday meant that it had not been noticed at the Foreign

Office -- and the outcome was that it was sent for.

After a day out at aid projects up country, I boarded our helicopter

to find the Foreign Secretary sitting in the front row reading a fax of

the article. ''Just looking at your words of wisdom,'' he said. For the

rest of the trip the article made its way back down from adviser to

adviser. The thing is he did not say it was wrong, which he could easily

have done, although not in so many words -- that is not his style. In

the event it was not incorrect, although, come Easter, the signals that

he was staying on had resumed. They were, however, misleading.

He had been pondering all last month about the right timing for the

announcement of his departure. Had things not taken the unexpected turn

they have, he could have left it until the July reshuffle.

He decided, however, in the light of Mr Major's decision that it was

best to disentangle the issue of his own future from all the events to

come and was said to be relieved at having got it off his chest at last.

He has no firm plans for the future beyond the promise given in his

statement to be an active back bencher and support Mr Major in every way

he can from outside government, although he is known to want to return

to writing books.

So where does he stand in the ranks of post war Foreign Secretaries

now that his six year tenure of the job is about to end? Ask his

officials who they consider to have been the best man and they

invariably reply -- Ernest Bevin. He was there a long time ago, but

Foreign Office memories are long, and Bevin seems to have had everything

they respected -- an enquiring mind, high intellect and broad vision.

After that they tend to hesitate when it comes to second place, the

choice usually being between Geoffrey Howe, respected for the sheer hard

work he put in and his ability to master a brief, and Mr Hurd. The Hurd

qualities they admire are his ability to think a problem through, to

think ahead, and his amazing talent for thinking on his feet.

A Howe statement on an overseas trip would have been the result of

much oil being burned in the wee small hours by his Head of News, whose

task it is to put his master's words -- and the department's words --

into language the world can understand.

A Hurd pronouncement is invariably done without notes. He will have

had extensive briefing, but clear, and concise sentences flow without

the aid of a crib, all the more noticeable when it comes to answering

questions. It is a very considerable talent not all politicians possess.

If his officials have anything against him it is that he is too much

one of their own, too constrained by his departmental past -- he spent

14 years in the diplomatic service before entering politics -- to

challenge some of the perceived views of the Foreign Office.

It was this fresh eye, the unbiased look, the ability not just to ask

why, but to ask -- why not this or that instead? -- which Bevin brought

to the post. Hurd's past means that sometimes he will accept this is how

it has been done and is therefore the right way to proceed.

He is also admired for his unflappability. He has had some bad

moments. There was the visit to Egypt and Israel, where he was to meet

representatives of the PLO, which started well in Cairo and all the

signals were that the meeting in Jerusalem was going to go well. But

once there it went disastrously wrong.

Israeli politicians, playing their own game, leaked distinctly

inaccurate versions of the talks he had been having with them, which

were duly broadcast on Israeli radio and television while he, and pretty

well everyone else from the British embassy, were attending an official

dinner. By the time the British found out what was being put about it

was too late.

The PLO had gone into a monumental huff, and when Hurd turned up for

the planned meeting in the outskirts of Jerusalem it was to discover

they were not coming. The visit had collapsed in ruins. He managed to be

philosophical about it, which took some doing.

He is not a memorable orator, but he is a good public speaker and a

most efficient parliamentary performer. His biggest drawback is a

certain reserve, a tendency to seem aloof and that peculiar upper class

disregard for dress -- his green loden coat became not so much a symbol

of authority, as did Anthony Eden's hat, as a running gag on a par with

Michael Foot's duffle jacket or John Cole's houndstooth horror.

Maybe it is just the natural superiority of the Old Etonian, maybe it

is the tendency of the natural born diplomat, which he is, to be rather

grand and above the mundane. One of the less happy aspects of the

leadership election campaign was the attempt his supporters made to

present the upper class, but not aristocratic, Hurd, a man who does not

suffer fools gladly, as another of the party's Common Men.

A former President of the Cambridge Union, he joined the Foreign

Service in 1952, serving in Peking, Rome, in the British mission to the

United Nations and as private secretary to the Permanant Under

Secretary.

In 1966 he joined the Conservastive Research Department as head of its

Foreign Affairs section, and two years later became Edward Heath's

private secretary. When Mr Heath became Prime Minister he moved with him

as his political secretary. He entered Parliament in 1974 and has

represented first Mid Oxon and then Whitney.

He has risen, if not effortlessly, certainly smoothly from being

Opposition spokesman on Europe through Foreign Office Minister of State,

Home Office Minister of State, Northern Ireland Secretary, and Home

Secretary to his present job.

Married twice, he has three sons by his first marriage, a son and

daughter by his second. He is the author of a number of political

thrillers, including the notorious nationalist Scotch on the Rocks, the

television version of which had to be withdrawn, and likes to write

short stories using his experience gained on his longer overseas trips.

By deciding to go he has opened up the Prime Minister's options in the

reshuffle because it means one of the plum offices of state will be

vacant without requiring a sacking, and if one domino is moved it leads

to many more toppling.

US Secretary of State Warren Christopher last night described Mr Hurd

as a giant of the Atlantic alliance who made his mark as a man of

''stature, civility and wit''.

Mr Christopher said he telephoned Mr Hurd and ''conveyed the

appreciation of the United States for his wise counsel and resolute

support over the past six years''.

He added: ''He has made a major contribution to strengthening the

ability of the Atlantic alliance to meet the challenges that have arisen

following the end of the Cold War.''

Murray Ritchie, European Editor, writes: Douglas Hurd presided over

another crisis in Britain's dealings with Europe when the Prime Minister

decided to veto the appointment of Jean-Luc Dehaene, the Belgian premier

and master-fixer, to the presidency of the European Commission in

succession to Jacques Delors.

Hurd greatly admired Delors, as did all thinking British Cabinet

Ministers, although he disagreed, naturally, with the Frenchman's style.

John Major, seeking credibility at home, decided to block Dehaene's

nomination -- he was the choice of Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany, a

fellow Christian Democrat -- but Hurd knew the damage that killing off

Dehaene would do to relations with pro-British Belgium.

While Major took the credit for being tough -- at least from Tory

Euro-sceptics -- Hurd was left to justify what appeared to be a crass

political gimmick. Major said simply that Dehaene was a force for big

government -- a fairly meaningless phrase -- and that Jacques Santer of

Luxembourg was the ''right man in the right place at the right time.''

Hurd was left to put some intellectual force into this blatant British

bluster. He argued, plausibly, that it was unnecessary at a time of

difficult transition for the European Union to have another

''philosopher king'' in the top job in Brussels. Few outside the UK were

convinced, but Hurd's patient, patrician style helped calm bad feelings.

Yet Hurd will be remembered as the Foreign Secretary who was left

justifying a brutal and sorely-felt insult to Belgium at a time when

plans were being made to celebrate D-Day -- a celebration which the same

Belgians later joined in wholeheartedly after booing British Ministers

arriving for council meetings in Brussels.

So Hurd will go down in the history books as a damage limitation

expert in Europe, never the visionary he might have been if times had

been normal. There is no doubt he had the intellectual clout to do the

job well. His trouble was he was handed the job at exactly the wrong

time in the EU's troubled evolution.

Nothing has done more damage to EU foreign policy than the prolonged

agony of Yugoslavia's disintegration into war. Yet the alternative was

to permit what Hurd called, memorably, the ''level killing field.''

Yugoslavia might yet come to that.

There is an irony in the fact that in the long term the seemingly

greatest failure of EU foreign policy -- ex-Yugoslavia -- might yet show

that Hurd was wiser than most of his colleagues. He will have to wait,

however, for the credit if it ever comes.