Reflections on politics of the week

A new British envoy in Paris; far-right ructions in Berlin; the usual playbook in Washington

A few stories that I didn’t want to let slip past entirely in this ever-howling maelstrom we call news.

Mr Ambassador, you are spoiling us!

It was announced at the beginning of the week that the new British Ambassador to France would be Sir Thomas Drew, who will take up the post in August. He succeeds Dame Menna Rawlings, the first woman to hold the position, who will have served a four-year term in Paris. The role of Ambassador to France remains one of the most influential overseas postings, and is certainly among the most prestigious and glamorous, with a grand embassy at 35, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, and the Ambassador’s residence at number 39, purchased by the Duke of Wellington from the Emperor Napoleon’s sister, Pauline Borghese.

Drew’s background is worth noting, though one should not attach too much importance to it in determining his appointment to the Paris embassy. He joined the Diplomatic Service in 1995 after starting his career at management consultancy McKinsey & Company, having read Classics at Trinity College, Oxford, and would return on secondment as a Visiting Fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute, an independent research organisation, in 2015. He has served in Moscow and Islamabad, where he was first Political Counsellor (2006-08) then High Commissioner to Pakistan (2016-19), and was Principal Private Secretary to William Hague as Foreign Secretary from 2012 to 2014.

It is striking, however, that many of Drew’s senior positions have been in the broad field of security, defence and intelligence. From 2008 to 2010, he was seconded from the Foreign Office to the nascent Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (now the Homeland Security Group), a division created in the Home Office by Dr John Reid and responsible for leading on all aspects of counter-terrorism. He then returned to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office as Director, National Security. From 2020 until the end of last year he was Director General, Defence and Intelligence at the FCDO, and in early 2023 was mooted as a potential candidate to replace Sir Jeremy Fleming as Director of GCHQ (the post eventually went to Anne Keast-Butler, Deputy Director General of the Security Service).

None of this should be taken as conclusive proof that Drew is going to Paris as some kind of spook-in-chief; the Diplomatic Service, no less than any organisation, always has to fill posts and the degree to which they are matched with post-holders can vary. But it may be a more general indicator of the tenor of the times, when national security in its broadest sense is consistently towards the top of the political agenda.

The new Head of the Diplomatic Service, Sir Olly Robbins, is best known as one of Theresa May’s key allies in the Brexit wars of the late 2010s, but he was also Director of Intelligence, Security and Resilience in the Cabinet Office (2007-10) then Deputy National Security Adviser (2010-14). The previous Cabinet Secretary, Simon Case, had served briefly as Director of Strategy at GCHQ (and had written his doctoral thesis on the Joint Intelligence Committee); the FCDO Political Director, Christian Turner, is also a former Deputy National Security Adviser and International Affairs Adviser to the Prime Minister (2017-19), as is the current Ambassador to Spain, Sir Alex Ellis. Meanwhile, the National Security Adviser, Jonathan Powell, who was Sir Tony Blair’s Downing Street Chief of Staff for 10 years, is regarded as the most influential voice in Sir Keir Starmer’s ear on foreign and security policy.

If you want to get ahead, get a securocrat? The word dates from the late 1940s but muscled its way to prominence in a British context in the 2010s, by my reckoning. I don’t mean it as a pejorative, though I’m sure some people day. It’s more a reflection of where we are in political terms. The spectrum which runs from foreign policy wonk to spook is now far less isolated and remote from the mainstream, and in the long run that may be no bad thing. Bonne chance to Sir Thomas.

How far should the centre admit the right?

Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), has now concluded, subject to approval, a coalition agreement with the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) to form a government. In that strange yet common way—I may look at this in more depth anon—the junior partner has seemed to hold the negotiating advantage; remember that the CDU and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), won 208 seats and 28.5 per cent of the vote, while the SPD, which had been the senior partner in government, saw its worst electoral result since the 1880s and could manage only 120 seats and 16.4 per cent of the vote. Yet the SPD will take seven places in the 17-member cabinet including the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Defence, as well as the position of Vice-Chancellor, as is traditional for a junior coalition partner.

There is, however, another looming headache for Merz and his colleagues. The new Bundestag is scheduled to meet for the first time on 6 May (you will recall that the outgoing Bundestag has met since the election so that Merz could use the parliamentary arithmetic to secure changes to the Basic Law, the Federal Republic’s constitution, and loosen the country’s debt brake), and for the first time the far-right populist Alternative für Deutschland will be the largest opposition party, with 152 seats.

Much has been written (a small proportion of it by me) of the way that the mainstream parties in Germany, understandably and apprehensively mindful of the country’s grim past, have throughout the life of the post-war Federal Republic refused to have any dealings or meaningful contact with far-right (and indeed some far-left) parties, maintain a so-called “firewall” (Brandmauer). A handful of parties have even been banned, namely the Socialist Reich Party (1952), the Communist Party of Germany (1956) and the Free German Workers’ Party (1995), while in January 2024 Die Heimat (formerly the National Democratic Party of Germany) was banned from receiving party funding by the Federal Constitutional Court on the grounds that it opposes and sought to undermine the fundamental democratic principles of the Federal Republic.

However you classify the AfD, there is an undeniable fact that it been electorally far more successful than any other far-right/hard-right/populist/nationalist party in Germany’s post-war history, and this is where the problem arises. As the largest opposition party, it is entitled to nominate the chairs of some of the committees in the Bundestag, as Politico reported. These committees more or less reflect the machinery of government, in that respect like House of Commons select committees, and, also like our own select committees, the chairmanships are allocated according to party strength in the Bundestag. In particular, the Budget Committee is traditionally chaired by a member of the largest opposition party.

In the 19th Bundestag, elected in October 2017, in which the AfD won 94 seats and entered the federal legislature for the first time, the party’s Stephan Brandner became chair of the Legal Affairs Committee. However, after the Halle synagogue shooting in October 2019, in which a far-right extremist killed two people and injured two more, Brandner shared a message on Twitter which described the victims as neither Jews nor Muslims but “organic Germans”. The next month he said that the singer Udo Lindenberg had been awarded the Federal Order of Merit as a “Judas reward” (Judaslohn) for his anti-AfD statements. There were widespread calls for him to resign his position on the Legal Affairs Committee, but in the end the Bundestag took the unprecedented step of voting to remove him.

In the last Bundestag, the AfD’s electoral strength entitled it to choose the chairs of three committees, and it was allocated the Health Committee, the Internal Affairs and Community Committee and the Economic Cooperation and Development Committee. However, as chairs are formally elected by the members of the committee, the other parties cooperated to deny the AfD nominees their positions and instead chose caretaker chairs from their own ranks. The AfD claimed this was an infringement of its rights and a diminution of the influence it deserved, but last September, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled that, while it was convention that the positions had been allocated to the AfD, the members of the committee were acting within their rights under the Bundestag’s rules of procedure to choose not to install AfD representatives.

Can that parliamentary version of the Brandmauer be maintained now that the AfD is the main opposition? It is certainly troubling some legislators. Jens Spahn, a former Deputy Leader of the CDU, has argued that the AfD should be treated “in parliamentary procedures and processes like any other opposition party”, while the Deputy Chair of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, Johann Wadephul, has made the case—one I find plausible, I must say—that the outright exclusion of the AfD until now had allowed the party to nurture an image of victimhood. Wadephul has proposed that AfD members of the Bundestag should be able to take up positions as chairs like any other politicians “if they haven’t behaved inappropriately in the past” (which, in the case of the AfD, is a significant “if”).

Not everyone agrees. Roderich Kiesewetter, a former Bundeswehr general staff officer who is a CDU member for Aalen-Heidenheim in Baden-Württemberg, has described the AfD as a “security threat to Germany” and said that “AfD lawmakers don’t belong in the parliamentary oversight panel that monitors the intelligence services—just as little as in the budget trust committee”. The SPD’s chief whip in the Bundestag, Katja Mast, who also by coincidence represents Baden-Württemberg, was uncompromising:

The AfD is not a party like any other. We will protect our democratic institutions—above all our parliament—with full determination.

There is no easy answer to this question. It is undoubtedly the case that many members of the AfD, some of them very senior, hold views and have expressed views which are not just unpalatable or inflammatory but openly racist, xenophobic and designed to divide and stigmatise. Given Germany’s history of extremism, it is perfectly understandable that mainstream politicians want to give no oxygen to that kind of rhetoric or ideology.

On the other hand, it is equally the case that the party won 10.3 million votes, a fifth of the total, and recent opinion polls show it neck-and-neck with the CDU/CSU around 25 per cent. To continue to exclude it absolutely from any position of power or influence not only risks sustaining its cherished image of the oppressed, persecuted underdog, but forces us to ask to what extent a democratic system can simply declare that a fifth, or even a quarter, of the electorate holds views that are so outrageous and unacceptable that the other 80 per cent or three-quarters need not even engage in debate but can simply refuse to have any contact with them and bar them from large parts of the democratic process.

I think there is also a deeper issue. In my experience, politicians are frequently guilty of asking themselves questions to which they fear a difficult or unpleasant answer, and often therefore don’t follow logical chains of events to their natural end. I am a great believer in the often-awkward challenge: and then what? In this case, suppose that the AfD is denied the chairmanships it would automatically assume if it were any other party. Suppose, somehow, that exclusion, that Bundestag Brandmauer, holds together for the term of the legislature. Meanwhile the AfD’s support at least holds steady around 25 per cent or even grows. There is a good chance it could emerge from the next Bundestag election in March 2029 as the largest party. And then what? What is the game plan of the other parties? To keep the AfD on the margins in the hope that its support wanes, and therefore merely buy time for that to happen? To exclude it irrespective of its electoral support? At what point does that become an impossibility? Thirty per cent, 40 per cent? If the CDU, the SPD and others haven’t thought this through and calculated where they want the chain of events to go, they are failing to do their duty, and setting themselves up for failure.

A big boy did it and ran away

A short but predictable notice from Washington, D.C., reported by The Washington Post. Readers with stamina may recall, amid the miasma of activity, that last month President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport 137 alleged members of the Venezuelan criminal gang Tren de Aragua to El Salvador, where they were to be imprisoned without trial or sentence in the country’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca. The Alien Enemies Act gives the President the power to arrest, relocate or deport anyone over the age of 14 who comes from a foreign enemy country, and was last used in the Second World War to authorise the mass internment of Japanese Americans (now regarded as an unjustified, hysterical and fundamentally racist reaction to the declaration of war with Japan in December 1941).

To meet the necessary criteria for the use of the Alien Enemies Act, Trump claimed that Tren de Aragua was a hostile force conducting an invasion of the United States at the behest of the government of Venezuela.

Tren de Aragua is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization with thousands of members, many of whom have unlawfully infiltrated the United States and are conducting irregular warfare and undertaking hostile actions against the United States. TdA operates in conjunction with Cártel de los Soles, the Nicolas Maduro regime-sponsored, narco-terrorism enterprise based in Venezuela… [it] is closely aligned with, and indeed has infiltrated, the Maduro regime, including its military and law enforcement apparatus… the result is a hybrid criminal state that is perpetrating an invasion of and predatory incursion into the United States, and which poses a substantial danger to the United States.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and activist group Democracy Forward filed a case with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and the Chief Judge, James Boasberg, issued an order temporarily halting any deportations. The federal government did not comply and the deportations went ahead, and also appealed against the order to the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia, which denied the appeal. The administration then filed an appeal with the Supreme Court, which voided Boasberg’s order but stipulated that anyone liable for deportation had to be notified in sufficient time for them to petition for a writ of habeas corpus. The legal cases go on.

Meanwhile, the National Intelligence Council, which assesses and analyses information from across the intelligence agencies and works with academia and the private sector to produce comprehensive, independent assessments of intelligence, policy and future trends and development, has reportedly concluded that the basis of the President’s policy is incorrect. In a secret assessment of the situation with regard to Venezuela, it has, according to “people familiar with the matter”, determined that the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro does not direct or control the activities of Tren de Aragua, although there are some low-level contacts between the gang and the government. This conclusion was agreed almost unanimously, the exception being the FBI, which described the level of cooperation between the Maduro government and Tren de Aragua as moderate.

(You may remember that the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is Kash Patel, a former Department of Justice prosecutor who worked for Rep. Devin Nunes when he was Chair of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee (Nunes is now CEO of Trump Media and Technology Group). He then worked for acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, was for a few months Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence and then (for seven weeks) Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense after Trump sacked Mark Esper following the 2020 presidential election and installed Christopher Miller. Patel went on to serve on the board of Trump Media and Technology Group, established the Kash Foundation to assist those charged with involvement in the 6 January Capitol riots with legal costs and maintained a media profile endorsing a wide range of conspiracy theories including fraud in the 2020 presidential election and various views on Covid-19 vaccines and the “deep state”.)

The National Intelligence Council reports to the Director of National Intelligence, currently Tulsi Gabbard, who was, to put it mildly, a controversial choice, with no background in intelligence. Gabbard is a strong and pugilistic Trump partisan, so the reaction of her office to the assessment by the NIC is no surprise. This is, you will not be surprised to learn, part of a conspiracy against the President and his heroic efforts to protect the United States from clear and present threats.

President Trump took necessary and historic action to safeguard our nation when he deported these violent Tren de Aragua terrorists. Now that America is safer without these terrorists in our cities, deep state actors have resorted to using their propaganda arm to attack the President’s successful policies.

Who you believe is a matter of choice. It is possible that the whole intelligence community is in cahoots with the media and (I imagine) other parts of the “deep state” to undermine Trump and deny him due credit for his successful actions. Alternatively, the administration has simply fabricated a wholly false narrative against various enemies to enable it to use powers which have very few legal safeguards or any kind of oversight, in pursuance of its determination to undertake mass deportations without too much concern for the identities and status of those who are deported. I think I know which way I’m leaning.