Trouble brews for prime ministers escaping party meltdown at home
Sky's Jon Craig highlights how foreign trips have ended in the downfall of a number of Britain's leaders.
Wednesday 31 January 2018 00:09, UK
We've been here before. A Tory Prime Minister thousands of miles away in the Far East on a trade mission while Conservative Cabinet ministers and MPs are in open revolt back home.
At news conferences and in TV interviews, the PM and her Number 10 team want to talk about trade and diplomacy, but all the questions from the travelling correspondents are about disloyal Cabinet ministers and mutinous backbenchers.
"You're the Prime Minister with a majority of 18," the occupant of 10 Downing Street once lamented.
"A party that's still harking back to a golden age that never was and is now invented. You have three right-wing members of the Cabinet who actually resign.
"What happens in the parliamentary party? We don't want another three bastards out there."
It could have been Theresa May talking to journalists on her flight to China this week. It was, of course, John Major's notorious "bds" attack on Cabinet rebels back in July 1993, recorded after a TV interview.
That month, at the height of the 1990s Maastricht Treaty rebellion, Major went to Japan. It was a disastrous trip.
He was recorded describing one rebel MP as "three apples short of a picnic" and saying about another: "Every time I hear his name I think of flapping white coats."
At a news conference in an enormous lecture theatre in Tokyo, he was besieged by questions about his rebels.
At one point, to Major's despair, his Japanese host asked the political editor of the Daily Mail, the late Gordon Greig, if he was satisfied with the answer he had received.
Major cringed as Gordon ambled back to the microphone and asked another rapier-like question.
On another overseas trip, visiting then-Russian president Boris Yeltsin in Moscow, Major tried to restrict the number of journalists attending a news conference, claiming the room was too small. In the Kremlin!
One snubbed scribe shouted at him through the door: "You can run, Prime Minister, but you can't hide!"
The most famous occasion when a Prime Minister came to grief abroad was when Margaret Thatcher was in Paris, at a summit many of her inner circle advised she could have missed, during her leadership battle in November 1990.
"We fight on. We fight to win!" she declared in the courtyard of the British embassy after the first round ballot, a moment memorable for her press secretary Bernard Ingham pushing the pushy John Sergeant out of the way. Within days, her Cabinet had turned on her and she was toppled.
But they weren't the only Prime Ministers at bay on a foreign trip when the party was in near-meltdown back home.
In 2008, on his way to the Beijing Olympics with his wife Sarah and two young sons, Gordon Brown stopped off in Kabul for talks with the Afghanistan leader Mohammed Karzai.
It was when David Miliband and his Blairite his allies were circling, plotting a coup - only to bottle it later.
Miliband, then Foreign Secretary, had written a devastating attack on the PM in a newspaper article. Sound familiar? A mutinous Foreign Secretary attacking the Prime Minister in a newspaper article?
When Brown was inundated with questions about his disloyal Foreign Secretary at a joint news conference, Karzai made a humorous intervention about how he dealt with plotters in his government.
Modern communications help a beleaguered PM stay in touch with Number 10 or the party managers at Westminster.
But they also benefit correspondents hell-bent on making the PM's life a misery. A tweet, email or report of an attack by a malcontent Cabinet minster or backbencher can reach the travelling press pack in seconds.
It's significant that Theresa May has taken her husband Philip - one of the few people she can trust, it's being claimed at Westminster right now - to China.
Norma Major once complained to political journalists on one of her husband's overseas trips that they were beastly to him. One wag replied: "You should see what we do to Neil Kinnock!" Of course, he never became Prime Minister.
Major eventually took on his Tory mutineers in 1995 by resigning as Tory leader, triggering a leadership contest and defeating John Redwood.
Might Theresa May do the same? Unlikely. The voting in a Tory leadership election was by MPs only until William Hague brought in one member, one vote. It's a much more complicated and lengthy process now.
As a general rule, the longer Prime Ministers are in power the more they enjoy grandstanding on the world stage. Some, like Tony Blair, believe they can personally solve all the world's problems.
Theresa May has only been PM 18 months and hasn't reached world stateswoman status yet. Nor will she if the Tory civil war carries on. So there may not be that many more big trips like China.
She postponed this one when she called the general election last year.
So ironically for all the pitfalls of foreign travel for Prime Ministers, she would have been better off going ahead with the China trip last year.