JUDGEMENT AT FAULT

With this accumulated experience is it not strange that she should have chosen this last week to give a newspaper interview which inevitably led to yesterday's headlines about her advice to David Milliband that he would be “daft” to challenge Gordon Brown for the leadership of the party when Mr Blair departs? There is a school of thought that Mrs Beckett is a mere cipher as Foreign Secretary and that her inexperience has enabled No 10 Downing Street to consolidate its role as the centre of foreign policy making. That impression can only be deepened by her remark in the course of the interview that “I've had harder weeks”.

The crisis over the captured British sailors in Iran would have taxed the time and the abilities of most past Foreign Secretaries but it has not been Mrs Beckett's only problem of the week. The report of a cross-party Select Committee of MPs criticised in the most damning terms her handling when minister for agriculture of subsidy payments to farmers. Many of these payments are still in arrears and the whole scheme has been in chaos for years with an estimated half-a-billion pounds wasted; the report expressed astonishment that Mrs Beckett should have been “promoted” to the Foreign Office after presiding over this scandal.

Her decision to talk about Labour party leadership politics in this week of all weeks suggests that her judgement is seriously at fault.