NEWLY INSTALLED EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton extolled the merits of “quiet diplomacy” as she faced down critics of her appointment in the European Parliament, insisting she has the right skills for the job.
Taking care to avoid controversy on her second day in office, Baroness Ashton played safe on sensitive issues such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the EU’s engagement with Russia.
On Afghanistan, for example, she said Nato and EU meetings in January would bring opportunities for her to discuss with EU and other colleagues “how best we approach” a very difficult set of issues.
Arguing that she would not be an extension of the British government in her job, she said she took the post as a European with unanimous support from the EU’s 27 members and was known in Britain as a pro-European.
“I won’t pretend that I’ve got considered detailed views on everything because it was only last Thursday I discovered I was going to be doing this job and it’s a day and a half in.”
Referring to demands in many quarters that the job should go to a high-profile international figure, she said her intention was not to stop the traffic in foreign capitals. “I want to keep the traffic moving.”
Criticised as a newcomer to foreign policy and for her low profile, she said she had no doubts whatever about her own abilities and would be tough in her defence of human rights.
“There has also been some talk of a lack of experience, and you might say that if you define experience very narrowly,” she said.
“However, I have never been someone who has considered things from a narrow perspective, and I have 28 years of experience of negotiation, of consensus-building and of advocacy. My belief in the power of ‘quiet diplomacy’ is founded in a healthy respect for the challenges we all face in the world today.”
Her experience showed that doing things “out of the limelight” often produced better results, she said.
“That does not mean – and you’re absolutely right to question it – that on all occasions that is true. Those who watch me operate I think will bear witness to the fact that when it is necessary we must be out on the front foot with a very loud voice expressing our concerns, our worries about what is happening in the world.”
The two-hour encounter, which came in advance of a formal confirmation hearing next month, was generally a tame affair, although a number of British MEPs expressed hostility to her appointment.
This she confronted head-on, rejecting the contention of Conservative MEP Geoffrey Van Orden that she was no more than “an afterthought” in the eyes of Gordon Brown and should resign if the Tories won the next election.
“Can I just say that your leader was one of the first to congratulate me? And I was delighted to get that. I don’t think he is seeking my resignation. I do have the voice-mail message if you’d like to hear it. But I was extremely pleased that he welcomed me so warmly,” she responded.
Questioned about her work in the early 1980s as treasurer of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, she said she never accepted money directly from any Communist-bloc country.
Much of CND’s money was collected in buckets, she said, and it was no surprise that she could not say where “all the money in the buckets came from”.