Share

What the UK’s new Foreign Secretary is actually in charge of

It is a shrewd tactic, but one that will be sorely tested by the pressures that lie ahead for Britain’s new prime minister.

Advertisement

The former London mayor campaigned for Brexit but pulled out of the race to succeed David Cameron as prime minister, Bloomberg News reports.

May has fired Justice Secretary Michael Gove, a former leader of the campaign for Britain to leave the European Union. Clinton, who today is the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, was at the time seen as a favourite to win the 2008 USA presidential election.

The spokeswoman said current relations “could hardly be described as cooperation”, adding that Russian Federation “will not miss [Philip] Hammond”, Britain’s former foreign secretary and new chancellor of the exchequer.

The criticism from the usually buttoned-down Ayrault is nearly without precedent in the discreet world of European diplomacy, where top leaders typically attack one another’s policies, not their characters. The former mayor of London is internationally famous – but for rumpled eccentricity and distinctly undiplomatic gaffes, rather than statesmanlike behavior.

On Thursday U.S. President Barack Obama called May to congratulate her, but White House spokesman Josh Earnest offered a tepid response to her choice of foreign secretary. On accepting the position of foreign secretary, he was asked whether he owed Obama an apology.

“The Cabinet works collectively and we have got a range of different characters and a range of different styles and a range of different talent”, he told BBC radio. For Prime Minister May’s chief objective in putting together her first Cabinet since assuming office on Wednesday is not to please foreign governments but, rather, to embrace all warring factions within her ruling Conservative Party and redirect the government’s attention to an ambitious agenda of social and economic change.

Many were surprised new post-Brexit British Prime Minister Theresa May had given him the role, citing his history of faux pas including insulting the president of Turkey and commenting on the U.S. president’s ancestry. Davis, a veteran lawmaker who has twice run for the Conservative leadership, is one of the staunchest euroskeptics in British politics. He is now suing the British government in the European courts against surveillance laws May introduced as home secretary.

He said Obama may have been involved in nixing a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office, which could be “a snub to Britain” or “a symbol of the part-Kenyan President’s ancestral dislike of the British empire – of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender”.

Mogherini and Johnson will have an informal dinner, an European Union official said.

/ AFP PHOTO / ADRIAN DENNISADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/Getty Images Comparison of the European Union with Hitler: Arguably Mr Johnson’s most prominent contribution to the Brexit debate came when he suggested Europe could not be unified, that Hitler and Napoleon had tried to do so and failed, and that the European Union was “an attempt to do this by different methods”.

Juergen Hardt said in a statement Thursday that, for example, “free access to the common market means, among other things, accepting other fundamental freedoms such as the freedom of movement” between European countries. “Britain is open for business”.

“As far as I can interpret the psychology of the rule, which has only been applied since 9/11, it is part of America’s new them-and-us mentality, the Manichaean division of the world into Americans and non-Americans, obliterating any category in between”.

Philip Hammond says he will meet with the head of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, on Thursday to “assess where we are”.

Advertisement

But the committee hinted it would loosen policy in August, when it will have fresh forecasts about the state of the British economy.

Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary