It was a rollercoaster start to a new job, and Britain’s new Foreign Secretary admitted she was ”flying by the seat of my pants”. An exhausted Margaret Beckett flew to London from New York on Tuesday night after 36 hours of back-to-back meetings.
Countering suggestions that she lacked experience on the international stage, Beckett, speaking at the British mission to the United Nations, said that both as agriculture secretary and environment secretary she had been involved in all-night and difficult international negotiations.
She paused long enough amid a welter of sessions covering Iran, the Middle East, human rights and Darfur to admit: ”I am flying by the seat of my pants but, I was told by one of my officials this morning, quite gracefully.”
Beckett’s appointment as Foreign Secretary in Friday’s reshuffle was a surprise — not least to her. After a weekend of briefings in her Derby South constituency, her posting began at the VIP lounge at Heathrow airport at 11am on Monday where she started work on her red boxes. John Sawers, political director at the Foreign Office, who is leading the negotiations on Iran, briefed her on the nuclear stand-off during the flight to New York.
She arrived at the Waldorf hotel at 4.10pm, long enough to change clothes before a 30-minute meeting with Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, and then Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General. At 8.30pm she joined Rice and her French, German, Russian and Chinese counterparts for a chat before dinner. The discussion lasted two hours and by the time the group sat down to dinner the divisions over Iran were bigger than before — and the sea bass had dried up.
With lack of sleep visible on her face, Beckett held a press conference at the Waldorf just before midnight — 5am British time — at which she refused to reiterate Straw’s mantra that a military strike on Iran was ”inconceivable”, instead saying ”it’s not the intention”.
Tuesday began with a meeting at the French mission, followed by bilaterals with her Chinese and Russian counterparts, a lobbying mission at the UN on the creation of a human rights council and a speech at the Security Council in support of a new UN peacekeeping mission.
It was a hesitant, safe performance, sticking to a few lines supplied by Foreign Office officials. Her plane to London left New York at 6.30pm. Before boarding, she said her next step would be to pause ”to take stock of the rest of my life”. – Guardian Unlimited Â