STILL VIRTUALLY unknown in international politics, EU trade commissioner Baroness Catherine Ashton took a unexpected leap forward last night when she was made foreign policy chief of the EU.
Although she has little experience of the world of international diplomacy, she takes on a task of mammoth complexity with responsibilities straddling global geopolitics, security and counter-terrorism and the battle against global warming.
Not only has she no public profile to speak of, but she never served in a prime role in the British cabinet and had little experience of front-line politics. Therefore, her appointment to a job designed to strengthen the EU’s influence in the global arena is nothing short of extraordinary.
Her appointment was greeted with a sense of bewilderment in Brussels last night, but went unopposed when EU leaders met at a special summit. It was widely acknowledged that her task, as a virtual newcomer to international diplomacy, will be considerable.
Sources with knowledge of the discussions say she was one of three candidates proposed by the British government to the group of European socialists whose support ultimately secured her appointment by EU leaders. The other two were British business secretary Peter Mandelson, and Geoff Hoon, a former defence secretary and former minister for Europe.
Neither proved acceptable, securing the job for Ashton. According to sources, there was no substantive discussion on the merits of individual candidates when EU centre-left leaders met yesterday afternoon in the Brussels headquarters of Austria’s diplomatic mission the EU.
This is not the first time she has jumped into the political limelight. A little more than a year ago she defied the restrictive confines of the House of Lords to take Mandelson’s job on the commission when he returned to London to bolster Gordon Brown’s troubled administration. In that role she has won plaudits for striking a trade deal between the EU and South Korea and for making strong progress to resolve an intractable dispute over banana tariffs.
