Iran and Israel have just come dangerously close to all-out war; a mass grave has been uncovered at two hospitals in Gaza; Ukraine’s military commander is warning they are losing ground to Russia; UN officials have condemned Britain’s Rwanda deportation policy for its “harmful impact” on global responsibility-sharing and human rights … and Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton is in a ger in Mongolia drinking toasts of fermented horse milk.
As he looks around the tent admiringly, I wonder if he is getting ideas to upgrade the shepherd’s hut famously sited in his Cotswold garden. He is rosy-cheeked after a horse ride with Mongolia’s prime minister, Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai. They discussed Donald Trump. “Foreign leaders when they get together always talk about elections,” Cameron says, shrugging.
It’s the final day of a five-day tour of central Asia by Britain’s foreign secretary, now nearly six months into the job. As well as Mongolia, he has taken in all five “Stans” — Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, three of them in a single day. This has involved eating lots of plov (heavy rice and lamb) and a bit of horsemeat. He has visited some of the weirdest capital cities on earth, including Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, where all the cars are white, apparently because the country’s dictator, Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, once dreamt he was hit by a dark car.
I joined up with Cameron in Kazakhstan, a country made internationally famous by the Sacha Baron Cohen character Borat, in the futuristic capital of Astana. Constructed largely from scratch over the past 30 years, its buildings include a glass pyramid, an egg-shaped library and the world’s biggest tent, housing a shopping mall and a beach of sand imported from the Maldives, all designed by the architect Norman Foster’s firm. There’s also a silver tower shaped like a tree, topped with an observation orb in which, when you place your palm on a golden handprint of the former dictator (as I did), the national anthem strikes up.
These countries, former Soviet republics and satellite states, have seen imports from Europe rise exponentially since western sanctions were imposed on Russia — which is why Cameron is here. British exports to Kyrgyzstan, for example, have risen by more than 1,100 per cent since the invasion of Ukraine, many of them dual-use goods that, if they get into Russian hands, could be used to make drones or other military equipment. Has Cameron made progress in stopping that on his grand tour?
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“It was a much easier conversation than I expected,” he replies. “They were all happy to talk about it. They know there’s a problem and were saying, help us and we will help you.” As he dines with presidents and prime ministers — a perk of being a former PM — the message is the same: “I don’t come here and say, ‘Forget your partnership with Russia and China’.” Instead he says: “We want to offer you a choice. If you want to partner with us as well, we’d love to.”
But Kazakhstan’s border with Russia is 4,750 miles long with 50 border crossings and the-oil-and-gas rich country relies on a pipeline through Russia to transport 80 per cent of its oil to Europe.
At Astana airport Cameron sits down to eat an “enhanced tea” (more lamb) with the country’s foreign secretary, Murat Nurtleu. Cameron says he can eat anything — that Etonian training, perhaps. While he is having his bilateral I talk to Nurtleu’s deputy, Roman Vassilenko, and ask what he thinks of Cameron’s offer of a new partnership. “Our policy is like a three-legged stool,” he says. “We border countries — China and Russia — that are bigger than us in population and size so we need to maintain mutually respectful relations, but for the past two years we have also been working at engaging with the West.”
The Stans are just one leg of Cameron’s grand tour: in three weeks in April (see map overleaf) he racked up 34,000 miles, travelling to Mar-a-Lago in Florida for dinner with Trump, then Washington, then Israel, and Capri for the G7 foreign ministers’ meeting. After we part ways he was straight off to Saudi Arabia for the World Economic Forum to try to persuade Hamas to accept what he and his American counterpart, Antony Blinken, called “an extraordinarily generous” ceasefire deal.
It’s a punishing schedule, yet the 57-year-old is up by 6am doing his government box, then going for a run followed by a briefing with his team, who mutter that he is “always chipper”. He also fits in slick West Wing-style walk-and-talk videos with his personal videographer — part of his 12-person entourage. What happened to chillaxing? He laughs. “It was always a myth. I have always been a hard worker. I like work.”
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He is, it turns out, one of those annoying people who can sleep anywhere, head on a book on the floor of 10 Downing Street, on a plane … Because Rishi Sunak has taken the government plane to Poland, the jet we’re travelling on is an Embraer Lineage 1000, which has prompted the Labour MP Emily Thornberry to accuse him of “swanning round the world like a Kardashian sister”. It is, undeniably, a very comfortable plane. There are sofas and a menu that includes burrata, steak and merlot.
During our chat on the four-hour flight from Kazakhstan to Mongolia, Cameron says Sunak’s invitation for him to become foreign secretary came out of the blue. “I said yes surprisingly quickly actually, because I wasn’t expecting it at all.”
As Cameron was not an MP, he was swiftly installed in the House of Lords in November so he could take on the role. What made him agree? “Because the PM asked! I thought, I enjoy public service more than anything else, you’ve got the chance to serve in this incredibly interesting time and I like Rishi. I find him a good prime minister doing a difficult job at a hard time.”
I wonder how his wife, Samantha, 53, feels about his globetrotting. “I just spoke to her on the phone. She’s just opened a shop in London so she’s very busy.” The shop, in Belgravia, is the first permanent home for her Cefinn fashion label. “She says, ‘I know this is what you want to do.’ She has been very reasonable about it and the children are a bit older now.”
Their daughter Nancy, 20, is at Glasgow School of Art and their son Arthur Elwen, 18, is doing A-levels. The youngest, Florence, is 13. “She’s getting on the Tube every day to go to school. She’d rather Daddy was driving her, which I still do very often,” he says. Their son Ivan, who died aged six in 2009, would have turned 22 last month.
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William Hague once told me that when he was foreign secretary and Cameron was prime minister, Cameron was envious of Hague’s grand office compared to “poky” No 10. “I do remember admiring it,” Cameron smiles. “It’s an amazing office.”
Bringing Cameron back from the wilderness may not have pleased those on the right of the Conservative Party, but some see it as an inspired choice for a prime minister fighting off plots from his own colleagues and with little apparent interest in world affairs.
Cameron’s first public event on the Monday after his appointment was to give the closing speech at a Foreign Office event on global hunger, where I was chairing the afternoon session. He rushed in from the Lords and summed up the meeting as effortlessly as if he’d watched the whole thing. One Foreign Office director told me how, when she had given the white paper they were launching to the previous foreign secretary, James Cleverly, his only comment was “it’s a bit long”. Cameron came back with a raft of questions and the whole thing marked up with Post-it Notes. When staff gave him a 260-page brief on central Asia, nervous it was too wordy, he asked for more.
Foreign Office mandarins now talk of Cameron’s “pulling power” and of “having a grown-up” at the helm, after Dominic Raab, Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. “To be fair, it’s a low bar,” one ambassador says.
Cameron admits it’s “a much more dangerous, difficult and contested world” now from the one he left as prime minister after the 2016 Brexit vote — famously humming as he went to the door of No 10 for the final time. He describes it as “lights flashing red all over the global dashboard”.
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“Some people talk down Britain’s status [after Brexit],” he says, “but we are one of the top five military countries with the spending decision we just made.” Sunak has pledged to increase UK defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030. “We’re still a top five aid player. Definitely a top five diplomatic player. And when we look at things like the UN, [the vaccine alliance] Gavi, the World Bank … in all those things we are huge and important participants. But of course we have to work out who we are, how strong we are and what we do.”
He appears to relish the challenge. “The danger with foreign ministers is we analyse things, we meet each other and have diplomatic discussions.” Here he invokes Margaret Thatcher’s first foreign secretary. “But we always have to ask the question Lord Carrington asked at the end of each meeting: ‘And so and so?’ What are we actually going to do? So I have really tried to focus my team on outcomes. Let’s get American money into Ukraine, let’s get aid into Gaza, let’s back British commercial diplomacy like winning a JCB contract into Turkmenistan.”
That includes spreading the teaching of English as a form of soft power. While meeting a group of students at the IT University in Astana he tells them: “The French get out there and promote the hell out of their language. But we’ve always been slightly embarrassed.” A group of young male robotics students show Cameron their designs for a mini-tank, a drone, a stealth jet from a 3D printer and a 140kmh electric go-kart. “Even Jeremy Clarkson wouldn’t go in that,” he says of his Cotswolds neighbour.
It all looks very high-tech but just two years ago the internet was switched off when thousands took to the streets protesting at the doubling of fuel prices and corruption of the ruling elite — some of whose ill-gotten gains end up in London. It took 3,000 Russian troops to quell the protests, during which more than 200 people were killed, including a four-year-old girl, and 10,000 arrested.
For the former Soviet Stans, the invasion of Ukraine hangs heavy. None of them experienced more suffering under Soviet rule than Kazakhstan. The USSR’s second largest gulag, whose prisoners included Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn, was located here. It was also where nuclear weapons were tested by the hundreds, with scant regard for the safety of local residents.
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“Though they all have relations with Russia, they look very carefully at what’s happening in Ukraine and realise their own fragility when it comes to their big neighbour,” Cameron says.
Ukraine, he says, is his top priority and he compares the current situation in Europe to the 1930s. Cameron’s great-great-uncle was Duff Cooper, who resigned from Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet in 1938 over the Munich agreement and the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. “I have the letter President Benes of Czechoslovakia wrote him and his reply, and it seems to me quite similar: you have a dictator trying to change Europe’s borders by force, and the question for our generation is, are we going to help the country that’s at the sharp end? Will we have the determination and patience to see it through? And I really think we must. I try to spend as much time on it as I can.”
That’s not the only way it’s personal. The Camerons took in a Ukrainian family after the 2022 invasion, which he says “brings home the reality”, although the family recently moved 16 miles up the A44 to Chipping Campden. “I joke Chipping Norton was not posh enough for them,” he laughs. “And while the Israel-Gaza conflict is really important — it could take over your whole life if you’re not careful — it’s really important we continue to focus on Ukraine.”
He continues: “If Putin wins he will be back for more. There are two futures. There’s one in which Ukraine pushes back and wins itself a just peace, and Putin has suffered defeat and we finish up with Nato stronger than ever, and a Ukraine that will join Nato and a sense that democracies and the Atlantic alliance have rightly fought back against illegal invasion of a country.
“The alternative future in which Putin wins is one in which we really have to worry what he does next, and whether that might include [invading] a Nato country, and the world of danger and uncertainty we’d enter into would be very chilling.”
When he was prime minister, from 2010 to 2016, he was still hanging out with Putin, taking him to watch judo at the London Olympics in 2012 and visiting him in Sochi in 2013. Shouldn’t he have done more when Putin invaded Crimea in 2014?
“I remember having to argue inside the EU with countries that were saying, ‘Oh well, it’s not really clear.’ Actually it was clear — it was an invasion of Crimea, and my allies then were the Baltic States and Poland. But it was a bit of a battle in Europe — I was arguing with the French president [François Hollande], ‘You really shouldn’t sell warships to Russia.’ ”
If Ukraine is so important, why did RAF aircraft intercept missiles going into Israel but not Ukraine?
“It’s a very fair question,” he replies. “The principal difference is that there are many things we can do to help Ukrainians that are non-escalatory and Britain has proved that, giving antitank weapons, tanks, long-range artillery. But the one thing we have to try to avoid is Nato forces in conflict with Russian forces and that’s why, from the start, I’ve said I don’t think we can do a no-fly zone or Nato interception into Ukraine. But as long as Nato soldiers are not directly fighting off Russian soldiers, anything we do to help Ukraine fight off Russia is acceptable.”
The week before our trip he had been in Washington to lobby Republicans to pass a delayed bill to provide $61 billion in desperately needed military aid to Ukraine, even jetting off to Florida for dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Apparently much of their conversation was about golf. “I’d never met him before and didn’t quite know what to expect, but he’s a very interesting figure and we talked about a range of things — we touched on Ukraine and Gaza. I made my arguments, we had a good discussion.”
Did he feel he changed Trump’s opinion at all? “What I tried to do all across America and everywhere is get across the idea that it’s in nobody’s interest that Putin is on the front foot by November. It’s in everyone’s interest he’s on the back foot and that Nato is doing well and more countries are spending 2 per cent on defence, and that the Ukrainians are on the advance.”
Although his trip was reported as a failure, the US Speaker refusing to meet him, America’s Ukraine package was approved a week later. While Cameron was in Turkmenistan, Sunak was in Poland pledging a big increase in British help to Ukraine. “It’s been a good week,” he says.
We arrive in Mongolia to grey sleet and drive through the steppes, past old Soviet power stations belching smoke, into the capital, Ulan Bator, and gridlocked traffic. We head straight to the foreign ministry for a state banquet where the minister, Battsetseg Batmunkh, is dressed in silk the deep blue of the flag. Hanging above the stairs is a giant portrait of Genghis Khan. In an impressive room with a lapis-blue ceiling (and another portrait of Genghis Khan) we are served mutton soup, tilapia and milk vodka. An orchestra dressed in yellow tabards play horse-head fiddles; dancers prance like horses and the country’s leading throat singer makes a strange warbling sound.
I ask Sukhbold Sukhee, the head of trade, sitting next to me, about Cameron’s offer of working more closely and he points out Mongolia relies on Russia for electricity, while their main export, coal, goes mostly to China. I also ask how they feel about most of the world regarding their national hero, Genghis Khan, as a mass murderer. “He was a warrior beyond compare,” Sukhbold replies sternly. But Mongolians seem to have a sense of humour. The country’s former president Tsakhia Elbegdorj recently mocked Putin’s claim that Ukraine has always been part of the Russian Empire by tweeting a map of the even-bigger Mongol Empire, which included Russia.
After the feast Cameron is presented with a Mongolian hunting jacket while he hands over a copy of The Canterbury Tales, a passage mentioning Genghis Khan highlighted. We meet the rest of his party and head to a jazz club to celebrate the 30th birthday of one of his entourage. The singer turns out to be the winner of Mongolia’s edition of The Voice.
The next morning Cameron visits the president, Ukhnaa Khurelsukh, in his tent on the top floor of his palace. Afterwards, at School No 28, he is greeted by a line of children waving flags and chanting, “Welcome to our school!” He answers questions in English about how he spends his free time — “I don’t have much but I like cooking” — and his favourite sports: “tennis, riding and a bit of golf”. He soon gets to ride with the prime minister, Luvsannamsrai, at his country estate. Our photographer is kept away in case the grand tour starts to look like a jolly. ™
Last year English was made the official second language in Mongolia, having supplanted Russian as a required language in schools. “That’s a defeat for Russia, a win for Britain, a win for English,” Cameron tells me on a stroll round the estate. So impressed is he that he has pledged £10 million to Ulan Bator to help teach English. I get the impression he has plenty of leeway. “Well, look, I haven’t had a boss for years, so that is new,” he says. “But No 10 is very well run and Rishi is very clear in what he wants.” How often do they speak? “At least weekly,” he replies. “On the two most important things, Ukraine and Israel-Gaza, we are absolutely joined up and have daily communications between our teams.”
Cameron has faced criticism from many Conservative MPs over his manoeuvres in the Middle East — in particular for suggesting the UK move towards recognising a Palestinian state. He believes there has been a change in Benjamin Netanyahu’s stance on allowing aid into Gaza after the killing of seven aid workers, three of them British, last month. “The danger is they don’t operationalise it.”
I ask how frustrating it is dealing with Netanyahu. “I have a good working relationship with him, but obviously there are things we don’t agree about. I have always believed that the two-state solution is the right answer and he doesn’t, so it’s a tough task. We’ve got to persuade the Israelis that long-term security will only come when there are two states.”
I ask what he feels about the devastation and killing in Gaza, where more than 34,000 people have now died, mostly women and children, and so many are starving. “It’s very hard to watch,” he says. “But in my job you have to keep your eye on the ball. I’ve tried to focus on the things we can do rather than just talking. What are we doing to get in aid by sea, by plane, by land? Where are the choke points?”
Isn’t it putting out mixed signals when Britain is still sending arms to Israel? “You have to put it in context,” he says, pointing out that we supply just 0.02 per cent of Israel’s arms. “And we have a very strict process of arms export licensing.”
He says the most dangerous moment so far since he took office was the night of Saturday, April 13, when Iran launched a barrage of missiles at Israel. “Remember this is a state-on-state attack, so the role Britain played in instructing our pilots to shoot down anything coming their way, which was very effective, was a small contribution to a larger picture, but a larger picture thatI think helped stop the escalation.”
Which brings us back to the steppes of central Asia.“There is a fundamental reason for being here. We think we have a lot to offer in terms of education, economy, energy, climate change. These are shared problems, so important for our prosperity and security as well as theirs.”
While he was between Stans, parliament back home passed the Rwanda deportation bill. How can he go round the world telling people what to do when the Rwanda policy is being criticised as immoral and unlawful?
“I feel very strongly that highly visible illegal migration is utterly destructive of sensible democratic systems. You can see it with the southern border of the US, see it with the small boats, what happened in the migration crisis in Europe when I was prime minister. So when people come from safe country A to safe country B, you’ve got to send them back, and if you can’t do that, you need to come up with an innovative solution — and that’s what we have done.”
Last month a report entitled The World in 2040: Renewing the UK’s Approach to International Affairs, written by some of Britain’s most senior former diplomats, described the Foreign Office as “elitist and rooted in the past” and called for it to be modernised, with fewer colonial-era pictures hanging on its walls, including one depicting Africa as a naked black boy bearing a fruit basket.
Cameron calls this “absolute hogwash — it’s a great building with so much history. The only paintings on my wall are a very nice Barbara Hepworth to celebrate my love of Cornwall and Lucian Freud to celebrate my love of British modern paintings. I haven’t done an analysis of others.”
On Britain’s role in the world he talks about the importance of protecting sexual and reproductive rights when they are under threat both in developing countries “and more developed countries” — after his recent dinner in Florida, we both know he is referring to America’s newly restrictive abortion laws. Then he cites a surprising example. “Sometimes I think there can be oversensitivity to colonial history. The fact is Gambia is considering legalising FGM [female genital mutilation], which would be absolutely barbaric and not just bad news for people in Gambia but also British Gambians who might get taken back on school holidays to get cut. If this goes ahead we should consider sanctions and travel bans — I don’t want Gambian politicians shopping in Harrods if they just voted to cut girls.”
It seems as if he has found his calling. “I really enjoy the job,” he says. “When you are PM you are doing so many things at once. It’s nice to focus on one thing, even if that one thing is the whole world!”
Has it given him the taste for doing something on the world stage in future? “I am too focused on the job I am doing,” he replies, diplomatically.
