William Hagues foreign office era: subdued and subservient | Simon Jenkins

The departing foreign secretary was a former Tory star who descended into empty cliche and belligerence

The progressive collapse of the Libyan regime is the epitaph on William Hagues era as foreign secretary. It has been an age without a theme, rhetoric without content. When he took office he boasted that Britain would have a new global reach and influence. He left as the emblem of that reach, a new Libya, fell into anarchy.

Hague was a Yorkshire outsider whose star shone in the 1990s, not unli...