By far the worst appointment made by Boris Johnson in his cabinet reshuffle last month was that of Anne-Marie Trevelyan as secretary of state for international development. An ardent Brexiteer, Trevelyan has no known interest in overseas development; just about her only previous public utterance on the subject was an observation that ‘charity begins at home.’ But then she is...
What to do about overseas aid has long been a problem for the Conservatives. The Department for International Development (DFID), set up by the Blair government in 1997, is widely seen as a success. To borrow a phrase beloved of jingoists, our aid programme is one of the few areas where Britain is still seen as punching above its weight. The downside is that spending ever larger sums of taxpayers’ money on rescuing impoverished foreigners is not a cause popular with core Tory voters. Their resentment is fuelled by a persistent narrative in the tabloid media that most British aid is either stolen, squandered or lavished on the undeserving.