My piece at Telegraph Comment on Baroness Warsi’s resignation letter prompts two broad flows of e-comment:

  • you are mad/petty/vindictive/sexist/racist/generally revolting for criticising her grammar when people in Gaza are dying
  • well said – she showed (again) what poor judgement she has

The point that I might have emphasised more clearly is that a letter like this is something of a career-defining if not life-defining moment. It ought to convey effortless political and moral authority. Robin Cook’s resignation letter (re Iraq) back in 2003 shows how to do it:

At cabinet for some weeks I have been frank about my concern over embarking on military action in the absence of multilateral support. I applaud the heroic efforts that you and Jack [Straw] have put into the attempt to secure a second resolution at the UN.

It is not your fault that those attempts have failed. However, the evident importance that we attached to a second resolution makes it all the more difficult now to proceed without one, and without agreement in any other international forum.

As I cannot give my support to military action in these circumstances, I write with regret to resign.

You and I have both made the case over the years for an international order based on multilateral decisions through the UN and other forums. In principle I believe it is wrong to embark on military action without broad international support. In practice I believe it is against Britain’s interests to create a precedent for unilateral military action.

As our foreign secretary I was impressed by the energy and skill with which you ended Britain’s isolation in Europe and achieved for our country equal status and influence to Germany or France. I am dismayed that once again Britain is divided from our major European neighbours. As president of the party of European socialists, of which the Labour party is a member, it troubles me that I know of no sister party within the European Union that shares our position.

Steady, measured, and in its way quite generous to other points of view. Above all it focuses squarely on meaty policy substance, and does not (like the Warsi letter) drift off into other irrelevant issues. And it conveys its authority in good part precisely by being well written. We hear that Robin Cook is someone to be taken seriously.

That said, I happen to know that Robin Cook did not resign only for the reasons spelled out eloquently in his letter. He had his eye on the hard UK political fact that fact that the Labour Party base would not accept the government’s policy.

The Warsi letter? Far less effective on every count. Poorly written, and showing no sense at all of how and why the government is grappling with the Gaza situation as part of something far bigger (not least the Muslim-on-Muslim and Muslim-on-everyone massacres and war-crimes now going on in different parts of the Middle East). If she thinks that the government’s ‘approach and language during the current crisis in Gaza is (sic) morally indefensible’, what does she think about the studied – or baffled – lack of urgency in UK/EU/US policy towards the accelerating ISIS disaster? Patrick Cockburn knows his stuff:

The birth of the new state is the most radical change to the political geography of the Middle East since the Sykes-Picot Agreement was implemented in the aftermath of the First World War. Yet this explosive transformation has created surprisingly little alarm internationally or even among those in Iraq and Syria not yet under the rule of Isis

Well, quite. From Baroness Warsi comes nothing at all of interest on this momentous development. Too self-absorbed in her waffling against Islamaphobia (sic) even to spell it correctly in this vital letter.

Technique. It always comes back to that.