The question occupying senior ministers about Baroness Warsi can be expressed thus: is she Clare Short or Robin Cook? Both resigned from Tony Blair’s Cabinet over Iraq, but only Cook went on (until his tragically early death in 2005) to become a nationally respected figure of dignified dissent who could generate a very long queue at a book festival. Ms Short, in contrast, continued to snipe at Blair and those around him, but with fast-diminishing impact.
My hunch is that Warsi, who resigned yesterday over the British Government’s response to the Gaza crisis, will be more Clare than Robin — and not because of her gender. According to one Cabinet minister: “We have been expecting her resignation sooner or later, although it was never certain what the issue would be.”
Some of her colleagues thought she would go over the Government’s response to “Operation Trojan Horse”, the conspiracy by Islamists to infiltrate and radicalise Birmingham schools. But it had become increasingly clear that Britain’s relationship with Israel was the likeliest reason — or pretext, depending on your cynicism — for her departure.
At a recent meeting of the National Security Council, she had made her feelings on this subject fairly clear. At a Cabinet meeting shortly after the shooting down of the MH17 passenger flight over Ukraine, she declared that if sanctions against Putin were imposed then so too — logically — should sanctions against Israel.
In her four-year ministerial career, Cameron and George Osborne tried hard to keep her inside the tent, sweetening her demotion from the party chairmanship in September 2012 with the confected title of “Senior Minister of State” at the Foreign Office. They are now regretting their decision to keep her on board in the sweeping reshuffle last month.

Read the article in full at the Evening Standard.