‘A kind of gilded vagabondage’
‘Good temper, good health and good looks,’ wrote Sir Ernest Satow; ‘Rather more than average intelligence, though brilliant genius is not necessary.’
Sir Ernest, Queen Victoria’s Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Japan for the last five years of the nineteenth century, was listing the qualities a successful senior British ‘diplomatist’ (as they called it then) requires. His book, A Guide to Diplomatic Practice (1917), became standard reading within the Foreign Office and is still read today – though his recommendation that diplomats should have an independent income can now be ignored.
‘Science is not necessary,’ he adds; ‘Geography, beyond elementary notions, is not of great value. The diplomatist will acquire what geographical knowledge he needs of the country to which he is appointed while residing at his post.’
The ideal diplomat should be ‘a straightforward character’, Sir Ernest concluded. Such an officer needed ‘A mind trained by the study of the best literature, and by that of history. Capacity to judge of evidence. In short, the candidate must be an educated gentleman. These points cannot be ascertained by means of written examinations.’
If the marks of competence are as Satow describes them, readers of this book may agree that British diplomats have measured up well since he wrote. Whatever he thought of written examinations, it’s fair to say that, more than any other country in the world, Britain’s ambassadors have been assessed by their fellow diplomats at least (though not only) on the quality of their prose. Style always mattered in the Foreign Office. As I explained in Parting Shots, the forerunner to this book, I learned early as a young Foreign Office trainee that a successful diplomat was importantly judged on the quality of his drafting: not just the content, but the vigour, the clarity, the descriptive power, the style – and (in the right circumstances) the humour too.
These are the very attributes that, we hope you’ll agree, are to be found flowering abundantly in the despatches that make up this book. Compiling and researching our second collection of diplomatic writing has been great fun, not least because we allowed ourselves a much wider range of sources. Whereas every item in Parting Shots was a valedictory despatch – written by an ambassador departing a post – the despatches in this new book are far more eclectic. In Chapter 1, ‘Protocol Department’, you will find a hoard of miscellaneous comic masterpieces, sent from all sorts of different times and places. In so far as these ‘funnies’, as they are known in Whitehall, share a common thread, it is the pomp and ceremony of diplomacy; and the absurdity that goes with it.
Chapter 2 is a collection of despatches which are in one sense the opposite of valedictories, but actually have much in common with them, First Impressions despatches being sent at the beginning of a posting, of course, rather than at the end. In the best of these reports ambassadors turned their unfamiliarity with the local scene to their advantage.
The final chapter, ‘Envoi’, takes in a few previously over-looked valedictories in which ambassadors departing a post summed up what they had learned about the host country – and lessons too for their bureaucratic and political masters back in Whitehall and Westminster. The valedictory was (until banned by embarrassed ministers and civil servants in 2006) a traditional way of letting off steam, and saying what had perhaps been unsayable while the ambassador was still in post.
Almost all the entries in this book are despatches. Most are traditional diplomatic despatches: letters both signed and drafted by ambassadors in post, and formally addressed to (but only in a minority of cases actually read by) the Foreign Secretary of the day. An ambassador would typically write only one or two despatches a year (the rest of his post’s ‘reporting’ being by letters, telegrams and, increasingly, emails between colleagues) and the despatch of a despatch was an indication of the importance and interest the ambassador attached to the subject: an interest it was hoped (not always realistically) that colleagues back in Whitehall would share.
What exactly is a ‘despatch’? Let the Foreign Office answer that question itself, as it does in some Office notes we found at the National Archives, dating from the early 1980s:
3.2 DESPATCHES
3.2.1 The despatch is the most formal method of communication. It is sent by or in the name of the Secretary of State to a Head of Mission, Minister, Acting Head of Mission, Head of Post, Officer Administering the Government of a Dependent Territory or the Governor of an Australian State. It is sent from a Head or acting Head of a Post to the Secretary of State, or on some matters, between a Mission and its subordinate Posts.
3.2.2 A despatch is usually confined to one subject. It is written in a clear, simple style, without courtesy phrases in the text, and the addressee is referred to throughout as ‘you’. Normally, paragraphs are numbered and a file reference given. References to previous correspondence are given in full. Appropriate security classifications and privacy markings are used. Recipients of copies of the despatch are listed in the last paragraph. Further specific guidance is given in paras 3.3 to 3.6.
3.2.3 The despatch opens with ‘Sir’ or ‘My Lord’ and closes:
I am, Sir,
yours faithfully
It is addressed simply by name and place, e.g.
Sir Nicholas Henderson, GCMG PARIS
The Rt. Hon. Dr David Owen, MP LONDON
Our book of valedictory despatches, Parting Shots, was accompanied by two series of programmes for BBC Radio 4. The success of both the book and the radio programmes took my co-editor, Andrew Bryson, and me by surprise. We had certainly been confident that poking around in a forgotten corner of diplomatic archives would amuse and entertain a minority audience; but such was the quality, the humour, the wisdom and sometimes the outrageously undiplomatic tone of the valedictories we unearthed through word of mouth, Freedom of Information and the National Archives at Kew, that both book and broadcasts gained a far wider audience than we had expected. And people seemed to enjoy reading gems of Foreign Office draftsmanship, and to have approved.
Approval came, not least, we found (again to our surprise), from serving and former members of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) itself. Essays that had been crafted to impress were now impressing an intelligent readership they had never anticipated – and their authors, many of them men-of-letters-manqués, were pretty chuffed about that.
As a result, correspondence, calls and emails started to come in. ‘I seem to remember that old Archie wrote a corker from … where was it? … something-or-other-stan, wasn’t it?’ Or ‘Why don’t you try to track down a marvellous bit of comic writing from our ambassador in … Algiers, I think it was … about a ludicrous flight into the Sahara and a Spanish ambassador (was it?) with a mysterious and incredibly heavy suitcase? The despatch was circulated right round the Office at the time …’ and ‘There was this fantastic pen-portrait of Göring – sometime before World War II – can’t recall from whom – our man in Berlin, obviously – or exactly when …’ Our former Prime Minister Sir John Major reminded us of a hilarious British Embassy telegram from Moscow, describing the lengths to which diplomats had gone to arrange the transit by railway of a horse given to him by the President of Turkmenistan.
And so began part two of Andrew Bryson’s sleuthing work: a hunt for documents half-remembered and imperfectly described, some comical, some vivid pen-portraits of countries and individuals, some heavy with prophecy, some triumphantly right, some horribly wrong … all of them essays that deserve rereading, and many of them models of wisdom, humour or style.
The research process for this book was much the same as for Parting Shots. It was at the National Archives at Kew that we found most of the despatches in this collection. After thirty years most despatches are declassified and sent to Kew, where anyone can read them. These files, in which sit the despatches alongside further correspondence and memos sent between the embassy and officials at the Foreign Office in Whitehall, make for fascinating reading, especially the remarks scribbled in pencil or pen in the margins by senior politicians – some of which we’ve quoted in this book.
Andrew made more Freedom of Information requests (ninety-eight this time, against sixty-five for the first book; the hit rate was lower because not all ambassadors wrote First Impressions despatches – but the quality of what we found when we did score a hit was striking). He did a great deal more research in the National Archives too, going through all the new files that were declassified at the beginning of 2011 for 1980; and, this year, those declassified for 1981.
Not least in the appeal of reading these reports is that they were never intended for prying eyes. Most were classified documents (categorized as ‘Restricted’ or ‘Confidential’ – sometimes ‘Secret’) which only those inside the Foreign Office, government ministers and other privileged individuals in the higher echelons of Whitehall were permitted to read – and of course only those that had passed the relevant security vetting procedure.
A great many of these despatches were written in what we have come to consider the ‘golden age’ of despatch-writing between 1965 and 1975 when Britain still had a Diplomatic Service fit for an empire but no longer had the empire. Our diplomats counted among their number the brightest in the land; but one has the sense that back then British ambassadors had rather more time on their hands than they do today; time enough, for instance, to compose works as long, as dense and as brilliant as Sir John Russell’s 1967 First Impressions report from Rio (pp. 179–90).
Modern diplomatic writing may be less showy but its very newness packs a punch. The scattering of despatches in this collection from the 1990s and 2000s have a currency and relevance all of their own. Whereas older generations of diplomats would peck away at the embassy typewriter, an antique which required them to underline words to represent italics, modern diplomats sally forth with word processors. With the advance of technology despatches are no longer sent as typed or printed documents but rather as tele-letters (secure emails); and they sit awaiting discovery not on a dusty library shelf but on a computer server. Naturally the Foreign Office keeps this material under close control. Unlike at Kew where the main problem is simply too much information, official material written after 1981 is currently unavailable unless you ask for it, and your Freedom of Information request had better be specific if it is to stand any chance of success. The printouts we received in response to our FOI requests would arrive in the post redacted – that is to say, with sensitive sections blacked out in thick marker pen. What made it into the book is what survived the censors’ pen. Researchers in later decades will be able to see the full versions of these despatches once they finally arrive at Kew. Tomorrow’s historians will have a shorter wait, however, than today, with the thirty-year period being cut to twenty years.
In November 2010 – shortly after Parting Shots was first published – Wikileaks began releasing 250,000 confidential US diplomatic cables, the content of these leaks and the methods used to obtain them attracting intense interest and controversy. Parting Shots and this new collection are more modest undertakings, but they do have their similarities with Wikileaks. Unlike Julian Assange, however, we’ve gone through official channels to obtain properly vetted copies of diplomatic reports. Doubtless there exists sensational material we might be unable to obtain in this way, but our experience has been that the authorities are pretty grown-up about withholding things and do not do so for trivial reasons; we’ve occasionally been surprised at the release to us of some quite seriously embarrassing material, but never material that would prejudice national security. A couple of times, on seeing (through other sources) pre-redacted versions of material we received in redacted form, I’ve understood the reasons for redaction.
What follows is a magpie collection. Not all are of equal quality, but the best are truly outstanding. In my view the 1934 despatch from our ambassador in Berlin, Sir Eric Phipps, describing a day in the forest with Herman Göring, is the finest despatch we found, sending shivers down the spine even as one winces at Phipps’s unkind humour; and it is, too, a work of minor prophecy. This is diplomatic writing at its very best. But even the worst here are worth reading for the insight they give into just how wrong an ambassador – with all the experience, contacts and research available to him – can sometimes be.
There’s one quality, however, very few of these despatches lack: penmanship. Senior British diplomats really knew how to write.
They wrote (at their best) with a beautiful balance between economy and style. In the Foreign Office prose for which as a young entrant I was encouraged to aim, a work-manlike functionality was prized equally alongside a certain understated classiness. Every word, every paragraph, would whisper ‘top drawer’. There was an understated confidence, a smidgeon of cynicism and a suggestion of buried humour. It was the language of the very best kind of courtier: high-calibre, at its most powerful quite spare, practical and to the point, but delivered with grace and subtlety; prose that could wink but would never leer, hint but never hammer home, tweak tails but seldom draw blood. The mood is convivial but never gushing.
Lofty rhetoric was despised – the sort of thing politicians do. Strings of adjectives were not encouraged. Mysticism was disapproved of. Arguments of idealism and incantations to Destiny were treated with suspicion. To this day, British diplomats tell against themselves, but with a secret pride, the story of Sir Oliver Franks, who was HM Ambassador to the United States of America from 1948 to 1952.
One evening in 1948, shortly before Christmas, the British Embassy in Washington received a telephone call from a US radio station asking to interview the ambassador for its holiday programming. Franks was told that the radio station was doing the same with the other embassies, and he duly answered their questions about international affairs and other matters. At the end they asked him what he would like for Christmas, and thanked him for contributing to the programme.
Franks thought nothing of it until he turned on the radio on Christmas Eve and heard the broadcaster announce that they had asked three leading foreign ambassadors to share with listeners what they would like for Christmas.
The Russian ambassador had said he wanted ‘peace on earth and understanding between nations’. The French ambassador had said he wanted ‘a brighter future for humanity and for the spread of freedom throughout the world’. The British ambassador had said: ‘That’s ever so kind of you – a small box of crystallized fruit would be lovely.’
You can imagine the company in which this anecdote would be related, to an amused chuckle. Such is the company into which the despatches that follow are intended to draw their reader: a worldly but civilized company; a circle of the best and the brightest among whom it was implicitly understood that we chaps were but intelligent observers of a world in which our capacity to transform was severely constrained, but we might here or there readjust a detail or two. We were a Rolls-Royce of a cadre, we thought, in the faintly disappointed service of a country that probably wanted only a Vauxhall. The language of these despatches breathes as much. Foreign Office prose was once described as ‘the last respite of the English subjunctive’.
This is drafting that does not hope for too much from the world and subtly denigrates those who do. There is, in truth, a trace of something smug here, and the false modesty can grate: but the style is never unreflective, never thoughtless, never unmindful that things could be a little better or a little worse and that the difference matters. Above all, never too much zeal.
Note that last sentence. The best sort of British diplomat would not reproduce the original French (‘Surtout pas trop de zèle’) or cite Talleyrand by name. That would be showy. Instead he would assume his audience’s easy acquaintance with the source, indulging himself and his readers thereby in a little discreet mutual flattery.
Apart from a few routine obsequities towards the Foreign Secretary to whom the despatch is formally addressed, British politicians are almost completely disregarded in these letters, or treated as a peripheral nuisance. That more or less mirrors the ethos in which I worked, and I’ve no reason to suppose it has changed.
Something that has changed is our modern and welcome intolerance of racist language and racist opinion. There are some frankly embarrassing remarks, usually meant in jest, to be encountered in these pages, but we’ve on the whole left the material in place – as being indicative of another era (though Ronald Burroughs’s jokes about black skins in his famous Algerian despatch on pp. 94–103 did test our patience. They aren’t even very funny).
Towards the Office (as we called it) in London, readers may sometimes detect the false servility that knows respect is called for but does not feel it. A senior diplomat abroad doubts that his colleagues in Whitehall entirely understand his situation or sympathize with his difficulties; doubts they are giving his views or reports the attention or credence they deserve; and suspects they think they know it all already from secondary sources while treating lightly the gold dust of a first-hand report offered by their man in post, on the ground, in harness and in daily contact with the realities.
He fears they think he’s ‘gone native’ (suffering from what Kenneth East, departing Iceland in 1981 – see pp. 348–9 – described as ‘“clientitis” – that blurring of the vision in which one’s hosts are increasingly seen at their own valuation’). He thinks that in international affairs they’re so focused, back in London, on the immediate British interest that they’ve lost sight of the longer-term benefits of the good relations with a friendly and promising country: a place he can tell them all about if only they would listen.
He may have, however, no stars in his eyes about the natives, and many of these despatches attest to that. Our ambassador’s 1970 pen-portrait of President Bongo of Gabon is rescued from calumny only by wit. In Parting Shots a handful of the valedictories we published caused, by their modern publication, quite a stir in the countries criticized. A 1984 despatch by the British High Commissioner in Ottawa opining on the ‘moderate’ ability of the populace (‘One does not encounter here the ferocious competition of talent that takes place in the United Kingdom’) briefly became national news in Canada when we uncovered it with a Freedom of Information request. A much older despatch from Thailand caused an even bigger stink. Sir Anthony Rumbold signed off from Bangkok in 1967 by saying of the Thais that ‘they have no literature, no painting and only a very odd kind of music’ and that among the rich, after gambling and golf, ‘licentiousness is the main pleasure of them all’. Our man in Bangkok in 2009 felt obliged to issue a press release after local media picked up on the story. ‘My own views differ from my predecessor of 42 years ago,’ said HM’s thoroughly modern Ambassador Quinton Quayle, who avowed his love of the country’s culture, landscape and people: ‘The country for me certainly lives up to its brand name – Amazing Thailand.’
Mercifully for the book that follows, President Bongo is now dead, so there should be no comeback there. Sir John Russell’s 1967 description of the steamy and dysfunctional country that Brazil then was – as being like ‘the United States … if the South had won the Civil War’ – is so obviously out of date that no offence will surely be taken today. And let me assure Barbadians that ‘This windblown island of boredom’ (I quote our sometime High Commissioner – see p. 324) describes the Barbados of 1967, not today. I hasten, too, to remark that John Robinson’s bleak and bitter prospectus for the Algeria he found in 1974 has not really come to pass, though I still find the despatch perceptive. So Andrew Bryson and I can hopefully sleep safely in our beds after publication.
Andrew, who has done all the work, will deserve the slumber. He and I have not sought to give this collection any sort of thematic shape. Instead, to stop the book becoming one unremitting barrage of diplomatic prose, we’ve gathered the material into three chapters, whose rationale – should you wish to challenge it in the particular – I will not even attempt to defend, but simply here describe.
‘Protocol Department’ (Chapter 1) needs the most elaboration. Many but not all of these despatches are funny, and intentionally so. Typically they draw their humour from the ridiculous situations created by diplomatic protocol; so ridiculous (and a serious point is often being made here) that the diplomat decided the incident was worth describing to a wider Office audience than his own staff.
Not every entry in this section is a despatch; some of the funniest were simply letters written from one diplomat in the field to a colleague with whom he was friendly back in London. Even these, however, often tended to stick to the standard despatch format, with numbered paragraphs and a mock-formal tone, which often contrasts to great effect with the ludicrous events described. There’s an echo of public-school giggling in a lot of this.
When we talk about ‘protocol’ we mean the word defined in its broadest sense: from etiquette to silly costumes to formal processes, arcane ceremonies, foot-dragging, grandstanding and pedantry: all of them part – sometimes an integral part – of the business of diplomacy. The observation of correct diplomatic etiquette is deemed so important that there is in the British Foreign Office, and in the foreign services of other countries, a unit dedicated to it, from which this chapter takes its name. It is the job of the Protocol Department to advise British diplomats on the accepted practice. A British High Commissioner in Africa wants to know the correct drill for the funeral of a former President: should he attend in person? – and how attired? – or simply send condolences? And an ambassador in the Middle East wants to know how he might politely decline a gift offered to Her Majesty the Queen by a wealthy but somewhat suspect sheikh, without causing a diplomatic incident – or should he accept? When they dispense their advice, the FCO’s protocol experts rely on precedent – because things should be done the correct way, which is as they have been done before; and because breaking a precedent or setting a new one could make things difficult further down the line.
Diplomats can find themselves bound by many such rules and precedents, although things have relaxed a little since the 1950s, when Marcus Cheke’s Guidance on Foreign Usages and Ceremony, and Other Matters (1949) was the bible distributed to new FCO recruits. Cheke’s tome had dos and don’ts for every social and professional situation, governing how a diplomat should behave among his colleagues in the British Embassy as well as with foreigners, and how his wife should act too. Protocol and good manners were imperative; if a diplomat found himself faced with two alternatives, ‘one easy but appearing somewhat over-familiar, the other respectful but appearing somewhat pompous or old-fashioned’, Cheke’s advice was always to choose the latter. ‘If his wife is hesitating whether to appear at the beach picnic of the Counsellor’s wife (who has been most friendly to her) with or without stockings,’ wrote Cheke, ‘let her (if she is unable to telephone and ask) wear stockings.’
I recall on joining the Service in the mid-1970s being given a slim introductory guide to ‘Diplomatic Service Etiquette’, which included the advice that on a social occasion a serving male officer desirous of seating himself on a sofa or one of a line of adjacent chairs should never so position himself that a senior officer (or the wife of a senior officer) would – if also desirous of a seat – have no choice but to sit beside him.
Nowadays things are not quite so stuffy and formal, but many of Cheke’s rules still stand – indeed, many FCO recruits in recent years to whom an old copy of the book is made a gift as a joke by friends or family say they find themselves turning to it for real advice in the end. A 2005 guide by the US State Department called Protocol for the Modern Diplomat contains passages which could (and some probably do) come straight from Cheke: concerning the necessity of official calls to make introductions, sample seating plans for formal dinners, and the order in which diplomats should step on board the deck of a ship (ambassador first, naturally). And woe betide the US diplomat who thinks embassy social functions are for socializing. ‘When you attend social functions that the ambassador and other high ranking U.S. officers are also attending, you should arrive approximately fifteen minutes early … remember to eat before leaving home … Leave a party at a reasonable hour, no matter how much fun you are having’ while, at the same time, observing the golden rule: ‘Do not leave before the guest of honor.’
On official business, as opposed to the cocktail circuit, protocol enters another league altogether. One formal set-piece which occurs time and again in these despatches is the presentation of credentials by an incoming ambassador to the Head of State. The Head of Mission must be accredited by the host government before ambassadors may represent their country in any official business at the Foreign Ministry. He or she must be acceptable to that government, which will have been notified of a proposed candidate for any ambassadorial vacancy in advance, so that any reservations may be lodged. The acquiescence of the receiving state is signified by its granting what is called agrément to the appointment. It is rare but not unheard of for agrément to be refused.
Letters of credence (and recall) follow a standard text, identifying the diplomat as the representative of Her Majesty the Queen and empowering him or her to speak for her. The amount of time given by the Head of State for the tête-à-tête component of the ceremony is jealously watched and recorded by ambassadors, as an indicator of how important Britain is seen in comparison with other nations. Protocol, however, dictates that no official business should be discussed in these conversations but that the exchanges should be cordial. The ceremony complete, the ambassador is deemed accredited and, according to protocol, gains the protections, privileges and immunities accorded to the Diplomatic Corps.
The Diplomatic Corps is a key concept: when used of a single country it is the collective term for all diplomats, from every country, accredited to that host government. Despite their different nationalities and origins, these itinerant envoys in fact have more in common with one another than the vast majority of officials with whom they might deal in the host country. Diplomats practise the same profession, of course, and attend the same functions: be they the formal state affairs of the host government, or the social merry-go-round of the National Day receptions each ambassador holds at his embassy. In many of these despatches the British ambassador will refer to ambassadors from other countries posted in the same capital as his ‘colleagues’, a term laden with meaning (the casual observer might have expected ‘competitors’ instead). In a way, therefore, the Corps functions like a trade association.
Protocol is easy to mock and diplomats mock it all the time, but in fact they do take it rather seriously – and not without reason. There is much formality in national and international affairs, and people need to know their place. Samuel Pepys in the 1660s describes an occasion when rivalry between the ambassadors from France and Spain over which sovereign – and thus which ambassador – had precedence at a British state occasion, led to two footmen being killed. Breaches of protocol are to be avoided at all costs lest they be misinterpreted as a deliberate slight against the ambassador and, through them, their Head of State.
Protocol has at its heart an acknowledgement of hierarchy, and diplomats use precedence as a straightforward way of organizing the corps without causing ugly scenes. For ambassadors, precedence is determined by the order in which they presented their credentials to the Head of State; on many social occasions whoever has been in post longest has precedence over all the others. This rule crops up to comic effect in the ‘Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase’ despatch. Of course behind closed doors states still jostle for power, and superpower diplomats pack a bigger punch than diplomats from small states, no matter how long they have been in post; but on the surface at least the system of precedence helps maintain order.
British diplomats within these pages come with a wide range of titles each marking a different degree of importance within the Office, and between the countries involved. Until the late twentieth century, for instance, Britain sent ministers, not ambassadors, to lesser powers, and they worked out of legations not embassies. The names and the titles always signified something: hence the various titles here – Consul-General or Chargé d’Affaires where the regime in power was not officially recognized by Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) or diplomatic relations were otherwise politically complicated or incomplete, or where a more junior diplomat was minding the shop in the absence of a fully fledged Head of Mission. Consuls are usually senior diplomats abroad whose function is to look after the interests of their own nationals who may need help in the country in question; and we sometimes maintain consuls in large cities that are not capitals, as well as in the capital itself. If you get robbed in Barcelona, it is to the British Consul that you should address your requests for help.
Where the host country is a member of the Commonwealth, the Head of Mission is called a high commissioner, not ambassador. The even more arcane label of Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary was used to indicate that a diplomat had full powers to negotiate treaties and the like in the name of the Queen. ‘His/Her Excellency’ is an honorific given to both ambassadors and high commissioners.
As an indication of how seriously issues of protocol are taken in diplomacy, papers declassified in January 2012 show how the Foreign Secretary and Britain’s Ambassador to France had to get involved when French officials complained about the relative size of the chairs proposed for President Giscard d’Estaing and Margaret Thatcher to sit on at a 1981 summit. The issue, raised ‘quite seriously’ by the French, was that Thatcher’s chair had arms, while the chair intended for the French President did not.
The reader will have gathered that ‘Protocol Department’ is really a ragbag of a category, by whose title we also include the logistics, the nuts and bolts, the whys and wherefores of a senior diplomat’s life abroad. Readers may, for a start, wonder how and in what form all these despatches reached London: a question I’ll try to answer now.
‘Needs must …’ and a few of the letters you’ll find in this book were sent as telegrams via the FCO’s very extensive Diplomatic Wireless Service. But the medium of choice was a proper, typed letter on pale blue Foreign Office crested paper, which reached London by the relatively secure means of the Diplomatic Bag. Let Humphrey Trevelyan in his book Diplomatic Channels (1973) describe a world before what he calls ‘the central ceremony of embassy life’ was elbowed aside by today’s electronic despatches. Lord Trevelyan had been Ambassador to Egypt (1955–6), Iraq (1958–61), the Soviet Union (1962–5) and High Commissioner in Aden (1967) before he wrote this:
The central ceremony of embassy life [is] … the ritual of the diplomatic bag. It is an expensive and complicated operation. Someone buried in a London attic tenuously connected with the Foreign Office takes a hundred retired service officers – or whatever the number is – pours in a bag of airline schedules, stirs vigorously and allows the mixture to simmer gently till ready. Enormous ingenuity is shown in routing the Queen’s messengers so as to cover the largest number of posts with the smallest number of colonels. In sensitive areas they travel in pairs so as to avoid being raped on the way. The rhythm of embassy life centres on the bag and it is advisable for outsiders to give the embassy a wide berth on bag day … it is not advisable, though not unknown, for an ambassador to use his diplomatic bag to enhance his salary by conducting profitable and illegal currency deals, or selling duty-free cigarettes on the black market … But the British are not guilty of these peccadilloes. A British head of chancery guards the virginity of his bag like a mid-Victorian chaperone at an attractive maiden’s first ball.
These bags, incidentally, have by custom been sewn, repaired and laundered in Wandsworth Prison in south-west London. Some of our closest allies have used our own facilities for the transmission of their bags. The Canadians have. By some ghastly error in 1991 Canadian diplomatic bags still full were sent for laundry. A British minister was called to the House of Commons to make an Emergency Statement on the fiasco – an occasion the gravity of which was undermined from the start by Mr Speaker’s commenting that some of the ‘Foreign Office’s briefs’ might have been in the laundry … but let the parliamentary sketch I wrote for The Times of 6 December that year speak for itself:
‘PUBLIC WASHING OF PRIVATE GRIEF’
Where will political fortune take Mark Lennox-Boyd – Home Secretary, Chancellor, who knows? But of this we may be sure: however famous he may become, nobody will ever forget that Thursday in December, way back in 1991, when he had to handle the Diplomatic Bag and Prison Laundry Affair.
Or it may be (merit is not always rewarded) that he sinks back into the friendly obscurity of the Tory backbenches, praised for his quiet but capable service, and knighted after twenty years. But of one thing we may be certain: though the rest be forgotten, everyone will remember how, as junior Foreign Office minister, he drew the short straw and manned the dispatch box for the Diplomatic Bag and Prison Laundry Statement. Readers may know what happened. Empty diplomatic bags are washed at Wandsworth Prison laundry. Some sent there recently were not empty.
And that’s all – except that the incident sparked the funniest Westminster episode for years. For much of twenty wonderful minutes the whole Chamber was quite literally helpless with laughter.
Mr Lennox-Boyd rose. To picture him, imagine a tall, slim, slightly dishevelled fellow in his early forties: the sort who, despite intelligence and breeding, might not notice that a collar was frayed, a shoe scuffed, or a shave overdue. A sallow man with dark hair, Mr Lennox-Boyd has a courteously hesitant manner and always looks vaguely preoccupied. If ever he should be subject to violent passions, he never permits them to disturb an air of quietly anxious concern. His mildly sorrowful look would equip him well for the profession of undertaker’s assistant in a cut-price funeral parlour. But he is a junior Foreign Office minister and the Dominion of Canada had lost their correspondence in the Wandsworth Prison laundromat, and the Opposition had found out, and Mr Lennox-Boyd had to explain. We couldn’t stop laughing.
‘Mr Speaker, I must get the answer out!’ he pleaded. Apparently the Canadians use our bags for some of their own traffic. ‘On this occasion the Canadian bags in question had been inadvertently included in such a consignment’ and sent to Wandsworth.
Containing what? Were secret by-pass plans for Moose Jaw now in the public domain? Were local election results in Saskatoon common knowledge among prison officers? Were the sensitive points of Belgo-Canadian relations a subject of gossip with bank-robbers, the details of Alcan’s balance sheet exposed to comment among recidivist kerb-crawlers? Struggling through gales of laughter, an expression of the utmost dolefulness on his worried face, Mr Lennox-Boyd staggered on …
‘Steps were immediately taken to recover the diplomatic mail and to investigate the incident.’ And, quite abruptly, he sat down.
What? Was that all? ‘More! More!’ the House shouted. But there was no more. Lennox-Boyd sat on the green bench, staring intensely at his shoes.
For Labour, Gerald Kaufman now pretended that this was a Home Office matter and he had expected the Home Secretary to handle the statement. Was it true, he asked, that ‘an interval of several days elapsed between the discovery and the search?’ How much material was still missing? How much of it was sensitive? With each new bogus question the laughter grew. The Speaker tried to stop it, insisting that this was ‘an important matter’ [cries of No!]. To no avail.
‘Can you say if a watch was in the missing material? What guarantees can you provide that other metal objects cannot find their ways into prison in the way that this did?’
The watch was a new element in the mystery. There were cries of ‘oooh!’ and ‘aah!’. Mr Lennox-Boyd’s feet became the objects of his renewed scrutiny. ‘Was the Home Secretary informed? Why has the Government not made this public?’ Mr Kaufman has a talent for dignifying the ludicrous, but even he could not keep a straight face now, and he sat down, grinning. ‘Is he aware,’ intoned Sir Peter Tapsell, ‘that Prince Metternich left Vienna disguised in a laundry basket? This incident is in the highest diplomatic traditions.’ Dared the minister smile? The faintest of grins hovered, briefly, on Mr Lennox-Boyd’s troubled face.
Such are the snakes and ladders of FCO logistics. By those who knew the ropes, the internal structures of diplomatic life tended to be taken for granted in the report and analysis that ambassadors framed for Foreign Secretaries. But their existence was understood and acknowledged, and underlies much that you won’t find in the despatches themselves. Take, for instance, the endless round of entertaining and being entertained our senior diplomats have to endure. ‘A diplomat these days’ (wrote Peter Ustinov) ‘is nothing but a headwaiter who’s allowed to sit down occasionally.’ When they complain about their demanding social calendar, diplomats know better than to expect much sympathy from outsiders. ‘Much rubbish,’ wrote Paul Wright, in his book A Brittle Glory (1986), ‘is written and talked about diplomatic entertainment:
… the alleged glamour of gold chairs, caviar, champagne and glittering jewels and of state secrets falling from the pretty but careless lips of the Prime Minister’s mistress. Much indignation is generated by the supposedly artificially high lifestyle necessarily adopted by our diplomats in order to suborn and seduce the foreigner … The reality is quite the contrary, as anyone will vouchsafe who has sat through innumerable meals, struggling to keep going conversations of stupendous dullness, or has hung about at cocktail parties clasping a sweaty glass and trying to avoid the Olympic-class bores of which the profession has its share.
Wright, who was Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo and later Lebanon (from where he wrote a lively First Impressions despatch – see pp. 287–8) nevertheless saw the utility of such encounters:
Shared social occasions, however painful, do in the end produce familiarity and, in some cases, intimacy … [T]he ice gets broken or, more important, is prevented from forming. Moreover, indiscretions have been known to filter through the noise and smoke and to have been recognised as important when discreetly reported back; or if deliberately let slip, as I have done on more than one occasion, have been picked up and acted upon in exactly the way hoped for. Much of this is possible on a social occasion, little of it elsewhere.
The cuisine can be as important as the conversation. ‘A good cook,’ comments François de Callières in his 1716 The Art of Diplomacy, ‘is often an excellent conciliator.’ And as Michael Shea describes in To Lie Abroad (1996), even when the conversation is all about the food, diplomacy can triumph.
My Ambassadress in Bonn in the late Sixties, the invincible Lady Roberts, at a time when Franco-British iciness over de Gaulle’s refusal to allow our entry to the EEC was at its most frozen, left a dinner party at the French Residence with the calculating words directed at her hostess: ‘Thank you for a wonderful evening, my dear. Such a pity about the soufflé.’ This was no mere catty remark. This was serious. The two ladies, and it reflected on their husbands’ relationships as well, hardly spoke again.
But mishaps occur in even the best-regulated of Residence dining rooms, as happened in the 1970s to Norman Reddaway, ambassador father to an ambassador son, David. In To Lie Abroad Shea explains that sometimes a culinary catastrophe can be turned, with the right butler, into an opportunity. David Reddaway of the British Embassy in Ankara recalls such an event in Warsaw when his father was Ambassador to Poland:
As the butler entered the room carrying a salver with three sizeable legs of lamb for the main course, he caught his toe on the carpet and fell full length. The legs of lamb rolled onto the floor. My mother watched ashen faced … as the butler gathered them up and disappeared. Uneasy conversation resumed … within ten minutes, however, the butler reappeared. He was carrying a tray with a number of roast duck, which he served with due aplomb to the gratified amazement of the guests. As soon as the guests had left, my mother … asked the butler to explain the miracle … the answer was simple. The Swedish Ambassador, who lived next door, had also been giving a dinner that evening; and his cook had been kind enough to let our household serve their duck. What … had the Swedes eaten instead? ‘Why,’ replied the butler without batting an eyelid, ‘they had our lamb.’
The challenges of managing domestic staff in the lives of ambassadors and spouses have been an iceberg of which but a tip surfaces in diplomatic archives. The experience of Sir William Hayter, Second Secretary in Shanghai, 1938–40 (described in To Lie Abroad), is an indication:
[Sir William and Lady Hayter had an] enormous staff, the No. 1 boy and No. 2 boy, the cook and the learner cook, the amah, the coolie, the gardener, the chauffeur, most of them with large families (the No. 1 boy had two wives). Quei, the No. 1 boy, was a remarkable character. He had been the head servant in the flagship of the flotilla of British gun-boats which patrolled the Yangtse. He had found his position an excellent one for organising opium-smuggling up and down the river. When this was detected he was dismissed, whereupon he withdrew all Chinese labour from the gun-boats, thus effectively immobilizing them. ‘Face’ clearly precluded his re-employment in the flagship, but was saved by the provision of a suitable situation for him in the Embassy, which being immobile provided less scope for opium-smuggling.
No better description of a career, domestic as well as political, in the Diplomatic Service, will be found than that captured in the last five words of a commentary by Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen, whose despatch from the Baltic States is on pp. 90–94. ‘This is,’ he says:
… the most unfaithful of careers. At comparatively regular intervals the diplomat is called upon to express simultaneously his immeasurable grief at leaving his old post and his unlimited joy on arriving at his new one. I had to express these twin sentiments on one occasion in the presence of natives of both … Life (for diplomats) is … a kind of gilded vagabondage.
‘A kind of gilded vagabondage’: diplomatic prose of the highest order. Sir Hughe’s observations take us neatly to the second and third chapters of this book. ‘First Impressions’ means exactly that; and is the name the Office itself gave to the despatch which by tradition a new ambassador sent back not too long after arriving. Such despatches are, as Sir John Russell put it, ‘an essentially subjective account of how the country first strikes the writer’. In the 1960s Russell was himself a writer of brilliant if rather wordy despatches – among his FCO contemporaries we might call him the Tolstoy of the telegram age.
The best First Impressions have much in common with the best travel-writing. These despatches were sent, by custom, after about three months in a new post. That was thought long enough for the ambassador to have taken a good look and formed an initial opinion of the principal personalities – but not so long that by the time pen was set to paper the authenticity of the first response would have faded, to be replaced by less intuitive judgement.
Unlike the now-banned valedictory, First Impressions despatches are still sent today. In fact, I understand that they thrive, not least because the current Foreign Secretary, William Hague, apparently has an appetite for frank diplomatic reporting in considered prose rather than just sofa-based remark. (Mr Hague told me in 2011 that on becoming Foreign Secretary he had inquired whether the ban of valedictories could be lifted, and the missive perhaps be given better protection, where appropriate, against exposure. The answer had been that it could not.)
Where the valedictory despatch was the parting shot, an ambassador’s first despatch was his opening salvo: a chance to set the agenda, to set the parameters of his post, to define what success and failure would look like in the context of his new posting and before embarking on his work; an opportunity to put his stamp on the role before others did it for him.
‘I had better write this now’ is a sentiment frequently expressed in these despatches, the author concerned his First Impressions might become considered or second thoughts unless he commits them quickly to paper. It’s a sentiment that implies (I think usefully) that lack of experience, lack of familiarity, has a value all in itself: a fresh pair of eyes on the problem. Today’s business argot has a term for people like this: ‘valuable virgins’.
Not all First Impressions are of value for their naivety, however. Some of the country studies in this collection are astonishingly considered and knowledgeable – read, for example, Sir John Pilcher’s erudite despatch from Tokyo on pp. 159–69.
Revealingly, ambassadors often seem to try to get the measure of their new post by comparing it to the post from which they’ve just shipped out. The FCO likes to be even-handed in the way it distributes assignments: everyone takes a turn and everyone gets their share of both tough and cushy posts; so a couple of years listening to gunfire outside the residency in Freetown might earn you some time in tranquil Luxembourg for your next post. And vice versa. ‘After pacifist, neutral, affluent, Socialist, birth-controlled Sweden,’ writes Ian MacKenzie (p. 173), ‘Korea presents an extreme contrast. Magpies are about the only thing the two countries have in common’). Maurice Eaden in Karachi (pp. 321–3) finds surprising parallels between war-torn Pakistan and sleepy Belgium.
More than any other diplomatic missives, except perhaps valedictories, First Impressions stand a decent chance of reaching the desks of ministers. But their authors know how little time politicians have to spare and how many other reports and priorities their despatch competes with in the minister’s red box. So they deploy descriptive colour as a device, like a peacock’s tail, to draw the audience in. The reader hooked, the despatch then invariably moves on to matters more profound, grown-up – and, all too often, dull. For the benefit of our readers, in researching and editing these despatches we have tried to excise the seriously boring bits while keeping the bait. Many entries are in fact short extracts from within despatches, as opposed to abridged versions. The very best writers here, however, managed to make even their serious writing a pleasure to read – and plenty of these make their way into the book. We’ve given the longer entries due prominence by including the letter-headings as they appeared in the original despatch, but we’ve omitted these from the shorter entries. Further inconsistencies in the way despatches appear on the page stem from periodic advances in the communications technology ambassadors used to write them (among which email stands out as a particularly retrograde step, aesthetically speaking).
Finally it’s worth noting that, as he or she drafts a First Impressions despatch, a new ambassador knows there’s a good chance reactions will be read with an open mind: by senior colleagues and perhaps ministers keen to see what the new ambassador makes of a posting, and whether they seem to be shaping up to the task. Once an ambassador gets a reputation – as being anti- or pro-French, for instance, labels which both have been pinned frequently on British ambassadors in Paris over the years – they know that that reputation will become a prism through which their subsequent analysis will be interpreted. So they try hard to make their first unclouded effort hit the target. And, as you will see, it shows.
‘Envoi’ was a term of art in diplomatic prose. In poetry an envoi is a short stanza at the end used either to address the reader or to comment on the preceding verses. In valedictory despatches some ambassadors would confine their outspokenness to this final section, having devoted the remainder to more serious, immediate and matter-of-fact commentary on policy issues relating to the post they were departing. Then, finally, they would (variously) let fly, shed a metaphorical tear, shake a wise head or try to sum up what it had all meant to him or her. It’s an opportunity, too, for ambassadors to give their successors some useful advice: at its best a distillation of wisdom acquired in post; and at any rate a few helpful hints on the obvious pitfalls; whom and what to cultivate; and whom and what to avoid.
In Parting Shots we may have deluded ourselves that we had all but exhausted the FCO’s treasury of valedictory despatches. Not so. More were recommended to us and Andrew Bryson’s further searches through both the National Archives and Freedom of Information uncovered some nuggets. Not all confined their un-pulled punches to a few paragraphs of Envoi at the end.
From Stockholm our outgoing ambassador, Sir Jeffrey Petersen, drew a portrait of 1980’s Sweden as ‘a leisured, antiseptic society’ (p. 352). Writing in the same year our man in Oslo, Sir Archie Lamb, had plainly hated Norway (pp. 355–6). Cambodia (concluded Sir Leslie Fielding, in a marvellous phrase in 1966) was ‘more of a retinal sensation than a coherent picture’ (p. 362). Baroness Park, leaving Hanoi in 1970 as Consul-General (she was actually a very senior spy), observed that to Vietnamese Communists, ‘some pigs [are] more equal than others’ (p. 373).
Our final despatch is from the Vatican. Geoffrey Crossley, departing both the Holy See as HM Envoy Extraordinary in 1980, and a lifetime’s career as a diplomat, tries to sum it all up.
He does so, as do almost all the diplomats whose essays follow, better than I can. So without further ado, read on.
Matthew Parris
Derbyshire
September 2012