Ever The Diplomat

Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin

SHERARD COWPER-COLES

Dedication

For Harry, Rupert, Minna, Freddy, Myles and Louise

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

List of Illustrations

Preface

Chapter 1 - The Third Room

Chapter 2 - School for Spies

Chapter 3 - Death on the Nile

Chapter 4 - Immortal Junior Typist

Chapter 5 - Potomac Fever

Chapter 6 - Back in the Office

Chapter 7 - Chinese Take-Away

Chapter 8 - Death on the Seine

Chapter 9 - The Gnome Secretary

Chapter 10 - Poppies of Palestine

Chapter 11 - In the Heart of Arabia

Chapter 12 - Afghan Afterword

Chapter 13 - Envoi

Index

Picture Section

Also by Sherard Cowper-Coles

Copyright

About the Publisher

List of Illustrations

FCO Letter of Appointment

‘Thatcher’s Thesaurus’

Middle East Centre for Arab Studies. Photograph by a local Lebanese photographer

TRH The Prince and Princess of Wales, and President and Mrs Sadat. Photograph by a member of the crew of HM Yacht Britannia

Foreign Office Planning Staff. © Brian Harris/The Times/NI Syndication

Permanent Under Secretary’s office. Photograph by an FCO photographer

Congressman Kennedy. Photograph by a member of his staff

Mrs Thatcher. Photograph by a member of Blair House staff

Governor Patten. © Roger Hutchings/In Pictures/Corbis

Hong Kong Handover Ceremony. © Reuters/Jason Reed

President’s House, Jerusalem. Photograph by a member of the President’s staff

Crown Prince Abdullah, the Prince of Wales and the author. Photograph by a Saudi court photographer

Crown Prince Abdullah, Prime Minister and the author. Photograph by a Saudi court photographer

All other photographs are from the author’s private collection and were taken either by him or by friends, colleagues or family members

Preface

This book is really a long love letter to an institution – the Foreign Office – for which I worked for some three decades. From the age of twenty-two until I was fifty-five, I was a British diplomat. Formally, I was a member of Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, with a commission from the Queen. But for me diplomacy was much more than a job, or even a profession: it was my way of life. It was what I got up for in the morning, and what I went to sleep at night thinking about. For thirty-three years, I looked forward almost every working day to going into the office, or embassy, or wherever work took me. I was never bored. And I didn’t just enjoy being a diplomat. I also believed that what I did as a diplomat mattered in small but important ways. From Ireland to Israel, and Arabia to Afghanistan, in Paris or Washington, in long hours in London worrying about Europe’s future or Hong Kong after the handover, I tried as a minor cog in HMG’s foreign policy machine to make the world work better. I met the people who helped or hindered our efforts. I went to the places where foreign policy happened. I cared about the issues. And at the end of it all I wanted to share some of the highlights and low points, as I remembered them. I wanted to give the reader a flavour of what diplomats really do, and of what being a diplomat actually feels like. But mostly I wanted to show why I had enjoyed it all so much.

I kept no proper diary. The random private papers I did keep are now buried beyond easy recovery in barns and attics in Britain and France. I have made no use of official documents. But what I do have is memories: plenty of them, good and bad, of the tough times and the bright spots, of the fun I had, but also of the horrors I witnessed and of the mistakes we made. Of the people too, conscientious mostly, committed and often courageous, but some charlatans as well and others with more reptilian qualities. I have set down, place by place, post by post, the best and worst of those memories. All are the truth as I remember it, but not always the whole truth. The story stops at the edge of private turmoil. It alludes only in passing to the disreputable deal-making over top jobs that led me to choose early retirement, five years sooner than expected.

As with my first book, Cables from Kabul,* I have asked myself whether publishing an account of my experiences so soon after I left the public service was consistent with my obligations to my former employer. But Diplomatic Service Regulations state that ‘The FCO welcomes debate on foreign policy … The FCO recognises that there is a public interest in allowing former officials to write accounts of their time in government. These contributions can help public understanding and debate … there is no ban on former members of the Diplomatic Service writing their memoirs … but obligations of confidentiality remain …’

Like Cables, this book is the fruit of a conversation with my future agent, Caroline Michel, at a dinner at the Irish Embassy in London in 2009. It was Caroline who first suggested that I had a book or two in me. It was she who told me to set down my memories and share them. I shall be forever grateful to her for sticking so faithfully to that judgement.

I am also immensely grateful to the team at HarperPress who have given such enthusiastic and wholly professional support to this project: in particular my editor and friend, Martin Redfern, a diplomat if ever there was one, whose quiet judgement has often saved me from error, and who has driven the whole thing forward with determination and discrimination; to project editor Kate Tolley for putting the book together with efficiency and taste; and to Helen Ellis, publicist sans pareil, Minna Fry and the whole of the HarperPress gang.

I owe my research assistant, Max Benitz, a particular debt of gratitude for his hard work in establishing what really happened, in tracking down key documents or photographs, and in offering many excellent suggestions, all done with remarkable accuracy and to time. I have also been extraordinarily lucky in my copy-editor, Peter James, an Oxford contemporary, and in having had the help of the king of indexers, Douglas Matthews.

Two people have given me exceptional support and encouragement as I conceived and wrote this book: my friend Charles Richards and my wife Jasmine. I must also thank a number of former colleagues, including Nigel Cox and Andrew Patrick, for help and suggestions with different parts of the text. As with Cables from Kabul, we have had outstanding help and support from the Cabinet Office in clearing the text around Whitehall: I am very appreciative.

The mistakes which remain are my responsibility alone.

Ealing, July 2012

Chapter 1

The Third Room

The walk down Whitehall, from Trafalgar Square to the vast Italianate palazzo of the Foreign Office, seemed so long. I passed the statues of Sir Walter Raleigh and the generals* on the green in front of the Ministry of Defence with hardly a glance in their direction. I ignored the Cenotaph. My stomach was knotted with excited dread. I was worried I would be late. It was just like starting at a new school, right down to my new suit and shoes, my empty briefcase and my freshly filled fountain pen.

Nervously, I turned right down King Charles Street, under the bridge which joins in stone but not in style the two great departments of the British state – the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and HM Treasury – then right again, through the main-entrance arch of the Foreign Office. A single security guard waved me in across the quadrangle, to the steps in the far left-hand corner. Up I climbed, through the great double doors. Two grand ladies peered down from behind a high counter. I told them that I was a newly appointed member of the Diplomatic Service. I had been instructed to report by 10 a.m. to the Recruitment Section of the Personnel Policy Department. Gently they told me that I had come to the wrong place. ‘PPD’ was across the other side of Whitehall, in the Curtis Green building (now Cannon Row police station). If I didn’t hurry, I would be late. More nervous than ever, I retraced my steps, and eventually found the official whom I had been told to see.

The formal ‘fast stream’ induction course was not until the following month, and lasted only two weeks: we were taught not much more than how to use the Foreign Office telephone directory. But four members of the 1977 entry of seventeen young diplomats had been told to start work earlier. After minimal formalities, we were led back across Whitehall, and taken to our new departments in the labyrinth still known formally as the Old Public Offices. The Foreign Office believed in on-the-job training.

It was Monday 22 August 1977, and I had been told that I had been accepted into the Diplomatic Service only in April that year. I had graduated from Oxford in June. In July, out of the blue, had come a letter saying that I had been appointed desk officer for Ireland in the FCO’s Republic of Ireland Department. I was needed two weeks earlier than the official start date. I asked how I should prepare. Read three books, I was told: Ireland since the Famine* by the Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, F. S. L. Lyons; Tim Pat Coogan’s history of the IRA;† and, best of all, Robert Kee’s two-volume history of Irish nationalism, The Green Flag.‡ The few brief weeks between being a student and having a grown-up job had passed in a flash, mainly on my uncles’ farm in Devon. I immersed myself in the emotion-filled history of Britain’s engagement with Ireland. In my mind’s eager eye, deepest Devon became rural Ireland. I could hardly believe my luck: I was being paid to think about issues and events in which I would anyway have taken an interest. And I had learned the first and last lesson of diplomacy: know your history. It had been a narrow escape – had I not passed the Foreign Office selection process, I might instead have become a barrister or a merchant banker.

That selection process had had its moments. Sitting the initial Qualifying Tests with hundreds of others in Oxford’s cavernous Examination Schools had felt like retaking the Eleven-plus – with the same rather arbitrary pattern of success and failure. Some very bright people had fallen at that first fence, while some notorious dunces had somehow scraped through. The next stage was a series of extended interviews and of subjective and objective tests – the infamous ‘country-house weekend’, in a nondescript office block, long since demolished, just off Trafalgar Square. It was based on the techniques Britain had used in wartime to find capable officers, and it worked. The interview with the psychologist felt a bit weird. The invitation to ‘chat among yourselves’ while we were observed was even more artificial. But writing descriptions of oneself by a best friend and by a worst enemy was fun. So, in a masochistic way, was the Final Selection Board, in front of a group of grand officials high up over Horse Guards Parade. Less fun was the Positive Vetting. A creepy former Palestine Police officer asked if I had ever been drunk or in debt, and did not believe me when I said I had never taken drugs. A written questionnaire enquired whether I kept a radio transmitter, and how many of my friends were Communists (‘For the purpose of this form, the term “Communist” is taken to include the term “Fascist”’) – quite a few I had to say. Somehow I got through.

That first week in the Foreign Office began on a high note. My Oxford contemporary Bobby McDonagh* had just started in the Irish Foreign Ministry at Iveagh House in Dublin. I decided I had to ring him up, to tell him that I was the new Desk Officer for his country in London. ‘Guess what, Bobby,’ I said proudly, ‘I have been appointed desk officer for Ireland.’ ‘Aw, that’s nuthin’,’ boasted Bobby, in his seductive Irish accent. ‘I’m the Desk Officer for the whole of Africa and Asia.’ It was a good introduction to the blarney and bravado of one of the world’s smaller but more effective foreign services.

A second encounter was harder work. The First Secretary at the Irish Embassy in London, Dick O’Brien, invited me to lunch, at the Gay Hussar in Greek Street. I remember little of what was said at the lunch – although a great deal was said, mainly by Dick. As we ranged back over the eight years since the Troubles had flared up again, and far back beyond that, Dick wouldn’t concede a single point: it was good that I had studied my history and had taken a close interest in Northern Ireland ever since British troops had been put back on the streets in August 1969. I was flattered that Dick, an experienced first secretary, should have taken me, a newly appointed third secretary with no diplomatic experience, even half seriously. I suddenly realised that, in the eyes of those with whom I was dealing professionally, my job – my formal position and title – counted for more than I thought they did, or necessarily should. I was now an official representative of my country and my government. What I said or did would be seen or heard in that light. Diplomatic titles, the elaborate protocols of international intercourse, concealed – and eased – substantive exchanges, of information and opinion.

After a good lunch with plenty of wine, Dick insisted on three brandies each. I staggered back into King Charles Street at four in the afternoon, incapable of further work. If this was diplomatic entertainment, I was not sure how much of it I could take.

But I had a real job to do. As what was then called a ‘Grade 8’ new entrant, a third secretary, I was taking over from an experienced first secretary, Alan Goulty, an Arabist in his early thirties with several overseas postings under his belt. I would have to work hard to fill his shoes. Alan taught me straight away the two unwritten rules of the Foreign Office. The first – never knock on any doors – is meant to reflect complete trust among diplomats, but still leads to many embarrassing incidents. The second – call everyone by his or her first name, except ministers, ambassadors and the Permanent Under Secretary – seemed revolutionary in 1977: at twenty-two, I had great difficulty in addressing a fifty-nine-year-old deputy under secretary as ‘Antony’, let alone ‘Tony’. The only other occupant of my first office, sitting opposite me, was a diplomat even more experienced than Alan Goulty. Michael Hodge had joined the Prison Commission as a clerk, but, having proved himself at policy work, had transferred after only a year to the Foreign Service (as it was then) as a junior diplomat. I dealt with Ireland (or the Republic of Ireland as the Diplomatic Service formbook taught us to call it: ‘Irish Republic’ implied a republic embracing the whole island). Michael handled overseas interest in Northern Ireland – mainly forty million Americans claiming Irish descent. Michael gave me more wise advice than he will ever remember, about drafting, about what he called officemanship, about good and bad postings, and about good and bad ambassadors. As an incentive to stay the course, Michael shared his memories of foreign service, ranging from repatriating, in a shoe box, the remains of a British citizen killed in Uganda whose cremation Michael had had to perform, to travelling the Gulf as personal assistant to the Political Resident, Sir Geoffrey Arthur, during the last year – 1971 – of Britain’s quasi-colonial presence there.

Together, Michael and I made up what was called the ‘Third Room’ of the standard Foreign Office political department of the time. In the hierarchy above us, in rooms of their own (presumably the second and first rooms, though we never used the term), sat the Assistant (or deputy head of the department) and the Head of Department.

A fourth room contained two alarmingly efficient Foreign Office secretaries. Both took shorthand, but not from someone as junior as me. In a fifth and final room two clerks slaved away, carefully registering all the department’s papers, before placing them on files established according to a centralised system overseen by the Chief Registrar of the Foreign Office – the high priest of the cult of the file. Apart from the fact that most, but by no means all, papers were now typed, little can have changed since Victorian times.

I had my first lesson in pushing paper: the approved way to attach one paper to another was to punch a hole in the top left-hand corner of each, half an inch in from the top and side, and then to pass a tag through the holes. Paperclips become detached, or attached to the wrong papers; staples are a fiddle to unpick. In the Foreign Office then, as now, the India tag, aka the Treasury tag, ruled supreme: two small metal, later plastic, bars, joined by a miniature red cord. With the India tag went the key instrument of bureaucratic order: the hole punch – always in short supply, often purloined, never to be let out of sight, the only property I have ever ‘liberated’ from the Foreign Office.

My first Assistant (and therefore boss) was a kind and careful official, Peter Wallis, who had come to the Foreign Office via HM Customs & Excise. He took endless trouble to improve my drafts. We used special blue drafting paper, with wide margins for corrections. In those leisurely days, almost everything we wrote was prepared first in draft, in type or handwriting. Most serious pieces of work on Britain’s relations with Ireland started on my desk, as a draft by me. As that draft moved up the chain, it would change beyond recognition. But, as the new boy in the Department, I was the bureaucratic focus for Britain’s bilateral relationship with Ireland. I was the continuity person, the official responsible for knowing which plates we had in the air at any one time, and for keeping them there. It was at once exhilarating and intimidating. After university, the most difficult thing, by far, was dealing with a dozen real problems at once, rather than the single subject of that week’s essay.

We were told that the core of our job was influencing foreigners, in the British interest. In order to do so, we needed first to understand them, and then to put our messages in terms that would have the best chance of being absorbed and acted upon by those we were trying to persuade to do what HMG wanted them to do. Clear thinking equalled clear writing. And clear writing was most effective in explaining to ministers in London the realities of any particular foreign policy challenge, and of ensuring that the instructions resulting from our analysis had some effect. All this explained why the Foreign Office attached so much importance to ‘drafting’, and why, in my first job in London, and my second in Cairo, each of my bosses took such trouble to go through my drafts and improve them. And at the heart of all this – the lifeblood of any decent diplomatic machine – was and is the telegram: a collective classified message, as tautly drafted as possible, sent from overseas posts to London, and vice versa.

That was why in the autumn of 1977 we new entrants to the Diplomatic Service were told, only half jokingly, that, like the fountains in Trafalgar Square, Foreign Office officials operated only from ten till six. We didn’t need to arrive in King Charles Street before ten o’clock, because that gave time for the distribution, around the Office and Whitehall, of the overnight telegram traffic pouring into London via the former Diplomatic Wireless Service station at Hanslope Park, near Milton Keynes. The first thing we did each morning was read the telegrams.

I soon learned that Foreign Office life is a continual merry-go-round of postings, for yourself and for your colleagues. After only a few weeks Peter Wallis was posted, on promotion, to Ankara. He was succeeded by one of the most accomplished eccentrics of the Foreign Office of that time – an official who was anything but careful.

Trevor Mound was a minor hero to my generation in the Foreign Office. In idiosyncratic fashion, he encapsulated one of the attributes the writer and diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson had said were essential for success in diplomacy: a sense of proportion, but leavened with a sense of humour. Trevor never ever panicked. And he always saw the funny, often absurd, side of everything.

The son of a small Worcestershire farmer, Trevor had joined the Army as a private soldier without going to university. He had begun in the Guards, but before long he had been commissioned into the Parachute Regiment. Well over six feet tall, he had the erect bearing of the Foot Guard he had once been. A long thin face was framed by a sweep of reddish hair on top, and a small pointed ginger beard at the bottom, set off by twinkling blue eyes and an ever present smile. He could easily have been a late-nineteenth-century French novelist-adventurer. He was always immaculately turned out, in hand-made black jodhpur boots and deep-cut three-piece suits, with all sorts of extra features, including more pockets than anyone could ever use, and cuff buttons that really undid. Every day Trevor wore a cream silk shirt and a blue-red-blue Brigade tie, even though most of his military service had in fact been with the Paras. He had an OBE after his name, but would never say for what. There was an air of charmingly seductive mystery about him. Much married (or so he liked us to think), he loved women, fine wine and fun.

Trevor had joined the Diplomatic Service late, as a retired major. He had had a succession of tough postings, culminating in Beirut as we closed the Embassy at the height of the Lebanese Civil War. The last telegram Trevor had received in Beirut before he smashed up the cipher machine with the hammer provided in every embassy for just that purpose had been ‘You are instructed to proceed with closing down the Embassy in accordance with Volume 12 of Diplomatic Service Procedure.’ His reply to London had been ‘DSP already incinerated. But shutting down any way. Signed Mound.’

Back in London, financial pressures, including multiple alimony payments, had obliged Trevor to let out his own house and live in the top floor of the Foreign Office building as a resident clerk. In return for a reasonably generous allowance, and a one-bedroom flat in SW1, with stunning views over St James’s Park, resident clerks were expected to man the phones – and monitor the overnight telegram traffic – one night a week, and one weekend in six. Trevor used often to invite me up to his eyrie after work, for gin and tonic and a gossip. He used his flat to entertain generously and widely. With that in mind, he had persuaded the Foreign Office Home Estates Department that his bad back – the result, he said, of an awkward parachute landing in Malaya – required that a double bed be installed in his bedroom in the Clerkery, at some expense, and even greater effort for the workmen obliged to propel the bed up the narrow staircase. Sometimes Trevor would invite his latest ‘lady friend’ (as he used to call them) and any other guests to climb, quite illegally, out of the window of the Clerkery, to enjoy a drink on the roof of the Foreign Office, as the sun went down behind Buckingham Palace at the other end of the Park.

Over those talks with Trevor, I learned much about diplomatic life. The Army had trained him as a Cantonese speaker, although, when the Foreign Office had subjected him to its language-aptitude test on joining, he had been judged incapable of learning any foreign language. But Trevor’s first diplomatic love was China, and it was in Shanghai that he and I would next meet, eight years later. Perhaps because of his Chinese, Trevor’s English handwriting resembled an exotic, almost cuneiform, script. His written expression was anyway economical in the extreme. At least decrypting his written comments in the margins of my drafts gave me a chance to see him and talk. Trevor offered several pieces of career advice. One was that, if you wanted to rise to the top of ‘the Office’ (as he always called it), spend as little time as possible in distant or dangerous postings. Colleagues in faraway embassies were soon forgotten, accidentally or deliberately. It was naive to think that the reward for a tough posting would be a plum one. The ambitious knew that walking the corridors in Whitehall or in the Brussels near-abroad did far more for one’s career than working the far bazaars of Asia, Africa or Latin America. It was advice that Trevor, with his love of China, did not himself follow. He ended his career, serenely happy, as consul-general in Marseilles, untroubled by the anxious ambition that ate away at so many others. Trevor showed that striving too hard in the Diplomatic Service did not always lead to the best postings. In fact, as he once observed on seeing a hopeless colleague sent to govern a balmy Caribbean island, ours was a good service in which to fail.

Another piece of Trevor’s advice I also followed only partially. Abroad, Trevor said, as the British representative, one had to cut a dash. That meant always wearing a hat, so as to stand out from the crowd of other diplomats.

None of his colleagues would have wanted to describe Trevor as lazy. But he didn’t believe in exerting more effort than was strictly necessary to get the job done. The time saved from this remarkable economy of effort was devoted to various good causes: lunch, an early drink after work, and, in the Office, the composition of limericks. One of the best celebrated the IRA ‘dirty protests’ in HM Prison Maze and the involvement of the Roman Catholic Primate of All Ireland, Cardinal Ó Fiaich (correctly pronounced O’Fee). One couplet had the Cardinal’s name rhyming with ‘dabbling in IRA muck’.

Trevor’s boss, and the Head of our little department, could hardly have been more different. Philip Mallet had been educated at Winchester and Balliol. He bore the burden of at least two immensely distinguished forebears in the public service: his father, Sir Victor Mallet, had ended his career as ambassador to Rome, while a cousin, Sir Louis Mallet, had served as permanent under secretary of state for India. He must have complained at having been obliged to accept a green young third secretary as his main desk officer. At first sight, Philip was Foreign Office premier grand cru. In my first week, he took me to lunch at his club in St James’s. I must have passed the test, because he later included me in the dinners he gave for foreign diplomats at his house in Chelsea. In the autumn, he would appear on Monday mornings with apples for us all from his orchards in Kent.

But, despite his ancestry, or perhaps because of it, Philip and the Office had never quite got on as they should have done. He was too well mannered to complain, but one could see that he had not had the promotion his talent deserved. I was too inexperienced to understand quite why: he worked hard, his judgement was good and his understanding of Irish issues profound. I suspect it was something to do with his manner, and perhaps self-confidence. He was particularly upset when an especially high-handed minute from the Foreign Secretary’s office landed on his desk. Usually, notes from the Foreign Secretary’s private secretaries were models of periphrastic circumlocution: ‘The Secretary of State was grateful for your advice, but wonders whether it would be possible to examine an alternative …’ But that wasn’t the style of the new young Foreign Secretary, Dr David Owen. The memorandum to Mallet read, rather brutally, something like: ‘The Secretary of State has seen your minute, and does not like this advice at all …’

In a sardonic way, Philip saw the funny side of it. After the Republic of Ireland Department, his final posting would be as high commissioner to Guyana. He said that his main contribution in Georgetown had been to redraft the post’s fire regulations.

Ireland’s unique position in Britain’s foreign relations made it a close to ideal subject on which to work while learning diplomacy by doing. Britain’s first colony, Ireland was now an independent state as well as a member of what was then known as the European Economic Community. We had a complicated bilateral relationship to manage, as well as the business of co-ordinating our approach to European issues, notably the Common Agricultural Policy. But everything was overshadowed by the problem of Northern Ireland, and the search for a solution following the breakdown of the Sunningdale process* in 1974.

The foundations of good diplomacy are honest reporting and clear analysis. Our Embassy in Dublin sent back a stream of reports, by telegram and, twice weekly, in the diplomatic bags carried by the Queen’s Messengers back and forth across the Irish Sea. The opening of the bag in London always brought a flood of letters from the Dublin Chancery (or political section), covering many different aspects of Irish politics, the Irish economy and Irish society. The Ambassador, Sir Robin Haydon, would send private letters, typed on blue Foreign Office airmail paper in the large typeface then reserved for ambassadors, reporting, often in amusing terms, his encounters with Irish ministers and senior officials. We read all the main Irish papers and magazines. I took the Irish Times each day, and came to love it. Once I was made a temporary Queen’s Messenger, with a special passport on a folded sheet of vellum, and sent to Dublin with the diplomatic bag. I was so proud to be sitting at the front of the BA flight, beside me the white canvas mailbag, on which was stencilled in black the legend ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Diplomatic Service’.

I made my first acquaintance with the world of secret intelligence. We received a steady flow of intelligence reports, of varying quality. Some were gold dust, real secrets, but many were little more than gossip, which we would sooner or later have picked up anyway. Others had more comedy than political value. One reported solemnly on a conversation between two IRA men, during which one managed to set himself on fire as they talked. The report’s editor prissily inserted ‘[expletive deleted]’ more than a dozen times, but we could guess what ‘Seamus’ had been saying. Another revealed that a senior Irish diplomat had visited Belfast disguised as a priest, to find out what was happening there.

Like every other British embassy, the Chancery in Dublin kept, and regularly updated, a folder of Leading Personality Reports on key figures in Irish life. Each individual entry was in a set format, with basic biographical information, followed by an account of the subject’s career, and ending with comment and some more personal details. Later much of the juicy stuff was removed, after Mrs Thatcher, as prime minister, complained that Foreign Office LPRs were too gossipy. In 1977, however, it was still possible to record that one senior Irish minister had ‘an unconventional method of mounting a horse’.

Another great advantage of being trained while working on Ireland was that the job involved dealing with much of Whitehall beyond the Foreign Office. The Home Office, for example, was concerned with the operation of the Common Travel Area. The Department of Energy was interested in talking to Ireland about oil and gas in the Irish Sea. The Department of the Environment was anxious to reassure Ireland about discharges from the Sellafield nuclear-waste processing plant in Cumbria. The Ministry of Agriculture had many exchanges on Irish farming issues, both bilaterally and in the context of the European Community. At that time the President of the British Friesian Cattle Society was an Irish priest.

A symptom of the intimate complexity of the relationship was the problem of desertions decades earlier by Irish citizens who had enlisted in the British Army. The Special Branch at Dover would run anti-terrorist checks on lorry drivers passing through the port. Almost every week, or so it seemed, their records would show that twenty or thirty years earlier Sean Higgins (or whoever it was) had deserted from one of the British Army’s Irish regiments. Although an Irish citizen, as a deserter he was subject to British military law, and was immediately transferred to the custody of the Royal Military Police. With his lorry abandoned at Dover, a horrified middle-aged Irishman would then be taken to the depot of his parent regiment, often many miles away, formally to receive a dishonourable discharge. In the meantime, his firm or family would have alerted the Irish Consulate in London, who would ask me to find out what was going on. It was a small but painful hangover from history.

But in 1977 the government departments most concerned with Irish issues were the Northern Ireland Office and, to a lesser extent, the Ministry of Defence. Dealing with these two very different departments was an invaluable experience. The NIO had been formed only in 1972, when the Government in London had imposed direct rule on Northern Ireland. It was composed, in a hurry, of able and dedicated officials from across Whitehall, mainly from the Home Office, but also from the FCO and elsewhere. With bases in London and Belfast, the NIO’s purpose was to work itself out of existence, by restoring devolved government to Ulster. The whole NIO was thus dedicated to the proposition that Northern Ireland needed a political solution, and that a security-only approach would never be enough. The failure of the Sunningdale process had been a huge setback. It had been launched by Ted Heath’s Conservative Government in 1973, but had collapsed thanks largely to the new Labour Government’s unwillingness to face down the Ulster Workers’ Council strike the following year. But even then everyone knew that, as proved to be the case twenty years later, the eventual solution would be on the broad lines of Sunningdale: power-sharing in Northern Ireland, with an ‘Irish dimension’ – that is, recognition that Dublin should have a benign role in overseeing the governance of the six counties of Ulster. As the Social Democratic and Labour Party MP Seamus Mallon was to remark in 1998, the Good Friday Agreement of that year was ‘Sunningdale for slow learners’.

The NIO’s officials – and most of its better ministers – never lost their humane and intelligent vision of how the conflict would, and did, end. And many of them came to love Ulster, and its rich landscapes and cultures. At the same time, they understood that the Nationalist minority’s aspirations had to be accommodated politically in an all-Ireland arrangement which took account of the wish of the Protestant communities – the majority in Northern Ireland, a minority in the whole island of Ireland – to remain part of the United Kingdom.

The Ministry of Defence was rather different. A vast military–civil bureaucratic machine, it had a divided population. On the one hand, enthusiastic officers from all three armed services, socially and intellectually confident but taken temporarily from what they regarded as proper soldiering to ‘drive a desk’ in Whitehall, as a necessary stage of purgatory on the military cursus honorum. On the other hand, career MOD civil servants, generally better educated, at senior levels more intellectually gifted than their colleagues in the uniformed branch, but less well paid and less socially ostentatious. It was, and is, an uneasy union, that works, more or less, provided there is clear direction from the politicians at the top, and from the most senior civil servants who support them.

Working on Ireland also acquainted me with civil servants from shadowier parts of Whitehall: not just the smooth extroverts of MI6 (or Secret Intelligence Service, SIS), many of whom operated under Foreign Office cover, but also the quieter, somewhat more stolid (and probably therefore more reliable) operatives of MI5 (or the Security Service), as well as the frighteningly clever, and often rather geekish, introverts of Government Communications Headquarters (usually known as GCHQ). All three agencies ran courses to present their wares to new entrants to the Diplomatic Service. ‘Six’ came across as a bit too slick. ‘Five’ or ‘Box 500’ (after the PO Box they used) seemed more conservative: every one of our lecturers wore a military tie. They spoke, perfectly sensibly, about the threat from Communist espionage and from Irish terrorism. But there was also some alarmingly right-wing talk of the need to monitor the trade unions and keep an eye on industrial subversion. The ‘West Country’ course – GCHQ is based in Cheltenham – felt a bit like a seminar for prospective mathematics students.

In a separate – but not lower – league were the senior officers of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch. They came across as real Flash Harrys, who dressed and behaved like the stars of some cool television series. They took us, at police expense, to Italian restaurants, and ordered in what was meant to sound like Italian. They were a world away from Whitehall. But they knew what they were doing: the Special Branch had, after all, been created as the Special Irish Branch to deal with the threat of Fenian terrorism in the late nineteenth century.

Back in the Foreign Office, I learned how everything revolved around the Foreign Secretary, known in house as the Secretary of State. In 1977, only nine years after the Foreign and Commonwealth Offices had merged, there was still a rearguard action to remind everyone that the minister in charge was technically the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary, and to describe him as such. But it was a battle finally lost when Sir Geoffrey Howe, on becoming secretary of state in 1983, said that he wanted to be known simply as the ‘Foreign Secretary’. And there was a definite feeling that working on Commonwealth issues wasn’t serious foreign policy: Trevor Mound had told me that, India apart, it was better to avoid being sent to a Commonwealth post – where our embassies were known as high commissions – if I could.

In August 1977, the Secretary of State was Dr David Owen, at thirty-seven the youngest Foreign Secretary since Eden. He had been promoted by the Prime Minister, Jim Callaghan, in April that year, when Tony Crosland had died, in the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, of a heart attack after going to fetch the Sunday papers. I woke up one morning in Oxford to hear the terrible news, and regretted that I wouldn’t be working for Crosland, if and when I joined the Foreign Office that autumn.

Owen was a man in a hurry, determined to make a difference, above all on the problem of Rhodesia. There the insurgency against Ian Smith’s illegal minority regime was gathering pace. Owen spent much time on shuttle diplomacy with President Carter’s envoy, the former Mayor of Atlanta, Andy Young. In the rush for results, Owen lost patience with Foreign Office procedures. He preferred to operate through the SIS network, sending messages on their channels, rather than using the Foreign Office’s rather more stately telegraph system. Owen’s apparent disdain for conventional diplomacy showed me how important it was to work in ways which satisfied the demands of politics.

Rumours filtered down of tensions between the Secretary of State and officials at the top of the Office. In one of his regular private messages to ambassadors abroad, the Permanent Under Secretary described the Foreign Secretary as tired and under strain, as a result of trying to do, and travel, too much.

All that only added to the sense of awe when I was asked occasionally to walk urgent papers down to the Foreign Secretary’s office, or to retrieve them from there. The Private Office (as it was known) consisted of the Foreign Secretary’s own magnificent office, with its views across Horse Guards and St James’s Park, and, separated from the Secretary of State and from the corridor by great oak doors, the private secretaries’ room. The walls of the latter were covered with small portraits, latterly photographs, of every previous holder of the office, including Tony Crosland and Jim Callaghan. Around the side of the room sat the four private secretaries at their great desks: in the far corner, with a bust of Pitt the Younger behind him, the Principal Private Secretary. The other occupants of the room were two bright mid-career diplomats as assistant private secretaries, and a diary secretary. The Principal Private Secretary seemed impossibly grand: I never dreamed that one day I would do his job.

‘Walking a paper down’ meant entering the private secretaries’ room, and approaching the desk of the private secretary in question, always aware that at any time the great oak door might swing open and the Foreign Secretary himself emerge. The first time I went down, pretty terrified, I was pleasantly surprised that, in the middle of the maelstrom, the Assistant Private Secretary who dealt with Ireland, Kieran Prendergast, had time to ask me who I was and what I did. It turned out that he had known my Dutch journalist cousin during his last posting, in The Hague.

But the Foreign Secretary isn’t the only minister in the Foreign Office. Usually, he is the department’s sole representative in the Cabinet, but there are at least four other ministers, including a peer to cover Foreign Office business in the House of Lords. For Ireland, in 1977, our junior Minister was Frank Judd. Personable, able to take a brief and speak to it, Judd was all that officials wanted in a junior minister. He did the political and representational jobs the Foreign Secretary couldn’t do, but without interfering unnecessarily in policy.

Ministers apart, the most intimidating aspect of starting in the Diplomatic Service is getting to know your way around a building that once housed four separate ministries: the Foreign, India, Colonial and Home Offices. Palmerston had asked for the present Italianate design, in place of Gilbert Scott’s Gothic vision, which instead became St Pancras Station. In 1977, the hugely imaginative and expensive restoration programme for the Old Public Offices had not yet started. They were still in a state of post-war squalor. The glories of the Locarno rooms were concealed behind plywood partitions, erected to create more office space in wartime. The beautiful marble floor of the Durbar Court of the India Office was covered with Nissen huts, housing communications equipment, even though the Court was roofed over (rather leakily). Only ten years earlier, the building had still been heated by the coal fires which adorned most offices. The ashes of that era still seemed to cover everything in a fine film of dust. The Republic of Ireland Department was hidden away in the roof spaces of what had once been the Colonial Office. Only yards away was the old Colonial Office Library which still houses the stuffed anaconda, known fondly as Albert, brought back from distant parts who knows when or why. As gradually I found my way round the great building, I came to know and love the place where I was to spend much of the next three decades. I was immensely proud of its wonders, and its stories. Even then I used to invite friends in to show them the marvels of the India Office or of Sigismund Goetze’s kitsch post-Great War murals – apparently detested by Lord Curzon when he was foreign secretary – which adorn the great landing at the top of the main staircase. Then, as now, I marvelled at the allegory of Britannia Pacificatrix, surrounded by her victorious allies at the end of the First World War: France in her revolutionary bonnet, Belgium and Serbia depicted as naked maidens, Africa represented by a small black boy with a bowl of fruit on his head. Or the hooded figure invoking ‘Silence!’ above the door into the Foreign Secretary’s office. Best of all is Britannia Nutrix, breast-feeding her young colonies, just beside the Ambassadors’ Waiting Room where the Foreign Secretary’s visitors sit before they are summoned in. One of the best things the Foreign Office ever did was to institute guided tours of this magnificent labyrinth, at the heart of our imperial history.

From my first day in the Foreign Office, I knew that I was going to love the job. I was thrilled when, after six months, Philip Mallet told me that he quite liked my work, even though there was plenty of room for improvement. I had already noticed that he used bits of some of my drafts.

The weeks passed into months, and our group of new entrants began to wonder what next. We knew that the usual pattern was a year learning on the job in London, before language training and a first posting overseas. We called ourselves – and still do – the G77, borrowing the name of the UN developing countries’ caucus. We met regularly for drinks and dinner, usually at Mon Plaisir in Monmouth Street, and compared notes. One of us had been sent straight abroad, as the annual reinforcement for the British mission to the UN in New York for the General Assembly session. We asked him what life was like overseas; the answer came back that it was even better than in London. Living abroad, working with foreigners, was just as rewarding as advertised: it was what we had joined the Diplomatic Service for. And the free accommodation, and allowances, would help pay off our debts.

When sitting the Qualifying Tests at Oxford, and again soon after joining the Diplomatic Service, we had been obliged to take a language-aptitude test. The test involved learning Kurdish in an afternoon. It examined every aspect of aptitude (or otherwise) for learning foreign languages: aural as well as oral ability, written expression, grasp of grammar and so on. Foolishly, I had a glass of wine at a picnic in the park with my aunt just before the second test, on the grounds that it would improve my fluency. I was quite wrong, but my average mark over both tests was just good enough to suggest that I might be capable of learning what the FCO Training Department called Class I languages: essentially, Arabic, Chinese or Japanese. It didn’t take me long to choose. My poor ear for pitch meant that I could not hope, so I thought, to master a tonal language such as Chinese or Japanese. But what tipped the balance was that I knew very little about the Far East, and a bit more about the Middle East, based mainly on my study of ancient history. I opted for Arabic, and was told that I would start at the Foreign Office’s famous Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, or MECAS, in the village of Shemlan, above Beirut, in September 1978.

Three other contemporaries were selected for Arabic training. Others went off to learn Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian. About half of the entry managed to avoid hard language training and instead brushed up their French, or acquired German or Spanish, for European postings.

We had taken our first steps on the perpetual treadmill of diplomatic life: with the average posting lasting three or so years, you are always either speculating about your next posting or preparing for it. The sense of continual anticipation of working somewhere on something, or with someone, more interesting than your present job is what keeps many diplomats going – and what makes life such a let-down when the wheel finally stops turning.

That summer of 1978 I met up with an Oxford friend who had failed the Foreign Office entrance exam, and asked him what he was now doing. He was working as a rep for Thomson Holidays, ‘on the basis’, he said, ‘that the work will be much the same as in the Diplomatic Service’. As I soon discovered, he wasn’t far wrong.

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