Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin. Sherard Cowper-Coles

car with the Ambassador, with the special Union flag flown by ambassadors fluttering over the bonnet, gave me a frisson of pride. The use of the Rolls-Royce seemed the best perk of being chargé d’affaires.

      In the summer of 1980, the irrepressibly energetic Chargé d’Affaires, Nicholas Barrington, used the Rolls-Royce to take his guests down to the centre of old Cairo, after iftar (the evening meal with which Muslims break the daily Ramadan fast) in his historic house in Zamalek. Ramadan in Cairo was pure magic. In Cairo’s ancient heart, we saw and heard jugglers and musicians mingling with the crowds celebrating what is for Muslims a month of Christmases. Everywhere there was light and noise and jubilation. I watched entranced as a magician levitated a man, having first passed an iron hoop around his body to prove the absence of wires.

      The Cairo Embassy lay in the shadow of the tangled history of Britain’s engagement with Egypt since the late nineteenth century, when Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, had been Britain’s consul-general in Egypt, with a modest title which belied great powers. The Residence itself, on the banks of the Nile in Garden City, had been built by Lord Kitchener, and its ballroom (in 1980 housing the Embassy Visa Section, but now restored to its original state) had had the only sprung dance floor in Africa.

      The most notorious of Sir Michael Weir’s predecessors was Sir Miles Lampson, who had been ambassador to Egypt throughout the Second World War. Immensely grand, he had referred to King Farouk as ‘the boy’. But what Egyptians really remembered – and resented – about him was the action he had taken in February 1942 when Farouk had persisted in appointing a pro-Axis prime minister. When the King had refused to back down, Lampson had had the Abdin Palace in Cairo surrounded by tanks. A prime minister more sympathetic to the Allied cause was soon appointed. This was still known to Egyptians as the ‘4 February incident’. In blissful ignorance of the date’s sensitivity, the BBC planned one 4 February to hold a party in Cairo to promote its Arabic Service: the Embassy intervened just in time.

      Another story about Lampson was more personal, and was told me by John Keith, a City solicitor who had served during the Second World War as Lampson’s military ADC. Halfway through the war, Churchill had decided that the somewhat pompous Lampson should be ennobled, as Lord Killearn. Shortly afterwards, the exuberant Shakespearean actor Sir Donald Wolfit had visited Cairo with his troupe of players. As the Ambassador’s lunch for the visiting thespians drew to a close, Sir Donald chinked on his glass. He wanted ‘to say a few words’ to thank the Ambassador for his hospitality. As he sat down, he added, with a flourish, that it had been ‘particularly nice to have been entertained by you, Lord Killearn, as we have heard such terrible reports of your predecessor, Sir Miles Lampson’. John Keith said that the ensuing silence was long and painful.*

      But what did an embassy like this actually do? First, we provided the Foreign Office in London, and many other parts of Whitehall, as well as other British diplomatic posts in, or interested in, the Middle East, with a pretty comprehensive political intelligence service. We reported to London by telegram and letter – not in those days by telephone – sending back vast quantities of the reporting and analysis that made Britain’s Foreign Office the best informed in the world. What it was all for none of us asked.

      We kept a close eye on what we called ‘Egypt Internal’ – the political state of the nation behind the façade of the Sadat regime, and of a National Democratic Party that was neither national nor democratic nor a real political party, but still won well over 90 per cent of the votes in national elections. For one of those elections, we spread out over the country to monitor exactly how Egyptian democracy worked in the early 1980s – long before such exercises had become commonplace. The results were not encouraging. At a deserted polling station in a village on the edge of the Delta, we found two police officers desperately putting crosses on ballot papers and stuffing them into the ballot boxes, worried that they wouldn’t have filled their quota before the regional police commander did his evening round, to check on the state of the polls.

      More interestingly, without offending a regime with whom Britain had good political relations, we tried to find out what we could about the sources of opposition to Sadat’s increasingly autocratic and eccentric rule. Improbably, impossibly, one of the main sources of that opposition sat in a crumbling palatial villa only a few hundred yards from the Embassy, in Garden City beside the Nile. This was the home of Fuad Serageddin Pasha, a larger than life ancien régime figure, who, as King Farouk’s interior minister, had dealt with the anti-British riots of January 1952 that had precipitated the Free Officers’ Revolution of July that year. He led the Wafd Party, which took its name from the wafd or delegation which had tried to travel to London in 1918 demanding freedom for Egypt from British imperial rule. Serageddin used his Turkish title of pasha with some style. He used regularly to receive me in his palace, embracing me with a bear hug, a slobbering kiss and a fat cigar. He came from a different era. For all the Pasha’s talk of democracy and reform, in those and later days there seemed to be less to the Wafd than met the eye.

      The same could not be said of the Islamists with whom we struggled to make contact. Even before Sadat’s assassination, we knew that, despite or perhaps because of the efforts of one of the most effective police states in the Arab world, tens of thousands of Egyptians were devout conservative Muslims, strongly opposed to the one-sided peace Sadat had made with Israel and to many of the more worldly aspects of his rule. The Muslim Brotherhood had been banned in Egypt since 1954, but, in many ways, it was less interesting and less effective that the more extreme fundamentalist groups which had given birth to the plot to kill the President. The much feared Egyptian internal state security service, the Mubahith Amn al-Dawla, kept many thousands of citizens under surveillance – when they were not behind bars.

      At the other end of the spectrum were the Marxists and Nasserites of the old Egyptian intellectual left. They shared the Islamists’ opposition to the Camp David accords and to the close alliance with America, but they favoured a secular society. Many of them had been educated or trained in the Soviet Union, and, as with the Afghan former Communists I was to meet a quarter of a century later, they had acquired there a fondness for vodka which made them less than perfect Muslims.

      One reason why the Foreign Office at that time put so much emphasis on political reporting was that we had utterly failed to foresee the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The internal FCO inquiry, conducted by a bright young diplomat called Nick Browne,* had concluded that the Embassy in Iran had been too preoccupied with selling tanks and tractors to the Shah to notice what was happening in the bazaars of south Tehran. We needed to be on the lookout for similar earthquakes elsewhere in the Muslim world. At the time, I accepted this verdict. Later, however, I came to see that the comment made by the Ambassador in Tehran at the time, Sir Anthony Parsons, when he exercised his right of reply, was probably closer to the mark: our failure to foresee the fall of the Shah was, he wrote, due not to a shortage of intelligence or information, but to a failure of imagination. We simply could not conceive of Iran without the Shah. Just as later we found it difficult to imagine Egypt without Mubarak, or Libya without Qadhafi.

      Despite this, the conventional wisdom in the Cairo Chancery in 1980 was that opposition to Sadat was growing, but did not threaten the regime. The murder of the Pharaoh – which we totally failed to foresee – did not change that view. That was not, however, the judgement – or wish – of the American and other Western media, who poured into Cairo in the days after Sadat’s death looking for harbingers of a revolution that was not to come for another thirty years. Out of desperation, they ended up interviewing each other. One crestfallen US network decided to justify the expense of having sent a camera crew to Cairo to cover the revolution by instructing them to make a documentary entitled, rather lamely, Why Was Cairo Calm? None of that stopped a famous British foreign correspondent known for colourful prose connected only loosely to the truth from filing from Upper Egypt a piece suggesting that Egypt was on the edge of an abyss.

      The firm grip which the Egyptian regime had on power did not mean that occasional demonstrations weren’t allowed. We would go along to watch. Cruelly, I once persuaded a gullible friend from London, keen to accompany us to such a demonstration, that diplomats did so in disguise. With great enthusiasm, he donned the ‘Arab sheikh’ outfit he had