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

Lawrence, he turned up, with his black brogues protruding from beneath his galabia, looking more like Thomson or Thompson in a Tintin story. The languidly linen-suited diplomat who was going to lead us to the demonstration observed, witheringly: ‘I think that’s rather overdoing it, don’t you?’

      But, with the Government struggling even then to provide Egypt’s teeming masses with the cheap food and decent jobs to which Nasser had told them they were entitled, it was a question not of whether there would be another revolution, but when: we would never have thought it would take another three decades.

      Another area to which we paid close attention was the position of the Coptic Christian minority in Egypt. The Copts make up about 10 per cent of the population, and can justifiably claim to be the original Egyptians – ‘gypt’ is the same root as Copt. In 1980, the Coptic Pope, Shenouda III, had just been sent into internal exile by Sadat for criticising his rule. He died as I was writing this chapter, in March 2012, having performed a skilful balancing act over many decades, protecting his people, while maintaining relations with successive Egyptian regimes, including, latterly, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.

      Sadly, in 1980 there were very few Jews left in Egypt from a community that had once numbered many thousands and had made an immeasurable contribution to the country’s commercial and cultural life. But the great synagogues in Cairo and Alexandria were still there, looked after by aged custodians, and visited by some of the Jewish tourists then arriving in Egypt in great numbers. The ancient synagogue in Old Cairo was of particular interest, as it had hosted the priceless deposit of papers known as the Geniza, and now lodged mostly in the Cambridge University Library. This was essentially a large waste-paper dump, as Jews were not allowed to destroy papers on which the word of God had been inscribed. Incredibly, the ancient tailor recommended to me by rather dress-conscious colleagues in Cairo turned out to be Jewish, though he kept very quiet about it. Sadly, his age meant he was no Montague Burton: the buttons soon flew off his suits, none of which survived my return to London.

      One of the most bizarre tasks I was given as the junior Chancery officer was to take an inflatable rubber cushion up to an ancient British lady known as Omm Sety. She lived, with dozens of cats, in a hut amid the ruins of the ancient city of Abydos in Upper Egypt. Born and raised in Blackheath, after falling downstairs and suffering a severe concussion aged three and then a trip to the British Museum, she had believed herself to be the reincarnation of the nanny of Seti I, a pharaoh of the Nineteenth Dynasty. She went on to study Egyptology, marry an Egyptian and work for the Egyptian Antiquities Department. Highly detailed dreams informed a remarkable ‘recall’ of life in the Pharaoh’s palace. The Embassy regarded itself as having consular responsibility for her.

      But we didn’t look just at what was happening inside Egypt. As a Permanent Member of the United Nations Security Council, and a prominent member of the European Economic Community and of NATO, as well as the former colonial power across much of the Middle East, in the 1980s, as today, Britain still regarded itself as a significant player in Middle Eastern affairs. In fact, Britain’s moment in the Middle East had long passed, probably with our precipitate scuttle from Palestine in May 1948, but certainly with the Suez debacle of 1956 and then, more recently and painfully, our humiliating early departure from Aden and South Arabia in November 1967. Anyone who had suggested back then that, thirty years later, we would be joining the Americans in not one but two ill-fated invasions of Muslim lands would have been dismissed as a fantasist.

      In the 1980s, as now, much of our sense of diplomatic self-importance was based on unhealthy doses of nostalgia and of wishful thinking. Yet the irony was that, like many other people in the Third World, the Arabs then – and still today – attribute to Britain more power than it actually has. Perhaps more justifiably, they believed – or often told us that they believed – that Britons in general, and British diplomats and spies in particular, understood the Arabs better than the Americans. We would lie back proudly and think of MECAS. It probably was true, however, that Britain’s diplomats spoke more Arabic less badly than those of any other power, except perhaps the smooth operators of the KGB.

      In 1980, as in every year since 1948 until the present, top of the Middle East agenda was the dispute between Israel and its Arab neighbours over Palestine. The familiar theme was of European dismay at American reluctance to do much to promote real peace: at the time the excuse for US inactivity was a visceral refusal to acknowledge that the Palestinians were entitled to a state of their own, and a total boycott of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. At their summit in Venice in June 1980, the nine member states of the EEC had issued a declaration acknowledging the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, and the PLO’s right to be involved in peace negotiations, based on the famous Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, passed in the wake of respectively the 1967 and 1973 wars. These days those European pronouncements look like little more than common sense or natural justice, but in 1980 this was revolutionary language, putting clear blue water between America and Europe on the Middle East.

      So it was not surprising that much of the debate in the Middle East over the next few years was over whether we could expect a European initiative, with Britain and France in its van, to break the logjam. But such talk came up against two iron laws of Israel–Palestine diplomacy: first, that, for all sorts of reasons, America is essential (if not always enough) for progress, and, second, that no one can dance unless the all too imperfect Israeli democracy can be persuaded to come on to the floor. On this, as on so many other issues, the Europeans excelled themselves at producing towering clouds of puffery, but little or no significant action. They couldn’t accept they had no real leverage over Israel. It was all too reminiscent of one perceptive journal editor’s verdict on something I once submitted to him: ‘Like much that comes out of King Charles Street, my dear Sherard, this is elegantly drafted – and utterly irrelevant.’

      But inability to make a real difference was never an obstacle to diplomatic activity. And so throughout my three years in Cairo, the Arab–Israel dispute was Britain’s main preoccupation in the Middle East. We in the Cairo Embassy spent much of our time talking to the Egyptians, still locked in the embarrassingly unproductive, US-brokered talks with the Israelis on the Palestinian autonomy that had been the other half of the Camp David accords. And we would cajole the American Embassy, from the Ambassador down, into telling their trusted friends, the Brits, what was really happening. At the time the officer in the US Embassy Political Section handling the ‘peace process’ was Dan Kurtzer, a devout Jew who spoke fluent Arabic and Hebrew, and who has dedicated his life to the cause of Middle East peace. It was a delight to come across Dan again in 2001 as my US colleague in Tel Aviv, after he had had a tough tour as ambassador to Egypt. All the information the Embassy picked up was distilled into thousands of ‘groups’ (the unit in which telegram traffic was then measured) telegraphed back to London, and into hundreds of letters, sent by the diplomatic bag, giving more context. British ministers toured the Middle East, talking privately and publicly, giving interview after interview, but never making any real progress: Lord Carrington came (and managed to fit in a Nile cruise) and so did his successor as foreign secretary, Francis Pym (but without the cruise). The Foreign Office Minister of State for the Middle East, Douglas Hurd, included Cairo in one of his regional tours. Arranging such visits, and reporting on them, gave the young diplomats in the Cairo Chancery plenty to do. We loved it.

      But Egypt wasn’t just an Arab state at the heart of the peace process. As Sadat and his Foreign Ministry used to remind anyone who would listen, it was also a Muslim state, and an African one. The Arab, Islamic and African circles of Egyptian diplomacy, plus the hangover from its role in the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, meant that Cairo was still a crossroads of international diplomacy. Following the Camp David accords, most Arab states had either closed their embassies in Cairo or reduced them to ‘chargé d’affaires’ status. The Arab League had left its purpose-built headquarters overlooking Tahrir Square and moved to Tunis. In its place, Sadat had set up a Potemkin ‘League of Arab and Islamic Peoples’: a formal call on its Secretary General by our Political Counsellor, Tony Reeve, and me ended in us both collapsing into helpless giggles at the absurdities of what we were being told. Despite the Arab boycott, there was plenty going on in Cairo with which to fill our reports to London. When I started work, I was told by Tony’s predecessor, the meticulous Nicholas Barrington, that my first task was to report on Egypt