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

Albanians. A month later, I was struggling to draft, on Nicholas’s instructions, talking points for Denis Thatcher to use with Madame Suzanne Mubarak, during the official visit which Vice President Mubarak was to pay to London in September 1980.

      Two Palestinian intifadas (or uprisings) and hundreds of thousands of Israelis settled in the Occupied Territories later, it is not easy now to recall the heady days of Egyptian–Israeli rapprochement of 1979–81. In those days, the hotels of Cairo were full of Jewish tourists, mainly from America, combining a week in Egypt with a week in Israel. Two young Army-officer friends of mine, one of whom was to rise to the top of the military establishment, were stationed in Cyprus with their regiment, the Green Howards. They decided to come over for a ‘pulling expedition’ up the Nile on one of the cruise boats then plying between Luxor and Aswan. They equipped themselves with panama hats, slick tropical clothes and a case of the Embassy’s gin. A week later, they returned, crestfallen: they had been the youngest passengers on the cruise by about forty years, and had spent the week playing bridge with ancient widows and divorcees from Florida and New York.

      In those days, the Jerusalem Post (then a much more balanced paper than it was later to become) was sold openly in the main newsagents of central Cairo. Israeli experts were helping install drip-feed irrigation systems in the agricultural schemes on the margins of the desert and the Delta. And, most convenient of all, there were regular long-distance bus services across the Sinai, between Cairo and Tel Aviv.

      As foreign secretary in 1974–6, Jim Callaghan had ruled that all Foreign Office Arabists, fresh out of MECAS, had to go on a familiarisation visit to Israel before or during their first posting in the Arab world. When in 1982 my turn came, I was able to take the bus from Cairo to Tel Aviv, and begin a fascination with, and affection for, the Jewish state that has never left me. But the law of unintended consequences kicked in: what was meant by Callaghan as an effort to recalibrate the camel corps had the opposite effect. The uncompromising line taken by the Israeli briefers, the determination with which the early settlements around Jerusalem and across the Green Line* were then being established, and the obvious plight of the wretched Palestinians, particularly in Gaza, all served only to reinforce the conviction of the young diplomats sent on the course that a grave injustice had been done, and was being still being done, to the Arab inhabitants of historic Palestine.

      As so often in the Middle East, the peace turned out to be too good to be true. In early June 1981 Israeli aircraft bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor south of Baghdad, and all hell broke loose. Years before the neocons had developed the doctrine of pre-emptive defence, the international condemnation was universal. Even the United States criticised the Israeli action, while blocking serious punitive action in the Security Council. Sadat reacted with fury at what he saw as a betrayal by his Israeli partner, Begin. The rapid cooling in Egyptian–Israeli relations that followed was unavoidable. And those relations were never as good again.

      Alongside covering Egypt’s internal politics and its external relations, my third area of work in the Cairo Embassy was as press attaché. In this, I faced in two directions: towards the Egyptian media, and towards the corps of impressive Western correspondents then based in Cairo. My daily routine involved repackaging for the Egyptian media a constant stream of good news stories about Britain (in reality, charmingly amateurish propaganda) sent out by the Central Office of Information. These ranged from texts of speeches by the Prime Minister to pieces puffing British products. I remember trying to place articles praising the merits of the new Austin Mini Metro, then rolling off the British Leyland line at Longbridge. Once a month, I would call on the head of Egyptian State Television and offer her a selection of news and feature clips from Britain to help fill the schedules. None of this was quite as absurd as it now seems: the state-controlled Egyptian media were hungry for material, and not too fussy about where it came from. If it helped promote the interests or exports of a country regarded as an ally, so much the better.

      My propaganda work assumed a bit more importance during the Falklands War of April–June 1982, as Britain sought to build political and diplomatic support round the world for its claim to sovereignty over the islands the Argentines called the Malvinas. To my surprise, I did manage to secure some sympathetic coverage in the instinctively anti-colonialist Egyptian media, mainly because I could offer better images than the opposition. But the Newsweek cover of HMS Hermes and the task force steaming south, bearing the caption ‘The Empire Strikes Back’, was more help than all my efforts: the world needed to know that Britain meant what it said, and the victory which followed earned us grudging respect in Egypt and indeed across the Middle East.

      In those days, there were three main daily Egyptian papers in Arabic, Al Ahram, Al Akhbar and Al Gomhuria, two in English, the Egyptian Gazette and the Egyptian Mail, and, perhaps surprisingly, one in French, Le Progrès Egyptien, whose origins lay with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798. Of these, the one that mattered most, and was least easy to influence, was Al Ahram (or ‘Pyramids’). Gone were its glory days under Nasser, when its brilliant editor, Mohammed Hassanain Heikal, had been the voice of the Arabs. It was now the voice of the Government and the party. But that did not mean that some talented individuals didn’t work for it, particularly the nest of Nasserites in the Al Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies, or that it wasn’t worth engaging with them. The paper’s name did occasionally cause confusion: I remember taking the former British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, to call on the editor, only to find that we were approaching the Sphinx on the edge of the desert west of Cairo: the driver had confused the paper with one of the greater glories of Pharaonic Egypt.

      By contrast, the Egyptian Gazette was a rather run-down affair, obviously produced on an ancient press, full of mistakes and misprints. On the day the Israelis withdrew from Sinai, the Gazette managed to mark the event by printing on the top of its front page an upside-down map of the peninsula. Its staff usually included one or two young British interns, brushing up their Arabic and having fun at the same time.

      The other side of being press attaché was liaising with the foreign journalists in Cairo. This was useful and important, as well as enjoyable. Cairo in the early 1980s was the place from which the Western media covered the Middle East. The BBC, Reuters, AP and UPI had big bureaux there. CNN was just getting going. All the major British papers had Cairo correspondents, many of them full time, as did the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Meeting the range of talent and experience they deployed was a big privilege for a young diplomat – and I learned much from them, including some of the old ways of the Street of Shame. The hacks worked hard, but also played hard. After one memorable party, given by the correspondent of a British Sunday broadsheet, the host had to ring round all his guests to apologise for the way things had got out of hand the night before. A visiting correspondent regaled us with stories of his conquests on the night train to Aswan. For the British Embassy, the dean of the corps was the BBC bureau chief, Bob Jobbins, a reporter of scholarship and flair. One of the MI6 team in Cairo said we should treat Jobbins as ‘cleared up to confidential’, on the basis that he could be trusted with sensitive information, and that we could learn as much from him as he could from us. But the journalist of whom I saw most was a university friend, Charles Richards, who graduated from sub-editing the Egyptian Gazette to writing for the Financial Times and, later, the Independent. He knew the real Egypt better than any of us.

      I also learned – the hard way – the importance of setting the ground rules before saying anything significant to a working journalist, even in a social setting. After a particularly gruelling visit to Egypt by the Duke of Edinburgh, I relaxed over supper with the Guardian correspondent and his wife – a member of one of Britain’s most famous families, who worked part time as a stringer for the Daily Express. At dinner, I explained how almost everything that could have gone wrong with the visit had gone wrong. Fog had meant that we had had to cancel a visit to Sinai by Prince Philip, who was in Egypt in his capacity as president of the World Wildlife Fund. Instead, we had tried to take him to the wetlands of Lake Fayoum. Almost incredibly, crossing a desert with only two roads, the Egyptian police escort had lost their way. The convoy juddered to a halt. An unfortunate police major tried desperately to explain to the Duke what had happened. ‘Your Highness, the road has been washed away’ was the best he could do. ‘I don’t believe a word of it!’ snapped Prince Philip, who strode off into the desert. On