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

Philip was in no mood for flannel, telling them that the problem with their country was that ‘you Egyptians breed like rabbits’. Asked at the end whether he planned to come back, he retorted, ‘You must be joking.’ Without warning me, my hostess put some – but luckily not all – of this on the front page of the Daily Express.

      But the royal visit which caused us most difficulty was the honeymoon of the Prince and Princess of Wales in August 1981. Out of the blue the Ambassador called me in one morning to read a long personal ‘DEYOU’ (meaning it could be decrypted only with the Ambassador present) telegram from the head of the Foreign Office in London. It explained that the Top Secret plan was for the Prince and Princess of Wales, embarked on the Royal Yacht Britannia, to pass down the Suez Canal at the end of their honeymoon cruise through the Mediterranean from Gibraltar. On the assumption that they would have avoided the world’s media during the cruise, the first ‘press availability’ would be at Port Said at the northern entrance to the Canal. The Ambassador’s instructions were to plan for this, but to tell no one, certainly no Egyptian. In desperation, the Ambassador asked the Naval Attaché and me to help.

      The first task was the most dangerous. Once Britannia had passed through the Canal, the idea was that Their Royal Highnesses would picnic on a beach on one of the deserted coral islands at the northern end of the Red Sea. The Ambassador was instructed by the Flag Officer, Royal Yachts (FORY) to find a ‘mine-free, shark-free’ beach. There was nothing we could do about the sharks, and the only way we could establish whether a beach was mine-free was for the Naval Attaché, complaining furiously, to be sent there in great secrecy and walk up and down it.

      Somehow Britannia did elude the press as she made her way east through the Mediterranean, although there were one or two close calls. The Suez Canal Authority reserved a berth for Britannia alongside their majestic building in Port Said. Telling the Canal administrators meant that we also had to tell the President. To the fury of the Austrian Government, Sadat promptly cancelled, at about a week’s notice, a state visit to Vienna, citing ‘security reasons’, in order to have dinner with the Prince and Princess of Wales when they arrived in Port Said. As Britannia steamed closer, the signals flew back and forth between the Rear Admiral in command and the Ambassador. One memorable exchange read something like: ‘FORY to HMA: at dinner HRH will be wearing Royal Yacht Squadron rig’ (none of us knew exactly what Royal Yacht Squadron rig was, but we guessed it involved a black bow tie); ‘HMA to FORY: dinner jackets have not been worn in Egypt since the Revolution’.

      Eventually, Britannia tied up in Port Said. The world’s press, whom I had assembled on the roof of the Suez Canal Authority building, went mad. They couldn’t see the Prince or the Princess, but they did now know where they were. Suddenly, I got a laconic message from my friend and Diplomatic Service colleague Francis Cornish, who was on Britannia, working as assistant private secretary to the Prince of Wales. ‘Their Royal Highnesses are thinking of taking a private stroll on deck before dinner, and do not want to be observed. Please clear the press from the building.’ And that was it. I had 200 baying journalists, scribbling, filming, photographing, recording, and had been told to prevent them covering the royal story of the year. The Egyptian police refused to help. After about thirty minutes of pushing and shoving, I managed to get them all down the stairs, and out of sight of the Yacht. Last to go were the BBC’s Kate Adie and an aggressive leather-clad German news-agency photographer. ‘All clear,’ I signalled to Francis. ‘Sorry,’ came the reply, ‘TRH have changed their minds: no stroll on deck this evening.’ I could have throttled him.

      Dinner over, press availability done, Britannia steamed south through the Canal, bearing her precious cargo. Passing Ismailia, halfway down the Canal (Francis told me later), the Officer of the Watch observed a scruffy little boat, rowed by two Egyptians, making for Britannia. Getting out a megaphone, and using their fruitiest language, the officers of the Royal Yacht instructed the Egyptian rowing boat to stay clear. But it just kept on coming. Somebody spotted several wooden crates in it. In later years, the Royal Marines would have opened fire. But in those innocent days the Suez Canal Authority pilot was allowed to ask the two oarsmen what their business was. ‘On behalf of President of Egypt,’ they replied, ‘we bring boxes of mangoes for Highness Diana.’ At dinner a day earlier, the Princess of Wales had confessed to Sadat her love for Egypt’s favourite fruit. The President had his priorities.

      Eventually, Britannia made landfall, at the Egyptian Red Sea resort port of Hurghada, where a VC10 of the Royal Air Force was waiting to take the honeymoon couple back to England. Sadat sent his Republican Guard to give the royal visitors a proper send-off. The world’s press were too busy photographing and filming the newlyweds to notice the coal-scuttle helmets, field-grey uniforms and jackboots of a military formation that betrayed only too obviously Sadat’s wartime sympathies.*

      The other major royal visitor during my time in Cairo was Prince Andrew, then aged twenty. His Royal Highness had just won his helicopter wings – a qualification which, within a year, he would be using in war. But in 1981 as a reward for his success the Queen treated her second son to a Nile cruise. As the Chancery bachelor, I was detailed to accompany the young Prince. All I can say is that neither the Prince nor the Third Secretary did full justice to the distinguished professors of Egyptology whom the Egyptian Government deployed at every one of the great Pharaonic temples between Luxor and Aswan. But fun was had, not least during the last leg of the holiday in Cairo, during which Hilary Weir arranged for the young Prince to go riding in the desert and for a poolside barbecue (which became a bit more exuberant than she had intended).

      As a result of this, Prince Andrew was kind enough to invite me to his twenty-first birthday party at Windsor Castle. About a thousand people were there, ranging from the Prime Minister and Mr Thatcher through to younger friends of the Prince. I found myself sitting next to one of them – a dashing American blonde – when, halfway through the evening, we moved into the Waterloo Chamber (I think it was) for a concert. A man in cap and spectacles strode on to the stage, sat down at the piano and started singing. I had no idea who he was, and turned to my neighbour to ask. ‘You caaan’t be serious,’ she drawled, ‘you are sooo sad. Don’t you recognise Elton John? I flew over with him on Concorde two days ago.’

      None of us had dreamed that one of the guests at the poolside party in Cairo a few months earlier would achieve fame, for a sadder reason. In helping Lady Weir draw up the guest list, I had suggested that we include a young Egyptian diplomat, Rifa’at al-Ansary, who had just returned from a posting to London and was going places in the Egyptian Foreign Ministry. He duly came, and delighted the girls at least with a bravura display of disco dancing. Soon afterwards, he was transferred to what was then a front-line post for Egypt – the Embassy in Tel Aviv. The next time I heard of him he was on the front pages of the British press, dubbed by the tabloids the ‘Cairo Casanova’. In Israel, it turned out, he had reconnected with a British diplomat, Rhona Ritchie, whom he had met during his posting to London. During what was by all accounts a passionate love affair, she had allegedly shown al-Ansary British diplomatic telegrams. Observing this, the Israeli security service, the Shin Bet, had tipped off Britain’s Security Service. Apparently without the Foreign Office being properly briefed on what was happening, Ritchie was called back to London on a pretext and then arrested by the Special Branch at Heathrow, before being tried for espionage. In my view, and that of many of Rhona Ritchie’s Diplomatic Service colleagues, it was a ridiculous overreaction to a serious lapse of judgement – to which the right response would have been dismissal, not imprisonment. When my Ambassador in Cairo, Michael Weir, was told that Rhona Ritchie’s crime was to have shown al-Ansary British diplomatic telegrams, his response was that he did that all the time with the American Ambassador – with no authority, although admittedly America was a much closer ally than Egypt. Trading information is the core business of diplomacy: no successful diplomat can ever get it exactly right. Rhona Ritchie wasn’t the first or the last to have got it seriously wrong, but she was unwise enough to have done it under the eyes of the world’s most unforgiving security agency.

      Some visitors to Cairo weren’t royal, but expected to be treated as such. One of these was the Lord Mayor of London, in those days without any rival at City Hall, and conducting himself during his year in office with pomp and ceremony that have since – wisely – been greatly reduced.