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

weapon kicked in: Harry started to cry, very loudly. Egyptians are kindly people, and none can resist the sound of a bawling child. The border guard offered a compromise: Harry (and his mother) could leave Egypt on the exit visa, go round the hut, re-enter on an entry visa the guard would provide for a fee, and then leave again. It was a neat solution to a problem that should never have been: the Egyptian Arabic for red tape is al Ruteen.

      We crossed the frontier, to be greeted by striking Israeli women border guards, flaunting Uzi sub-machine guns. But appearances were deceptive: courtesy was not a quality they shared with the Arabs on the other side of the fence. We raced on, through the pine groves of the Gaza Strip. Three happy days in Jerusalem followed, and then we set off for the port city of Haifa and the ferry back to Piraeus, via Cyprus and Rhodes. Our fake Egyptian diplomatic number plates (which the Embassy garage had run up for me, after the originals had had to be returned to the Foreign Ministry) attracted surprisingly friendly attention within Green Line Israel but hostile stares in the Occupied Territories. We soon worked out why: Israel had opened its border with Lebanon to its Maronite allies in the South Lebanon Army, and Arabic number plates from Christian Lebanon were not an uncommon sight in Israel. Nothing in the Middle East was simple.

      As we sailed from Haifa, with all its memories of the British Mandate over Palestine, I little dreamed that, in eighteen years’ time, I would sail back into the great harbour as British ambassador to the State of Israel.

Chapter 4

       Immortal Junior Typist

      In 1983, I took the Optional Route for my return from the Middle East, just as I had on the way out in 1978 and again in 1980. Wisely, the Foreign Office still allowed its diplomats and their dependants travelling to and from the region to go by car, train or ferry, and would meet the costs, up to the price of an air fare for each of the travellers. And so, as our Land Rover rolled off the ferry at Piraeus, and we started the long haul north and west, we knew that most of what we spent on travel could be reclaimed on arrival in London. But the Office’s apparent generosity wasn’t disinterested: giving young diplomats time to explore and learn made good operational sense. It was an idyllic journey, up from Greece’s coastal plain, through the mountains of Macedonia and along the valleys of the Sava and Drava rivers, through mountains and forests of extraordinary beauty at rest in the August heat. Everywhere was hot and still, and surprisingly green. After the parched hills of Palestine, it was good to be back in the verdant lands of the north. Mostly, we camped, or stayed in cheap hotels. But in Belgrade we caught up with friends in the Embassy and saw something of the magnificence of the city. We paid our respects at Tito’s tomb. In the open-air privacy of the fields around the dacha our friends were renting on the Danube, we heard about the rigorous tradecraft and suffocating loneliness of operating as an intelligence officer. In Old Belgrade, there was that elegiac sense of a lost central European past, one evoked by Patrick Leigh Fermor’s accounts of his pre-war walk down the Danube,* and, in a different register, by Hergé’s account of Tintin’s adventures in Syldavia in pursuit of King Ottokar’s Sceptre.* I remembered what we had been told at Oxford about the similarities between the Serbian tradition of oral poetry, with its formulaic composition, and that of the poet or poets now known as Homer. And I wondered about Hadrian’s legions, marching and counter-marching up and down what had become one of the great trunk routes of an earlier empire – the Via Egnatia. From Belgrade we went on up the flat valley, passing Turkish truck after Turkish truck, to Zagreb, and over the mountains to a richer, more familiar, damper, tidier Europe. But the dust and heat of the south were now in my blood: for me, Goethe’s line encapsulated every northern European’s longing for the warmth of the south: ‘Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?’

      Across the Channel, up the Dover Road and on to Devon and Nottinghamshire to visit our families and show off the new baby. But I still did not know what my next job would be. Until, one afternoon, the phone rang at my mother’s house: standing outside the window in the garden, I took the call from the Personnel Operations Department. We want you to start, as soon as possible, in the Foreign Office Planning Staff.

      I was delighted. My only previous encounter with the planners had been when the unforgivingly cerebral head planner, Christopher Mallaby, had come to Cairo for what were optimistically known as ‘planning talks’. I had been impressed by the range and depth of Mallaby’s brief, looking beyond and beneath the horizon, in as many possible directions at once. I knew that the planners were clever, and were supposed to be close to the Foreign Secretary – a sort of intellectual Praetorian Guard. And I was intrigued to be working in a department headed by Pauline Neville-Jones, who already had a formidable reputation.

      I was not disappointed, even though the real work started slowly. The Planning Staff had at least three roles. They produced forward-looking planning papers – what would now be called strategic think pieces – for the monthly meetings of the committee of Foreign Office deputy under secretaries (now called directors general) chaired by the Permanent Under Secretary. They drafted the Foreign Secretary’s speeches, and provided drafts of those on foreign policy to the Prime Minister and occasionally other ministers. And they served as the secretariat for the private system of Cold War consultation between the four Western powers – the United States, Britain, France and Germany – known as the Quad. This system was private, not because we didn’t want the Russians to know about it, or even because we didn’t think the Russians didn’t know about it, but to keep out the Italians, who always wanted to be at the top European table, but whose communications were, and probably still are, notoriously leaky. Of course, the Italians too knew about the Quad’s existence, but, if it was secret and deniable, their pride was salvageable, when we told them that we didn’t know what they were talking about.

      Pauline Neville-Jones was not easy to work for, but she knew what she wanted, and liked, and was usually right. Her bark – which frightened men more than women – was far worse than her bite. Underneath the donnish exterior was an extremely kind and generous, and somewhat shy and vulnerable, person of great intelligence and sensitivity. When I left the planners, she cooked at her home in Chelsea for me and a dozen of my guests one of the best dinners I have ever had in a private house. I was the member of the Planning Staff who accompanied her for talks with other foreign ministries’ central strategy units. In this capacity, I once went with her back to Cairo. As Christopher Mallaby had found, ‘planning’ was not a concept that came naturally to the Egyptians. But Pauline persevered, and, as a reward for our labours, decided that she and I should have a day in Upper Egypt, which she had never visited. After an exhausting morning touring the temples of Karnak, Pauline announced that she wanted me to take her to a typically Egyptian restaurant for a relaxing lunch. I found a suitable place, on the banks of the Nile. When the waiter brought the menu, Pauline waved it away. She was getting in the swing of things and was beginning to feel as though she was on holiday in the Dordogne (where she had a house). She would do as she did there, and go into the kitchen and choose direct from the food the patron was preparing. It was a big mistake. She entered the kitchen, to find the ‘patron’, clad only in a loincloth and sweating heavily, struggling to cut up a lump of blue-grey meat covered in flies. The kitchen felt like a cross between an abattoir and an inferno, awash with blood and rotting flesh and dirt and dust, and infested with cats. Pauline beat a hasty retreat and announced that she wasn’t feeling hungry after all: a glass of sweet tea would keep her going until we got back to the Sheraton in Cairo that evening.

      During my time in the planners, Pauline had two, quite different, deputies. David Manning was the prototypical Foreign Office mandarin: capable, unflappable and with a keen sense of the politically possible. The second, Alyson Bailes, was one of the cleverest – probably the cleverest – person ever to join the Diplomatic Service. She spoke and wrote Hungarian, and later taught herself Mandarin. But she had two flaws: she produced more good work than most lesser minds could absorb, and she hated hot climates. Alyson’s early departure from the Foreign Office was a great loss to the public service.

      As a planner, you were expected to think, and then write. In order to do so, you