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

Redfern, a diplomat if ever there was one, whose quiet judgement has often saved me from error, and who has driven the whole thing forward with determination and discrimination; to project editor Kate Tolley for putting the book together with efficiency and taste; and to Helen Ellis, publicist sans pareil, Minna Fry and the whole of the HarperPress gang.

      I owe my research assistant, Max Benitz, a particular debt of gratitude for his hard work in establishing what really happened, in tracking down key documents or photographs, and in offering many excellent suggestions, all done with remarkable accuracy and to time. I have also been extraordinarily lucky in my copy-editor, Peter James, an Oxford contemporary, and in having had the help of the king of indexers, Douglas Matthews.

      Two people have given me exceptional support and encouragement as I conceived and wrote this book: my friend Charles Richards and my wife Jasmine. I must also thank a number of former colleagues, including Nigel Cox and Andrew Patrick, for help and suggestions with different parts of the text. As with Cables from Kabul, we have had outstanding help and support from the Cabinet Office in clearing the text around Whitehall: I am very appreciative.

      The mistakes which remain are my responsibility alone.

      Ealing, July 2012

Chapter 1

       The Third Room

      The walk down Whitehall, from Trafalgar Square to the vast Italianate palazzo of the Foreign Office, seemed so long. I passed the statues of Sir Walter Raleigh and the generals* on the green in front of the Ministry of Defence with hardly a glance in their direction. I ignored the Cenotaph. My stomach was knotted with excited dread. I was worried I would be late. It was just like starting at a new school, right down to my new suit and shoes, my empty briefcase and my freshly filled fountain pen.

      Nervously, I turned right down King Charles Street, under the bridge which joins in stone but not in style the two great departments of the British state – the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and HM Treasury – then right again, through the main-entrance arch of the Foreign Office. A single security guard waved me in across the quadrangle, to the steps in the far left-hand corner. Up I climbed, through the great double doors. Two grand ladies peered down from behind a high counter. I told them that I was a newly appointed member of the Diplomatic Service. I had been instructed to report by 10 a.m. to the Recruitment Section of the Personnel Policy Department. Gently they told me that I had come to the wrong place. ‘PPD’ was across the other side of Whitehall, in the Curtis Green building (now Cannon Row police station). If I didn’t hurry, I would be late. More nervous than ever, I retraced my steps, and eventually found the official whom I had been told to see.

      The formal ‘fast stream’ induction course was not until the following month, and lasted only two weeks: we were taught not much more than how to use the Foreign Office telephone directory. But four members of the 1977 entry of seventeen young diplomats had been told to start work earlier. After minimal formalities, we were led back across Whitehall, and taken to our new departments in the labyrinth still known formally as the Old Public Offices. The Foreign Office believed in on-the-job training.

      It was Monday 22 August 1977, and I had been told that I had been accepted into the Diplomatic Service only in April that year. I had graduated from Oxford in June. In July, out of the blue, had come a letter saying that I had been appointed desk officer for Ireland in the FCO’s Republic of Ireland Department. I was needed two weeks earlier than the official start date. I asked how I should prepare. Read three books, I was told: Ireland since the Famine* by the Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, F. S. L. Lyons; Tim Pat Coogan’s history of the IRA;† and, best of all, Robert Kee’s two-volume history of Irish nationalism, The Green Flag.‡ The few brief weeks between being a student and having a grown-up job had passed in a flash, mainly on my uncles’ farm in Devon. I immersed myself in the emotion-filled history of Britain’s engagement with Ireland. In my mind’s eager eye, deepest Devon became rural Ireland. I could hardly believe my luck: I was being paid to think about issues and events in which I would anyway have taken an interest. And I had learned the first and last lesson of diplomacy: know your history. It had been a narrow escape – had I not passed the Foreign Office selection process, I might instead have become a barrister or a merchant banker.

      That selection process had had its moments. Sitting the initial Qualifying Tests with hundreds of others in Oxford’s cavernous Examination Schools had felt like retaking the Eleven-plus – with the same rather arbitrary pattern of success and failure. Some very bright people had fallen at that first fence, while some notorious dunces had somehow scraped through. The next stage was a series of extended interviews and of subjective and objective tests – the infamous ‘country-house weekend’, in a nondescript office block, long since demolished, just off Trafalgar Square. It was based on the techniques Britain had used in wartime to find capable officers, and it worked. The interview with the psychologist felt a bit weird. The invitation to ‘chat among yourselves’ while we were observed was even more artificial. But writing descriptions of oneself by a best friend and by a worst enemy was fun. So, in a masochistic way, was the Final Selection Board, in front of a group of grand officials high up over Horse Guards Parade. Less fun was the Positive Vetting. A creepy former Palestine Police officer asked if I had ever been drunk or in debt, and did not believe me when I said I had never taken drugs. A written questionnaire enquired whether I kept a radio transmitter, and how many of my friends were Communists (‘For the purpose of this form, the term “Communist” is taken to include the term “Fascist”’) – quite a few I had to say. Somehow I got through.

      That first week in the Foreign Office began on a high note. My Oxford contemporary Bobby McDonagh* had just started in the Irish Foreign Ministry at Iveagh House in Dublin. I decided I had to ring him up, to tell him that I was the new Desk Officer for his country in London. ‘Guess what, Bobby,’ I said proudly, ‘I have been appointed desk officer for Ireland.’ ‘Aw, that’s nuthin’,’ boasted Bobby, in his seductive Irish accent. ‘I’m the Desk Officer for the whole of Africa and Asia.’ It was a good introduction to the blarney and bravado of one of the world’s smaller but more effective foreign services.

      A second encounter was harder work. The First Secretary at the Irish Embassy in London, Dick O’Brien, invited me to lunch, at the Gay Hussar in Greek Street. I remember little of what was said at the lunch – although a great deal was said, mainly by Dick. As we ranged back over the eight years since the Troubles had flared up again, and far back beyond that, Dick wouldn’t concede a single point: it was good that I had studied my history and had taken a close interest in Northern Ireland ever since British troops had been put back on the streets in August 1969. I was flattered that Dick, an experienced first secretary, should have taken me, a newly appointed third secretary with no diplomatic experience, even half seriously. I suddenly realised that, in the eyes of those with whom I was dealing professionally, my job – my formal position and title – counted for more than I thought they did, or necessarily should. I was now an official representative of my country and my government. What I said or did would be seen or heard in that light. Diplomatic titles, the elaborate protocols of international intercourse, concealed – and eased – substantive exchanges, of information and opinion.

      After a good lunch with plenty of wine, Dick insisted on three brandies each. I staggered back into King Charles Street at four in the afternoon, incapable of further work. If this was diplomatic entertainment, I was not sure how much of it I could take.

      But I had a real job to do. As what was then called a ‘Grade 8’ new entrant, a third secretary, I was taking over from an experienced first secretary, Alan Goulty, an Arabist in his early thirties with several overseas postings under his belt. I would have to work hard to fill his shoes.