Parting Shots
MATTHEW PARRIS
AND ANDREW BRYSON
VIKING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
VIKING
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First published 2010
Copyright © Matthew Parris and Andrew Bryson, 2010
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
Valedictory Despatches are covered by Crown Copyright and reproduced under the terms of the Click-Use Licence
The publishers wish to thank The National Archives for permission to reproduce the following pictures: 1 (ref. FCO 15/339); 6 (ref. FCO 8/2889); 7 (ref. FCO 7/3356); 8 and 9 (ref. FCO 33/3941); 10 (ref. FCO 7/680); 11 (ref. FCO 7/1111); and 12 (ref. FCO 93/1925)
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Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-14-196295-5
Contents
Introduction Matthew Parris
1. Diplomacy as Caricature
Part I: NORTH
Part II: SOUTH
Part III: EAST
Part IV: WEST
2. Settling Scores
3. Cold Warriors
4. Friendly Fire
5. The Camel Corps
6. Now, If I Were Foreign Secretary …
7. Privileges and Privations
8. The Sun Sets on Empire
9. Envoi
Notes on the Material Andrew Bryson
Index of Diplomats
Index of Countries
Introduction
Beyond retirement there can be no reprisals. Which of us does not have embarrassing memories of a works leaving-do at which (after perhaps a few drinks too many) the departing colleague decides to say a few words; and says a little too much: really lets rip? It may be venomous, it may be melancholy, it may be mawkishly affectionate or it may take the boss apart, but what distinguishes these occasions is that an individual, offered the chance to take a parting shot, has blurted out all the things he or she always wanted to say about the job, about colleagues, about customers, about the business, or about life generally: things that can now be said without fear of disapproval.
HM Diplomatic Service has, over the centuries, learned to civilize the practice in a most unusual sort of essay. It’s an extraordinary beast, called the Valedictory Despatch. How we tracked the beast to its lair you may read in my co-editor’s Notes on the Material, at the end of this book – a chapter I recommend looking at before you turn to the material itself, as it sets the species in context. And these animals, surviving into the Millennium, have recently become extinct, hounded from existence by thin-lipped Whitehall mandarins and a vengeful Foreign Secretary.
The creatures in question were simply called ‘valedictories’ in the FCO. As you will read within, they – and a centuries-old tradition – came to an effective end in 2006 when Margaret Beckett was Foreign Secretary, and some exasperated remarks about the ‘bullshit bingo’ of the new management-consultancy culture in Whitehall leaked from a valedictory into the press. The Foreign Office’s response was so to clip the valedictories’ wings by restricting and ‘targeting’ their circulation, that the free-ranging and indulgent ambit of the despatch, and thus its essential spirit, was lost. With their writers deprived of an audience, the tradition withered on the vine; diplomats who were in post at the time talk of the move simply as ‘the ban’ (see Chapter 2).
‘I thought it was a splendid tradition,’ Lord (Chris) Patten, the last Governor of Hong Kong, told us: ‘It’s important to remember that the final telegram from an ambassador at the end of his career represents the mountain top in this cultural exercise.’ Lord (David) Owen called the ban ‘absurd … one more of those dreadful PC behaviours inflicted on us, flattening out individuality …’
But, said Denis MacShane, a Foreign Office minister under the late Robin Cook, ‘the days when, once a week, an ambassador would go into a darkened room and write an essay as if they were competing for a Fellowship at All Souls are gone’. What a pity.
But perhaps we should in part blame this sad demise on the very instrument by which we have been able to extract many of the despatches you’ll read here from locked archives of material classified under the Official Secrets Act. The Freedom of Information Act has been our tool. Now we have it, ‘For Your Eyes Only’ is an instruction in which no modern diplomat can any longer place confidence, and it is precisely because most valedictories were more embarrassing than they were threats to national security, that the FCO cannot block their release by using the exceptions allowed to the Act. Yet valedictories, though they were often formally and elegantly printed, and given a circulation wide enough to include (sometimes) Buckingham Palace and the Bank of England, were inherently private documents, written in a personal and private style, for a knowing audience of sometimes-cynical insiders. Paradoxically, they were the more relaxed, indiscreet, knockabout and broad-brush because of it.
I was twenty-five when I read my first. I’d just joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and was serving as a junior officer in Whitehall on the Foreign Office desk dealing with the Scandinavian countries. I read the wires; I opened the post; mine were often the first eyes to see the material arriving from abroad in the FCO’s big, Wandsworth-prison-sewn diplomatic bags. And every so often would arrive a despatch that was different from the others, awaited with interest, and – as often as not – circulated fast and with relish. This would be a valedictory, and addressed (in form, at least) direct to the Foreign Secretary, though not all were read, or even shown, at that altitude. The valedictories I processed included final despatches from an ambassador leaving his present post but moving on to another one; and also the more exceptional type of valedictory: a diplomat’s last, before he left the Foreign Office for retirement.
In came one such from our retiring ambassador in Oslo. I chortled as I read. His letter was a tirade against the difficulties British diplomats labour under; he warned of the dangers of drink; he recommended regular exercise; he lamented that he had to get up at dawn when VIPs from Britain stayed at the Residence, check whether they’d left shoes outside their rooms – and, if so, clean them himself because you just couldn’t get the staff in Norway. I thought this despatch oddly compelling, and argued with my colleagues for its wide circulation – and was overruled: colleagues thought the despatch ra
ther silly.
But I remembered that elegantly eccentric little essay on Service life – and have managed to find it again, for this book.
What exactly is a valedictory? Ambassadors departing their posts abroad write – ostensibly to the Foreign Secretary – a sort of goodbye-to-all-that letter, usually classified (see Notes on the Material) as ‘Confidential’ or ‘Restricted’, talking often astonishingly frankly about the country they’ve been posted to, its inhabitants and its politicians.
They may turn their fire on their own colleagues too, if they wish – or even on their own government, country or countrymen. They may complain about conditions of service, or lavish praise on their long-suffering spouse. Nothing – from the President, to the economy, to the local cooking, to the drains – is off limits. As custom has it the letter is printed and circulated often quite widely within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and beyond. Then it’s locked away in Classified FCO files.
When the post the valedictory-writer is quitting is his or her last before retirement, the missive can be particularly frank – or funny, or sad. British diplomats are often accomplished stylists, and ambassadors (knowing their valedictory will get a wide and interested audience) can take tremendous care to make it good.
I’ve never forgotten this curious diplomatic tradition, though it did not strike me that, having left the Foreign Office, I would ever be able to retrieve such documents. But I wrote about the custom in The Times and the Spectator. Out of the blue a young BBC producer, Andrew Bryson, contacted me. He said he thought he could track down a range of valedictories, using the Freedom of Information Act. Maybe we could make a book from them, rescuing the material from obscurity? Maybe we could make a radio series out of the best? As the tradition had recently been (effectively) abolished, why didn’t we set about putting together a valedictory to the Valedictory?
Interested, I left him to it. We decided to start with the radio series. If the material we found seemed to support the idea, we could then go on to make the book.
Andrew burrowed. The Freedom of Information Act was by far his most important tool, though a clumsy and time-consuming one. The fruits of his researches started coming in. ‘After four years in Hanoi,’ wrote our ambassador to Vietnam, ‘I shall be overjoyed to leave. Of the six European Community missions here, four live, and three have their offices, in rat-infested hotels … Most foreigners in Vietnam, diplomats or not, are on the verge of insanity.’
Both Andrew and I became convinced that this would make a marvellous series on BBC Radio 4 – the commission for which Andrew had set about, finally with success, securing. The programme we made was broadcast in 2009, and was surprisingly well received (greatly assisted by the use of some splendid if somewhat camped-up actors’ voices to read the choicest of our selections). We were pleased at the number of listeners, colleagues and friends who encouraged us to carry on and publish a book; and our appetite for the idea had grown as Andrew had worked to edit down the material he had gathered, and shortage of space had forced us cruelly to abbreviate, and often regretfully to abandon altogether, reams of wonderful stuff.
We had learned, too, that many of the despatches we were encountering were more than rude and funny. There was plenty of knockabout stuff, but some of the finest valedictories went far beyond that. These men and women, people of the highest calibre and intellect, had spent the whole of their adult lives in exotic, or dangerous, or pivotal places, often at critical times in history. Their valedictories had been their first and often only opportunity to draw the threads together. You would expect – and we encountered – more than wit.
Sir Peter Jay’s valedictory, as he departed Washington in 1979 (see Chapter 6), turned its guns upon his own country, and began ‘Our world is dying, and its death is being hastened by errors and myopia in our own ranks …’ Sir Nicholas Henderson (‘How poor and unproud the British have become’ – see Chapter 4) had in one magnificent sweep surveyed the relative decline of modern Britain – and perhaps unwittingly set its author up, as it turned out, to be brought back by a new Prime Minister in Downing Street for the most important role in his career.
Our book, as it was emerging in our minds and from the material Andrew was amassing, would uncover some of the more notable essays on modern politics, economics and diplomacy to emerge over the last half-century; many of them important even at the time among the small private audience for which they were written. We were to uncover some of the silliest, too. Now a wider audience would see them all.
For that wider audience it’s worth, in this Introduction, placing the valedictory in its context.
‘Despatches’ have for centuries been the formal method for official communication between Heads of Mission at foreign posts, and senior diplomats based in Whitehall; and with government ministers. The bulk of reporting and commentary is done at a lower level, by letter or (these days) email to the appropriate department at the FCO in Whitehall. A despatch, however, is special. There are First Impressions despatches, written at the start of an ambassador’s tour. Ambassadors have also been expected to write an (often tedious) Annual Review summing up their work, accompanied by a catalogue of the year’s events, which could read like a school history project.
Then again there are ordinary despatches, the most numerous dealing with matters serious or technical. A big ‘set-piece’ occasion such as a state visit would justify a special, one-off despatch (if it was a Royal visit, such a despatch, likely to be copied to Buckingham Palace, could be relied on to be sycophantic in its praise of whichever royal personage was sent to patronize the ambassador’s patch; these were written, and read in Whitehall, with an unspoken wink).
But valedictories were exceptional: an opportunity for ambassadors to be far more wide-ranging, critical and self-indulgent than usual. They shared some attributes, though, with other types of reporting. Some First Impressions despatches, for instance, contain generalizations about foreigners as funny and damning as in any valedictory. And some ‘set-piece’ despatches were brilliantly funny and descriptive; Denis MacShane remembers reading a ‘splendid essay’ from a roving British ambassador in Mexico equal in its descriptive prose to anything by Bruce Chatwin.
Candour is (I found) a quality encountered in refreshing quantity everywhere in the Diplomatic Service – but only in private between consenting adult colleagues. Privately, ambassadors love shooting from the hip, many being the very opposite of the bland diplomatists whom you might imagine handing out chocolates. Some were incredibly brutal and rude about people and events. ‘The way the Foreign Office worked – it seems to be for hundreds of years –’ (said Denis McShane) ‘is [to display] the most brutal frankness on paper.’ The valedictory can be the finest flowering of that.
These days, means of communication have changed. Ambassadors write fewer formal despatches; communication by secure email is used, with encrypted messages taking moments to reach Whitehall rather than weeks, as the old diplomatic bag might. And with the advent of social media, diplomats now blog and tweet. Not only has the means of communication changed, so has the audience; the Foreign Office now encourages its diplomats to write blogs which anyone can read on the internet. In some ways the new forms of communication may be said to give the Foreign Office a more human face: to the outside world, at least. In the process, however, some of the intimacy and sense of honest exchange between colleagues that permeates these despatches has been lost.
Sir Alan Campbell, a former ambassador to Italy and Ethiopia, writing in Gaynor Johnson’s useful book of essays The Foreign Office and British Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century (Routledge, 2005), says that modern innovations such as air travel, email, photocopiers and faxes made life easier since he joined the FCO in 1950: ‘All of this eliminated or simplified many of the tasks which used to be so very time-consuming and boring – the enciphering and deciphering of telegrams, typing and retyping of drafts, the numerous messengers carrying sealed bags or locked boxes, their trolleys thundering down
the passages. Then there were metal tubular cylinders that enclosed papers to be sent all over the building by a compressed air system. They sometimes got stuck. But fifty years ago, an expert typist, operating the good old Imperial typewriter, could produce five but no more than five legible copies of a typescript using carbon paper …’
Faster communication means more communication. Before the advent of electronic mail diplomats could spend days (sometimes weeks) assembling and polishing a despatch; today, however, even a small post might receive sixty official telegrams from the FCO and from other posts in a single day. The painstakingly slow craftsmanship of old nowadays looks like antique office practice.
In the days before email, the printing and circulation of despatches was bound by custom and some ceremony. Despatches which were considered to be important or of wider interest were accorded the honour of printing and a wide distribution, but they had to justify it. Custom, however, dictated that valedictories were printed unless there was a good reason why not. To some extent that limited the power Whitehall had to suppress the spread of contrary views from ambassadors in the field. But Whitehall could still exercise power over the distribution list. Ambassadors would hope to see their despatches printed as Diplomatic Reports. Here the printers would typeset the document and run off several hundred copies on best green paper, to be distributed far and wide. Less favoured valedictories were printed and distributed in what was known as the Departmental Series – a despatch about, say, Brazil would go to other diplomats in the South American department and others with a stated interest in the region. And some valedictories were never printed at all, merely filed away. But not most. Andrew Bryson and I have been surprised at the polite ceremony afforded to a number of astonishingly indiscreet – sometimes plain insulting – valedictories. I have to admit that in putting this collection together, hilarious indiscretion has been, for me, the most fun.
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