We laughed (as most of our radio series’s audience laughed) at the valedictory from a British High Commissioner departing Canada (p. 101), who remarked that ‘the calibre of Canadian politicians is low. The majority of Canadian ministers are unimpressive and a few we have found frankly bizarre … Anyone who is even moderately good at what they do … tends to become a national figure … and given the Order of Canada at once.’ Not everyone in Canada laughed, however, where the broadcast caused a minor storm, with Canadian columnists manning the barricades on both sides of the argument. Indeed the publication of newspaper commentaries forcefully and eloquently taking the High Commissioner’s side went some way (in my view) to proving him wrong. The spirit of self-criticism, and the energy of the debate, showed a less parochial Canada than his own valedictory had suggested.
I will not spoil for you the valedictory from our man in Bangkok, beyond reporting that its broadcast in 2009 forced his present-day successor, a generation later, to issue a statement dissociating himself and HMG from the ambassador’s predecessor’s remarks.
In Nigeria it seems there were no repercussions following our quotation of a valedictory from Lagos in which our departing ambassador wrote that Nigerians had a ‘maddening habit of always choosing the course of action which will do the maximum damage to their own interests. They are not singular in this: Africans as a whole are not only not averse to cutting off their nose to spite their face; they regard such an operation as a triumph of cosmetic surgery.’
I could quote for ever (‘There is, I fear, no question but that the average Nicaraguan is one of the most dishonest, unreliable, violent and alcoholic of the Latin Americans …’) but, instead, why not read on? It is in Chapter 1 that the bulk of these ‘poking fun at foreigners’ discoveries will be found. Modern readers may perceive racism, or at least a rather unkind tendency to resort to national stereotypes, but it should be remembered that standards were very different in earlier decades.
And, as Chapter 4 (‘Friendly Fire’) shows, British diplomats abroad were not scared of turning their critical gaze back in the direction of home as well as on the natives abroad. As Sir Nicholas Henderson, author of arguably the most famous of valedictories, put it, ‘A representative abroad has a duty to draw the attention of the authorities at home to the realities of how we look.’ Diplomats get a privileged vantage point from which to see ourselves as others see us, and, as Andrew Bryson describes in Notes on the Material, Foreign Office records from the 1960s and 1970s provided the richest seam for this collection. It was a period when a British Chancellor of the Exchequer had to go ‘cap in hand’, as the contemporary cliché had it, to the IMF for financial aid. These despatches reflect the preoccupations of that time – a sense of loss of national prestige, and in the background a nostalgia for the days when a British ambassador had real clout. Our diplomats abroad were remorseless in their reports of how our own country’s standing, if not the affection felt for it by many foreigners, had fallen as a result of economic difficulties.
Regularly in the despatches you will see self-doubt. But you will also detect an underlying and defiant pride: a sense that even if we and others had temporarily lost sight of the fact, Britain was still, after everything, Great.
A theme we explore in Chapter 8 (‘The Sun Sets on Empire’) is decolonization. The empire was recent history, if history at all – some despatches contain accounts of Britain’s withdrawal from far-flung colonies even in the late 1970s. The Foreign Office was deeply and directly affected by these events; it was subject to various reviews – Duncan, Berrill, Plowden – designed to trim its scope and budget accordingly, and the bruises felt show repeatedly in valedictories of the time. Indeed the arrival of management consultancy (see Chapter 2) becomes a recurring and increasingly enraged theme. The diplomats know their world is changing, and their role changing, yet they cannot help bridling at its passing.
Readers will often sympathize – I do – but resistance to the measurement of performance can sometimes be self-serving. Nor can the FCO be accused of racing ahead of the times. It is said that when the Churchill War Rooms underneath the Treasury were opened to the public as a museum in 1984 all the curators had to do to fit it out with authentic 1940s furniture was stroll across King Charles Street into the Foreign Office and borrow some of the vintage stock still in everyday use there. As for the office furniture, so for some of the furniture of diplomatic minds and procedures.
But all have been changing, including the attitudes. If not (by the standards of their times) racism, then paternalism is certainly apparent in many of the older despatches. But readers may feel, as I do, that this was benign. Despatches are imbued with a touching concern, particularly for former colonies, a watchfulness for the development of good government in the nation which has been their temporary home-from-home, and a real anguish when things seem to be going wrong.
More than anything, I think you will detect a strong sense of public service running through this book, particularly through despatches written at the end of a long career. The belief in national duty is a sentiment sometimes shyly articulated by diplomats, almost apologetically, as if adhering to an old creed. Some of this is movingly expressed.
Indeed it’s often been moving, but at other times depressing, occasionally shocking – but mostly fun – to retrieve and read these yellowing documents. From their pages leap sometimes grumpy, sometimes comical, sometimes prophetic individuals – none of whom, when they wrote, can have had the least idea that their letter to the Foreign Secretary would, one day, be broadcast, and now, in this book, published in print.
There is no need here to take the reader through our chapter headings – they are self-explanatory – or our organization of the material, which is self-evident. Chapter 1, within which we have tried to corral some of the best examples of ambassadors lashing out merrily at the characteristics, conditions and foibles of the nation to which they’ve been posted, needs no introduction beyond this: within it, we’ve divided the planet roughly into the four quarters of the compass.
To each of the succeeding chapters I’ve penned a short introduction to its field. But it’s worth conceding that there’s a degree of randomness in our attempt to corral valedictories into fields, as they were by their very nature wide-ranging. A large part of this collection could really have been placed in a single chapter, entitled ‘And Another Thing …’ Occasionally we’ve put part of a despatch in one chapter, another part in a different one; occasionally we’ve allowed a despatch to ramble off into territory that really belongs elsewhere.
And we have condensed, sometimes brutally, often by excising huge chunks, and bridging with ellipses. For our brutality we apologize to the authors of some of these valedictories, or to their shades. The abbreviating process can make tracts read in a rather summary or jerky way, so some of the non sequiturs or apparently arbitrary pronouncements you’ll find in this book are the editors’ and not the authors’ fault – but we wanted to save our readers wading through material which time has rendered dull, or too narrowly specific.
Whatever the subject-heading, what almost every valedictory shares, from the flippant or comical to the profound, is a wish to make an impression. For many, this was the Big One; for a few it was a bid for fame; for many, too, it was a chance to blow their own trumpet – a final toot, though the tooting is often extremely subtly done. For some it really was an angry or aggrieved parting shot; for others an apologia for those things they ought to have done which they had not done; or ought not to have done which they had. For almost all the valedictory was written in hopes of raising a cheer, a boo, or at least an eyebrow around the Office.
Many of the valedictories we encountered are notable for their erudition – quoting widely: from a fifth-century Bishop of London to Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics. And there is a good deal of poetry too – where else in a civil service career did one get the chance?
These essays were often very well written: the best British diplomats (
and some of the worst) were writing for an audience that would judge style as well as content: it was in part a cultural exercise.
As to their success, you may share the editors’ opinion that this collection displays some sharp variations in the calibre of the writer, and of his or her mind. Many of these valedictories are simply magnificent; a few are magnificently pompous; not a few are magnificently wrong and just as many proved magnificently right; but sometimes ambassadors tried too hard, obviously feeling they were expected to push the boat out stylistically for their career-defining final despatch. You can occasionally sense a diplomat moving beyond his comfort zone – and the bounds of his intellectual or stylistic ability.
Not every ambassador submitted a valedictory: the practice was entirely voluntary. Here, in what might be called a valedictory blog (blog-edictory or vale-blog? Foreign Office classicists, of which there were many, would incline to the second), is our erstwhile man in Freetown, Derek Partridge, explaining (in June 2009) why he never wrote a proper valedictory. His blog was prompted by the online posting by another former ambassador, Brian Barder, of his own 1991 valedictory (p. 281) complaining that Africa and its needs had been ‘downgraded’ by the British government. Partridge agreed. ‘I left Sierra Leone’ (he blogs)
on retirement in May 1991 having served five years as British High Commissioner. I did not submit a valedictory despatch. My Annual Review for 1990, in which I had made the case for more assistance to Sierra Leone now that it was abandoning the one-party state constitution and moving to multi-party democracy, had not been submitted to Ministers. I was told that they were pre-occupied with Kuwait, and Sierra Leone had ‘little priority’. What would be the point, therefore, in repeating those arguments in a valedictory despatch? I did in my final call on Lynda Chalker [then Minister of State for Overseas Development] complain at the paucity of aid to Sierra Leone while I knew that we had been content to let Kenya misapply £200 million. I was told that steps were being taken in respect of Kenya. When I paid my valedictory call on Douglas Hurd [then Foreign Secretary] he said that he understood that I thought we should be giving more help to Sierra Leone. He would expect a good High Commissioner to think that. Would I tell him why? I did so. It clearly made no impact. I was speaking to a closed mind. My final report on leaving the Service, I was officially told, was that I had done a good job but because I had spent so long in Sierra Leone I had exaggerated the British interest there …
Not many years later, HMG found itself sending troops to Sierra Leone.
At the FCO they have a term for that notion – that one has ‘spent too long’ in a place. They call it ‘going native’. Only in one particular area of diplomacy and geography is the vice widely indulged, if teasingly, by the Office. ‘The Arabists’, as they are known by Whitehall – or, more affectionately, ‘the Camel Corps’ – are a distinct cadre of British diplomat (see Chapter 5). People are proud to be Arabists.
Otherwise, ‘he’s gone native’ is a sneering charge, and, often enough it isn’t until an ambassador comes to write the final valedictory that he dares to acknowledge that there has been any question mark about his objectivity, and to answer back. Time and again the valedictory will explain why its author believes Britain should strengthen its relations with the country he is leaving, and try to understand – even sympathize – more. Time and again an ambassador will exhort ministers not to ‘take for granted’ the goodwill and cordial relations between Britain and, say, Burundi – even though a dispassionate observer in Whitehall, juggling a myriad of competing and superior priorities, may question the proportionality of that response.
It is hard, of course, not to become seized of the needs and concerns of a foreign nation when sent there to represent HMG, and easy to exaggerate the extent of the British interest in the country’s fate. But cool heads (or cold hearts) back in London are quick to spot the edge of the slippery slope to ‘going native’ – which can end (and, in the British Diplomatic Service, remarkably often does) in marrying a native. We asked Sir Andrew Green (see Chapter 2) whether he had gone native in Saudi Arabia. ‘I think there’s a very important difference,’ he replied, ‘between taking a country’s point of view and understanding their view … If you go native you’re finished, but if you don’t understand the natives you’re useless …’
Sir Harold Nicolson, in Diplomacy (his classic 1939 manual for the profession), remarks that ‘the worst kind of diplomatists are missionaries, fanatics and lawyers; the best kind are reasonable and humane sceptics’. I would add that the best kind of sceptics are indeed reasonable and humane; the worst kind (and the FCO is not without examples) are aloof, dismissive and blinkered by a notion of the national interest that can be self-defeatingly narrow and short-term. The knee-jerk Whitehall response, ‘gone native’, can be less clever than it sounds. This collection of valedictories offers an antidote.
But there’s one despatch we never found: the despatch that helped tip me, finally, and two years after joining after Cambridge and Yale, into resignation from the Foreign Office.
Our man in (I’m almost, but not totally, certain) Reykjavik, quitting as HM Ambassador to Iceland and also retiring, commented bitterly that, looking back over a long Diplomatic Service career, he reckoned he’d given key advice to HMG at perhaps half a dozen or more critical moments. And reviewing the advice he had given, he reckoned he’d been, in retrospect, right in about three quarters of those cases, and wrong in the rest.
But nobody else had ever conducted this review, he wrote, sadly – and nobody ever would. He didn’t believe anybody in London had ever checked, later, to see when he’d been right and when he’d been wrong. By the time anyone was in a position to judge, everyone had moved on; many were in different jobs; and it was all water under the bridge. Nobody noticed and nobody cared. Advancement in the FCO, he implied, was largely unrelated to the quality of an officer’s decisions or the long-term wisdom of his advice.
To a degree, I think that ambassador was right. But our study of hundreds of valedictories suggests that, in headline cases at least, there was awareness within the Office when the judgement-calls of senior colleagues had gone seriously well or seriously awry after the event. As you will sense from many valedictories collected here, ambassadors would be expected when they quit a post to make predictions about the future – who among the country’s politicians should be cultivated, who was likely to endure, who fade, who be shot. In unstable regimes such advice was particularly useful. Diplomats willing to stick their necks out and make concrete predictions in their valedictory were admired for it, but risked being proved wrong.
Some were. We give examples in this book. Not included, however, were the remarks of our ambassador to Malawi, Sir Robin Haydon, who played it almost risibly safe when he said of the then Leader in 1973: ‘President Banda could, I believe, go on for as long as he lives or he could be assassinated tomorrow (nice easy non-prediction in a valedictory despatch – but the truth!).’ Banda in fact did go on: ruling until 1994, dying, peacefully, in 1997.
Others simply threw up their hands and admitted the impossibility of the exercise: ‘Our visitors usually ask, in decent circumlocutions, when the Bahrain revolution will break out. The reply is that the revolution is not due for a year anyway and probably not for two: they should ask again next year, when they can expect much the same answer.’ – Alexander Stirling, Ambassador to Bahrain, 1972.
To what, then, if not always for their forecasting skills, was advancement related? That valedictory from Reykjavik did not (to the best of my recollection) go on to say what as a young desk officer I was beginning to suspect: that communicating in the right way, in the right voice, with the right people, in the right order of precedence, was often more important than the objective truth or wisdom of what you communicated.
I can still recall the raised eyebrows and gentle admonition that followed my pinning together a sheaf of documents for internal use, in a manner that left the sharp end of the pin protruding from t
he top folio. In the FCO, I was advised, you never, ever, used a paperclip: only in the Department of Health and Social Security were such things even glimpsed. Ideally you used (for longer sheaves) a ‘green Treasury Tag’ (a length of green wool with a metal end-stop at each end) or (for shorter sheaves) a ‘red India tag’. In extremis (‘if you’re desperate’ is not the way they put things at the FCO) one might indeed use a pin: but it should be placed in the top left-hand corner of the sheaf, aligned at forty-five degrees to the horizontal, proceed from the top folio to the ultimate folio, re-penetrate the ultimate folio, and end its passage with its sharp end safely sheathed between the penultimate and the ultimate folio – lest any senior officer or (God forbid) minister – should run the risk of pricking their fingers when handling the documents.
I exaggerate but do not entirely misrepresent the picture when I say that, in the 1970s at least, questions like this, of presentation, were at least as important as whether the advice contained in the document was in fact sound. You will find within (p. 231) a valedictory from our man in Tehran, freely confessing that he got the most important judgement that his job required him to offer, wholly and disastrously wrong. He went on, no doubt deservedly, to higher things.
No doubt deservedly, I did not – and ended up outside the walls of Whitehall, as a clerk to Margaret Thatcher instead. But I’ve never forgotten that first valedictory I read from Oslo; and Andrew and I hope you’ll find some of what we’ve subsequently uncovered memorable too.
Matthew Parris
Derbyshire
July 2010
1. Diplomacy as Caricature
Parting Shots Page 2