Gore-Booth was hauled before another committee to defend his role in what he calls ‘the Surtees case’; the sacking in 1994 of Paul Surtees, a British Aerospace employee. Gore-Booth, then Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, had complained about Surtees to the company. The ambassador was rebuked by the head of the Diplomatic Service, John Kerr, and accused of ‘extraordinary arrogance’ by the Labour MP Peter Bradley.
The valedictory was addressed to Robin Cook. It is he who is praised for ‘filleting’ the government while in opposition. Nevertheless, the barb about ‘the gradual erosion of trust’, and the charge that ministerial responsibility was being ‘blatantly
prostituted’, would have hit their mark. It was inevitable that a despatch this critical, circulated to hundreds of readers around Whitehall, would leak. Gore-Booth’s despatch quickly found its way into the pages of The Times under the headline ‘Labour in turmoil: angry envoy blames ministers’.
Sir David’s father, Paul Gore-Booth, had the High Commission in Delhi in the 1960s and eventually became Permanent Under Secretary, the head of the Diplomatic Service. His son seemed destined for similar heights, but David Gore-Booth’s career eventually foundered upon an ill-starred state visit by the Queen in 1997 to India. Gore-Booth had already had to mop up the damage caused by an unsolicited offer from the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, to mediate in the dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, but that was only the start of his problems. During the visit Britain was to express regret for the 1919 Amritsar massacre, one of the empire’s darkest days, when troops under the command of Brigadier-General Reginald Dwyer opened fire on a crowd of 10,000 Indians protesting against the extension of First World War detention laws. A Royal visit to the site heightened tensions, especially after the Duke of Edinburgh was overheard commenting that a plaque commemorating the victims exaggerated their number by counting the wounded. (The Duke’s timing may have been unfortunate but his sources were impeccable: General Dwyer’s son had served with him in the Navy.) Britain’s decision not to offer a full apology for the massacre enraged some Indians further. Gore-Booth’s reported description of Delhi bureaucrats as being ‘incompetent bunglers’ for forcing the Queen to cancel a planned speech in Madras added to the damage.
Gore-Booth’s falling out with the Foreign Secretary, as much due to a clash of personalities as the embarrassment of the state visit, saw him recalled from India, and he resigned from the service soon after. Alistair Campbell’s carelessly unthinking suggestion that ‘plummy-voiced old Etonians’ in the Foreign Office might no longer best represent modern Britain summed up the prevailing mood.
Controversial to the end, Gore-Booth managed one final kick at the conventions shortly before his untimely death in 2004, after Jack Straw was photographed mistakenly shaking hands with Robert Mugabe at the United Nations. ‘It was quite dark in that corner,’ Gore-Booth told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. ‘Here are a lot of people and quite a lot of them are black, and it’s quite difficult to sort them out.’
SUBJECT: KEYDOC: GORE-BOOTH: VALEDICTORY
I leave India tomorrow and the Diplomatic Service on New Year’s Eve. It is no secret that I had hoped to leave the DS1 from New York on 14 May 2003. But the dice fell another way. So I shall see in the Millennium as Special Adviser to the Chairman of a major financial institution instead.
As the son of a diplomat, I promised myself not to be one (my wife, a diplomatic daughter, swore she would never be so stupid as to marry into the career!). Yet abroad was in my veins, as was a sense – old fashioned though it seems now to say it – of duty … I joined the FO on 3 September 1964 and was despatched two weeks later to learn Arabic at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies (MECAS2) in Lebanon.
The choice of Arabic (made for, not by, me) turned out to be pivotal. In Baghdad for the June 1967 war, in Tripoli for Colonel Quaddafi’s overthrow of King Idris, in London for the October 1973 war, in Jeddah in the early 1980s for the height of the oil boom and the depth of the Death of a Princess,3 in London again for the crisis with Iran over Salman Rushdie, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent Gulf War; and in Saudi Arabia a second time for its aftermath. A posting to Zambia, two multilateral assignments in UKREP Brussels and UKMis New York4 and spells in Financial Relations Department and as Head of Planners were testing, if welcome deviations from what had become the norm. As, when I had mined the seam of Arabism to its richest point in Riyadh, was India, controversy over State Visits and nuclear tests notwithstanding.
Arabists were trained for colonial tours of duty in the Gulf and Aden: they were described – even if they did not see themselves – as latter day Lawrences. But before most of my generation could ply their trade, withdrawal from the East of Suez had changed the nature of the task: the rise of the oil price and power meant that the Gulf remained as important to the UK as ever and Saudi Arabia began to eclipse Egypt as Britain’s most substantial interest in the region. Above all, the two Arab/Israel wars of 1967 and 1973 meant that Arabists had more than enough to do, not as apologists for the Arabs but to persuade London (and indirectly Washington) that Palestine was a running sore that needed to be treated if the entire Western position in the Middle East was not to be undermined. That danger remains.
To follow one’s father’s passage to India, three decades on, was as tricky as it was (I think, though I have not checked) unprecedented. At first, social Delhi – a formidable force – queued up to congratulate London on having finally accepted the dynastic principle. Later, as things soured after the 1997 election and the ensuing State Visit, socialites wrote off socialists and began taking pot shots at Her Majesty’s messenger. The Indian press is commendably free, but it abuses that freedom to make mincemeats of personalities. I have never held a rein, a gun or a rod in my life – yet I am regularly described here as a hunting, shooting, fishing aristocrat of a type inconsonant with Labour, old or New.
As I learned during the Scott Report saga, the British press is no less proficient than its Indian counterpart at creating stereotypes only to demolish them. One of the great failures of the Diplomatic Service has been its inability to cast off its image as bowler hatted, pin-striped and chinless, with a fondness for champagne. It does not help when Ministers earn themselves a cheap thrill by colluding in the notion that the FCO is elitist and fuddy-duddy. Or that Eton is a dirty word. A Foreign Office Career is one of the best levellers – upwards or down – that has been devised. It is also testing. Bubbly is far from the mind when burning confidential documents on the roof of the Embassy in Baghdad, battening down the hatches against stone throwing mobs outside the High Commission in Lusaka or the Embassy in Tripoli, grinding out texts at all-night sessions in Brussels or New York, paying incognito visits to Syria or doing bumps and jumps in an RAF Tornado over Kuwait. Indeed cocktail parties are death as I am sure 99 per cent of DS colleagues would agree. Whoever it was who suggested an international treaty banning National Day receptions should be canonised.
I know that you filleted the Conservative Government on the issue, but in truth Sir Richard Scott’s Inquiry was a travesty in its origin, procedure and output. I am not surprised that you decided that Sir Thomas Legg5 should conduct his in private. No civil servant should be put in a position where he or she is pilloried in public – and mimicked on the radio, TV and stage – without the chance to defend him or herself. The gradual erosion of trust between officials and Ministers is one of the saddest consequences of the dumbing down of the media and the focus on personalities as opposed to policies. If the doctrine of Ministerial responsibility is to be so blatantly prostituted then civil servants will have to man their own ramparts for rightful remedy. I believe that, as a first step, the Diplomatic Service Association (which I hope will soon be open to all who accept the mobility obligation) should retain the services of a lawyer. He, or she, should advise Foreign Servants on how to protect their fronts – and their rears. Such advice would have been handy not only during the Scott episode but, more recently,
the Surtees case in which ill-judged but widely publicised comments by the present FCO Legal Adviser helped to fuel a report which was as inflammatory as it was prejudicial to my personal and professional reputation …
Having spent the last six years in Duncan’s Outer Area6, I have to say that I think he got it totally wrong. Saudi Arabia and India are both countries where the UK has extensive interests that can only be promoted by British diplomats. And these must be possessed of abundant reserves of talent, resilience and humour. Saudi Arabia is a cheerless confine, India is a cacophonous cauldron. Serving in the Third World is quite different from serving in the First and, increasingly, the Second; as well, in most cases, as being further from home. Such service needs to be rewarded on a totally different scale, with a much larger quality of life element. I am glad to hear that Hornby7 marks a step in this direction – though, from the projections I have seen, not a large enough one. Distance, dirt and danger are the key variables.
So how does the ‘blustering buffoon’ of Francis Wheen’s8 imagination sign off for the last time? Not without thanking my wives; the first for giving up under the strain after only a few years; the second for making the last 21 years a joy above and below deck. And scores of colleagues, whether UK based or locally engaged, who have helped keep this particular show on the road. I have hugely enjoyed a career that has always been colourful and at times controversial. But now it is time to go home.
GORE-BOOTH
1. DS: Diplomatic Service.
2. MECAS: The first generation of post-war British diplomats trained at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies in the mountains overlooking Beirut gained such astonishing proficiency in the language that their successors still speak of the establishment with reverence today. MECAS had regional notoriety as a ‘spy school’; the CIA also sent trainees there.
3. Death of a Princess: The broadcast of this 1980 drama-documentary on ITV depicting the execution of an Arab princess and her lover for adultery spiralled into a major diplomatic incident. Saudi Arabia banned Concorde from her airspace and James Craig, then Ambassador to Riyadh, was asked to leave the country (see p. 325 for his earlier despatch from Dubai). The film, based on the death of Princess Masha’il in 1977, has never been re-broadcast in the UK.
4. UKREP Brussels and UKMis New York: Diplomatic posts at the European Union and United Nations, respectively.
5. Sir Thomas Legg: Head of a 1998 inquiry into the British company Sandline International involving allegations of arms sales to Sierra Leone.
6. Duncan’s Outer Area: Duncan Review Committee on Overseas Representation (1968–9). One of several post-war reviews tasked to trim costs, the Duncan Review proposed a scaled-down and less lavish network of embassies and residences. Duncan divided the world into an Area of Concentration (Europe and North America) and an Outer Area where the axe might fall.
7. Hornby: A review of overseas allowances designed to compensate staff for the additional cost and hardship involved in living overseas. The Hornby System allows for eight return business-class flights over a typical three-year posting, but diplomats can also save up their allowance for personal travel if they take fewer trips or slum it in economy. Some do very well out of it; a 2009 Daily Mail exposé described a diplomat taking the long way home from a posting in Kuwait via Bangkok, Australia, Washington and Poland, among other places, totalling 35,000 miles.
8. Francis Wheen: Private Eye journalist. Sir David was known to readers of the satirical magazine as ‘Gore-Blimey of the FO’.
‘Today’s applicants to join the European Union will find Europa’s paps all but dry’
SIR ADRIAN BEAMISH, HM AMBASSADOR TO MEXICO, 1999
SUBJECT: MEXICO: VALEDICTORY
The Valedictory belongs to the genre Complaint: the Poet complains to his Mistress (i.e. the DS). After thirty-odd years, it is perhaps not surprising if, in this context, the Bard’s ‘age shall not wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety’ evokes no more than a cautious if courteous ‘ahem’. My purpose is not to complain but merely to make a few points without, I hope, being misunderstood.
But there is another difficulty. The venerable convention is that I address you, Sir, but the competition for space in your box becomes daily more pressing. If not you, then who? Senior colleagues, the gallery, or, via a leak, a prospect we cannot be unmindful of these days, the Press? Is the game worth the candle? Just, I think.
Those of us shuffling into the wings about now were boys in the 40s, teenagers (then a scarcely recognised concept) in the 50s, and joined the Service in the 60s. The world we grew up in, overshadowed by the Second World War, was a time of hope and generosity. The 1944 Education Act, the Marshall Plan, the National Health Service and, later, substantial and enthusiastic overseas aid programmes and the European Common Market all were animated by positive convictions and important commitments to widely shared community goals. But as time passed, changes came. A more hard-nosed approach installed itself at the personal, national and international levels. For example, today’s applicants to join the European Union will find Europa’s paps all but dry: a sharp contrast to the bounty of the sixties and seventies when the founder members fattened so blithely. The Service could not have expected to remain immune from these changes. Nor has it.
Five years ago, everyone knew how much the PUS1 was paid. Few do today. Five years ago … there were four grades in the senior structure. Today there are about 15. These developments, in keeping with modern management philosophy, divide members of the Service one from another and reduce transparency. Twenty years ago, a member of the Service leaking a document would have infringed not only the Official Secrets Act, but, more gravely, the sense of solidarity and esprit de corps arising from the Service’s cohesiveness. Today, the reaction is likely to be ‘what do you expect?’. In short, in these different ways, reflecting national trends, the Service has become less cohesive.
1. PUS: Permanent Under Secretary of State for the Foreign Office (also head of the Diplomatic Service). The UK’s top diplomat; a civil servant who runs the Foreign Office under the Foreign Secretary.
‘Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened’
SIR ANDREW GREEN, HM AMBASSADOR TO SAUDI ARABIA, JUNE 2000
Here comes a rant par excellence – a missive which must have vastly cheered the ambassador who sent it and got it off his chest.
Part of a diplomat’s job is to show ministers back in London how Britain is seen, by foreigners, from the outside. This can mean presenting an unflattering picture. With considerable aplomb but in unapologetically provocative style, Sir Andrew Green acquits himself of this responsibility in his valedictory, describing the clash of cultures when the permissive West meets Saudi conservatism.
But in the year 2000, confronted by Sir Andrew’s own conservatism, Whitehall was not in a listening mood. The New Labour government had recently employed the (then celebrated) idea of setting out a ‘mission statement’ for the FCO, relaunching British foreign policy with an explicit ‘ethical dimension’. In a memorable speech the late Robin Cook, then the new Foreign Secretary, declared the Labour government would put ‘human rights at the heart of our foreign policy’ and support ‘the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves’. By ‘ethical’ it is unlikely that Mr Cook meant theological.
This valedictory caused a stir: Sir Christopher Meyer remembers word spreading around the embassy in Washington, where he was ambassador: ‘People were saying – “phew! bloody hell, have you seen Andrew’s despatch,” ’ he recalls. ‘It certainly seized everyone’s attention.’
Readers will make up their own minds about Sir Andrew’s views on women and ethnic minorities in the Diplomatic Service. Some of his comments are simply statements of fact (although it takes courage to commit them to paper in an age impatient with such thoughts): it is true, for instance, that the bulk of the work in bringing up children tends to fall on mothers, not fathers, though Sir Andrew’s crit
ics would say that women are able to take this into account before applying.
Sir Andrew remains an iconoclast in retirement, as founding chairman of the pressure group Migration Watch.
SUBJECT: VALEDICTORY TO SAUDI ARABIA AND THE SERVICE
One valuable tradition, not yet abolished by the modernisers, is the Valedictory Despatch – an opportunity to record some reflections on a lifetime of service.
I leave with no complaints whatsoever. I have had a wonderful time, enjoying everything I have done in the course of 7 years in Saudi Arabia, 16 in the Middle East and 35 in the Diplomatic Service. It has been a challenging and fulfilling career. I recommend it to any man, but not to every woman, for reasons explained below.
Saudi Arabia
Handling our relationship with Saudi Arabia will always be tricky. The gap between our cultures is more like a chasm, and Western ability to comprehend foreign cultures is in sharp decline. It is not easy to explain Sharia criminal procedures to a Western press fixated on the possible execution of British nurses. Nor is it easy to explain to Saudi Princes the apparently unlimited freedom permitted to Arab dissidents in London. The knack, I believe, is to keep Saudi Arabia out of the British press, to see difficulties coming, and to settle them quietly behind the scenes.
Recent campaigns based on the Western concept of human rights miss the mark and engender hostility. We should focus on the undoubted weaknesses in the administration of justice recognising that the bulk of the Saudi population reject many of our concepts on both religious and social grounds. They are aware of the rate of divorce, abortion, fatherless children, drug abuse and crime in Western societies and do not accept that we can give them lessons in how to organise a society. But, even more important to them, they see us as a Godless society.
Parting Shots Page 12