Parting Shots

by Matthew Parris

  As I leave, we are in the middle of an unresolved argument with the Chinese over the governance of Hong Kong in the last six years of British rule. We are right to insist that Hong Kong should have an effective and authoritative government until 1997, and Hong Kong’s nervousness at Chinese interference is understandable … Our immediate objective is the removal of the suspicion in the minds of the Chinese leaders that we intend to leave the coffers bare as we leave Hong Kong. We must equally persuade Hong Kong of Chinese sincerity in accepting what we agreed in 1984 as the basis for the transfer of sovereignty. If we fail to achieve this elementary trust, we have no foundation on which to build the future. We must tackle the Chinese hard on the question of confidence in Hong Kong. We have allowed them to put the onus for maintaining confidence on us. Yet it is for the Chinese to do what must be done to keep up confidence in Hong Kong … The irony is that, whatever Governments do, international capital moves as it likes and as fast as it likes …

  Those who will govern Hong Kong after 1997 need to have a clear idea of what China understands by a ‘high degree of autonomy’. In talking of the future leadership of Hong Kong it seems to me that we have paid a steep price for not having much earlier created a seedbed in which a responsible Hong Kong Chinese political leadership could grow. By this I do not mean the appearance of Western type ‘democracy’, but the training up of potential leaders in something like the style of the Singaporeans. Hong Kong’s prominent figures sometimes fail to understand that choices have to be made between unpalatable options. If they wish to be political leaders in the future they have to be responsible for persuading the public to recognise this. It often means the forfeit of short-term good in the interest of long-term gain. As I have said before, if we wish the policy of ‘one country, two systems’ to work, this requires Hong Kong people, and especially the Hong Kong media to act responsibly and restrain themselves from interfering in China’s affairs. The difficulty is that our British liberal tradition believes in minimum restraint on what the Hong Kong press and Hong Kong local leaders may say and do. Yet prudence and commonsense will increasingly require them to exercise that self-control. As we get closer to 1997 the people of Hong Kong themselves will have to accept the responsibility for building their own future with their giant neighbour. Otherwise the Territory could well be only as ‘autonomous’ as Tibet.

  Afghanistan

  ‘This regime has failed because it could not adapt to the natural grain of the country’

  KENNETH CROOK, HM AMBASSADOR TO AFGHANISTAN, SEPTEMBER 1979

  Crook took his leave from the embassy in Afghanistan just two months before the Soviets invaded. The regime he dealt with in Kabul was Communist, but it was an Afghan Communism, imposed following the 1978 Saur Revolution. The atheists in command of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan instituted a policy of shaving off men’s beards and banned women from wearing the burkha. Twenty years later in Afghanistan the Taliban would, of course, reverse all that. There is surely poignancy, to Western eyes, in Crook’s conclusion that Marxism was failing in Afghanistan because it ignored the strength of fundamentalist Islam.

  The attempt to introduce the alien philosophy of Communism into an old and very reactionary society seems to me to have failed miserably. It was in any case an unnatural intrusion of a bad European politico/economic system into an Asian context. Some blame for its failure must rest on this regime, which contains a high proportion of very old-fashioned revolutionaries (the Left-wing version of Jehovah’s Witnesses or devotees of the gospel according to St Marx?) whose ideas are based on one particular theory invented about a hundred years ago and whose minds have closed to any other ideas, especially modern ones. It seemed to me soon after the revolution that if the parent body were not to reject the new tissue completely, with the attendant risk that the patient might die in the process, there would be required extreme delicacy and finesse. This regime has shown all the delicacy and finesse of a bull in a china shop. The regime had quite a good chance of success if it had played its cards more skilfully. Had it, when it first came to power, shown any sign of recognising the need to adapt its Communist creed to local conditions, even making a concession here and there to local opinion, especially Islamic opinion, its situation today would have been very different. It could not do this, and will, I think, pay the price of its inability. It seems to me to have made every mistake in sight. Perhaps its stupidest was failure to introduce a touch of green into the national flag, to symbolise a synthesis between Communism and Islam. As it is, the national flag symbolises Communism and Russia. It does not symbolise Islam and Afghanistan at all.

  This regime has failed because it could not adapt to the natural grain of the country. Perhaps inability to adapt is characteristic of the Russian version of Communism. Experts can tell. If so, Communists would do well to remember the brontosaurus which finished up on the scrapheap of history as a model that failed because it could not adapt. The first-hand experience we have gained in Afghanistan of Communism in a Third World country may be of benefit elsewhere. It has created in me a strong impression that however long they may be on theory, when Communists have to face a real situation involving real people they cannot cope. They throw back to their bible and repress ruthlessly anyone who does not believe in it. Throughout my 25 years off and on in this area, all of it post-Indian independence, I have thought that the area’s first need was for a positive attitude by governments to the alleviation of backwardness and poverty. In a spirit of honest questioning I was even prepared to consider the possibility that Communism might, in spite of its reputation, in practice have something to offer. I am forced to conclude that it has nothing. It is seen in under-developed countries as a possible alternative politico-economic system. Our experience here suggests that it is a very bad one. It seems quite incapable of attracting any popular support. Indeed, it does not seem to feel the need of any. It depends for its survival on overwhelming force. It is full of the hate-filled propaganda of the past. It appears quite insensitive to the real wishes of the people. Communists are full of propaganda about the common man, but, all too evidently, care nothing for his real welfare.

  Cuba

  ‘A fundamentally decent and likeable people’

  RICHARD SLATER, HM AMBASSADOR TO CUBA, JANUARY 1970

  (CONFIDENTIAL) Havana,

  12 January, 1970

  Sir,

  On re-reading my first impressions of Cuba preparatory to recording my final ones, I feel that, like the Bourbons, I have forgotten nothing and learnt nothing. The picture has perhaps filled out; it has acquired no new dimensions.

  An initial impression which I find least reason to change concerns the quality of the Cuban people. Good-natured, good-humoured, courteous and incorrigibly hospitable, they bear no resemblance to the mental picture I had formed before I came out. With one or two exceptions the Cuban representatives I had met in London seemed to me furtive and uncouth. Cuban National Day receptions were squalid affairs; most of the guests seemed to have crawled out from under stones. The aggressive guttersnipe language used by Cuban representatives at international meetings suggested a seething mass of complexes – and was moreover depressingly reminiscent of Soviet diplomacy in its most abusive phase. Such evidence of the Cuban character as had come my way contained no hint of either dignity or charm.

  Yet the Cubans possess both in a marked degree, and this goes for the Government as well as the people. Indeed, to draw a distinction between the two would at the present stage be misleading. Though some of the privileges that used to go with money are tending now to go with position, I do not think it can be said that a ruling caste has emerged. Leaving Fidel Castro aside, the people who run the country are typically Cuban, and if in some cases their dedication to the revolutionary cause has been too much for their sense of humour, they are still capable of civilized behaviour. Their embarrassment when their friendly instincts are required to yield to the dictates of policy is often painfully apparent.

>   The fact that the Cubans are a fundamentally decent and likeable people has in a way compensated for the unpleasantness of living in a closed society, isolated to a degree which can only be comprehended by those who have experienced it and where the officially accepted values have little in common with one’s own. But it has also in other ways made the experience worse. For it is impossible to preserve a sense of detachment in the face of the privations and the encroachments on personal freedom which continue to afflict the Cubans. In this small country, where travel is virtually unrestricted, it is hard for a diplomat not to identify with the people; and my emotions have been engaged here in a way in which they were never engaged during my service in Moscow in the mid-fifties by the suffering of the vast amorphous mass of the Russian people, unknown and virtually unknowable.

  4. Friendly Fire

  The relative post-Second World War decline of the economy, prestige and living standards of the British was marked by low points during the Suez crisis in 1956; and, twenty years later, by the near-bankruptcy of the UK economy, as a British Chancellor went (as the cliché fast established itself) ‘cap in hand’ to the International Monetary Fund in 1976.

  As Sir Nicholas Henderson puts it in his despatch, beneath: ‘A representative abroad has a duty to draw the attention of the authorities at home to the realities of how we look.’ Some of our most senior diplomats discharged this function unsparingly – at times, it seemed, almost with relish. Keith Hamylton Jones, who wrote his valedictory one month before Henderson, was unapologetic: ‘It is one of the functions of Diplomatic Service officers, when abroad, to provide London with the dimension dubbed by Robert Burns the “pow’r to see oursels as others see us”.’ If Henderson and others were right, the picture was unflattering.

  ‘How poor and unproud the British have become’

  SIR NICHOLAS HENDERSON, HM AMBASSADOR TO FRANCE, MARCH 1979

  Nicholas Henderson’s valedictory charts in unforgettable prose the moment in 1979 when many people in Britain overcame a sense of denial and finally faced up to the severity of the economic sickness afflicting the nation. As a valedictory it is justly famous; uniquely, it also carries importance as a seminal document in British post-war history.

  Its argument – even its title – was designed to provoke a reaction, amplified once it was leaked and published in the Economist weeks after the election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power. The valedictory prompted the new Prime Minister to recall Henderson from retirement and appoint him ambassador in Washington, the most important job in the overseas service.

  Henderson was convinced that Britain’s destiny lay within Europe, but as ambassador in Warsaw, Bonn and Paris he had witnessed successive British governments squander the opportunity to take a leadership role in the drive towards integration. His valedictory set out baldly the price he thought Britain had paid in lost economic growth as a result of sitting on the sidelines for almost thirty years while France and Germany grew rich.

  ‘Nicko’, as he was universally known throughout the Foreign Office, was tall and thin, extremely charming and something of a maverick, although his eccentricities were perhaps a little contrived – critics noted that the Henderson ‘look’ of ill-fitting collars and overhanging ties did not come cheap. A giant pedigree Dalmatian called Zorba accompanied him to postings on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The dog proved its worth in Warsaw, delivering a nasty bite to the embassy’s Polish washerwoman who was rifling around for confidential papers: a warning to other servants not to play the spy. Henderson’s valedictories from Germany and Poland are on pp. 34 and 182.

  In 1979 Chris Patten was head of the Conservative Research Department (and Matthew Parris’s boss). Patten remembers the Paris valedictory as providing ‘evidence from the dock’ for a frightening proposition: that the British people ‘risked seeing relative decline compared to our principal competitors turning into absolute decline. [Henderson] was, I think, stating something which is still a problem – our difficulty of accommodating ourselves to a role in Europe – as well as arguing that we were falling behind European countries that had been reduced to rubble in 1945. It was powerful stuff.’

  Henderson’s daughter, Alexandra, told us her father was ‘extremely frustrated and furious about the way he felt Britain was being run’. The valedictory, written days before his sixtieth birthday and (he thought) retirement, was an attempt to get through to his political masters ‘once and for all … he felt they had treated him with some contempt and weren’t really listening’.

  Henderson’s call for a new ‘sense of national purpose’ would have been music to Margaret Thatcher’s ears. Nevertheless it was surprising that she should pick Henderson, a staunch pro-European, for the critical Washington job. Alexandra Henderson says he was ‘incredulous’ upon being offered it. The ambassador himself recalled that Thatcher impressed him on the occasions they had met in Europe, even though he disagreed with almost everything she said.

  When the despatch arrived in Whitehall, officials record that David Owen, the Labour Party Foreign Secretary, ordered it to be suppressed ‘so as to minimize the risk of its content, or indeed its existence, becoming known’. Owen told us he ordered his private secretary to track down the five or six copies of the despatch known to exist and lock them away in his office. But a week later he changed tack, allowing the valedictory to be circulated in the usual manner, having realized that printing and distribution would take several weeks and that copies would not arrive until after the election.

  The official file containing this despatch was fully declassified for the first time in 2010. It includes a letter dated 30 May to Ian Gilmour, the Lord Privy Seal, from Andrew Knight, editor of the Economist, announcing that the magazine intended to publish, Henderson having by then taken up his post in Washington. The despatch was more of an embarrassment to the previous Labour government than to the newly arrived Tories, but Gilmour had still tried to persuade Knight not to publish, arguing that ‘the taint of partisanship’ might make Henderson less effective as ambassador. In the letter Knight disagrees:

  Wherever in Washington Sir Nicholas is not already regarded as somebody of note, to be listened to, it is precisely this kind of statement, forthright but subtle and so beautifully argued as it is, that will help make him so … I think it will be widely read in the places that count in Washington, and it will do him (and Britain, and your government for appointing him) nothing but good.

  The letter also reveals that while Henderson himself had ‘strongly discouraged’ Knight from obtaining the document, now that the Economist had it he was ‘not averse’ to the substance of it being reprinted. Rejecting the government’s pleas for delay, Knight reveals that not only did he have three copies of the despatch in his possession, he had been offered a fourth and could not risk a rival publication beating him to his scoop.

  The source of the original leak has never been identified. But some in the Foreign Office believe it may have come from the very top. Patrick Wright, a former head of the Diplomatic Service, revealed in 2000 his firm belief that David Owen was a ‘material agent’ in passing the despatch on – something the former Foreign Secretary rejects as ‘conspiracy theory’. There was no ‘deliberate decision’ to leak the document, Owen told us in a radio interview; ‘I just guided its publication until after the election.’ Owen delivered this line with a chuckle, which perhaps suggests there may have been a tiny grain of truth somewhere in Wright’s claim. ‘The little devil in me,’ Owen recalled, ‘may have said overall, let’s have the debate, the sooner the better.’ The file shows the Foreign Office was in fact considering eventually releasing a bowlderized version of the despatch to the public (one po-faced official suggested that in order to defend civil service neutrality ‘the factual material in the despatch could be presented without the judgements’, an approach which rather sweetly manages to miss the point entirely).

  Plain-speaking of the sort exemplified in the Henderson despatch is a force for good in the w
orld and it is pleasing to note that the principal characters profited from the controversy that ensued. In Washington Henderson’s rumpled, urbane charm served HM Government well during the Falklands War, when the ambassador appeared almost nightly on the American television news to state Britain’s case. Thanks in part to Henderson’s good relations with officials in the Reagan administration, America maintained a neutral stance in public while privately furnishing Britain with critical intelligence, as well as more concrete assistance – fuel, ammunition and missiles – at the American base on Ascension Island.

  Andrew Knight’s career also entered the stratosphere. After the Economist he helped Conrad Black buy the Daily Telegraph, which Knight ran as chief executive before jumping ship again to become chairman of Rupert Murdoch’s News International.

  CONFIDENTIAL

  Foreign and Commonwealth Office Diplomatic Report No. 129/79

  WRF 020/1 General / Economic Distribution

  BRITAIN’S DECLINE; ITS CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES

  Her Majesty’s Ambassador at Paris to the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

  (CONFIDENTIAL) Paris

  31 March, 1979

  Sir,

  Since Mr Ernest Bevin made his plea a generation ago for more coal to give weight to his foreign policy our economic decline has been such as to sap the foundations of our diplomacy. Conversely, I believe that, during the same period, much of our foreign policy has been such as to contribute to that decline. It is to the interaction of these delicts, spanning my time in the foreign service, that this valedictory despatch is devoted.