Parting Shots

by Matthew Parris

  The affairs of … UK dependent territories (e.g. the Cayman Islands, whose fishing-boats are periodically apprehended by the Nicaraguans) sometimes also impinge on this post, and perhaps this gives me an excuse for a farewell reference to a subject which occupied me throughout 1973 – viz. the future of the less politically and/or economically viable territories. One day, particularly if current trends towards devolution continue, Northern Ireland may be given the choice between (a) continued union with England, Scotland and Wales (b) union with the Irish Republic (c) independence. If she chooses (b) or (c), and we accept her choice, we shall have to rename our country again. What better moment to propose a positive change to ‘the United Kingdom of the Greater British Isles’? (It is high time we jettisoned ‘Great Britain’, a name which an increasing number of foreigners – and even British – misinterpret as a symbol of nostalgic chauvinism rather than as a straightforward geographico-historical reference to an island bigger than Brittany.) The new State could incorporate as full members (if they consented) all citizens of Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula, of the Falkland Islands Dependencies (if not of the Islands too), of the British Virgin Islands, of British Antarctic Territory, Ascension, St. Helena, Tristan da Cunha, Pitcairn, and perhaps even of Gibraltar and/or the Cayman Islands. (The days when the UN seriously cavilled at – e.g. France’s like and continuing incorporation of Martinique, Guadeloupe, etc., are long past.) The price to be paid would be extension of representation in the British Parliament, and of British social security arrangements (by then drastically reformed – see next paragraph) to these five million odd people (worthier candidates, perhaps, than increasing numbers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh?). The potential dividends would include preservation of valuable fishing and oil exploration zones, bases for nuclear submarines and satellite-tracking stations (if not our own, then leased to the US), second holiday homes for Britons within an area exempt from exchange controls, etc., etc.

  On the economic side, this post endeavours to subserve the well-understood need to promote British exports (though one can hardly expect great things from underdeveloped countries with populations of little over two millions each). However it is of little use increasing exports if the money thus earned is either frittered away at home or, even worse, allocated to tasks which merely make those exports less competitive. 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’. A high proportion of the ‘others’ I meet, in Costa Rica (also a ‘welfare state’ of not negligible efficiency), consider we would be a happier and more effective society if, inter alia,

  a) we revamped our social security system so that payments from the rest of us to the genuinely ill and needy continued, but payments to the merely idle and greedy ceased;

  b) we revamped our labour legislation and procedures so as to provide positive incentives for co-operation and production at all levels in the industrial structure, as in the early Soviet Union (? perhaps a new division in the Honours List) plus negative safeguards against the non-fulfilment of contracts, as in West Germany.

  In other Central American countries where I have been accredited some critics are inclined to add: if your legislators will not fulfil the will of the majority in respects such as these, are they not risking ‘our’ traditional solution – viz. that the armed forces, tired of clearing up other people’s rubbish to have it pile up again, step in to clear up in a more drastic way?

  This is a sensitive theme, but I cannot forbear developing it. Someone formerly in the Personnel Department once told me that I was regarded there as an ‘eccentric’; but (perhaps in consequence) it is others whom I regard as eccentric when I look at the current economic situation in Britain. I joined the Foreign Service in 1949 with no resources save the exiguous residue of a £200 Second World War wound gratuity. Earlier that year (then a schoolmaster) I had sat down and listed my basic objectives in life: in the field of possessions, they included a country cottage and (already achieved) a bicycle. I resolved to acquire sufficient money to purchase and maintain this list of possessions (the cottage was in fact achieved in 1969). Success in this aim, I reasoned, would be one element – the secondary element – in ‘happiness’. If I chanced to earn more money (so that for example I could – in Britain – afford a car as well as the bicycle) then this would be a bonus, to be accepted as agreeable (at any rate in those days before use of the ‘breathalyser’ indiscriminatingly on those accustomed and unaccustomed to strong drink), but certainly not an essential (to be pursued with desperation). Once the means to a certain basic quality of joy are achieved, this will not be markedly affected by quantitative accretions. And the primary element in ‘happiness’ – it went without saying – would be the joy to be derived from creative activity – making the most (within innate limitations) of one’s individual potential. This was – and is – clearly a reward in itself, irrespective of the money it may earn. As Aristotle observed over 2,300 years ago, ‘pleasure lies in the putting out of active energy by an organism in its natural state’; it ‘perfects the act of working … like the bloom on a young cheek’; and ‘happiness, the end comprehending all others’ comes from ‘the working, or energising, of what is best in each of us’. Once initial education and training is completed, the decision to lead a fully active and creative life ultimately depends on oneself, not on the State; and provided one earns enough money for one’s basic needs, why should it bother one in the slightest if one’s neighbour happens to be earning more?

  All this has always seemed to me to be self-evident. Judging however from some contemporary speeches by British politicians (of all parties) and, a pejori, from programmes on British commercial television, a very different philosophy seems to be meekly accepted – even sometimes encouraged – as the yardstick for an increasing number of Britons today – a philosophy which (if rightly reported) rests on a number of glaring psychological fallacies. Two of these may be singled out:

  a) the fallacy that one is happier when ‘contributing less than one’s maximum potential’, or even ‘doing nothing’. This may be true for short periods (everyone needs a rest occasionally) but (even allowing for the inevitable spread of automation) it is hardly the basis for a truly satisfying way of life (pace the poster which I saw in London in 1974 during the three-day week: ‘Vote for Ted: four days in bed’). If it is really the case (as we read) that some British Leyland ‘workers’ (or, for that matter, City directors or civil servants) prefer to sit idly at home or in restaurants/canteens and draw either ‘unemployment benefits’ or ‘compensation payments’, rather than to put out maximum effort to do a job well (even if the only job for which nature has fitted them is a filthy and/or back-breaking one) then our society is betraying our stock, and condemning it to that elimination of the unfittest which (whatever temporary palliatives may avail) is evolution’s ultimate law.

  b) the fallacy that, even if there is conceded to be a more positive aspect to ‘happiness’, this can be equated tout court with the acquisition of ‘more and more money’ (as somehow an end in itself, to be pursued even after one has accumulated the little clutch of electricity-consuming machines which we have now been persuaded to regard as a ‘basic need’). In fact, as we all know, but sometimes find it unfashionable to admit, though money may sometimes help achieve happiness, it by no means always does; indeed it often does the opposite, and corrodes it. To take an example, the personal friendships by which one has benefited, over the years in different lands, inside and outside the Service, have not been dependent on money: and if they had been, they would have less, not more, true value.

  Americans (among whom I spent the New Year, visiting Drake’s Bay in California) profess to envy us our ‘quality of life’. One of the supposed elements in this is precisely a commonsense British realisation (implicit rather than explicit) that human qualitative ‘values’ are created basically by human instincts and satisfa
ctions, bred into all of us genetically, and modified by racial or individual experience. It is possible (and for some purposes useful) to apply quantitative measurements (e.g. monetary ones) to most qualitative satisfactions (as an intersubjective standard of comparison); but this practice must not be allowed imperceptibly to slide into the unjustified assumption that it is the monetary values, as distinct from the psychological values, which are somehow the ‘basic’ ones. If we fall into this error (so tempting to ‘economic advisers’ when they stray beyond their proper field (a preserve into which I have respectfully avoided straying in this despatch) we shall end up by embracing those very features of the American way of life which more enlightened Americans are now rejecting as inadequate.

  The materialistic and quantitative-blinkered disease has even affected, to some extent, our own professional subgroup. From being when I joined, a trio of ‘Services’, each with its own distinctive emphasis on ‘duty’, the unified Service has, since the Plowden Report1 of 1964 (half-way through my service) seemed to put ever-increasing emphasis on ‘rights’, imprimis pecuniary ones. At risk of sounding insufferably priggish I must confess that (even if it has not saved my fellow taxpayers very much) I derive pleasure from knowing that:

  a) I never drew a penny (to the best of my recollection) in ‘boarding school allowances’ or ‘language allowances’ (albeit a father and a linguist);

  b) I am now voluntarily moving onto half-pay and no allowances (but, I hope, equally strenuous activity) at 55, thus permitting someone else to have his or her own Mission who might otherwise – at a time of ‘structural’ constrictions – not have done so, rather than seeking to assert a ‘right’ to another.

  And, a fortiori, I welcomed the ‘freezing’ of higher salaries a few years ago: the previous increase had, I think, given me rather too much.

  1. Plowden Report: The recommendations of the Plowden Committee on Representational Service Overseas – one of many cost-cutting reviews – saw the Foreign Office and the Commonwealth Relations Office, hitherto separate bodies, merged to form the modern FCO. Plowden also recommended that every Head of Mission should have commercial experience, after which, alongside the usual political work, ambassadors were increasingly obliged to accept the unglamorous role of cheerleader for British exports.

  5. The Camel Corps

  It would take a book of its own – and an immersion in the psyche of the British elite deeper than your editors’ – to inquire into the fascination that Englishmen of a type well represented in the Diplomatic Service feel for Arabs and the Arab World. We could dwell on Lawrence of Arabia; we could quote the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; we could cite Wilfred Thesiger. We could speculate on a latent fear of women and hankering for an all-male society felt by some whose education has been at boys’ boarding schools. We could even darkly hint at suppressed anti-Semitism. But perhaps this is psychobabble; and be all that as it may, it is an observable fact that many British diplomats have been drawn, by more than the region’s international importance, to the Middle East.

  And (as mentioned in the Introduction to this book) joining what the Office affectionately called the Camel Corps has been the only respectable way in British Diplomacy of ‘going native’. An Arabist, according to David Gore-Booth, would try to ‘put himself into the mindset of the Arabs and not to become an Arab or behave like one but to be able to predict or judge how Arabs would react in certain circumstances’. But that, of course, is something of an Arabist speaking.

  In the FCO they have been something of an elite – new entrants of Matthew Parris’s generation heard it whispered of the brightest among them that they might be potential Arabists. This is not to deny, however, that other elements within Whitehall have looked askance at the Camel Corps, and insinuated that the Corps has skewed British foreign policy towards a collection of shifting, sometimes shifty, allies with unstable and undemocratic political systems and economies based on oil, foreign labour and bling.

  But the Arabists, as you will read below, are unrepentant. Many of the signatories to the 2004 letter from fifty-two retired diplomats, in protest against British policy in Iraq, were core Corps members. The MECAS language school was the glue that binded them – school tie and all – and it’s said that after its disbandment the Camel Corps were never so distinctive or acted and thought in such a coherent way. At least one academic has suggested that their inheritors in terms of a distinct tribe within the FCO may be diplomats serving in Europe and working in multilateral bodies – who run the risk of becoming institutionalized and infected with the ‘organizational virus’.

  It would be wrong, however, to suppose that the Arabist virus predisposes a diplomat to admire the society or the government of the Arab country where he is posted. The most conspicuous example of a valedictory from an ambassador who in some ways did so, Sir Andrew Green’s from Saudi Arabia, is placed, for other reasons, in Chapter 2 (‘Settling Scores’). Another Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir James Craig (whose valedictory from Syria you will find below, and whose farewell despatch from Dubai is printed in Chapter 8, ‘The Sun Sets on Empire’), presumably took a different view from Sir Andrew, as even the Freedom of Information Act has failed to prise his Riyadh despatch from the FCO’s secret files. It was briefly infamous. Charles Crawford (Chapter 9, ‘Envoi’) has recounted the story to us for our BBC programme, and tells it in his blog:

  I served as Resident Clerk and indeed lived in my own room in the Foreign Office for some two years (1985–6). My finest hour came very early one morning.

  At around 23:30 hours I was called by an unhappy FCO News Department duty officer to say that the Glasgow Herald had told him in a gloating tone that they were running a copy of a Diplomatic Despatch by Sir James Craig, who had finished a distinguished career as HM Ambassador in Saudi Arabia. The point was that earlier that day an injunction had been issued in London against the New Statesman to block publication of this Confidential document, said to be full of trenchant, heartfelt and pertinent observations by Sir James on the general subject of ‘Arabs’. So the Glasgow Herald had decided to publish this tract in Scotland, confidently expecting to side-step the English court’s injunction.

  I telephoned the then new FCO Permanent Under-Secretary Sir Patrick Wright at his home. I told him that from my barrister training I recalled something about a procedure involving an overnight duty judge who could issue urgent legal orders; maybe that might work in this case? Sir Patrick said, ‘Do your best, my boy’ (or words to that effect). I telephoned Sir James and alerted him. He decamped to a friend’s flat to avoid the throng of journalists he (correctly) expected would gather at his house the following morning as the Despatch story broke big.

  I then feverishly started trying to track down (with the help of the excellent Number 10 switchboard) numbers for senior English and Scottish Law officers, hoping to explain the problem and see what if anything might be done. This dragged on for a couple of hours. Eventually deep into the night the Herald were startled to receive a formal order from the Scottish courts forbidding printing the Despatch. The early editions had already been printed and carried the text, but later editions had to be changed. The key thing was that thanks to my telephoning which had triggered the Scottish court’s intervention, the text could not be quoted.

  Thus the issue fizzled out to official satisfaction. Freedom of the press had been ruthlessly crushed by the Establishment in general and by me in particular. Hoorah. UK/Saudi relations were not ‘embarrassed’ (this time at least). Phew.

  If Sir Willie Morris’s valedictory (with which we start) was deemed fit for release (under the ‘30-year rule’, see Notes on the Material) one can only wonder what was contained in Sir James’s despatch …

  Saudi Arabia

  ‘The theatre of the absurd is never far away’

  SIR WILLIE MORRIS, HM AMBASSADOR TO SAUDI ARABIA, 1972

  Morris served as envoy to Egypt, Ethiopia and then Saudi Arabia. Riyadh clearly had its frustrations, as his valedictory
shows. The ambassador also became embroiled in the ever-thorny issue of commission payments paid by British defence firms to middlemen in arms deals. A 1970 despatch from Morris (parts of which are still censored) raised the ‘obviously crucial’ question of systemic corruption in the Kingdom. Bribery, he warned, was so widespread that it had the potential to incite a revolution against the House of Saud: ‘Commercially and politically “the system” is at best an infernal nuisance, and it is politically explosive – a time bomb under the regime.’ (There was in fact just such an uprising in 1979, but it was quickly crushed.)

  In Riyadh, the good offices of HM Embassy were sometimes at cross-purposes with the UK government’s Defence Sales Organization, in its lack of scruples ‘just another Levantine business organization’ according to Morris. Lord Gilmour, who ran the DSO at the time, admitted in 2006: ‘You either got the business and bribed, or you didn’t bribe and didn’t get the business … It’s not something you emblazon or are particularly proud of. It just happens to be the terms of trade.’