Parting Shots

by Matthew Parris

  British envoys in the Persian Gulf were often drawn into disputes between local chieftains over land. A conversation over one such affair during celebrations to mark the Queen’s coronation in 1953 was to test the ambassador’s powers of subtlety and mischief to the full. The Sheikh of Bahrain came across a weary Winston Churchill sitting on some steps after a banquet and, with Weir translating, asked his help in retaking lands held by the Emir of Qatar. ‘Tell him,’ Churchill replied, ‘that we try never to desert our friends.’ This much Weir dutifully relayed to the Sheikh. When Churchill added, after a pause, ‘Unless we have to’, Weir tactfully left this out of his translation.

  Cairo was Weir’s final post. He was sitting two rows behind Sadat at a military parade when the President was assassinated in 1981. The Belgian envoy beside him was badly wounded. Diving to the ground for cover, Weir found himself clinging on to the American Military Attaché’s foot.

  BRITISH EMBASSY,

  CAIRO

  28 January 1985

  The Rt Hon Sir Geoffrey Howe Kt QC MP

  Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

  London sw1

  Sir,

  VALEDICTORY FROM EGYPT

  Forty years after first seeing Egypt, on wartime passage to India, and after eight years total service within the country, it is time for a last retrospective. That timespan would cover most of the recorded history of the first country I served in, Qatar. For Egypt it is but an evening gone, as the hymn says. Considering that a great deal of what Herodotus had to say about Egypt remains valid today, it is difficult for the contemporary observer to find novel themes, though over the past six years I have seen some interesting variations on old ones.

  When British veterans of the Second World War make a sentimental return visit, as many still do, to the city that offered the juiciest fleshpots of any theatre of war, they are apt to be shocked by the transformation Cairo has undergone. Instead of quiet tree-lined avenues, Parisian arcades, palatial villas, polo at the Gezira Club and green fields stretching to the Pyramids, they see a teeming megalopolis of 14 million souls, its streets and pavements choked with strident traffic, new skyscrapers mushrooming unplanned, magnificent Islamic monuments crumbling unmaintained, dirt and pollution abounding, most services on the point of breakdown, and the Pyramids overtaken by urban sprawl …

  In social terms, the Egyptian upper class may have been destroyed but there is still a middle and a lower. The values of the former may be judged by the popularity of the British TV serial Upstairs Downstairs which was shown a year ago at peak viewing time seven days a week and repeated at least once, driving Dallas off the screen. For the millions of adult Egyptians for whom the nightly episode had absolute priority, it represented a nostalgic evocation of a society that still flourished in their life-time, though it had disappeared in England half a century before …

  While there is as much bombast, self-congratulation and self-deception in the Egyptian media as in other Arab countries – indeed much more by volume, since the Egyptian media eclipse the others in scale and experience – it is offset by a priceless national gift of humour and humanity. I have not met any other Arabs who are capable of laughing at their own foibles; in Egypt making irreverent jokes about authority is a national sport.

  They are also extraordinarily forgiving, both of individuals and of institutions. As far as Britain is concerned, Suez disappeared from the Egyptian political vocabulary years ago, long before it did in Britain – if it has. Despite the occasional assassination and crime passionel the Egyptians are not a violent people and abhor bloodletting; the fratricidal carnage of Hama could not have happened here. But there is no lack of moral integrity. Among the Egyptian intellectuals, creative writers, journalists, film producers, and scholars, who for generations have dominated the Arab cultural scene, there were many who went into voluntary exile or refused to write rather than submit to the censorship and ‘guidance’ of the Nasser and Sadat regimes.

  Restrictions on free speech, which James Craig1 deplores as an endemic feature of Arab society, are milder under Mubarak than at any time in living memory, and numerous independent writers are taking full advantage of the thaw. The trouble in Egypt is that there is too much speech and not enough action. Government ministers know, and are constantly reminded by the IMF, what remedies are needed for the country’s problems, and I do not think that their failure to act stems solely from fear of riots or losing their jobs. There seems to be a deeper inhibition afflicting almost everyone in authority which amounts to an unwillingness or even perhaps an inability to take decisions. The instinctive preference is for procrastination; no deadline is ever final; and the decision when taken is usually to set up a committee. As with the Arabs, this could be the fault of either the educational system (which is all theory and no practice) or of Islam. But I think a more important factor may be Egypt’s 5000 years’ dependence on the annual Nile flood and a complex irrigation system that left no room for individual initiative. Successive generations of Egyptians have always tended to turn their rulers into Pharaohs and to refer every decision to the top. We are seeing this happen to President Mubarak now, under the relentless sycophancy of the government, media and the unchanging protocol that dictates that a circle of ministers and courtiers must accompany him everywhere he goes … He would prefer to share responsibility, and I believe he sincerely wishes the democratic experiment which he launched with last year’s elections to succeed. While one must share his hopes, my guess is that the system will defeat him, and that his experiment will end up in little more than a proliferation of debating societies designed to obscure the fact that there is going to be no devolution of power …

  … But the Pharaonic tradition has also given the Egyptians a sense of security and identity that allows them without shame to accept their incompetence, indecisiveness, lack of foresight, and public squalor as part of the natural order of things: the rest of the world can take it or leave it. My wife and I find that we can take it, for the sake of their compensating human qualities, and of the extraordinary historical, cultural and physical panorama the country offers. We have made more genuine friendships here than in any other post.

  One should perhaps pose the question, as many have, whether the Egyptians are Arabs at all … The most telling evidence to the contrary, is that when the average Egyptian speaks of Arabs he does not include himself, rather like the average Englishman speaking of Europeans. One has to put up with constant commiseration from those Egyptians who flock to London each summer on the fact that the place is being ruined by ‘the Arabs’. At a deeper level, however, and unlike the British, I believe most Egyptians feel that by virtue of language and religion they are part of the wider Arab nation, though by virtue of their ancient culture superior to the rest …

  … In the arts we almost appear to be ashamed of our heritage. In my six years here the [British] Council – as distinct from its admirable local initiatives – has not mounted one major artistic event, although they were common in the darker days and Shakespeare is a guaranteed sell-out. In the country which preserves the remains, literary as well as monumental, of a greater diversity of civilisations (Pharaonic, Greek, Roman and Islamic) than exists anywhere else in the world, Britain is almost the only Western nation of significance to have no institute of its own. In field archaeology a handful of dedicated British scholars keep alive the tradition of Flinders Petrie2 on a dwindling grant from the British Academy, but only by enduring conditions of extreme austerity and enlisting the help of unpaid amateurs. On the official side we teeter constantly on the brink of a decision to close the Consulate-General in Alexandria, the third largest city in Africa and a major commercial centre, to save some £50,000 a year. At least we are not burning the Library, like earlier conviction Christians … But it will not efface the impression that we are becoming a nation of Philistines more preoccupied with pennies than with power, more interested in making quick profits from the oil sheikhdoms than in developi
ng our assets and opportunities in a country of much greater size and influence.

  One must not exaggerate. The Egyptians like most people are susceptible to flattery, and will respond to a renewed show of interest. Unfortunately, they have been spoiled in the years since Sadat became the darling of America by the attentions of world, especially Western, statesmen at the highest levels. While the United Kingdom has managed to keep up a good working relationship through ministerial and official visits, the fact that no British Prime Minister has ever been to Egypt, despite repeated invitations and acceptances over the past ten years and numerous presidential visits to the UK, is beginning to assume the proportions of an affront to Egyptian national pride. I apologise for harping yet again on this familiar topic but I believe that the omission has now become an impediment to better relations such that they can only gradually deteriorate unless it is soon remedied. I must end with the customary tribute to spouse and Service, empty gesture though it is to include a sentence or two of compliments in a despatch which will be read mainly by colleagues. In my case I have two wives to thank, both of whom have been a great support but the first of whom decided that diplomatic life was crippling to the spirit. The second had joined the Service before we met, and has no excuse. I am not therefore taking my leave in the same way as other valedictorians, and look forward to several further years’ service below stairs while my wife pursues her career. Already I owe to her a deeper insight into Egyptian society than I could otherwise have hoped to achieve. She has amply confirmed, from the personal friendships she built up with a range of Egyptian women from the wives of two Presidents to Marxists jailbirds, the view I formed during the testing time of Nasser that, broadly speaking, Egyptian women are much stronger characters than their menfolk. Leaving aside Queen Hatshepsut and Cleopatra, the earliest Egyptian feminists were active before Mrs Pankhurst, and achieved equality in politics and education well before the 1952 revolution. Regrettably the current female generation is suffering from, and indeed embracing, the Islamic revivalists’ view of women’s personal status, and these hard-won gains risk being eroded. This could have more than purely social consequences, for it is self-evident that the only solution for Egypt’s greatest problem, overpopulation, lies in the continuing spread of enlightenment among its women.

  To the Service I feel almost nothing but gratitude for 34 years of satisfying work and congenial companionship. For action and excitement there has been nothing to match the early, pre-oil, days in those one-man posts in the Gulf where the untrained equivalent of a District Commissioner found himself not only presiding judge, boundary demarcator, oil concession negotiator and manumitter of slaves, but also called upon to mobilise military resistance to the Saudi invader – all unencumbered by cypher communications bringing instructions or demanding reports. We made and unmade a few Rulers too in our time, and it was gratifying to note during a visit to the Gulf earlier this month that most of them appear to have at least as good prospects of permanence as the creations of Lawrence and Gertrude Bell.3 I am thankful also for the periodical relief afforded to me from the Arab world, especially eight years total sojourn in the United States. Having had one’s first experience of America in California and the West, in the days of Senator Knowland4 and the China Lobby, before moving to the East Coast, makes it easier to understand if not to sympathise with the mood in President Reagan’s Washington.

  A life-long friendship with many of the dedicated professionals in the State Department should also perhaps make it easier to react as philosophically as they when our own Service becomes the object of the same kind of public obloquy and misrepresentation as they have endured for decades. But it does not. Even after pleading collective guilt to occasional complacency, arrogance, spinelessness, misjudgement, high living and other human frailties I remain unable to fathom why journalists and politicians who have seen us at our work (and enjoyed our hospitality) should persist in both denigrating its value and attributing to the Office ulterior policies of its own; or indeed why the Treasury should choose to devote so many of its mandarin man-hours to the minutiae of our conditions of service. The motive of the superficial critic is perhaps to be found in that dogged British attachment, exemplified by Arthur Scargill, to the stereotype and the class outlook that provides an excuse for evading the more pressing and difficult challenges of changing times. If so the only course is to redouble our efforts of recent years to demonstrate that the stereotype is wrong. But if, as I sometimes fear, criticism of diplomacy reflects a growing national preoccupation, with domestic problems and a feeling that the rest of the world – with certain exceptions – is not worth our attention, or at any rate not worth spending money on in the absence of a guaranteed return (a view expressed to me by one of our visiting ministers), then the task of a diplomat is indeed fruitless as well as thankless. There is no point in paying someone to obscure the fact that the emperor has no clothes.

  At least there is honour outside one’s country. The Egyptian Foreign Minister’s last words to me today were in praise of the expertise, balanced judgement and consistency on Middle East affairs to be found not only among British diplomats but in British institutions as a whole, in contrast to the ever-changing scene in the United States. He hoped that these talents could be mobilised, and brought to bear across the Atlantic, in the cause of peace. This was more than just a pretty speech ad hominem, and I should like to see us doing more to justify the faith of people like him.

  I am sending copies of this despatch to HM Representatives at Amman, Baghdad, Beirut, Damascus, Jedda, Khartoum, Tel Aviv, Washington and at the United Nations in New York.

  I am Sir

  Yours faithfully

  M. S. Weir

  1 . James Craig: British Ambassador to Syria (1976–9) and Saudi Arabia (1979–84).

  2. Flinders Petrie: English archaeologist and Egyptologist (1853–1942).

  3. Gertrude Bell: Writer, traveller and diplomat (1868–1926). During the Second World War Bell was made a Political Officer – the only woman in the British military to bear the rank – thanks to her unequalled knowledge of the region born from years of adventurous desert travel. Bell spent her final years in Iraq, as adviser to the King (both the country and monarch being recent British creations).

  4. Senator Knowland: Californian politician who excoriated President Truman for ‘losing’ China to Communism in 1949. Knowland was dubbed the ‘Senator from Formosa’ for championing the rival Kuomintang leadership in Taiwan.

  Jordan

  ‘A singular combination of opposites … consistently inconsistent’

  HUGH GLENCAIRN BALFOUR-PAUL, HM AMBASSADOR TO JORDAN, SEPTEMBER 1975

  CONFIDENTIAL

  BRITISH EMBASSY

  AMMAN

  12 September 1975

  The Right Honourable

  James Callaghan MP

  etc etc etc

  Sir,

  Many good men and true, I have observed, on arrival in this eccentric principality, fall quickly under a sort of Hashemite spell (and some never break out of it). My own first impressions, recorded in 1972, might have suggested that I was sickening for a similar bewitchment. Three years’ experience has proved at least something of an antidote. There have been moments when the less agreeable aspects of life under the Hashemites have taken precedence. With the passage of time the bad has tended to obtrude, the good to be taken for granted and forgotten: a familiar syndrome, no doubt. In this valedictory review of the Hashemite Kingdom, its people and its policies, I shall try to reassess them objectively.

  Jordanians and their rulers, like other Arabs and theirs, display to Western observers a singular combination of opposites, are consistently inconsistent. Heart-warmingly open and genuine one moment, they can be devious and deceitful the next. Hospitable and generous to a fault with individuals, especially foreign ones, they can be singularly indifferent to social abuse and group suffering. They admire honesty but tolerate corruption; welcome outside opinion but continually disregar
d it. Their intellects are at once acute and sloppy, their imaginations effervescent but uncreative. They are masters of good argument but martyrs to rhetoric. Genuinely attached to their country, they know next to nothing of it, and desecrate what little they explore. They point proudly to their traditional arts and fill their houses with the vulgarest imported kitsch. The feckless hedonism of so many of the rich and the grasping incivility of so many of the poor (especially those ‘dressed in a little brief authority’) are balanced in both cases by virtues that Western civilization seems sadly to have discarded.

  One does not need to have spent 30 years with Arabs to grow aware of these and other startling dichotomies in their make-up. (No doubt the Arabs are equally baffled by inconsistencies in ours. Certainly they swing continually, in their attitudes to Britain, from admiration to disgust, from disaffection back to affection.) I do not pretend to any special understanding of the Arab character: on good days it seems to me (like those intricate villanelles of Auden) clear as a bell, on bad ones totally opaque. But viewing as objectively as I can King Hussein’s subjects as compared with the rest of the ‘race’, I believe them to have rather more of the agreeable qualities and rather less of the disagreeable than other Arabs of my acquaintance …

  … What about their rulers – the King and the handful who contribute to his policy-making? Certainly they too have their faults – displaying an exaggerated idea of their own importance, a cavalier approach to financial priorities and proprieties, and a mistaken belief that a loyal army is a substitute for a contented citizenry. But they have virtues too – and there have been times when Hashemite resilience and purposefulness have given me a lift of the heart, just as there have been others when their waywardness has left me grinding my teeth. Perhaps the King’s uncle, Sherif Nasser, provides the best example of this combination of opposites: notorious at once for buccaneering and for benefaction, his huge private irrigation project in the stony desert at Hallabat is the most imaginative of its kind in the region – and the most unscrupulous. The library in Prince Mohammad’s study offers an equally revealing (if less fair) illustration of Hashemitism: 100 volumes on the Middle East, 50 on Chess, 50 on Gun Culture, 50 on Karate, one on Male Grooming and Good Looks and one final one entitled My Poodle and Yours. The Crown Prince presents a third variant, combining intellectual conceit with moral concern, now repelling popularity through his penchant for polysyllables, now attracting it with his passion for parachuting. Zeid Rifa’i, Jordan’s agile Prime Minister for most of my time, was passed in the course of the farewell dinner he gave for my wife and myself a book of zodiacal horoscopes. Rifling through it for his own he found it to read: ‘Gambler, gourmand, critic, crook, loyal subordinate, right-hand man …’ and closed the book with a peal of engaging self-recognition …