Parting Shots

by Matthew Parris

  If entertaining is to be effective in a country where the standards of entertaining are high, the possibility of achieving high standards must obviously be maintained. Beautiful embassies must not wantonly be discarded because they seem to belong to a bygone age. Visiting Tribune Group MPs who argue for such a course, seem unable to understand that it is perfectly possible even in a socialist paradise for people to be ‘simple in their lives and splendid in their public ways’2. A modern Ambassador’s life is not always quite as luxurious as it still sometimes looks to outsiders, or even to some members of the Service itself. When for instance my more exigent house guests put their boots out to be cleaned, they are cleaned all right, and I hope to Brigade of Guard standards. But I have in fact to clean them myself. I do not nowadays find it easy to recruit staff who are willing to lick other people’s boots. Admittedly the government pay for an adequate domestic staff though usually alas on a scale adequate to recruit them a year or so previously. But when, as is inevitable, staff are in due course lured away to better paid jobs elsewhere, they are not always easy to replace at short notice. One often has to take and train up from scratch what one can find, be they but stray, cycling Sikh students as found for me here on one occasion by my Naval Attaché while sauntering in Frogner Park. They also have to be man-managed. To retain the services of my first butler, I found myself organising and eventually playing in an Embassy soccer team, a game which I had never played since I was twelve.

  All that is fun. With all the difficulties and anxieties, we have loved living in this perfectly beautiful house. There are however some much more serious disadvantages about service abroad. The constant shifts of abode become more painful each time. Floods, riots or even souvenir hunting by guests are bound to take their toll on personal possessions. Hard climates inflict their own wounds on the unlucky. Above all the children suffer. As indicated in the first paragraph of this despatch I have had experience over three generations in this field. On the basis of it, I would guess that in about 50 per cent of cases, service abroad constitutes for the children concerned a very seriously unsettling influence in their lives, which the broader horizons offered do not fully offset. I hasten to add that I personally was not affected in this particular way. From the age of 7 to nearly 18 I had the enormous advantage, in my own view, of having my parents serving at home.

  Sir John Russell referred to the prospect for most diplomats of impoverished retirement. I hope myself, despite inflation, to escape relatively lightly; but it is certainly true that while the Service offers people a higher standard of living abroad, it also engenders expensive habits which are not all that easy to break. It is moreover I suppose one of the few careers in which it is, in a sense, indecent to save anything. Those who sold their houses when posted abroad must, unlike their colleagues who stayed at home, look forward to a much more modest establishment when they return, unless they are fortunate enough to inherit something better. A returning diplomat obviously has few friends in the United Kingdom and is faced with the problem of making from his more modest surroundings a new set of friends in an England which seems, depressingly, to be growing more rather than less conscious of social status. Many of the friends he will have made abroad will, inevitably, come from the richer elements of society. These all promise to come and accept his hospitality in his retirement abode, where naturally there will be no allowances to help him cope.

  It is true, as Sir John Russell suggests, that honours used in the old days, to offer some compensation for all this; and it is, in my view, absurd to argue, as some do, that honours are fundamentally an irrelevance and that it is a sufficient honour in itself to represent Her Majesty abroad. Of course it is while it lasts. But journalists in England do not seem to hold the job of an Ambassador in any very high esteem. The appointment of my successor to this post was the third to be mentioned among the day’s appointments listed in The Times, and the tenth among those listed in the Financial Times. It is still essentially honours which give to the public an indication of the esteem in which jobs are and ought to be held. I am not however at all sure that this argues for more honours for the Diplomatic Service. I personally do not think that it is inappropriate that Ambassadors in Grade 3 posts should be equated with Major Generals. I think it would be very wrong to try to attract into the Diplomatic Service, now I believe some 6,000 strong, the calibre of candidate it was legitimate to try to attract into a service of 210. We still need the high flyers for the big jobs. I am not sure that one needs the same calibre of brain for the lesser jobs. If I had a son, which I have not, and were asked by him for my advice, which I would not be, as to whether to join the Diplomatic Service or not, I would I think be tempted to say ‘yes’ if he was an Oxbridge First, or an Oxbridge Third. If he had a good brain but not of the top calibre, I am not at all sure that he would not serve his own and his country’s interests better by using his talents elsewhere. I have enormously enjoyed my years in the Diplomatic Service, but I am very conscious of the fact that I have been an observer rather than an actor on the world’s stage.

  While in fact brains are still obviously important in the Service, they are not the only thing that matters. Whenever I have had occasion at this post to express an opinion about the qualifications which I would like to see in prospective members of my staff, I have always laid a certain stress on that degree of physical fitness which will enable people to ski. This is because skiing is what all Norwegians do in Winter, and enjoy doing. My advice in this regard never seems to have been taken very seriously, except perhaps in one instance; and I am bound to say that it is my firm belief that more attention could with advantage be paid to the merits of physical fitness and stamina for diplomatic life generally. Apart from the hymn’s ‘gilded baits of worldly love’3 our specific calling’s snare is drink; and it is profoundly depressing to see the number of members of the Service who are engaged in the process of destroying themselves by it, without any serious attempt to apply the remedies of which there are at least two. One is total abstention each year from hard liquor for a prolonged period whether over Lent or the annual holiday or both. A second is exercise. And quite apart from its potential, health giving aspects, an ability to indulge in any sport available is an enormous help in Diplomatic life. Half the fun I have had in the Service and half the useful contacts I have made, have been made through sport; and I have enjoyed and profited, from the sports which have brought me into contact with humble people, just as much as I have enjoyed the sports which have brought me, literally, into contact with Kings.

  Before concluding I would like to say that I am profoundly sad to be leaving the comradeship which exists in the Diplomatic Service from the highest grade to the lowest. It is frankly amazing that it does still exist and that morale has throughout remained so high. For 10 years the impression that I, and many of my contemporaries, derived from a visit to Personnel Department was that the greatest service that we could render to our colleagues and the state would be to drop dead … It is, however, in my view, very important that members of the Diplomatic Service should be made to feel, especially in the letters appointing them to new posts, that they are actually wanted …

  … It used to be a convention in the pre-war Diplomatic Services overseas, that people who had had the honour of representing Her Majesty abroad should not visit capitals where they had done so, for a period of at least three years. Does such a convention or something like it still exist? If it does, it should be more widely known. If it has fallen into desuetude it should I think be revived in some form or other although, I hope it will not preclude my paying strictly private visits to the mountains and fjords of this beautiful country in which,

  Sir,

  It has been my honour

  to be

  Your obedient Servant

  R. Selby

  1. ‘cookie pushing’: A term which has gained traction in the United States as a pejorative description of diplomats’ work; talk-radio hosts often refer to ‘those pinstriped cookie
pushers in the State Department’. In Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable it denotes a junior diplomat playing the waiter at embassy functions, forcing canapés on to unwilling guests.

  2. ‘simple in their lives … public ways’: From ‘These Things Shall Be’. John Ireland’s idealistic 1937 hymn was much sung by Labour politicians and public schoolboys.

  3. ‘gilded baits of worldly love’: Charles Wesley’s hymn from 1749. Bachelor diplomats overseas must let their head rule their heart, because an unwise romantic attachment could jeopardize their career – especially if it turns out be a honeytrap.

  ‘… who now closes both his career and this impossibly long sentence’

  PETER OLIVER, HM AMBASSADOR TO URUGUAY, MAY 1977

  An example of how the proximity to events of an ambassador in the field can lead him to draw very different conclusions – in this case, over the harsh treatment of rebels – to those of his superiors watching from a distance back in Whitehall. In this case Oliver had very good personal reasons for what he called his ‘preference of the enforcement of law’. As well as the abortive attempt to kidnap him in Cuba, Oliver alludes to another far more serious and recent precedent: his predecessor as HM Ambassador to Uruguay was kidnapped by the left-wing Tupamaros guerrillas in 1971. Geoffrey Jackson spent eight months in captivity and was only released after negotiations involving the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, and a ransom payment of £42,000.

  The Uruguayan government responded to the Tupamaros with brutal martial law. In his despatch Oliver backs this tough stance, but the file shows his bosses in the South American Department in London disagreed: ‘Mr. Oliver’s implied justification (through the medium of a “cynical observer”) of the Uruguayan human rights policies will not enjoy a receptive audience. Nor does it deserve one. Torture, brutality and murder apparently do not feature in Mr. Oliver’s vocabulary. But he has always been incorrigible on this question.’ This seems harsh, given the history. And Oliver’s style, elegant if sometimes slightly laboured in its elegance, has a playfulness that sourer observers in Whitehall appear to have overlooked.

  The same official concedes that Oliver’s despatch (from which only selected paragraphs appear here) is ‘very readable’, but that is the only praise – and, from the lips of a mandarin, double-edged. Elsewhere in the document, the ambassador’s prose is peppered with references to Zeus and Aesop – as well as the nods to Sherwood Forest in the extracts below – ‘and the somewhat confusing switches in allegorical characters, writes the rather sniffy official, ‘give it a carnival character … The result is perhaps best summed up in Mr. Oliver’s own words “sweet white wine, with just a touch of Angostura”, a concoction which, if taken in too great a quantity, is likely to cloy the palate and turn the stomach.’ The clerks also rounded on Oliver in their marginal notes for his ‘unfortunate’ reference to the embassy being downgraded; and for spelling mistakes.

  BRITISH EMBASSY

  MONTEVIDEO

  27 May 1977

  The Right Honourable

  Dr David Owen MP

  etc etc etc

  Foreign and Commonwealth Office

  Sir

  I am writing this despatch on the eve of my departure on retirement after close on five years’ service as Her Majesty’s Ambassador in Uruguay. If I start with a reference to earlier experiences in Cuba, it is not without relevance, both personal and political. For some months in 1958, when Castro was working his way westward from Oriente, I was acting as Chargé d’Affaires in Havana … and it was in that capacity that I deciphered a ‘strictly personal’ telegram from your Department, informing me that it was believed that there was a Castro plot to kidnap me, and suggesting that I took suitable precautions. This seemed eminently sensible advice, which I proceeded to follow, and I was relieved to find that the precautions proved successful. I was also interested to learn, some weeks after the fall of Batista, that they had been justified; a young Cuban student confided to my daughter that he was very glad to have met me at last, as he had been a member of a commando with orders to kidnap me – orders which, he added charmingly, had fortunately proved impossible to carry out. I must as a consequence confess to a certain preference for the enforcement of law and order in dealing with guerrilla tactics, especially when the latter (whatever their motivation) are directed against comparatively harmless persons such as my predecessor or myself, although I would be the first to agree that ‘enforcement’ is too comprehensive a word and requires some qualification. I can only apologise if that preference tends to colour this account of my stewardship here.

  Much has been written and published about the Tupamaros and I need not describe in detail their origins and early activities. They saw their heyday in 1970–71 and by the time I arrived in June 1972 they were, thanks to President Pacheco’s decision the previous year to bring in the Armed Forces to help the Police, already on the defensive although still remarkably active. They had also lost a good deal of their original anti-corruption ‘Robin Hood’ glamour and were becoming increasingly influenced by communist ideas, even though the official Communist Party disclaimed any connection with them …

  So much for the stage setting and the actors. How about the audience of the outside world, and their reactions? And how have these reactions affected the players themselves? A disinterested but cynical observer would probably derive a certain amount of quiet amusement from studying the scene. Ten years ago, when the Tupamaros were playing in Sherwood Forest and generally discomfiting the bad barons and the greedy Sheriff of Nottingham, they attracted some tolerant sympathy abroad. But then they started playing rough. They shot people. They murdered a United States official adviser. They kidnapped foreign diplomats, including a British Ambassador. By so doing, they forfeited such sympathy as they had enjoyed, and even when the Armed Forces were brought in and repaid toughness in kind, there was at first remarkably little talk of human rights. That, the same cynical observer might also note, only came later, when ‘domestic’ Tupamaros and more internationally-oriented communists came to be lumped together as ‘sediciosos’ … Finally, there is one Ambassador who (despite some slight lingering resentment that, for reasons still undisclosed to him, it was decided to downgrade the post before his arrival) has thoroughly liked being an Ambassador; who, with his wife, has found the last five years the most enjoyable of his service, and indeed the most rewarding in the non-financial sense; who has throughout had the loyal help, not only of an excellent staff but also of a British community more co-operative than any he has met elsewhere; who, reverting to the first paragraph of this overlong valedictory despatch, has gratefully contrived to avoid the unfortunate experience of his predecessor; who will always remember with appreciation the friendliness and the cheerfulness he has met throughout the length and breadth of Uruguay; and who now closes both his career and this impossibly long sentence by having the honour to remain,

  Sir

  Your most obedient Servant

  P. R. Oliver

  ‘I am not the man I was’

  RONALD HOPE-JONES, HM AMBASSADOR TO BOLIVIA, JULY 1977

  Today is my fifty-seventh birthday. I reach ‘notional 60’ in another three months and am retiring from the Service. I am exercising this option for two main reasons. One is that after five years in the Army during the war (I went a bridge too far) and another 31 in the Service, eight of them at an altitude of over 9000 feet, I am very conscious of the fact that I am not the man I was, either physically or mentally. O quanta qualia sunt illa sabbata!1 The other is that after La Paz there is really no other post that I would want to go to. We have been very happy here.

  1. O quanta … sabbata!: ‘How great and wonderful the sabbaths will be in heaven!’ A twelfth-century hymn, written by the monk Abelard, one of history’s star-crossed lovers. The afterlife was all he had to look forward to; Héloïse’s uncle had him castrated.

  ‘Most foreigners in Vietnam, diplomats or not, are on the verge of insanity’

  ROBERT TESH
, HM AMBASSADOR TO VIETNAM, MARCH 1978

  I should like to put on record the very intimate collaboration between the European Community Missions here. Of six of us, with the Danes planning to join, four live, and three have their offices, in rat-infested hotel bedrooms. We have done a lot to assert our Community solidarity, have made our first attempts at joint reporting, and are close personal friends …

  I should like to pay more than the normal tribute to my staff, even though they are all comparative newcomers by comparison with us. It can only be done by dramatic illustration. Time: 6.00 p.m. (to eliminate our raucous interpreter on the communal telephone). Scene: the strong-room and registry (each 10´ × 10´) and the corridor outside (5´ × 16´). Characters: my secretary, pounding out a telegram on our primitive cypher machine; my communicator/archivist on his back on the floor in the middle of the bits of the latest machine to go wrong; at the registry desk my large Administration Officer/Accountant/Vice Consul doing archives; in the corridor, his tiny archivist/secretary wife, alternately advising and bullying him while taking over her shoulder dictation from my First Secretary/Consul; my Honorary-Consul wife writing up her latest consular visit to the South in the middle of the tea cups; and myself treading through them all in search of a file. Even in theory we are all polydextrous. In practice, my First Secretary has had to spend almost all her time on the humanitarian task of evacuation from the South. Remember, when you judge us, that through an informal local arrangement we have ‘re-united with their families’ in Hong Kong nearly 5,000 people – probably more than have left by illegal boat trip …