Parting Shots

by Matthew Parris

  I must close by trying to illustrate the Vietnamese character. Anecdotes serve best. One early one was my driving test. Gossiping afterwards I discovered that their main traffic problem was bicycle crossbar riders. If the passenger baled out to the left he fell under the oncoming lorry: if to the right the bicycle did. Clearly there must be a law. But the debate went on unresolved on whether to ‘veer to the right or to veer to the left’.

  I also commented that the cyclists did not seem to obey the same rules as the motorists. ‘Of course not: they have a different set of rules.’ They might have told me.

  Much more recently, my wife asked our interpreter (ancient, pig-headed Vietnamese) to have my chimney cleaned. With rare electric power, our home was being kippered by our log fires. He insisted, as always, that there were no chimney-sweeps in Hanoi. She told him sweetly to ask the advice of the Indian Ambassador’s interpreter, who knew how to get it done. He was not to be defeated: she found one servant on the roof and two below, trying to clean the chimney – with the fire still alight. In the face of fact, few Vietnamese will lose face, admit they are wrong, or use common sense.

  Talking in the main port, Haiphong, to a Vietnamese shipping official, I suggested they mobilize the army to sort, list and clear the mountains of waiting and decaying goods. He said, sadly, ‘We keep doing that. It never lasts long. As long as one authority controls discharge, and another collection, and they refuse to speak to one another, things will stay as they are.’

  They leave everything to the last moment, then blandly rely on outsiders to extricate them from their own mess. They are infinitely charming and will give ten different reasons for not doing something which they have for months said they wanted to do and over which one has gone to endless trouble. After months of silence they will demand immediate and almost impossible action. Most things get done, somehow or other, at the expense of the nerves of others. That is why most foreigners in Vietnam, diplomats or not, are on the verge of insanity. The invariable last ditch defence: ‘we fought for thirty years’.

  I am sending a copy of this despatch to Her Majesty’s Representatives in Bangkok, Vientiane, Hong Kong, Peking, Moscow, Paris and Washington.

  I have, etc.,

  ROBERT TESH.

  ‘In the event of your marriage you would be required to resign’

  JULIET CAMPBELL, HM AMBASSADOR TO LUXEMBOURG, OCTOBER 1991

  After such interesting and enjoyable years here it was a difficult decision to leave the Diplomatic Service. The Service has of course changed greatly over the years I have known it, and to my mind mostly for the better … I naturally also appreciate the greater opportunities for women. I joined a Service in which women had not achieved equal pay, and my letter of appointment included a paragraph warning that ‘in the event of your marriage you would be required to resign this appointment’. Now I head an Embassy (surely the first) in which the majority of DS spouses are male.

  ‘Our predecessors earned more; and their day ended earlier’

  SIR BRIAN FALL, HM AMBASSADOR TO RUSSIA, JUNE 1995

  When I joined the Service, a Grade I Ambassador was paid £7000 a year. Twice that then would have bought a lot more house than twice what I’m paid would today. Some handy allowances have been slipping too: when I first went to Moscow, as a married Third Secretary, we had a maid who could cook; the Head of Chancery had a maid, a cook and a driver. When I got back here as Head of Chancery, we had a maid who could cook. Civil Service pensions, which looked so good in the 1960s and 1970s, have now fallen behind private

  sector best practice. And Knighthoods, in those dear, dead days, were two a penny compared to now.

  Admittedly, some of the cuts were into fat. Others were compensated by improved conditions of service: children’s concessionary journeys; difficult post allowance (better the cash than the promissory note), opportunities for working wives, health care – even the furnishings in many of our houses and flats. But, at the end of the day, the balance seems clear: our predecessors earned more; and their day ended earlier.

  My first boss in the Office, by reputation a martinet, was particularly keen that we should not skimp on the working day: by which he meant that we should not come in after 10.00, leave before 6.00 or spend more than two hours for lunch. I doubt that in those days there were Under Secretaries to be found searching the basement for their telegrams at eight o’clock in the morning, or key desk officers still hard at it twelve hours later. Nor, I suspect, were diplomatic staff in posts abroad so bound to their desks.

  ‘Free housing, reasonable pay and not too much to do’

  RICHARD THOMAS, HM HIGH COMMISSIONER TO BARBADOS AND THE EASTERN CARIBBEAN, FEBRUARY 1998

  A snapshot of an earlier age and a slower pace, this is one of the editors’ favourites: a gem of elegantly comical prose.

  Before they were merged in 1968, two separate departments managed Britain’s overseas affairs. The Commonwealth Relations Office conducted relations with countries that used to make up the British Empire; the Foreign Office dealt with the rest.

  Further extracts from Thomas’s despatch are on p.293.

  One fine day in the summer of 1961 in the Scottish Highlands, on leave from the Army, and staying with my parents, I received a small brown envelope which contained news that I had gained entrance to the Civil Service by means of the Open Competition. I had been allocated to the Department of my choice, the Commonwealth Relations Office. I had chosen the CRO because I had a friend in it, who when I had last seen him was living comfortably, with free housing, reasonable pay and not too much to do, in Dublin. I told my parents the good news, and in answer to their enquiries explained that the CRO, as its full name implied, presumably looked after Commonwealth relations. ‘Yes dear, but what does that mean?’ asked my mother, herself the daughter of a Civil Servant and given to inconvenient bouts of intellectual rigour. I hadn’t a clue, but so as not to let the side down I said that it presumably meant that I would be showing visitors from the Commonwealth around London. ‘That sounds very interesting, dear,’ replied my mother, in a tone that implied less than total conviction. My father, who earned a precarious living on the fringes of the theatre and who was appalled at the prospect of having a son in the Civil Service, merely shrugged. It was a beautiful day, and I was relieved to think that I would not have to look for a job when my National Service ended that November. We carried on with our holiday.

  The reality, when it materialised one dreary late autumn day, was not much less off beam than my untutored expectations. Because of my National Service, I had missed the Induction Course and was thrown straight into the CRO’s West and General Africa Department. There my duties were to fetch, twice a day, the telegrams on the current Congo crisis from the Foreign Office next door, sort them into date and time order, and give them to my immediate superior, a retired Colonial Deputy Governor. What he did with them I never discovered. The room in which I was thus employed was an attic, and is now inhabited by three or four members of WIAD1 – a neat irony, given my final appointment in the Service. My room-mates seemed busy enough, scratching away at manuscript drafts and occasionally dictating into astonishing machines that resembled tea-trolleys, recording on discs which were sent to Blackpool for transcription. (The results came back two or three weeks later, after one had forgotten what they were about, and in a form that did not encourage recall.) I did not have enough to do, but my colleagues advised me not to point this out. Instead they directed me to a makeshift bed, hidden behind a row of steel presses at the end of the room, for the use of anyone in need of a little rest.

  After a few months of this curious existence, so far from my expectations and, frankly, so boring, I told the Head of Estabs that I was inclined to seek alternative employment if things did not look up. Without further ado I was made Private Secretary to the CRO’s Parliamentary Under Secretary, who fortunately had a forgiving nature, and from then on things did indeed look up. Not least of the improvements was the successful hostile tak
eover bid, three or four years later, mounted by the FO on the CRO. I had put the FO second on my preference list because I believed it to be staffed by toffs with triple barrelled names who had been to Eton, and thus not a suitable milieu for a keen young radical like me, whose sole previous contact with it had been as a Suez demonstrator in 1956. But my forays into its Congo section had now disabused me of this exaggerated view …

  1. WIAD: West Indian and Atlantic Department.

  8. The Sun Sets on Empire

  ‘When I was about ten,’ writes Matthew Parris in 1959, ‘and hoping at that time to be appointed rather than elected to the leadership of a country somewhere in the world, I wrote from Africa to what I think was then called the Colonial Office, expressing my wish to be a governor when I grew up, and inquiring about the possibilities of employment, and the appropriate career-path. I received a kindly reply pointing out (gently) that by the time I was ready to be a governor, there might not be many British colonies left to be governor of; and suggesting I redirect my inquiries to the Foreign Office. Which I did.

  ‘Reading the despatches which follow, it may strike you that I was not alone in reposing in a diplomatic career the ambitions I had privately nursed for a more paternalistic role …’

  ‘Sweetmeats, Christmas cakes and fat goats … a far cry from the Foreign Office canteen. All this will pass one day’

  SIR JAMES CRAIG, HM POLITICAL AGENT IN DUBAI, OCTOBER 1964

  British diplomats come bearing a range of official titles which can be rather confusing. An outsider, ignorant of what they do, might be forgiven for failing to distinguish, say, a high commissioner from a vice consul, or a first secretary from a chargé d’affaires. But there is a gulf between their responsibilities. At one end of the scale, consuls look after British tourists who have lost their passports (an honorary consul in a particular city or region might even be – heaven forfend – a ‘locally engaged’ foreigner). At the other end of the hierarchy, ambassadors have in them vested the powers of Her Majesty the Queen, and can negotiate with foreign governments on Her behalf.

  Such powers at the top of the modern diplomatic tree are mere trifles, however, compared with the astonishing leeway given to British diplomats and colonial administrators in the days of empire. Along with their greater power went an entirely different (and now obsolete) array of titles – such as political agent. James Craig describes the responsibilities of this long-forgotten role in his peerlessly evocative despatch from Dubai, below, which we have reprinted in full.

  The Trucial States (comprising the sheikhdoms which today make up the United Arab Emirates, including Dubai) were British Protectorates created by a series of peace treaties in the nineteenth century. London saw fit to impose these treaties – which gave the protectorates their name – upon the sheikhs after repeated attacks by pirates in the Gulf on British ships bound for India. Britain assumed the power, through these successive alliances, to arbitrate in any local disputes. Tribal politics were complex, with sheikhs frequently facing challenges from within their own tribe; often from members of their own family. The British diplomat on the ground would throw in his lot – and, decisively, that of the Royal Navy, whose gunships cruised near by – with whichever brother looked most likely to run things in accordance with British interests.

  As well as playing kingmaker, political agents often had full legal jurisdiction over non-Muslims in the territory. The Indian penal and civil codes were imported for the purpose. Most strikingly of all, British envoys had the power to free slaves. Slavery had been abolished in much of the region but was still practised in conservative enclaves. In Oman any slave who touched the flagpole in the British compound won their freedom, and in the 1950s the political agent there was still freeing more than a dozen a year. Slavery was finally abolished in Oman in 1970, seven years after Dubai.

  Craig is held in deep respect by colleagues as an Arabist from the very top drawer; he taught at the so-called ‘spy-school’ for languages, MECAS, in Lebanon. His Dubai posting came comparatively early on; Craig went on to be ambassador to Syria (1976–9; see p. 252) and Saudi Arabia (1979–84). His Saudi valedictory was briefly the subject of a media storm (see the Introduction to Chapter 5) involving several high court injunctions which remain in force today. Craig’s ‘Impressions of Dubai Post’ was not strictly a valedictory – he was still in the job – but it is a farewell despatch all the same. The times were changing in 1964, as Craig saw, and the political agent’s days were numbered. Four years later, Britain declared its intention to withdraw from the Gulf, against the wishes of many of the locals. Like other remnants of empire the Trucial States had become a political liability for the Labour government and an expensive burden. The flag was hauled down, with undue haste, in 1971.

  THIS DOCUMENT IS THE PROPERTY OF HER BRITANNIC MAJESTY’S GOVERNMENT

  BT 1891/1 Foreign Office Distribution

  TRUCIAL STATES

  IMPRESSIONS OF DUBAI POST

  Mr. Craig to Acting Political Resident (Bahrain). (Received October 1)

  (No. 8. CONFIDENTIAL) Dubai,

  September 27, 1964.

  Sir,

  The title of Her Majesty’s Political Agent, I have the honour to submit, is an exceedingly romantic one. Even the dourest would not deny that it carries a less prosaic, less workaday ring than Commercial Officer or Second Secretary (Information). It has, to begin with (despite a lamentable increase of one-third in our numbers over the past three years) a growing scarcity value. To the best of my knowledge only four of us survive; and there is at times an enjoyable feeling of political agents contra mundum. The name, too, is rich in associations. It belongs with those other old and evocative titles: Collector, Resident, District Commissioner. It suggests remoteness in time and in place. One feels that a Political Agent is (or should be) at the end of the line, one of those originals on whom the sun used never to set, the final, executive blood vessel in the network of arteries that stretched out, long, efficient and complex, from the distant heart of empire; the true ultima ratio regum.1 The ghosts of dead colleagues rise up: in the club at Mandalay, saddling their horses in Peshawar, haranguing the tribes in the Kalahari. And the nostalgia grows with the awareness that one is very nearly the last of that very long line, those thousand men who month by month sent back their despatches to the district headquarters, to the provincial capitals, and finally to the red boxes of Whitehall. Oh my Wilson and my Cox2 long ago!

  I take the view, it will now be evident, that, having been given a title, one might as well enjoy it. But the times are changing. There has been criticism, as your Excellency knows, of the imperialist flavour of the name, and talk of adopting something more consonant with our egalitarian world. The nature of the post is also changing. Already the functions of my colleagues in our sophisticated neighbours, Bahrain and Qatar, are inclining more to the ambassadorial and less to the pro-consular.3 Dubai has begun to take the same well-trodden road and perhaps before long will be catching up. The gunboats still call, but they are less peremptory than before. The Political Agent still commands, but more often now he suggests or advises.

  Yet on the Trucial Coast, more perhaps than anywhere else, the old regime persists. The atmosphere is on the one hand imperial India. The guard at the compound gate hoist the flag at sunrise, and all day long it looks down upon the dhows and ferryboats in Dubai creek. Below the windtowers the bazaars are crowded with Sindis and Baluchis, Bengalis and Pathans, dhobi-wallahs, babus, and chokidars. The Agent sits in court below the Royal Coat of Arms and sees the old procession of clerks and petition writers. His servants wear turbans and puggarees and long shirwani coats. He inspects gaols and pursues smugglers, runs hospitals and builds roads. He takes the salute from the Trucial Oman Scouts, on a sandy barrack square, amid ornamental cannon, pennants on lances, bugles and pipes and drums. He makes State tours with reception tents and dining tents and sleeping tents, trestle tables, carpets and military escorts. He is very much a bara sahib.4

  Bu
t he is also a sheikh. All year round he sits and receives his callers: Rulers with business of State; tribesmen with pastoral complaints; conspirators with offers of partnership; wealthy merchants seeking agencies; gold smugglers seeking passports; schoolboys seeking scholarships to England. To each he offers, through his coffee-maker girt about with the great silver dagger, the tiny, handleless cups of black spiced coffee. Twice or thrice a year he sits in full majlis5 while the visitors pour in with congratulations, sweetmeats, Christmas cakes and fat goats. His letters are addressed to ‘His Honour, the Most Glorious, the Magnificence of Her Majesty’s Trusted One in the Trucial States, the Revered’. He decides fishing disputes, negotiates blood-money, examines boundaries, manumits slaves. He presides over the Shaikhs’ Council. He exempts, pardons, appeases; exacts, condemns, ordains. Over a large but undefined field he in effect rules. It is all a far cry from the third room and the Foreign Office canteen.

  It is important, I may break off to remark, that the sheikhly nature of the Political Agent should be thoroughly appreciated in the department. It may well be difficult for his fellow clerks, who have often seen him – and will no doubt see him again – making the office tea in a drab Whitehall corridor, to picture him as an oriental potentate among the grey-haired dervishes. The effort, arduous and even comical though it may be, must nevertheless be made. Without it, not only will the Agent seem intolerably pompous when he goes home on leave; his colleagues for their part will fail to understand the curious necessities which his post involves. What can he be doing with two maunds of cardamom and a bag of charcoal? For what purpose has he had his censer repaired? Why does the coffee-maker need (of all things) a dagger? Such questions, Sir, are pardonable. But they must be asked from a deferential and an understanding heart.