Parting Shots

by Matthew Parris

  Renwick’s despatch did not make this collection. Most of it is serious in tone, and what remained of the livelier sections of text after filleting by the censors was rather bitty. Historians may note, however, that this despatch may have helped to erect a central pillar of British economic policy: writing two years before New Labour came to power, Renwick argued that the Bank of England should be set free of government control. In Washington the ambassador in fact took Gordon Brown (then Shadow Chancellor) to meet Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the US Federal Reserve, to learn of the merits of central bank independence.

  The parting thoughts of Sir Robin Fearn, who retired in 1994 while ambassador in Madrid, are also absent from these pages. I had high hopes for this valedictory. Fearn had seen interesting service as head of the South American Department during the Falklands War. He was ‘lucid … and very funny’ according to his obituary in The Times, which drew a colourful picture; Fearn once set fire to his suit while giving a lecture to other diplomats, having absent-mindedly put his lit pipe into his pocket. It all sounded promising.

  The Foreign Office released the despatch, and most of the document passed the censors relatively unscathed. It is well drafted, if routine, stuff, describing the state of Spain’s economy and the ebb and flow of the regional tensions which dominate its politics. But the final three sections are entirely obscured with the thickest of marker pens. Clues in an earlier passage indicate that much of the missing text concerns the tussle between Britain and Spain over Gibraltar. Whatever Fearn had to say on the issue in 1994 obviously still retains a charge today. The centuries-old dispute burst into the open three years after his retirement, with Spain making a fresh demand for joint sovereignty. In 2002 Jack Straw, then Foreign Secretary, actually agreed to back the idea, subject to an eventual referendum. The idea was roundly rejected by 98 per cent of Gibraltarians in a poll hastily organized by enterprising local officials and the plan was quickly dropped.

  The final paragraph, usually the place where a diplomat thanks his wife and staff, is also rendered as a solid block of black ink in Fearn’s despatch; only the heading ‘Envoi’ remains legible. This was not unusual; other valedictories also had the personal touch stripped away, with the censors invoking the Data Protection Act in order to withhold private information about individuals. Like the other restrictions, however, censorship on data protection grounds was inconsistently applied. In other despatches, many of the touching tributes to wives were, happily, not struck out. Varying results are, of course, only to be expected when civil servants attempt to follow legislation drafted with such lofty aims (and numerous loopholes) as the Freedom of Information and Data Protection Acts.

  The modern extracts that feature here are what trickled through the censors’ net. We cannot know what was held back, but it is possible to make an educated guess. Most of the entertaining valedictories in this book are basically rants, and they fall into one of three broad categories: rants about foreigners, about living conditions, and lastly about the Foreign Office itself. Compared with the older (pre-1980) despatches, the material released under FOI is slanted more towards the third category with a little less of the first two. This is consistent with the exemptions in the FOI Act. The legislation gives the Foreign Office ample opportunity to censor colourful tirades which might offend foreign governments but less cover to withhold gripes about (for instance) how the Diplomatic Service is run. It is entirely likely, therefore, that in the paragraphs which have been redacted the authors of modern valedictories harangued foreigners just as strongly as their predecessors once did. Although one expects the sweeping racial generalizations of old may nowadays be expressed more seldom, or at least more subtly. The Foreign Office has after all moved with the times.

  All in all, the Freedom of Information process performed satisfactorily. The Information Rights Team at the FCO dealt with my voluminous requests with laudable thoroughness and patience, although not always with haste. The Act obliges public bodies to make an initial response after twenty days, but it sometimes took months to get a final result. When the decisions went against us I chose not to challenge them (the appeals process is rather tortuous and can take years; although at its apex the independent Information Commissioner can force disclosure). For their part, the Foreign Office did not invoke against me, as I feared they might, a clause in the legislation barring ‘vexatious or repeated requests’. Of course these days the Foreign Office, like most government departments, is geared up to handle a high volume of FOI traffic; in 2009 it received 1,136 FOI requests, or roughly three a day. Nosiness seems to have found an equilibrium; previous years have shown a remarkably similar total number of requests. Public access to information does not come cheap, however; the Foreign Office employs a team of about ten to manage the process. Central government auditing shows that they answer just 31 per cent of requests in full, which makes the FCO one of the strictest censors in Whitehall; among the other Departments of State only the Cabinet Office had a lower response rate. Given the sensitivity of the material that goes into the diplomatic bag, this is perhaps understandable. If you include partial responses, almost 50 per cent of public requests received by the Foreign Office meet with some degree of success.

  The FOI legislation includes a ‘cost cap’. Central government departments can refuse to answer requests where the cost in time and manpower to process the information would exceed £600. (Usefully, this amount does not include time spent assessing whether the material can be released, only actually processing it.) In this respect, it helped that my requests were for specific documents rather than for general information which might have to be pulled together from different sources. The Foreign Office has indeed had to scramble to answer some opaque and spurious FOI requests over the years. At the time of writing, the last submission answered on the department’s Access to Information website concerned the number of personal items reported stolen in the past two years from FCO buildings in London. Past topics of inquiry have included the cost of running the FCO wine cellars and – that tabloid favourite – the budget for toilet roll (February 2008 was a particularly heavy month, should anyone care: home-based diplomats at King Charles Street tore their way through 190 rolls, at a cost of £2,500).

  The experience of fielding all these requests – be they from academics, interested members of the public, time wasters or hostile journalists – has left its mark on Whitehall, and the chill has been felt particularly keenly in the Foreign Office. The main provisions of the Freedom of Information Act came into force in 2005. Denis MacShane was Minister for Europe at the time; he remembers ‘people began to get very worried’ as the first FOI requests arrived at the Foreign Office, suddenly realizing that anything they put in writing would no longer be protected as before.

  The Diplomatic Service has for centuries run almost entirely on paper and its modern equivalents. (Nowadays, compared with countries of comparable size Britain has a relatively small number of diplomats, spread thinly across the globe; email is the only way they can keep in touch.) And, while diplomats posted abroad may be thousands of miles away from their colleagues, the network in which they communicate and share reports is a close one, in which confidentiality is essential in order to allow a frank exchange of views. FOI, thinks MacShane, is ‘seriously challenging’ that culture. He thinks Freedom of Information ‘is reducing the quality, and the frankness, and the brutal honesty of what very clever men and women are sending back to their masters in London. And that may begin to affect the quality of decisions that government takes.’

  The culture of the Diplomatic Service is wrapped up in its prose; it is through their written reports that members of the tribe communicate, praise and chastise one another, argue and share jokes. The results often make terrific reading, as the extracts in this book hopefully show. But the possibility of disclosure brought by Freedom of Information creates a ‘chilling effect’ which works against the spirit of like minds locked in common endeavour, sharing stories. It may well be that
the sort of entertaining indiscretion and refreshing honesty contained in some of these despatches is now going to disappear.

  Fortunately, there is a wealth of material still to be discovered. The richest seam of material for valedictories remains the National Archives, which is where the bulk of the despatches in this book were unearthed. Government departments send their old files to Kew and, after thirty years, most get declassified and opened up to the public. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office records series is, along with the Cabinet Papers, one of the most popular resources among the professional researchers and academics who nowadays have to fight for a desk in the reading rooms with a noisy crowd of amateur genealogists inspired by television programmes. Every Christmas the opening of a fresh set of government files provides historians with new discoveries and broadsheet journalists with whimsical picture stories. Among the valedictories from 1979 most recently declassified under the thirty-year rule which feature in this collection are Sir Nicholas Henderson’s famous telegram from Paris and Sir Anthony Parson’s forlorn apologia from Tehran after the fall of the Shah.

  The electronic catalogue at the National Archives admits the existence of about 350 valedictories. There are doubtless many, many more in the vast stacks behind the scenes: valedictories indexed under a different heading, in files with other papers, and in series of despatches bound in books (the so-called ‘Confidential Print’). Finding good despatches in this Alexandria of Libraries was simply a numbers game; about one in every five or six of the documents I read was interesting. Many of the despatches – most, in fact – were too much ‘of their time’ to mean much to the modern reader. Foreign policy analysis tends to date quite quickly.

  Most of the Kew valedictories were written between 1960 and 1979. Things picked up – from a records-keeping point of view – in 1968, when the Foreign Office merged with the Commonwealth Office. One of the first innovations in the modern, combined FCO was a common file registry, a great asset which helps today’s researchers delve among thousands of individual despatches, reports and other correspondence, all of which are bound together with the minute sheets upon which ministers and Whitehall clerks would scribble their comments. Similar records exist for most government departments. Taken en masse this is nothing less than the nation’s memory.

  Not everything sees the light of day at Kew after thirty years. Some of the valedictories in this collection (notably Sir Arthur de la Mare’s from Bangkok in Chapter 1) still carry redactions many decades after they were written. Having been deemed exceptionally sensitive, this material is protected under the Public Records Act of 1958 which gave the Lord Chancellor sweeping powers to withhold information ‘with the approval, or at the request’ of another minister ‘or any other person who seems to him to be primarily concerned’. There is no time limit. Or rather, there was; that legislation has now been superseded by the Freedom of Information Act, which allows members of the public to request a review of any missing information with a mind to releasing it; although one imagines that in most cases the reasons for keeping it under lock and key will still stand.

  The movement towards greater disclosure which began with FOI continues to inch forwards, however, and in 2009 Gordon Brown announced that the thirty-year rule would be relaxed. A review into the issue chaired by the Daily Mail editor, Paul Dacre, backed halving the delay to fifteen years. The government settled on moving to a twenty-year rule. The change will happen in stages over the next decade, in order to give the National Archives time to process the necessary two million extra files to support it. The Foreign Office, incidentally, argued for twenty-five years. As the new rule comes in there will also be ‘strictly limited’ new exemptions, in order to protect ‘particularly sensitive material’, including records on the Royal Family.

  Researching this project has been something of an adventure, and I would like to end with thanks to the many people who gave me help, guidance and pointers along the way. They shall remain (for I hope obvious reasons) individually nameless. Particular thanks are also due, for their expertise and for their time, to the staff at the National Archives and to the Information Rights team and records keepers at the Foreign Office. Martin Rosenbaum at the BBC deserves a special mention for backing the idea and nurturing it through two series of radio programmes.

  Lastly, thanks are owed in abundance to the authors of the despatches, whose parting shots are captured here. We have been shameless in purloining their material, and ruthless in cutting out most of the serious stuff. There was lots of serious stuff; even in their valedictories. For them, duty always came first; having read many of their reports I found British diplomats as a class to be possessed of a strong and distinct sense of public service, an idea that has become a little old-fashioned. They considered life in the Diplomatic Service to be a privilege. They tolerated its downsides – ‘distance, dirt and danger’ as David Gore-Booth put it – with equanimity and with a certain sang-froid unique to the Foreign Office. They are the best of British.

  Andrew Bryson

  Index of Diplomats

  Addis, Sir John 187–90

  Arbuthnott, Hugh 358–9

  Bailey, Ronald 357

  Balfour-Paul, Hugh Glencairn 248–52, 262–6

  Barder, Sir Brian 281–9

  Beamish, Sir Adrian 133–4

  Braithwaite, Sir Rodric 167–76

  Brooks Richards, Francis 86–8

  Brown, Harold 48–50

  Bullard, Sir Julian 38–42, 123–6

  Bushell, John 65

  Campbell, Juliet 321

  Cartledge, Sir Bryan 157–67

  Cortazzi, Sir Hugh 82–5

  Cradock, Sir Percy 190–1, 359–61

  Craig, Sir James 252–5, 325–33

  Crawford, Charles 367–70

  Crook, Kenneth 195–7

  Dalton, Peter 98–100

  de la Mare, Sir Arthur 75–9, 333–8

  Donald, Sir Alan 191–5

  Elliott, Thomas 32–4

  Evans, Dame Glynne 141–5

  Everard, Timothy 85–6

  Ewans, Sir Martin 350–52

  Fall, Sir Brian 321–2

  Fergusson, Sir Ewan 357–8

  Ford, Sir John 88–9

  Gamble, Sir Frederick Herbert 58–9

  Garran, Sir Peter 23

  Gore-Booth, Sir David 126–33

  Green, Sir Andrew 135–41

  Hadow, Sir Michael 56–8

  Halford-McLeod, Aubrey 24–5

  Hamylton Jones, Keith 215–23

  Hancock, Sir Patrick 304–5

  Hannay, David, Lord 289–93

  Harlech, Lord (David Ormsby-Gore) 90–93

  Hayman, Sir Peter 100–101

  Henderson, Sir Nicholas 34–7, 182–7, 200–213

  Hennings, John 112–14

  Hohler, Henry 26–7

  Hooper, Sir Robin 363

  Hope, Peter 94–8

  Hope-Jones, Ronald 317–18

  Hunt, Sir David 46

  Jay, Peter 271–80

  Johnston, Sir Frank 339–42

  Kellas, Arthur 343–4

  Kermode, Sir Derwent 177

  Killick, Sir John 153–6

  Layng, Tom 345–50

  Ledwidge, Sir Bernard 30–32

  L’Estrange, Laurence 110–12

  McCann, David 29–30

  Meyer, Sir Christopher 42–5

  Midgley, Eric 27–8

  Moran, Lord 101–5, 366–7

  Morris, Sir Willie 227–30, 362

  Noble, Sir Andrew 300

  O’Brien, Terence 66–7

  Oliver, Peter 313–17

  Parsons, Sir Anthony 231–8

  Pinsent, Roger 106–9, 300–301

  Ponsonby, Myles 67–71

  Porter, Ivor 47–8

  Reilly, Sir Patrick 119–23

  Riches, Sir Derek 256–7

  Roberts, David 114–15

  Roberts, Sir Ivor 145–50

  Rubold, Sir Anthony 21–3

  Rumbold
, Sir Anthony 71–5

  Rundall, Sir Francis 80–82

  Russell, Sir John 51–6

  Scrivener, Ronald 178–81

  Selby, Ralph 213–14, 305–13

  Shaw, Thomas 302–3

  Slater, Richard 198–9

  Tesh, Robert 318–20

  Thomas, Richard 115–16, 293–5, 322–4, 364–6