by Wright, Ben;
The meeting at the hunting lodge rambled on for twelve hours, with a break during which we returned to our hotel for a press conference. Milosevic had changed the venue in order to create a more relaxed atmosphere. There was heavy drinking for much of the day, which clearly affected Koljevic, but I saw no evidence – then or later – that the alcohol affected Milosevic’s judgements. The Americans drank little, and I began a policy of accepting Milosevic’s frequent offers of drinks only when we reached agreements.28
Another US diplomat, James Pardew, called it the day of ‘bonding with the godfather’, and the plum brandy and whisky played its part in coaxing Milosevic towards the peace talks at Dayton, Ohio, later that year.
The agreement that followed stopped the fighting in Bosnia, but alcohol-assisted negotiation failed to prevent the West’s next confrontation with Milosevic in 1999 after his crackdown on Kosovo’s Albanians. At their last meeting, on the eve of the NATO bombing campaign that would lead to Milosevic’s fall and trial in The Hague for war crimes, he pleaded with the US diplomat he had shared many drinks with: ‘Don’t you have anything more to say to me?’ Holbrooke’s deadpan reply to the Serbian leader: ‘Hasta la vista, baby.’29
For the more lowly diplomat in a distant posting, the remorseless hospitality is an important part of the day job too, as the leaked US cables published by WikiLeaks confirmed. An August 2006 dispatch described how a three-hour ‘alcohol-sodden lunch’ between the United States Ambassador to Tajikistan, Richard E. Hoagland, and Tajikistan’s Minister of Defence, Sherali Khairulloyev, had ‘helped place another brick in the wall of U.S.-Tajikistan military relations’. The US ambassador lost count of the toasts after the tenth and later provided this summary to the State Department: ‘Although this drunk-fest is how many old-guard former Soviets do mutual business, it was most unusual for an American guest. It was, to a degree, a mark of respect.’ The cable finishes with this proud boast: ‘We were pleased to have drunk Khairulloyev well under the table.’30
The former British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, thought better of a head-to-head drinking bout with the Russians, even as he tried to soften their hostility to war against Iraq in 2003. Alcohol still oils Russian diplomacy, as Straw discovered on his visits to Moscow. ‘I had some convivial evenings with Sergey Lavrov and Igor Ivanov, his predecessor,’ he told me over coffee in the Houses of Parliament.31 ‘In Moscow it was vodka shots and you have to be very, very careful. It can be a lubricant but it can leave you very exposed. Drinking is useful if you’re trying to develop a relationship à deux. I had meals with Sergey Lavrov and I certainly found drink helpful with the Russians and some of the Eastern Europeans.’ Relationships, rapport, chemistry and empathy: such words as these are frequently used in discussions of diplomatic drinking. Politics and diplomacy are powered by the personal; and alcohol certainly helps bridge the divide when politicians from different cultures meet.
But this sort of drinking can be dangerous. In September 2014 the Labour MP for Heywood and Middleton, Jim Dobbin, drank a fatal quantity of spirits during an official visit to Poland organised by the Council of Europe. After drinking a shot with each course during a dinner in the city of Slupsk, the 73-year-old went to bed feeling unwell. He died hours later and a post-mortem examination revealed he was nearly five times over the drink-drive limit in England. The Coroner’s Court heard how Mr Dobbin never drank at home and only did so socially. The trip, which was also attended by several other MPs, was to honour the award to Slupsk of the Council’s 2014 prize for ‘promoting the European ideal’.
The foreign visits made by groups of MPs often consist at least as much of drink-consuming as fact-finding. On one such trip to Australia, the liberally lubricated chair of a select committee regaled his colleagues at dinner with scathing anecdotes about his constituents, one of whom happened to be sitting at the next table and duly passed the story to the newspapers.
When Paul Flynn MP joined the British parliamentary group on the Council of Europe, he ‘heard legendary tales of wild living and drunken fights among past delegations’. Although today’s MPs are more serious and sober, he is nevertheless able to recount an unforgettable story involving two MPs who had a competition one evening to see who could drink the most champagne. It ended with one of them projectile vomiting at a dinner attended by delegations from many countries, with the consequence that ‘the reputation of the British is still damaged by this incident’.32 It seems that it is not just at Europe’s tourist resorts that the British are observed to have a problem with drink.
Drop into almost any embassy on any evening in any country and you will find a drinks reception under way. The British Embassy in Washington might be seducing US businesses and lobbyists with wine, fishing for foreign trade. The Swedish Embassy may be exhibiting photography from Norrland accompanied by Scandinavian nibbles and aquavit. And Irish embassies around the world are cherished by foreign journalists for their willingness to give away free pints of Guinness several times a year.
Then there is the familiar image of diplomatic field work being conducted on the warm veranda of a bustling hotel bar. Think Saigon’s Continental Shelf in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, where diplomats and journalists swapped tips in wicker chairs over chilled martinis. In 1961 the British diplomat and politician Harold Nicolson wrote about the importance of saloon intelligence-sharing in an article for Foreign Affairs:
My own advice to the junior diplomat is not to confine himself lazily to the easy circle of his own embassy but to cultivate the society of journalists, both foreign and native. It is from them that he will derive useful advice and commentary. When I look back on the years before Hitler that I spent in the British Embassy in Berlin, I am grateful for the hours I devoted talking to journalists in the Adlon Bar. I learned more from them than I did from any other form of social relations … It was the journalists of the Adlon Bar who first warned me of the coming of the Nazi movement.33
Not that this drink-inspired glimpse of the future managed to stop it.
Alcohol can be meal-breaking too. Drink clearly plays no part in the politics of Muslim countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. Foreign diplomats posted there have no chance to build bonhomie and cross-cultural understanding with government ministers over an icy G&T. This dry policy can also make for brittle overseas visits. A particular flare-up has been between France and Iran over the presence of wine at French state banquets. In 1999, Iran postponed a visit to Paris by its then President, Mohammed Khatami, because the French insisted wine should be served to those who wanted it at official receptions. The spat over protocol went on for weeks, with Iranian officials saying Islamic codes were normally respected when the President travelled overseas. But France refused to jettison its secular, republican tradition of serving wine at state meals.
The same disagreement soured a visit by President Rouhani to Paris in November 2015, the first trip to Europe by an Iranian President for a decade. Again, Iran asked for bottles of the finest Bordeaux and champagne to be banished from the table at a planned lunch at the Elysée Palace hosted by President François Hollande. The Iranian request for a drink-free, halal menu was met with a firm refusal by Paris and the two presidents settled for a less convivial face-to-face meeting instead. Months before, France and Iran had managed to compromise enough to agree a deal between the Islamic Republic and the West that lifted sanctions on Iran in return for curbs on its nuclear programme. It marked a huge rapprochement after years of negotiation but, for Iran and France, a bottle of wine was a diplomatic hurdle too high.
In the European Union today alcohol remains an essential political oil. On a Thursday evening in Brussels, the picturesque Place Luxembourg becomes a 28-nation drinking binge as MEPs, their staff, lobbyists, journalists and diplomats from across the EU swarm into the square to gossip, network and flirt over gallons of Belgian beer. ‘It’s like a rave, it’s totally astonishing!’ bellows Nigel Farage, a big drinker in a town where alcohol is still wired
into the political culture.
It’s the same in Strasbourg, where the European Parliament decamps once a month. ‘It’s like being on holiday,’ Farage says. ‘Five thousand people go to a city they don’t live in and go berserk. Les Aviateurs bar is still heaving with political assistants and a few MEPS at 4 a.m. every morning. And the lunch culture in Strasbourg and Brussels is like it used to be in the UK thirty years ago.’ Farage can usually be found in the Old Hack bar in Brussels with other members of UKIP, raising their glasses in raspberry-blowing defiance at the European Commission opposite. ‘All the Commission drink in there,’ he laughs. ‘They all know I want them fired.’34
There are a number of characterless open-plan bars dotted around the European Parliament that do steady trade through the day. And the scene at Place Luxembourg on a Thursday does resemble an Oktoberfest for politicians. Farage nevertheless exaggerates. The Commission used to have a bar in its briefing room, run by a Belgian lady named Annie, where the daily briefings for journalists were made more bearable with glasses of wine. Summits of EU leaders used to rotate around Europe, depending on who held the presidency, and the food and booze was free. That has all stopped. When he was President of the Commission in the late 1970s, Roy Jenkins adored his ride on the Brussels gravy train, eating in the city’s best restaurants, which he thought rivalled the best in Paris, and seeking out the finest wines, which he meticulously described in his diary.35 But as Geoff Meade, a legendary figure of Brussels journalism, told me, ‘you try to get someone out for lunch now and it’s quite difficult. If you do it’s on a tight rein.’36 Brussels has also sobered up, as a political industry of think tanks and lobbyists has grown up alongside the expanding EU membership. It’s not the small club it once was and much Brussels business is now done at breakfast meetings and briefings over coffee and croissants.
At summits of EU leaders and ministers, however, wine and brandy still fortify the formal evening dinners, where late-night negotiations often stretch into the early hours. And as European heads of government wrestle with EU budgets over bottles of Chateau Angelus Premier Grand Cru, bleary journalists pass the time in the press bar at the Justus Lipsius building, the headquarters of the European Council. It’s a very convivial place to meet journalists from other EU countries and compare how a story looks from a different perspective. And then it’s into the press briefing rooms, where you notice how flushed this or that leader is looking at two in the morning.
The President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, is the ultimate Brussels insider and a veteran of backroom deal making. Juncker was Prime Minister of Luxembourg before taking charge of Europe’s executive branch, and during the European Parliament elections in 2014 that led to his Commission presidency, there was plenty of press speculation, mainly in Britain, about his appetite for drink; meanwhile a handful of anonymous EU officials were briefing that he might not be suitable for the job. He wouldn’t have been the first Commission President to allegedly enjoy a drink. Another former Luxembourg Prime Minister who ran the Berlaymont, Jacques Santer, the man who oversaw the introduction of the euro, acquired the soubriquet ‘Jacques Sancerre’ among some Brussels journalists.
There has never been any proof that Jean-Claude Juncker drinks excessively, and Juncker’s team were furious at what they saw as an effort to smear him when he was running for the presidency. But he and his friends have had to respond to the persistent rumours. The German Finance Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, talking to the Foreign Correspondents Association in Berlin in June 2014 after many years sitting in meetings with Mr Juncker, was able to attest to his sobriety: ‘I never said Jean-Claude Juncker was abstinent. I also drink sometimes, including in Eurogroup meetings, where it can happen that I have a glass of wine with dinner. Then he drinks beer. But I’ve never experienced him drunk.’37 Juncker himself hit back at an article in Der Spiegel titled ‘Achtung Alkoholkontrolle’ (Attention, Breath Test), snapping, ‘I have no problems with drink, that’s enough now! Leave me alone with these accusations that are not true.’38
But why should there be this kind of sanctimonious interrogation in the first place? Nobody has ever suggested Jean-Claude Juncker’s judgment has been impaired by alcohol. And after the issues he has had to deal with, from the near collapse of the euro to the continent’s refugee crisis in 2015, it might seem reasonable to allow the poor man a drink. But the experience of politicians and alcohol has always been clouded in contradiction. We expect them to drink as a mark of ordinariness, but condemn them if their consumption is judged excessive. Even then, some heavy political drinkers are celebrated while others are mocked and ridiculed. It’s been the same for hundreds of years and is, perhaps, a mirror of alcohol’s own conflicting charms. Some politicians have discovered booze makes life better. It rewards success, disperses boredom and unpicks the locks of conversation and relationships. At the same time drink can bite back, imprisoning some in dependency and despair. Winston Churchill believed that, on balance, he had got more out of drink that it had taken out of him. This has clearly not been true of others. As long as there are politicians, and drinks to be had, the story of their relationship is destined to continue.
CHAPTER 8
Time, Gentlemen!
Not only have politicians through the ages, from Alexander the Great to Boris Johnson, experienced the exhilarating balm of drinking alcohol themselves, but for as long as politicians have been consuming drink they have also been trying to control and regulate it. It has been a policy preoccupation across time and place. A nineteenth-century sake-drinking Japanese emperor, a bourbon-sipping US President, a wine-drinking English Whig and a present-day Swedish Prime Minister have all tried to police the alcohol habits of their people. The result is a global patchwork of different drinking rules that have evolved over centuries, their unifying aim being to limit the damage alcohol can do. This chapter looks at the politics of alcohol control.
According to the World Health Organisation in 2015, 3.3 million deaths every year result from the harmful use of alcohol. That’s 5.9 per cent of all deaths. But laws relating to alcohol use vary widely. In France, for instance, alcohol sponsorship of sport has been banned since 1991. You won’t see advertisements for spirits on Austrian television. A sixteen-year-old can buy a beer in an Italian bar, but a teenager in the US has to wait until they’re twenty-one. Scotland has a minimum unit price for alcohol, while in Sweden booze for drinking at home can only be bought from a state-owned monopoly called the Systembolaget. Burkina Faso and the Democratic Republic of Congo are among the handful of countries to have no drink driving limits at all.
Britain has always had a reputation for boozing. From the jolly ale drinkers described by Charles Dickens to the rampaging stag tribes that descend on Prague, the world knows we like to drink (and that we have trouble behaving when we do). Even Debrett’s, the snooty guide to British titles and manners, lists drunkenness as one of the nation’s notable characteristics:
Despite their reputation for reticence and reserve, British people love to drink. Alcohol oils the wheels of British social life – from the rarefied glamour of Royal Ascot and the traditional British wedding to the conviviality of a night out at the local pub or socialising after a day at work. For many people, alcohol is an effective de-inhibitor, a failsafe way of breaking down social barriers and bringing people closer together. But the emollient effects of alcohol can easily tip into drunkenness, as the rowdy Saturday-night streets of many British towns will testify.
For centuries, politicians have been the nation’s landlords, deciding when the rest of us can drink and how much. Current arguments around the price, control and availability of alcohol reprise age-old debates about the rights of people to drink freely and the duty of the state to protect its citizens from harm.
Until the Licensing Act of 1552, there were very few rules governing the sale and purchase of beer. In 1266 the price of ale was pegged to the price of bread and from 1393 alehouses had to identify themselves by di
splaying a stake in the ground by the door – a medieval pub signboard. The cultivation of hops in the early 1400s turned beer production into an industry for the first time and introduced many more people to the pleasures of booze. But as drinking became more popular, so did the fear of social chaos. The 1552 Act was passed to counter what it described as the ‘intolerable hurts and troubles to the commonwealth of this realm’ which ‘daily grow and increase through such abuses and disorders as are had and used in common alehouses’.1 This was the earliest attempt at licensing, and anyone wanting to keep an alehouse had to obtain a certificate from two local magistrates and prove their good character. Drunkenness was first made an offence in 1606; twelve years later James I brought in charges for licences, beginning the state’s practice of pocketing money from the sale of drink.
But it was the ‘Gin Craze’ of the early 1700s that first ignited mass panic about the dangers of drink. Invented in Holland, gin was imported to Britain around the same time as William of Orange, who became monarch along with his wife Mary in 1689. To begin with, gin distilling was encouraged because it was patriotically free of any French connection – unlike brandy, imports of which had been banned by Parliament. Gin was cheap, easy to produce at home, safer to drink than water and could be made with what was grown in British fields. Landowners were delighted to make money from the surplus grain produced thanks to more advanced farming methods and Parliament was happy to scoop up the duties. Crucially, there was at first no licensing, while government stimulated production by breaking up the London Guild of Distillers monopoly in 1690. It was the biggest drinking free-for-all in British history, with anyone able to distil and sell gin. And for the next fifty years gin fuelled an unprecedented epidemic of drunkenness that governments initially encouraged and then consistently failed to curb.