by Iain Bowen
I was quite surprised to be summoned to The Presence rather early; I did run through my mind if there had been any little gaffes recently, such as re-telling Critchley's joke about her new title of The Great White She-Elephant. However, I did think I was secure in my position, at least for a while.
I had the radio on in the car picking up the news; they were interviewing Wedgie - who had scraped through in Bristol - and he was cheerfully calling for heads to roll, a leadership contest and a full-throated but British socialism to be the basis of the next manifesto. We had hoped to hear so much more in this vein from him during the campaign, but the wily old fox had worked out he was in the proverbial and had ensconced himself in Bristol since late June.
Anyway, I was in before ten and I was handed a list of the Fallen for reference; it included a couple of provisional names, but there was no one really important on it except for young Needham - who would end up entertainingly scuttling off to the Irish House of Lords and doing rather well there. The latest gossip it seems was the awful "Red Ken[56]" was now the member for somewhere hideous in Hackney - not at all bad news from some viewpoints.
Anyway, I was ushered in to see the Leaderene and was offered real coffee; real coffee wasn't a problem at the FO, but Number Ten was usually very keen on ersatz. My trepidation increased slightly; was this the hanged man's hearty breakfast? However, it seemed my palpitations were premature: there was to be a reshuffle, and it would be quite a large reshuffle - especially of the middle and lower ranks. There was also a small reorganisation of departmental responsibilities etc. However, why I had been invited in early was two-fold. Firstly, the FO was to formally lose responsibility for the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa to the CO; not that we had much to do with them anyway. Of course, this was to be made more complex later, but at the time it was fairly simple. There were also to be cuts to the number of ministers; 2 Ministers of State and 2 Parliamentary Under-Secretaries was the giddy limit - one of whom would be from the Lords - and I'd only got that because I was away so much. The question was, was this acceptable - with an edge that if it wasn't, then I knew what to do.
I understand from conversations afterwards that, had I demurred, then Geoffrey would have got the position - which might have been for the best for the party in the long run given the amount of pique Geoffrey had about his sideways move. However, I did not flounce; I wasn't ready for retirement yet, and to be fair, the cuts were reasonable. I wasn't too keen on the expansion of Michael's little empire when that became apparent, but that is the nature of politics.
It was then suggested that I could come up with names for approval for the Ministries; Number 10 suggest a complete clear-out except for little Rifkind[57]. I tended to agree, and I had been considering a list for some time. I suggested Rifkind was good for a proper Minister of State and Margaret smiled; I also suggested that William Waldegrave[58] might be ready for the other position, or maybe Alick Buchanan-Smith[59]. As for the Pussies, I suggested the Earl of Gowrie[60] for the Lords; I was expecting some resistance to that - I knew that Dennis Thatcher had been very, very rude about him - but there was none. For the Commons, I suggested Tristan Garel-Jones[61] or again the capable and urbane Matthew Parris; the eyebrows shot up at my suggesting Parris, and a comment was made that perhaps people might look a little askance at that one. The PM said she would talk about those, but saw no real problems; I would be consulted further tonight. The reshuffle proper would start tomorrow - at the moment there were consultations going on.
On leaving I was assailed by young Gow; he mentioned that that old rogue Pardoe[62] was back in Cornwall North and that that unspeakable yokel populist Penhaligon[63] had managed to increase his already large majority to over 17,000 in Truro, but generally there weren't expected to be any more problems in the Friday declarations. He also told me that he and Morrison had to talk the PM out of appointing Clark[64] as Secretary of State for Defence; she was peeved with Francis again. I said I would find it very difficult sharing a Cabinet table with Clark, and he grinned; whilst he was a friend of Alan he couldn't imagine putting him in charge of nuclear weapons. A flunky came up at that point to tell us that Richmond was on a fourth recount - I enquired what the margin was and was told it was fluctuating at about 10. Ye Gods.
I felt I had earned another period at the FO, but I was aware that I had better start grooming some successors - the last thing the UK needed was one of Margaret's steely-eyed Essex accountants with a clipboard in charge of our foreign relations.
Just before Christmas, the Ottomans came back again with another proposal - it was actually their fourth, but the other two had been variations on the original theme with little to recommend them, so I had them turned down without consultation to Cabinet. This scheme was somewhat different; it was less ambitious in scale, it merely sought to provide a backbone railway through the Empire rather than the all-encompassing thing that it had been. It had some cash up front, which had shown that they were capable of learning something, and whilst it still wasn’t acceptable I did feel I had to take it at least to Norman and Nigel[65]. Nigel was being a much more hands-on Chancellor than Geoffrey had been about such schemes.
The end result was the same: the Ottomans wanted a railway that could take their troops from Basra to Nis - well, the maps said Belgrade, but Belgrade was still Austrian (although uncomfortably so). The extensive branch lines and the Greek and Egyptian spurs had gone, although there were hints in the text that they were not forgotten. There was a schedule of cash payments to be made each year, which my people said were just about possible but Norman claimed would be severely impacted by economic changes. The Ottomans had about 80% of the coffee business in the UK at the moment; he believed that would have shrunk to around 25% by the end of the millennium. There were also a series of suggested tariff reforms, which looked fair but felt foul, involving more extensive access for us - essentially everywhere but Palestine and Greece proper - but a bump to to category B for them. They also suggested we took a lease on Crete until the loan was paid off; we kept that condition very much under wraps - we didn’t want Crete and we were worried that the RN, who never saw a base they didn’t like, might combine that with the hint of talks about a Suez Canal concession to get this through.
We decided to say no; we did hint that the cash up front was enough to pay for a railway from The City to Adrianople (and some way further) and that we felt that they were good enough in credit terms to maybe stretch to Sofia. Also, if they were willing to accept a more limited railway - the scale of the proposal was still rather grand - then they might be able to get from The City to Konya with a suitable credit agreement. We conveyed this to them just before Christmas, and sat back and awaited the next in the series of Ottoman overstretch proposals. Unfortunately, we didn’t get another proposal for a long while, because Topal Pasha - who had clearly promised much - went under in a palace coup in early 1983. However Topal got off lightly and was sent to the Princes Isles, which is quite generous considering he had his predecessor strangled and his two main rivals killed by a mob. The most worrying development was that Asil Nadir - a former ladies tights salesman - ended up as chief advisor to the Governor of Cyprus after the coup.
Chapter 17
The BBC started 1983 off very well. They came up with “Yes, Governor”, which transplanted the hapless Jim Hacker to British Equatoria and had Sir Humphrey as head of the Colonial Civil Service. Like moving the “The Good Life” to British South East Africa it was somewhat contrived, but it worked remarkably well. The acting was, of course, superb and the look on Hacker’s face when he realises that he isn’t free of Humphrey is delightful. Of course, it quickly became compulsive viewing amongst the political classes - who all watched it and who all discussed it; the PM was quite a big fan, for instance. However, we all pretended that we are not Hacker and that our department was not like that, but any small problem or obstruction was often blamed on the Sir Humphreys.
In a way, I have been mercifully free of them. The
Dislocation was such a shock to the FO and we lost so many good people, that most of the manipulative types were either shunted elsewhere, were Lost or took retirement. A younger breed of diplomat was generally in charge, with a few old retirees brought back in places - although by 1985 they were starting to make noises about re-retiring again. Not that there weren’t attempts to move things in some directions; the old jokes about the Camel Corps have some basis in fact, and on occasion I have heard my decisions referred to as being “courageous”. Certainly around the Treaty of Bordeaux there was a prominent group of “Let’s be nice to the Spanish” who had to be reminded that we are the world’s foremost power by a country mile and that other nations’ foolish actions have to have consequences.
All in all, “Yes, Governor” was quite a triumph for the Corporation, which had some difficulties in adapting to their new role. Like parts of the FO, the BBC is full of liberal-conservatives and the odd socialist; they were generally appalled by the new Imperialism, loathed the new Commonwealth and seemed to regard trans-Europe as somewhere between Nazis in Brocade and unredeemable primitives. There were times that they had to be reminded that they are the British Broadcasting Corporation; luckily many of their prima-donnas still to the day tend to regard anywhere dislocated as being too unbearable for words, so much of their European reporting has been done by younger, more flexible and hungry reporters.
The FO was and still is, however, responsible for much of the payment for the World Service, and as such it has fairly regular meetings with the BBC about broadcasting matters. We did not seek to direct actual content, although Gray Gowrie usually had a laundry list of complaints that had to be seen to. What we did was to say what we were happy to pay for and what we were not happy to pay for. For instance, the BBC wanted to completely mothball a number of language services rather than shut them down leaving the staff on some substantial retainers, as we saw no real audience for them for probably a decade if not longer; we simply said we weren’t paying for the mothballing. They were also been loath to take up the BBC Commonwealth mantle, but that was generally been Michael’s problem - and when he awarded a couple of colonial radio franchises to commercial broadcasters, the BBC oddly moved on the issue post haste.
Essentially, the World Service then as now mainly broadcasts to Europe. Both transistor and clockwork radios were not uncommon by 1983 in the better of bits of Europe, although they tended to be more communal in a tavern or other meeting place rather than privately owned. Audience figures were and are quite hard to discern, but I don’t think the BBC was wrong at the time in saying that around 100,000 people were fairly regular listeners of the French and German service and the English for Learners Service probably got around 400,000 listeners throughout Europe. The numbers have since grown somewhat despite more and more broadcasting in Europe by Europeans. Back then, we paid for services in French, German, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, Maghreb Arabic and Danish. The BBC also did a service in Lithuanian and Finnish; we didn’t believe that penetration of radios was sufficient to make those worthwhile so we didn’t subsidise it, and we had some severe doubts about the intelligibility of the Italian service but that was hardly the fault of the BBC. Back then we were still just discussing India and the Far East, the BBC were pushing for it, but we resisted temptation. To be honest, such things are unlikely to happen even in the next few years. There are, of course, local services for Bombay and Phuket, but back then they were just the odd hour on a Forces network.
It wouldn’t be a new year without some form of trip to wave the flag and in 1983 I headed towards the Far East. Of course, there were some logistical problems in going to meet the various potentates of the East and their representatives. There were some places we just didn't want to sail to, there were others that were somewhat out of the way, and there was the general feeling that it would all take rather a lot of time. However, as it was often pointed out, the East was where there were quite a lot of goods coming our way and not a lot being sent back in return. However, unlike Europe, there was some considerable actual money around and a great deal of potential. Unfortunately, some of the regimes were even more politically poisonous than those of Europe, if they were looked at carefully - but as many had only small numbers of nationals or were little known, there was a certain amount of leeway as long was we didn't sell them arms. Needless to say, they all wanted to buy arms, which they had in common with Europe.
My first stop was Zanzibar. I had joined HMS Belfast at Lawrence Marks having flown there; had it not been for Zanzibar, I would have probably gone on by seaplane to Bombay. However, the Imam of Oman wanted a word - or, rather, one of the Imams, as there were currently two. We had carefully arranged to collect him from Oman and fly him to Zanzibar for talks, in order that he didn't have to spend much time out of his country before the other Imam discovered that he had gone.
Zanzibar was much like Lawrence Marks was becoming; a thriving port city, where cargos from the East Coast of Africa were exchanged with those of the Middle East. Zanzibar had a good deal of charm, whilst Lawrence Marks increasingly looked like a tropical Milton Keynes by the sea. However, LM didn't smell like a rugby changing room, was vastly cleaner and was safe for all travellers - nor was its main trade slavery; the picturesque charm of Zanzibar was rather overcome by the sordid squalor.
The young Sultan was actually rather charming, as opposed to the dissolute playboy image that the historical researchers had given him; he had clearly been doing his homework as well. Unlike some potentates, who gave gifts that were, well, awkward, his gift to Britain was to buy every slave in the Zanzibar market that day and free them - I almost thought that the Saatchis had been to call. He talked widely about how it was clear that Britain had been a friend of Oman and how Oman could help Britain with the patchwork quilt of statelets, holdings, treaty ports and petty chiefdoms that made up much of the East African coast. He was wary of the growing power of the Ottomans in Arabia and of Persians in the Gulf.
He also clearly had some cis-advisors; he played heavily on the Ibadi tradition of tolerance to others whilst retaining their own customs amongst themselves, and about how Oman could organise access to all those East African ports and act as the UK's agents. After all, whilst weak on land, they did have a navy to rival anyone but ours in the region. There was just a hint that they didn't respect our alliance with the Portuguese much, or rather they didn't respect the Portuguese much. They were quite plain-speaking for Arabs, and pretty clear on what we would and wouldn't sell. Their main interest seemed to be in water storage and treatment, dredging, improved ships and dock-handling equipment. There had been some toing and froing over this, but it was eventually decided that we could sell them new designs of sailing ship as long as they promised to use them not for slaving; nor would we arm the new ships. I found out later they had already arranged to buy new cannon from the French.
After a couple of days of talks, we had a draft trade treaty to be considered; we gave them the best possible tariff rates for a slavery state and they gave us very generous access rights to their markets. We promised to inform them about any actions with the various petty emirates between them and the Ottomans and they promised to keep us informed about the situation in East Africa.
This meeting lead to a steady relationship between ourselves and the Omanis; the additional riches brought by the British trade helped the Imam beat his inland rival, and we found that the coffee and spice trade was greatly assisted by them acting as middlemen - removing the dependence on the Ottomans. Of course, it helped considerably that whilst they were great bargainers, they always understood in the end that agreements were to be made with goods, commercial concessions or solid cash.
I met Nader Shah at the small port of Bandar Abbas, which at that point in time was actually officially controlled by some minor Arab sheik from Muscat. However, he had seen the wisdom of deciding that he was merely the servant of Nader Shah and that this would be a suitable place for a meeting.
/> Shah, historically, was an impressive figure, and the fact that he had pulled his coup off four years early showed that he had obviously received some information early and decided to take action. He had even sent notes ahead suggesting some points he would like to talk about. Quite simply, he wanted to talk about India and Afghanistan.
What was really impressive is that he had also spent a little time learning English; whilst we used translation, he did occasionally comment in slightly idiosyncratic English. This actually disturbed a couple of the professional diplomats on our side, who spent much of their time trying to work out how much English he knew.
On the trade side, he was happy to allow us access to his ports and markets, but he said that he didn't think that there would be that much trade between us for some time. Persia could not produce much that we would be interested in without some considerable infrastructure in place - infrastructure that, he pointed out, Persia could not afford. He was interested in irrigation equipment and the knowledge of how to make good roads, and he was interested in sending people to the UK as students.
His canny side was shown with his comments on Persia's vast reserves of oil and gas. He felt it would be his son who would start to tap those and make his empire wealthy, not him. Someone had been doing some fairly long term thinking. I did point out that there was actually a considerable market for carpets, and he might be surprised by the amount of trade he could generate from that.