GOOD MANNERS AND BAD BEHAVIOR
THE UNOFFICIAL RULES OF DIPLOMACY –
by
Candida Slater
.
SMASHWORDS EDITION
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Copyright © 2010 by Candida Slater
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Abroad is bloody.
George V1 (1895 - 1952)
L’enfer, c’est les autres.
Jean-Paul Satre (1905 – 1980). Huis Clos 1944
THERE ARE A FEW PEOPLE I’D LIKE TO THANK
This book is dedicated to the memory of mu late husband, Duncan Slater, who believed that the truth should never be allowed to get in the way of a good story.
My thanks to my children, my mother and Kate, and all the friends who remembered stories that I had forgotten and allowed me to share family jokes with a wider audience, and especially to my daughter Christina who made me re-write the whole thing (again); to Eleanor Fuller for jokes and the vigorous debate of ideas; and to Sandra Aragona, whose stories are much funnier than mine, and without whom I would never have done this.
My thanks also to colleagues in the FCO for help and support. I have quoted (with permission as appropriate) from the following FCO Guidances:
Guidance on foreign usage and ceremony, and other matters, for a Member of His Majesty’s Foreign Service on his first appointment to a Post Abroad by Marcus Cheke, His Majesty’s Vice-Marshal of the Diplomatic Corps. HM Diplomatic Service January 1949.
Guidance to Diplomatic Service and other Officers, and Wives, posted to Diplomatic Service Missions Overseas or some “do’s” and “don’ts” of Diplomatic Etiquette and other relevant matters. Diplomatic Administration Office 1965. Dame Barbara Salt).
Handbook on diplomatic Life Abroad, Sir Stanley Tomlinson, FCO July 1974).
In order to avoid tedious repetition, I have only given the name of the author and the date at the end of each quotation, rather than the full attribution.
PREFACE
It is axiomatic that no member of the [Diplomatic] Service should show or even imply personal disagreement with any aspect of His Majesty’s Government’s foreign policy. It is not always so easy…..(Marcus Cheke. 1949)
There are, I think, few other walks of life in which being goosed by a President, Prime Minister or some other illustrious personage is an everyday hazard, as it is for Ambassadors’ Wives or, indeed, Ambassadors (there are Ministers of all sexes with whom no Ambassador is safe). The progress of the principle guest through a distinguished throng can frequently be tracked via the startled yelps of the guests as he or she passes by. Time in office is short and fast work is needed to make the most of it.
But for diplomats themselves, the temptation to stray or at least experiment is a constant danger, as many Postings are both stressful and boring, and they go to a lot of parties. Senior diplomats enjoy great prestige, which goes down a treat with the opposite sex, opening delightful prospects, particularly on final postings. Some of the larger, more cosmopolitan posts, such as Washington and Paris, go through phases of such rampant sexual intrigue that you wonder whether there is any time or energy left for more mundane matters such as policy, commerce or the anxieties of Distressed British Subjects. Beneath the veneer of exquisite manners and immaculate dress and behavior, all human life, much of it entirely reprehensible, is there. So guidance is necessary, as what diplomatic services really dislike is disorderly lives.
Until sixty years ago, diplomacy was largely the preserve of an international aristocratic class, and the rules of behavior that it adopted were very much the rules of their own society. However, after the upheavals of two world wars, society became more fluid and the Foreign Office began to make conscious efforts to recruit more widely:
My dear chap – these days it really does not matter which university you attended. Either is equally acceptable. Anon.
The FO was nonetheless determined to maintain its own traditions. Manners simplify life by acting as rules of engagement for interaction between people who do not know each other and may come from different traditions, but they are also the basis for arcane rituals, which set castes apart, and the rules and regulations that governed Foreign Service life were no exception.
Between 1949 and 1974, the FO therefore produced a series of helpful little Guidances on How to Behave Abroad. Since in 1949, etiquette was still of paramount importance in diplomacy, the first Guidance was written by Marcus Cheke, His Majesty’s Vice Marshall of the Diplomatic Corps, the guardian of such important matters. It was addressed to a young diplomat, John Bull, who was about to join the staff of Sir Henry and Lady Sealingwax in the fictional country of Mauretania, and to his loyal wife, Mrs. Bull. Later versions were written by senior members of the Service, Barbara Salt and Stanley Tomlinson, drawing on their experience of life abroad. I have used quotes from these Guidances to highlight the transformation in attitudes over the twenty-five years during which they were produced, which in themselves carried the seeds of far greater upheavals to come.
Marcus Cheke’s’ Guidance is a hilariously idiosyncratic account, far removed from the dry tome that preceded and paralleled it, the Guide to Diplomatic Practice by Sir Ernest Satow, (1917 – 2009 updated at intervals by distinguished diplomats, including Lord Gore Booth and, most recently, Sir Ivor Roberts), and the careful booklets that followed, and all the more entertaining as a result. It was, of course, a confidential document (de-classified, I hasten to add, in September 1993) for internal FO use only, but it is eccentrically outspoken in a way that would be unthinkable in an official publication today:
There are countries where ….it is the virtues which are emphasized in the Old rather than the New Testament which impress the most…. The late Mr. Chamberlain might have done well to remember this when he flew to Munich to negotiate with Hitler; had he been accompanied by a platoon of picked men from the Guards instead of a secretary or two carrying umbrellas, he might have produced a different effect on the Nazi mind.
It is a shck to read the rules of etiquette that governed existence in Marcus Cheke’s day, and to realize how different our lives are now. However, it should be borne in mind that although much of the advice put forward so confidently may reinforce outsiders’ worst fears about the Foreign Service, it is as much a reflection of the diplomatic world as it was thirty to forty years earlier when Marcus himself was a young diplomat, as of the battered world of 1949. The old rigid forms of pre-war society were still apparently intact, but change was already working through the system, and there is a fascinating transition from Marcus’ sublime self-confidence, to the sensible, down-to-earth approach of Barbara Salt, sixteen years later, and the eminently reasonable, but definitely defensive tone of Stanley Tomlinson; conventions and rules of social behavior may have relaxed by 1974, but the world had become more circumspect. All three booklets describe conventions which belong to another age, as remote from us as the Victorians, to whom they would be much more familiar, although things were getting fuzzy by 1974, when doubt had begun to set in. Much space is taken up with the rituals surrounding the leaving of cards, which nobody would understand any more, and there were equally clear rules which told you what to wear, and indeed what not to wear.
Diplomacy is above all a theatrical performance, a comedy of manners, and when the conventions of society change, so do those governing the conduct of foreign relations. It is based on internationally acceptable norms and standards where the pace of change is much slower than at home, and on the necessity of putting on a brave show, so there can seem to be a time lag between diplomatic and contemporary life. It makes diplomats seem stuffy and old-fashioned for, as Marcus observes, other people are much keener on ceremony than the British are. There is the story, which has become apocryphal, of the French Ambassador’s wife who sat next to a former British Foreign Secretary at a grand dinner at Lancaster House. As soon as dinner was over, she stormed into the ladies loo [rest room], complaining in voluble French that he had propositioned her.
“But surely,” her companion protested. “You expected this?”
“Naturally,” she retorted, eyes flashing. “But not before the soup!”
Much of the tension between diplomatic services and the governments and peoples that they represent springs from the public’s view that diplomats are stuck in a privileged time-warp, at vast cost to the taxpayer (in fact, the FCO budget is one of the smallest in Whitehall) and diplomats’ view that, as Chou En Lai said, diplomacy is war by other means and they need to be properly resourced to carry it out. And anyway, where’s the fun in commuting from Milton Keynes or flying the flag in some grotty flat in downtown Beijing?
Diplomats believe passionately that their work is terribly important. Their tragedy is that, while this is true, most people have only the faintest idea of what they actually do. It is the question that you are always asked at parties, but even as you draw breath to give a balanced and articulate answer, the eyes of the questioner glaze over and shift to the other side of the room where he or she has just spotted someone much more amusing or important. Most of diplomacy is, in any event, pretty intangible or aimed at forestalling trouble, and it is difficult to find anything interesting to say about a disaster that did not happen, even if kept you up all night. From time to time, however, there is a lasting end result. When I first met him, my husband was working as assistant to Sir William Luce, the Foreign Secretary’s Special Envoy to the Persian Gulf, who was encouraging the establishment of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in the aftermath of British withdrawal East of Suez. They were shuttling between London, Teheran and the Gulf States, patiently stitching together an agreement that all the (very difficult) parties could live with (or indeed survive; one unfortunate Ruler was assassinated during the course of the negotiations). Their success can still be seen on the map, but this is rare. So the mystery remains, and indeed it is possible that people do not actually want to be told earnestly about negotiations over aid quotas, treaty sub-clauses or, heaven help us, prison visiting; reality is so tediously pedestrian. They want to be able to visualize diplomatic life as endlessly glamorous – and to hate diplomats for enjoying it. But there has to be more to it than that, so, this is a book about what diplomats do and the conventions that govern their lives.
A Foreign Service exists to defend and promote its country’s interests and maintain its place in a precarious world, and to give advice to its Government on which fights to pick and when to curb enthusiasm. As ever, the key thing in diplomacy is to pick your fights. Once the decision on a course of action or policy has been made (not necessarily in accordance with its advice), its job is to pursue it with tenacity and intelligence, without resorting to open warfare. There are a lot of Big Beasts out there, not to mention hordes of marauding little ones. All of them are hungry and the balance of power between them shifts constantly, so diplomats are kept pretty busy. If it all goes horribly wrong, and it frequently does, the Foreign Service sweeps up the bodies and engages on damage limitation. Foreign Services have evolved over the centuries, accumulating along the way a body of conventions and practices known as diplomatic etiquette, and they believed that they had the expertise to do the job.
But over recent years, an enormous cultural shift has taken place in the perception of what diplomats do and what they are for. Revolutions in travel and technology have altered the way they communicate and organize their work, but most significantly of all, diplomacy’s primary role has changed from representational, deeply rooted in the conventions of the nineteenth century, to service, ruled by key objectives, stakeholder surveys, indicators of success, capability audits and the familiar problems of finite resources (painfully more finite every year) and infinite demand. Outside management consultants have been brought in to produce blue-prints for change and Special Advisers to keep the line on policy.
A modern Foreign Ministry is expected to implement foreign policy as part of a government machine, but not to own it in the same way as it did in the past. It has lost its exclusive remit in Foreign Affairs and found itself in competition for the best-funded bits, such as anti-terrorism and aid, with other politically astute departments. It cannot even assume that bilateral diplomacy between two countries, carried out by a resident Ambassador and his or her staff, once its strongest suit and the very stuff of traditional diplomacy, will fit within the grid as a measurably effective activity. There is increasing emphasis on multi-lateral diplomacy through bodies such as the EU, the UN and NATO, which engage the interests of the whole government machine and call for close ministerial participation and control.
This has caused mighty diplomatic institutions, formerly symbols of self-confidence, to question their own existence and the validity of their calling as a profession, and as a consequence, Foreign Ministries have pretty much had to reinvent themselves. The major internal focus has shifted to the problems of devising and introducing corporate change fast enough to keep pace with dwindling resources, and it is more than a little strange to see organizations which prided themselves on clarity of thought and expression taking so readily to incomprehensible management-speak. The FCO’s internal structure has been radically pruned, especially at the higher levels. It no longer sees it itself as an employer for the whole of a career, and all jobs in the senior grades and many in the intermediate grades are open to the Civil Service as a whole. The concepts of a diplomatic service and of career diplomats are fast vanishing into the mists of time, and with them, for good and ill, the idea of a foreign service as a specialist caste. The Foreign Office thought that it was stronger than the Ministers who ruled it. It was wrong. The days are long gone of steely-eyed Ambassadors who would thunder at their supposed masters:
“You cannot seriously expect me to say anything so damned stupid to the Foreign Minister?”
And get away with it.
Where is the verve of former times? I miss it, but we must move on. The Foreign Office needs to open up to new people and new ideas, to find better ways of working and of serving its clients, and to embrace change for the good things that it brings, preferably without losing the best of the past. It is a difficult circle to square.
Why do I care? Because the Foreign Office has framed most of my adult life and it is difficult to kick such an old habit. On leaving university, I started as a desk officer in the United Nations department, and then joined the Private Office of the Minister responsible for negotiating Britain’s entry into the EU. I married a fellow diplomat and since at that time FCO rules demanded that a wife should resign when her husband was posted abroad, I spent the next twenty years as a diplomatic wife. After my husband died in 2002, the FCO, which had in the interim become an equal opportunities employer, took me back and I had another four years as a diplomat at the end of my career, to match the handful of years at the beginning.
This has enabled me to see that, besides the official rules that govern diplomacy and diplomatic life, which are enshrined in Guidances and dusty tomes on diplomatic practice, there are unofficial rules which really make the whole thing tick, and which govern the direction and pace of change. That is what this book is about - and the excuse to tell a few good stories (always irresistible to a diplomat). As Marcus Cheke observed:
“The whole science of human relationships is involved in the consideration of these things.”
SECTION ONE
THE UNOFFICIAL RULES OF DIPLOMACY
The broad function of any [diplomatic] mission is to represent, to observe and report, and to negotiate……..[Barbara Salt. 1965]
THE ART OF DIPLOMACY
If ever you fail to penetrate a man’s personal attitude towards yourself or towards the business that you have in hand, the following tactics will often give results; say your farewells, and then, at the very last moment before you are to vanish from his sight – at the very last instant before the door closes upon you – cast one rapid glance back. The expression which you will catch on the face of the man with whom you have been conversing is sometimes absolutely devastating. [Marcus Cheke, 1949.]
A major problem for the British diplomat is that English now gives us access to an entire world separated by a common language. Everywhere you go English has been happily adopted and then embellished and generally made to feel at home by exotic local rhythms and variations and an unorthodox use of vocabulary. This can make communications rather a hit and miss affair, but it adds immensely to the rich tapestry of life.
My husband was Head of Chancery (the head of the political section who was also responsible for the morale and well-being of a Mission; the term is no longer used) in the British High Commission Lagos, Nigeria at the time of the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales. The Times of Nigeria recorded the ceremony with the unforgettable words:
“The Royal wedding was consummated by the Archbishop of Canterbury – and a picked body of top clergymen.”
Which gives one a whole new view of the Church of England, and its place in British society.
Even amongst native English speakers, misunderstandings can arise, as in the case of the woman who was due to go to a franco-phone country in North Africa as PA to the British Ambassador, after a long home posting in London. She wrote to her future boss to ask if there were any special preparations she should make and he advised her that it would probably be a good idea to polish up her French.
So she went along to the local Further Education Centre and enrolled on a french-polishing course. On the first evening she was surprised to be asked why she had not brought a piece of furniture to practice on, but happily her mother found an old occasional table for her to take to the next session, and after that everything went swimmingly. Of course, when she arrived at Post, she had trouble communicating with the natives, but on the plus side, by the time she had been there a few weeks, the Embassy furniture was in excellent shape.
Sadly, unless we think carefully about it, English is full of pitfalls. For example, the advertising agency hired by a well-known international British Bank several years ago to come up with a new slogan, should really have thought it through before suggesting: “******** ********* Bank – the bank that helps people to help themselves”. Sounds like just the kind of bank we have all been looking for, but alas the Board did not feel that it was quite the image they wanted to project.
Interpreters add a whole new dimension. Sitting between two powerful representatives of different cultures, each looking at the interpreter trustfully and expectantly while the other rattles off a stream of incomprehensible, but clearly deeply important, gibberish, their power to edit what they hear is almost godlike, and sometime even necessary. My husband once acted as interpreter between a Gulf Ruler, in the days before they all spoke impeccable English, and a visiting British General and his wife, whose weather-beaten face bore witness to a lifetime of energetic all-weather gardening and a certain fondness for gin and ciggies.
“Ask His Excellency, “the Ruler said, fixing his hooded eyes on the General’s wife. “Why he doesn’t ditch the old bat and get himself a younger wife.”
Clearly an accurate translation would have been inadvisable.
“His Highness wants to know,” my husband said, after the briefest possible pause, “if the General has enjoyed his trip to the Gulf.”
The General nodded vigorously, beamed at the Ruler and said that he was having a perfectly splendid time.
“He’s thinking about it,” my husband said to the Ruler. “Maybe next year.”
The English use their own language in a way that foreigners, even those who speak it far better than we do ourselves, find entirely baffling. How many false hopes have been raised by the British Ambassador leaning courteously towards his cher collegue, after a long explanation of the latter’s country’s policy on some matter or other, and saying:
“My dear chap, I and my Government entirely understand your position.”
We know that the next word here is “but”; alas, however, other people do not see this coming – perfide Albion!
Information and language are the raw materials of diplomacy and words are a diplomat’s weapon of choice. A skilled diplomat should be able to make words say whatever he desires, using a kind of verbal sleight of hand to conceal ruthless manipulation. I was taught when I first joined the FCO (in those days, the Foreign Office raised its own and drafting was its most valued skill) that you should beware of using ‘weasel’ words – words which are designed to mislead; you should be able to achieve the desired result with Plain English, like a conjuror hiding a trick in full view. Drafting was an art form, but the pursuit of perfection should nonetheless be kept within reasonable bounds. As a venerable FO mandarin once put it:
“You should not allow the best to be enemy of the good – unless, of course, it is absolutely necessary.”
Sometimes, however, non-verbal communications can be even more effective than words at getting a message across. In August 1972, President Idi Amin of Uganda announced that he was going to throw all the Ugandan Asians out of his country with immediate effect. This was terrifically popular with the indigenous population. Amin declared that the Asians were Britain’s problem anyway, and not his, since half of them held British passports (without right of abode – in his eyes a mere technicality) and the rest, who had opted for Ugandan citizenship on independence, which had now been stripped from them, were former British subjects, albeit of the second class, colonial variety. The neighboring African countries were watching with keen interest to see what would happen, but were not prepared to take them in. If Britain abandoned them, they would be stateless.
Although not entirely unexpected, this was not welcome news to the British Government. The problem was not so much the Ugandan Asians themselves, but the wider precedent that they might set for all the other ex-colonial peoples scattered throughout the world if they were given proper British passports and allowed in as bona fide British citizens. There were, for example, an estimated two million Hong Kong Chinese. Britain is a small island; we would sink. Who thought of that when the Empire was being somewhat haphazardly created? Clearly someone had to go and talk to Amin and, since it was the summer holidays and no one else was available, the choice fell on the Minister I worked for in my early years in the FCO. As my more senior, male colleagues were also on holiday and had left me to care-take the graveyard shift when nothing was supposed to happen (but always did), I went along as accompanying Private Secretary. We had the radio on as we drove to Heathrow so that we could listen to the news, and the newsreader started to talk about our trip just as we entered the tunnel at the entrance to the airport and we lost the signal. As we emerged, we heard him announce that Idi Amin had refused to see us. This was a bad start, but we decided to go anyway in case he changed his mind.
Sadly, he did not. We spent two fruitless days kicking our heels in Kampala, having meetings with the Anglican bishop, the leaders of the Asian community and any other interested parties who were prepared to talk to us, and paying a visit to the encampment of would-be immigrants outside the British consulate. In the meantime, Amin addressed a huge rally in the football stadium where his decision to expel the Asians and his view that it was all Britain’s’ fault was endorsed with wild enthusiasm. Back in the High Commissioner’s Residence, we feared that at any moment we would be surrounded by an angry mob. We decided to move on to Tanzania and Kenya for talks with the leaders of those countries, mainly to check that they were not about to do the same thing, but also to give Amin time to rethink and agree to see us after all.
Two days later, there was still no word from Amin and we had no choice but to head for home. The return flight from Nairobi had stop-overs at Dar es Salaam and Entebbe, Uganda’s international airport, on its way back to London, giving us a last, tiny window of opportunity. Sure enough, when we reached Dar es Salaam, the British High Commissioner was waiting on the tarmac to tell us that Idi Amin had agreed to see us, the following morning at Government House in Entebbe, and that we should get off the plane at the next stop.
Idi Amin was a very big man, a dangerous mixture of highly unstable violence held on an uncertain leash, and a towering physical presence. He had been Ugandan Army boxing champion before independence, and was promoted to sergeant on the basis of his prowess in the ring. After that, his rise, like his left hook, had been unstoppable. He was flanked, during our meeting, by a chorus of terrified cabinet ministers, who tittered nervously at his jokes and nodded their heads vigorously when he made a particularly forceful point – which was often. They had good reason to be frightened. At that time, the life expectancy of a Ugandan cabinet minister was comparable to that of a subaltern at the Somme and most of them ended up face down in the river within two weeks of our departure.
Although my Minister handled the meeting with his usual emollient charm, the tension rose steadily as it progressed. There was no possibility of Amin changing his mind, and he certainly was not going to do so to please the British Government, since having them over a barrel was a large part of the fun. It became clear from the thunderous look on Amin’s face that we were fast approaching an explosion. Suddenly, he leapt to his feet. The Minister started and went pale and the rest of us cringed back into the sofa cushions. Amin bent slightly forward and farted very loudly.
There was a stunned silence. This was not the detonation we had been expecting. It was diplomacy at its most basic, but nonetheless brutally effective. After that, it was all over. We had no more fight left in us. Obviously feeling much better, he beamed at us and sat down again.
“If you take these people in,” he predicted. “Within six months you will want to chuck them out too. “
We adjourned for lunch on the lawn, a rather solid meal at which banana or plantain, the country’s staple foods, were patriotically served in some form or other in each of the five courses. We were photographed, toasting each other ostensibly in champagne, but actually in lucozade as Amin was a Muslim and was thus teetotal. We then left for the airport to resume our journey home to London. I sat up though the night writing the report of our meeting, which was to be rushed straight to the Prime Minister as soon as we landed, but although it was possibly the pivotal moment, I left the fart out. Official English is not really up to these things and it was difficult to find a suitable way of expressing it.
When we arrived, we went straight to Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country home. He had summoned all the other cabinet ministers who were not away on holiday – about three –, and after breakfast, we sat outside on the terrace under the sun umbrellas to discuss what they should do. As a cabinet meeting, it was an informal affair. The Prime Minister was wearing a vividly colored short sleeved cotton shirt and his face, brick red after the long, hot summer, was as incandescent as a second, slightly smaller sun. We advised that the Government should make a virtue out of necessity and welcome all the Asians who held British passports and wanted to come to Britain with the best possible grace. As it turned out of course, Amin’s dire warning was never fulfilled and Uganda’s loss was very much our gain.
It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good. The purpose of diplomacy is to get the best deal possible for your country, but a large part of the art of diplomacy lies in making it seem that you got the best deal, even when you have been comprehensively out-maneuvered.
DIPLOMATS AT HOME
Diplomacy removed from the hands of diplomatists and conducted in the full glare of publicity by politicians and journalists, has not always proved more efficient. (Marcus Cheke. 1949)
When sitting in the back of a London taxi on my way to the Foreign Office, I was often asked why I wanted to go there?
“Because,” I would reply, “I am a diplomat. I work there.”
“Which country do you work for?” would be the inevitable next question, since it is assumed that all diplomats living in London are foreigners working for foreign governments.
But diplomats do not just work abroad. Foreign Service jobs have fixed terms, usually two or three years, although postings in very difficult places may only last for six or twelve months, and Ambassadors may stay for up to four years. At the end of each tour of duty, a Foreign Service officer must bid for a new job in competition with other candidates from the FCO and, increasingly, from the rest of Whitehall. The hub of activity is the Foreign Office in London and diplomats expect to spend roughly a third of their time on home postings. This means that they have to chuck the tenants out of the house in Kennington, forgo foreign allowances and commute in to Whitehall like other civil servants.
London is the central point for representation by foreign governments in Britain. If another country does something that we don’t like, its Ambassador is summoned to the Foreign Office to be told of our displeasure. It is also the administrative centre, although all FCO work is increasingly shared across the whole organism. In essence, the work of the Foreign Office in London revolves around Ministers and the need to brief them and advise them, and execute their decisions.
You get to know a lot about Ministers in diplomacy. The Minister I worked for was in charge of negotiating Britain’s’ entry into the European Communities, or Common Market as we called it in those simpler times. This was a subject of vigorous cross-party (frequently very cross indeed) and public debate with the argument raging between the pros and the antis, as indeed it still does today.
The Minister was a charming and clever man, with an unerring barrister’s eye for the important details in a complex case. He never read his briefing notes properly, but would skim through them, just before a meeting, or indeed during the meeting, but he was rarely wrong-footed and he was a brilliant and patient negotiator. He was not, however, one of nature’s babe magnets. In fact, he looked like an amiable, over-weight, bespectacled, cigar-chomping frog, but although he was devoted to his wife and family, he also loved the glamour of nightclubs and anarchic, expensive ladies. High office had given him the access, and power had given him the sex appeal with which to pursue these other interests, which might otherwise have been denied to him.
This presented extra problems for his Private Office. He would never stay with the British Ambassador when he went on trips abroad and always insisted that official dinners should finish by ten o’clock, giving him the freedom to explore the local nightlife. It was the job of the accompanying Private Secretary to stick with him as he trawled the bars, nightclubs and dives until the small hours, and to make sure that he did not come to any harm. Remarkably, in spite of many adventures, and prematurely aging the police chiefs of five continents, he never did.
When official visitors came to call on him in London, they had to come to our office first and we would either ask them to wait, or, if he was ready, usher them straight in. He was not always ready, as, in the intervals between official business, he used to entertain his lady friends. When his next visitor arrived, we would press the buzzer to let him know, and he would, in due course, show the lady out of a discreet side door at the back of his office, where one of us would be waiting to escort her downstairs. Once the coast was clear, the official visitor would be shown in to find the Minister sitting behind his desk, industriously reading his official papers.
Unfortunately, on one occasion, the visitor was a very grand British Ambassador, who did not think that waiting to be announced could possibly apply to him. He swept into our office, threw his voluminous coat to me and his umbrella to my colleague, strode across the room and, before we could stop him, flung open the door surprising the Minister and the lady of the afternoon in close embrace on the sofa. The Minister released the lady and fixed an astonished, bulbous stare on the Ambassador who, transfixed in the doorway, was regarding him with equal amazement. After the briefest possible pause, the Minister heaved himself up from the sofa, the Ambassador moved forward, and the two men shook hands and settled into the meeting, neither of them looking round as we retrieved the lady’s shoes, bag and Alice-band and hurried her out of the back door.
The Minister’s official title allowed him to fly his own striking gold and blue pennant from the bonnet of his car. During night-time excursions the pennant was kept discreetly rolled up, with a spare, in the glove compartment, but he enjoyed showing it and the seal which allowed him to drive across Horseguards Parade and through the arch onto Whitehall (forbidden to ordinary traffic), to his lady friends. One night, while the driver was concentrating on the road and the Minister was otherwise distracted, one of the ladies tucked both flags into her handbag and in the small hours when she was dropped off at her little flat in South Kensington, they went with her. The loss was not discovered until the next morning. There was general consternation. The driver was in tears, a pensionless retirement staring him in the face, although we all assured him that it could not possibly be his fault. Nonetheless, how could we explain the situation and what should we do about replacements? The mystery was solved a few nights later when the lady accompanied the Minister to Annabel’s and revealed, as she took off her coat, that she was wearing the pennants, having enterprisingly sewn them together to make a fetching, but rather small top. She then proceeded to dance the night away, as it were flying the flag. The Minister was inclined to share her view that they looked better on her than on his car, and we never got them back.
The Minister was a great raconteur and excellent company. However, he did not drink at parties and the first few moments are sticky for the most convivial of us, so he used to take his team along with him to act as warm-up support, feed him lines and laugh at his jokes. Once he was launched and the centre of admiring group, he would dismiss us with a benign wave of his cigar:
“All right, children. Run along, you can go now.”
One night, we all went to a party in a house in Eaton Square which had an enormous, high ceilinged drawing room to the side of the main house, where the walls were entirely covered by fabulous, vividly colored modern art. The owner of the house was a staunch, and very rich, supporter of the pro Europeans. As soon as we entered the room, the Minister was surrounded by a crowd of activists in the Cause, including an attractive lady member of the Britain in Europe Group (motto “we’ve got to get in to get on”), who was keen to discuss with him the wording of a pamphlet setting out the Case for Joining, which was to be distributed shortly, paid for by the owner of the house. We received our usual dismissal and, confident that he was in safe hands, wandered off to circle the vast room, dazzled by the pictures on the walls and the excellence of the champagne.
Half an hour later, I went in search of the loo, which I was told was on the landing half-way up the grand staircase in the entrance hall of the house. It was not difficult to find, as a long queue of edgy-looking people stretched from the bottom of the stairs to the locked door on the half-landing. This was, alas, the only available loo and the crowd were growing increasingly restive. The lady at the head of the queue rattled the knob authoritatively, to show that there were people waiting, and the knob and spindle came away in her hand, the counterpart knob falling with a dull thud onto the carpet on the other side. Aghast, those nearest to the door pressed their ears to the panels, but no sounds could be made out coming from within, unlike the rising crescendo of noise now being made by the desperate crowd outside, crossing their legs on the stairs.
“Don’t worry,” the lady at the head of the queue shouted through the keyhole above the hubbub. “We’ll get you out of there in a jiffy. Just stay calm!”
The spindle of the doorknob was hastily reinserted in the hope that the other knob could be reattached and the door teased open, once the bolt had been released, but there was still no sign of anyone wrestling with the lock from the inside, although one man with his ear to the panel claimed that he could hear a muffled rustling. Was there actually anyone in there? Someone suggested sending for a screwdriver so that the door could be taken off its hinges. A gang of people, unable to wait any longer, had seized a coat-stand and started to form up to charge the door from the top of the stairs, a tricky man oeuvre as it meant twisting slightly to accommodate the half-landing in the final approach.
At that moment, the door swung open to reveal the Minister and the attractive lady activist, who had apparently taken advantage of the only quiet space in the house in which to discuss the fine tuning of the wording of the pamphlet, and failed to register that the noise outside the door was anything other than the roar of a particularly good party. There was sudden hush as, with bug-eyed astonishment, the Minister regarded the disheveled mob around the door.
“So sorry to keep you,” he murmured courteously, ushering the lady down the stairs and melting back into the party in search of more champagne.
Julian Critchley once said that: “the only safe pleasure for a parliamentarian is a bag of boiled sweets.” (The Listener, 1982). But, politicians love dangerous games and many knowingly run the risk that a private distraction may, at any moment, turn into an open blood sport with themselves as the quarry. The stakes are high for anyone in public life, as even in our apparently liberal society, where nobody is supposed to care who does what or to whom, no matter how exemplary the rest of a life has been, a scandal will be the only thing that is remembered.
The Minister owed his protection to the reticence of the Press who adored him, because he drank with them late at night in smoke-filled bars, swapping outrageous stories and waving his cigar expansively in the air, and in consequence, they never shopped him. There are very few real secrets, and most stories come out in the end, but that does not mean that everything known to an inner circle is immediately passed on to the general public. There is a great pleasure in knowing things that others do not, and secrets are marketable goods while they are only known to the few. Sometimes there may be legal reasons for keeping quiet; sometimes it just comes down to personalities. However, most important of all, the Press smell death and fear and all the stories come out of the bag, stinging venomously, when they do. My Minister was lucky that it was not his time to die.
Politics and diplomacy are both games of bluff and knowing how far you can push your luck and get away with it.
DIPLOMATIC LIFE ABROAD
As soon as you are told of your appointment to a Post abroad, ask the Welfare Section or Personnel Department for the post report and read it thoroughly. Some are better than others and some paint an unduly somber picture, such as concluding that “there are facilities for Christian burial”. [Barbara Salt 1965.].
“Your problem,” said the official sent out by London from the FCO Estates Department, gloomily sucking his teeth and looking disapprovingly at our crumbling but beautiful Residence in Oman, where my husband was British Ambassador, “is that you are over-housed.”
Oversexed, over-housed and over there at the tax payer’s expense is a widely held view of diplomats, shared, it often seems, by many of the FCO’s own support services. Whatever it is that they actually do, most people think that, once abroad, diplomats escape the safe confines of civil service anonymity and morph into something glamorous, extravagant and strange, almost certainly in contravention with the rules of Health and Safety. It probably had not helped, therefore, that I had just put my foot through the veranda.
So the man from Estates devised a cunning plan by which, at considerable expense, a new prefab Residence could be constructed within the shell of the existing building, with straight walls and sensibly low ceilings, built to the dimensions appropriate to my husband’s ambassadorial grade. This would take time to implement, but as an immediate result of his visit, a full-scale survey of the house was commissioned by London.
Houses, particularly Ambassadors’ Residences, play an important, but ambiguous role in the lives of the diplomats. You live there, but they are also part of the Ambassadorial workplace; they are public spaces and entertainment venues. Hordes of visitors troop through them on a daily basis. There are usually small private spaces where you can make a temporary home, and the house and its gardens are often beautiful or otherwise exceptional, and much loved by the tenants who pass briefly through them, but it can feel as if you are camping in a museum. No account of days in the life of a diplomat abroad is complete without the story of the house that he or she inhabits.
The house at Muscat was situated in the middle of Muscat Bay, beside the Sultan’s palace and between two promontories, each dominated by a sixteenth century Portuguese fort. When you approached from the town, all you could see was a blank stone wall pierced by a large wooden gateway surmounted by the British coat of arms. Then the gates opened inwards to reveal white buildings, overgrown with jasmine and bougainvillea on either side of a courtyard and beyond a white parapet, the deep blue of the sea. In the middle of the courtyard was a flagpole, taken from a British warship. In the old days, if a slave could escape, and touch the flagpole before he was caught, he could be set free by the British Resident and given a manumission certificate to prove it, which the Sultan of Oman would honor. In our time there were still manumission certificates in the stationery cupboard, kept just in case the need should arise.
At the end of the nineteenth century, sacks would, from time to time, wash up on the beach in front of the house which, when opened, were found to contain the bodies of wives of the Sultan who had committed adultery or otherwise displeased him. The sacks had been thrown into the sea from the fort to the right of the Residence, which was used as a prison, and the current washed them up on the beach. Deeply shocked, the Resident complained about this to the Sultan of the day and received an immediate and courteous reply. The Sultan said that he was very sorry – he had no idea that the Resident was being inconvenienced. He had therefore given orders that the sacks should be thrown into the sea from the promontory on the other side of the bay, where the current would carry them round the corner and away further up the coast. He trusted that the Resident would not be troubled again.
One of the forts had recently been tastefully restored. The second, above the cliff, referred to by the Sultan as his ‘Visiting Book’, where the tradition that visiting ships should stencil their names on the rock face in regulation Royal Navy white paint was already well established in Nelson’s time, was in the process of being done up when we arrived. This fort had an original gun chamber, built to the same dimensions and with the same raked floor, as the gun chamber on a Portuguese man-of-war. The seabed below the fort was littered with old canons – relics of the many battles fought over the centuries in Muscat Bay. These had been retrieved and lovingly restored and were ready to be installed on specially built gun-carriages in the chamber. Unfortunately, there appeared to be no way to get them up the steep flight of steps and through the several narrow gates that led to the interior of the fort. The solution was to fly them in one by one dangling from helicopters and drop them straight onto the gun-carriages in the castle courtyard, guided by the construction team waiting below. Then, with much shouting, gesticulating and huge expenditure of visible effort, the team wheeled them into position in the gun chamber. My children spent a happy day watching the guns being lowered from the sky by the helicopter pilots, who were mainly young contract officers - Britons, Americans and Rhodesians – and who were vying with each other to see who could get the guns onto the carriages with the greatest precision and accuracy.
The whole structure of the house was becoming increasingly unstable. It had been built in a traditional shape – a square stone building with an open central courtyard, full of large plants and a defunct fountain, which made an excellent roller skating arena for the children once the working day was over. The Embassy occupied the ground floor and our Residence the top floor. There was a flat roof over the four sides of the main building, littered with communications satellites, wires and aerials, and below that a sloping tiled roof above an open inner veranda which gave access to all the rooms of the Residence. To one side was a huge covered terrace, looking over the sea. We would sit on this terrace having breakfast, watching the dolphins playing and the shoals of little fishes shivering across the water, occasionally breaking the surface and leaping and skittering over each other, their scales glittering in the sun, in their frantic race to escape from some unseen predator hunting them below. At night, when the warm, damp air was heavy with the scent of jasmine and the sky was thick with stars, dinner was served there by candlelight, while, like great cities of light, the ships on their way to the port of Muttrah or to the Straits of Hormuz, glided silently across the line of the horizon, as if pulled between the silhouetted promontories by invisible wires.
The house had originally been built without any bathrooms. One day in the early nineteen twenties, an American millionaire, whose family had made their fortune in sanitary ware, parked his yacht in the Bay and came to call on the Resident. They had a very pleasant lunch, and after the meal, the American asked if he could wash his hands. He was ushered behind a screen and shown the rather basic facilities, and was so appalled by them that he sent the Resident three bathroom suites from the top of his range – probably the best thank-you present ever and a great testament to the virtues of American plumbing. The baths were huge and very beautiful, molded in classic art deco style. They did, however, present a problem as there was nowhere to put them. Parts of the external verandas were therefore boxed in to make en suite bathrooms for the main bedrooms. Unfortunately, the structure of the house was not really strong enough for such a modification and over the years, the bathrooms pulled steadily away from rest of the house – hence the foot through the veranda.
By the end of our third year in Muscat, the Military Adviser’s office, which was below the area most at risk, was a forest of scaffolding, kindly provided free of charge by a British construction company. The Colonel and his sergeant continued, gallantly, to work in increasingly difficult circumstances, negotiating the assault course from door to desk and secure communications machine, and no doubt drawing on their experiences of keeping the show on the road in bombed-out cities and war zones.
Early one morning, when my husband was away in London and my three small children and I were asleep, the house nearly solved the problem of its continuing existence by catching fire. There was a sudden surge of electricity, which caused an electrical fault in one of the air conditioning units in the dining room and a spark from the wiring ignited the curtains. Although the house was stone clad, it was essentially built of wood, which was tinder dry, so the whole thing could have gone up in flames in moments.
Luckily, the fire did not start until after the staff had come in to prepare breakfast and the steward on duty (an ex-electrician) turned off the electricity to stop it spreading along the wires, and banged on my door to wake me up.
“Hoorah!” said my son on emerging, brimming with excitement, from his room. “I’m going to ring the bell!”
He shot off at speed down the staircase towards the bell, which was hanging on the wall of the courtyard under the internal veranda waiting just such an emergency. It had been salvaged from the only British ship to be torpedoed in Muscat Bay during World War II, hit, slightly improbably, by a stray Japanese mini-submarine, which had mistaken its route home.
Meanwhile, I telephoned the Head of Chancery, who lived in a house across the courtyard to warn him of our peril and summon him to our aid. Unfortunately, in his haste to pick up the phone, he fell out of bed and put his back out so that he remained marooned on the floor like an upended turtle during most of the ensuing excitement.
One half of the dining room was by then well alight, the flames blazing merrily on either side of the portrait of Nelson which we had prized out of a deeply reluctant FCO picture library with earnest assurances that it would be perfectly safe in Oman. Nelson was reputed to have led the party which painted the name of his ship, the Seahorse, on the cliff below Fort Jalali when he visited Oman as a midshipman, and the picture seemed appropriate to symbolize the long-standing friendship between the two countries. He looked very good presiding over one of the other great treasures of the house, a magnificent mahogany dining table which could seat up to thirty guests.
Happily, the fire brigade, stationed just around the corner, was with us in minutes. A dozen very small firemen dressed in vast yellow helmets, shiny coats and enormous rubber boots, designed by their manufacturers for British fire brigades manned by altogether larger people, stormed up the stairs, dragging a large hose behind them. While heaving the hose around the internal veranda, they managed to drop it over the parapet into the central greenery below. They all stomped downstairs to retrieve it. They then helped us to pull the pictures off the walls and, in their enthusiasm, smashed the portrait of Nelson down on top of the table, gashing the polished surface of the wood and wrecking the veneer. Then, three to the nozzle, they turned on the water.
Two more neighboring fire brigades roared into the courtyard, bells ringing furiously. There had not been a really decent fire in the Muscat area for ages and everyone wanted to join in. They too brought hoses. A largish crowd of most of the able-bodied inhabitants of Muscat, summoned by my son’s vigorous ringing of the Embassy bell, were now milling around in the courtyard, getting in the way of the firemen. Within ten minutes, the last tendrils of fire had been extinguished, the dining room was a wreck and the house was completely sodden. The firemen left beaming; a job well done and an enjoyable morning had by all - with the possible exception of the Head of Chancery. The crowd reluctantly dispersed, shooed outside the gates by the gatemen and the nice young soldier who guarded our front door. Slightly later that day, the same nice young soldier stood to attention to mark the end of his watch, brought his heels together, rapped the end of his rifle butt smartly against the ground, and blew off the top of the flagpole.
During the week that my husband was away, we dried out the house, repainted the dining room, cannibalized carpets and curtains to fill the gaps and cleaned up the furniture. By the time he came home, most of the evidence of the fire had been removed, apart from the gouge in the table about which he was very cross.
New curtains and carpeting was eventually sent out from London so that when the man from the Estates Department came to call, the inside of the house appeared to be in pretty good nick, even while the basic fabric continued to crumble away. The report on the state of the building was due to arrive at around the same time as a visit from the Foreign Secretary. He, his wife, his private secretary, his press attaché, and his detective would be staying with us in the house. The children and the nanny were farmed out to friends and the rest of the party from London were scattered among the senior members of the Embassy staff.
I was to give a party on the first evening to introduce the Foreign Secretary’s wife to a representative selection of Omani ladies while the men went to dinner with the Sultan. It had already been a slightly trying day, but as we hurried, already a few minutes late, to the top of the stairs to leave with our guests for our first evening engagement – a visit to the newly restored fort to the right of the house - my husband stopped dead and turned, nearly colliding with me as I scurried in his wake:
“What have you done with the Home Secretary?” he demanded.
“The Home Secretary?!?” I yelped, aghast. This was an entirely new thought. Had I somehow mislaid the Home Secretary? Surely not? He was a large man and I was certain that I would have noticed.