Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin
For over 30 years Sherard Cowper-Coles was on the diplomatic front line in a distinguished Foreign Office career that took him from the corridors of power in Whitehall to a string of high-profile posts across the globe.Entering the Foreign Office fresh from Oxford in 1977, he enjoyed a meteoric rise with postings in Beirut, Alexandria and Cairo, Washington, and Paris, and working on Hong Kong, punctuated with spells in London, where the young diplomat had a baptism of fire writing foreign affairs speeches for Geoffrey Howe and Margaret Thatcher.In 1999, he was made Principal Private Secretary to the irascible Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, providing the book with some of its most hilarious sequences, and his glittering career culminated in a succession of ambassadorial posts as Our Man in Israel, Saudi Arabia and finally Afghanistan.‘Ever the Diplomat’ is his revealing, passionate and witty account of half a lifetime in diplomacy, which is set to become a classic of the genre.
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Ever The Diplomat
Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin
SHERARD COWPER-COLES
For Harry, Rupert, Minna, Freddy, Myles and Louise
Contents
Chapter 4 - Immortal Junior Typist
Chapter 6 - Back in the Office
Chapter 8 - Death on the Seine
Chapter 9 - The Gnome Secretary
Chapter 10 - Poppies of Palestine
Chapter 11 - In the Heart of Arabia
About the Publisher
FCO Letter of Appointment
‘Thatcher’s Thesaurus’
Middle East Centre for Arab Studies. Photograph by a local Lebanese photographer
TRH The Prince and Princess of Wales, and President and Mrs Sadat. Photograph by a member of the crew of HM Yacht Britannia
Foreign Office Planning Staff. © Brian Harris/The Times/NI Syndication
Permanent Under Secretary’s office. Photograph by an FCO photographer
Congressman Kennedy. Photograph by a member of his staff
Mrs Thatcher. Photograph by a member of Blair House staff
Governor Patten. © Roger Hutchings/In Pictures/Corbis
Hong Kong Handover Ceremony. © Reuters/Jason Reed
President’s House, Jerusalem. Photograph by a member of the President’s staff
Crown Prince Abdullah, the Prince of Wales and the author. Photograph by a Saudi court photographer
Crown Prince Abdullah, Prime Minister and the author. Photograph by a Saudi court photographer
All other photographs are from the author’s private collection and were taken either by him or by friends, colleagues or family members
This book is really a long love letter to an institution – the Foreign Office – for which I worked for some three decades. From the age of twenty-two until I was fifty-five, I was a British diplomat. Formally, I was a member of Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, with a commission from the Queen. But for me diplomacy was much more than a job, or even a profession: it was my way of life. It was what I got up for in the morning, and what I went to sleep at night thinking about. For thirty-three years, I looked forward almost every working day to going into the office, or embassy, or wherever work took me. I was never bored. And I didn’t just enjoy being a diplomat. I also believed that what I did as a diplomat mattered in small but important ways. From Ireland to Israel, and Arabia to Afghanistan, in Paris or Washington, in long hours in London worrying about Europe’s future or Hong Kong after the handover, I tried as a minor cog in HMG’s foreign policy machine to make the world work better. I met the people who helped or hindered our efforts. I went to the places where foreign policy happened. I cared about the issues. And at the end of it all I wanted to share some of the highlights and low points, as I remembered them. I wanted to give the reader a flavour of what diplomats really do, and of what being a diplomat actually feels like. But mostly I wanted to show why I had enjoyed it all so much.
I kept no proper diary. The random private papers I did keep are now buried beyond easy recovery in barns and attics in Britain and France. I have made no use of official documents. But what I do have is memories: plenty of them, good and bad, of the tough times and the bright spots, of the fun I had, but also of the horrors I witnessed and of the mistakes we made. Of the people too, conscientious mostly, committed and often courageous, but some charlatans as well and others with more reptilian qualities. I have set down, place by place, post by post, the best and worst of those memories. All are the truth as I remember it, but not always the whole truth. The story stops at the edge of private turmoil. It alludes only in passing to the disreputable deal-making over top jobs that led me to choose early retirement, five years sooner than expected.
As with my first book, Cables from Kabul,* I have asked myself whether publishing an account of my experiences so soon after I left the public service was consistent with my obligations to my former employer. But Diplomatic Service Regulations state that ‘The FCO welcomes debate on foreign policy … The FCO recognises that there is a public interest in allowing former officials to write accounts of their time in government. These contributions can help public understanding and debate … there is no ban on former members of the Diplomatic Service writing their memoirs … but obligations of confidentiality remain …’
Like Cables, this book is the fruit of a conversation with my future agent, Caroline Michel, at a dinner at the Irish Embassy in London in 2009. It was Caroline who first suggested that I had a book or two in me. It was she who told me to set down my memories and share them. I shall be forever grateful to her for sticking so faithfully to that judgement.
I am also immensely grateful to the team at HarperPress who have given such enthusiastic and wholly professional support to this project: in particular my editor and friend, Martin Redfern, a diplomat if ever there was one, whose quiet judgement has often saved me from error, and who has driven the whole thing forward with determination and discrimination; to project editor Kate Tolley for putting the book together with efficiency and taste; and to Helen Ellis, publicist sans pareil, Minna Fry and the whole of the HarperPress gang.
