Relations with Ministers
E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78590-345-8
Verlag: Biteback Publishing
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Lord Wright of Richmond is a retired British diplomat and current member of the House of Lords. Following appointments as the British Ambassador to Luxembourg, Syria and Saudi Arabia (1977-1986), he went on to become the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Head of HM Diplomatic Service.
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1986
20 JUNE 1986
One week before taking over as Permanent Under-Secretary (PUS) from Sir Antony Acland, we were both invited to lunch with Mrs Thatcher. She opened the conversation by thrusting a newspaper cutting about Oliver Tambo in front of us, saying that it proved that we should not be talking to him (having agreed that morning that Lynda Chalker, a Minister of State in the Foreign Office, could meet him). She continued, both before and at lunch, to express her views about a return to pre-1910 South Africa, with a white mini-state partitioned from their neighbouring black states. When I argued that this would be seen as an extension of apartheid and homelands policy, she barked: ‘Do you have no concern for our strategic interests?’ I replied: ‘Of course, Prime Minister; but I don’t think this is the way to protect them.’ Otherwise, this was a very agreeable occasion, with the Prime Minister occasionally reverting to the topic of South Africa. She paid very warm tributes to Antony Acland, with the snide comment that his imagination and initiative were constantly being eroded by the unimaginative approach of the Foreign Office. She was also very complimentary about Charles Powell [now Lord Powell of Bayswater], whom she described as the best private secretary she had ever had (a compliment I had personally heard her pay to his two predecessors). One of them, Sir John Coles, later told me that, at his farewell dinner at No. 10, Margaret Thatcher had gone over the top in her compliments, glaring at his successor and saying: ‘Mr Powell is going to have an extremely difficult job succeeding you.’ Her devotion to her private secretaries was to cause me endless problems during the next five years, not unlike the problems that my predecessors had encountered during Sir Philip de Zulueta’s time as private secretary to Harold Macmillan. This prime ministerial reliance on their private secretaries ultimately made it impossible for de Zulueta, as it did for Charles Powell, to return to the diplomatic service. On leaving No. 10, Antony and I bumped into the Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, who looked slightly put out that I had lunched with the Prime Minister before my first formal call on him. I therefore arranged to bring forward my call, the office having deliberately delayed it until I took over on 30 June. 24 JUNE 1986
I paid my first call on Geoffrey Howe, with only Tony Galsworthy (his private secretary) present. I talked about my impressions of the service, after an extensive tour of posts in Africa and the Far East, pointing out the financial strains on members of the service, particularly those abroad who, unlike their home civil service married colleagues, were unable, in those days, to benefit from double salaries. Geoffrey talked about his own impressions of the office, and his worries about staffing on Falkland Islands and other dependent territories questions. He also worried about one of his junior ministers, who he thought was much too ready to accept official advice without questioning it. No talk about the Prime Minister, though he was already having a very difficult time with her, particularly on South Africa, where their views were poles apart. 25 JUNE 1986
At a lunch with Robert Armstrong and Tom Brimelow (reminiscent of a lunch twelve years earlier, at which they had ‘vetted’ me for my job as Harold Wilson’s private secretary), Robert Armstrong described relations between the Prime Minister and the Foreign Office as worse than he could ever remember with any Prime Minister. When discussing her views about another Foreign Office official [whom Antony thought – as it turned out, wrongly – was a likely successor to myself], Robert replied: ‘All right, until 11 a.m.,’ explaining that the Prime Minister had emerged from Cabinet to see this official talking to the Foreign Secretary. In present circumstances, this was apparently enough to damn anyone. Margaret Thatcher’s contemptuous opinions of the diplomatic service contrasted strongly with her complimentary views on almost every individual diplomat she met [sadly, not many, in view of the way in which the doors of No. 10 were fiercely guarded by her private secretary]. After almost every foreign trip she made, she appeared to be impressed by the head of mission (particularly if he was tall and good-looking), often complaining to me that so-and-so was ‘far too good for X; why is he not in Paris or Washington?’ Curiously, one of her reservations was beards. When a bearded colleague of mine started a Foreign Office job which was likely to involve close contact with No. 10, I warned him [would this be acceptable nowadays?] that it might be better, given Mrs Thatcher’s known prejudices, if he shaved it off. He replied that this put him in a dilemma between a Prime Minister who disliked beards, and a wife that liked them. But he shaved it off! Moustaches were also a problem. Of one moustached colleague, Margaret Thatcher is reported to have claimed: ‘The trouble is, he looks like a hairdresser.’ Sherard Cowper-Coles, the private secretary I was to inherit from Antony Acland, told me that he had heard from Tony Galsworthy that my initial talk with Geoffrey Howe had gone very well. [I did not record, at the time, an earlier talk I’d had with Geoffrey Howe soon after my return from Saudi Arabia.] Geoffrey said that there would, of course, be many things we would need to discuss, but he had one request to make. ‘We must’, he said, ‘try to slow the merry-go-round, and leave heads of mission longer in post.’ I replied that this was music to my ears. But I reminded him of two things: first, that he had pulled me out of Saudi Arabia after eighteen months to become his PUS; and second, that his request was pretty ripe, coming as it did from a member of a Cabinet that had had twelve secretaries of state for Trade and Industry in thirteen years. 27 JUNE 1986
Today I went through the Green Safe, skimming the files, including several dating back to my days as private secretary to Sir Paul Gore-Booth in the mid-1960s. One of these concerned an Iraqi Prince, Prince Sami, who claimed a payment from the secret fund, on the grounds that he had been deprived of his inheritance by the Iraq Petroleum Company. He had once turned up at the Foreign Office with his entire family and threatened my predecessor, Nicholas Gordon Lennox, that he would camp on the premises until he was paid. My own earlier contact with Prince Sami had been in Washington where, as private secretary to the ambassador, I was instructed by Douglas Hurd [then private secretary to the PUS] to deliver a message to Prince Sami in a particularly expensive Washington hotel, telling him that he would receive no more payments. The lead story in the Evening Standard today was of a serious split between Geoffrey Howe and Margaret Thatcher, including an alleged (and accurate) quote of her saying in Cabinet, on the topic of his mission to Africa: ‘If you feel like that, perhaps you had better stay at home.’ I was told last night that Geoffrey, in fact, minds these attacks much more than he shows. I discussed with Antony and Sherard last night whether, like Antony, I was going to be faced with a Foreign Secretary resigning in my first week as PUS (Lord Carrington having resigned over the Falklands on Michael Palliser’s last day before Antony succeeded him as PUS). Sherard thought that Geoffrey loved the job (and Chevening) much too much. Antony commented that you wouldn’t know it, and he thought that the office would be astonished to be told it. I called on Janet Young, the FCO minister in the House of Lords, who became a good friend, but who sadly did not enjoy Geoffrey’s confidence (as he made abundantly clear during a large office meeting on the Turks and Caicos Islands). The trouble is that Geoffrey tends to reflect his own uncertainty over taking decisions by looking for faults in others. 2 JULY 1986
I called on Lynda Chalker, who confessed to having had a crisis of confidence. She obviously regards herself as a non-intellectual, surrounded by brilliant officials who all quote Latin at her. I reminded her that by far the most popular and most successful Foreign Secretary since the war had been Ernie Bevin, who had commented on a marginal reference to the phrase ‘mutatis mutandis’: ‘Please do not write in Greek; I have never learned it.’ 3 JULY 1986
This morning was the first of many presentations of credentials, for which I wore full diplomatic uniform. [There is a picture of me, accompanying the credentials ceremony for the United States ambassador, Ray Seitz, in 1991 on the back of his book Over Here, with the comment, in the text itself, that I was ‘immaculate in [my] dark-blue diplomatic uniform and cradling a great plumed hat across [my] front like a pet ostrich’. Simon McDonald later sent me a Christmas card showing himself in diplomatic uniform, with a picture on the back of me in an identical pose.] On this occasion, the talk with the Queen was mainly about whether the German von Weizsäcker had used the English words ‘common sense’ in his speech at the German state banquet on the previous evening out of politeness, or because there was no German word for it. Von Weizsäcker’s speech-writer had told me that the Germans normally used the English words, and he did not think there was a German equivalent. This recalls Harold Nicolson’s claim, which I was frequently to quote in my talks on diplomacy, that common sense was perhaps the most important qualification for a diplomat. At the later banquet, [my wife] Virginia and I talked to Lord Hailsham, who denied that he kept...
