Book review: The Naked Diplomat says Patrick Wright’s Foreign Office memoirs resonate across the decades

❱ Behind Diplomatic Lines: Relations with Ministers by Patrick R. H. Wright
❱ Biteback Publishing
❱ Hardback £25, e-book £20

On the wall outside the office of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office permanent under secretary is a list of the words to be used only with the greatest courage in papers to the head of the Diplomatic Service. “Utilize”, “transformation” and “tool” look to be the most recent additions. Others were inherited from previous incumbents of the FCO’s engine room, including “current”, “unique (unless it’s really unique)” and “timely”.

With this in mind, any review of the memoirs of a PUS has to tread particularly carefully. In an age of hot takes and live tweeting, Patrick Wright, who held the job from 1986 to 1991 has waited an admirably long time to publish his diaries. But he brings a fresh viewpoint to the heavily chronicled period when Thatcher, apartheid and the Berlin Wall fell. Wright even draws on the long discontinued ‘PUS’s monthly telegram’, a Yes, Prime Minister era circular to diplomats kept secret from ministers.

The unofficial motto of the civil servant record taker is that ‘my job will be done, when historians have read, what I think he thinks he ought to have said’. But thankfully Wright is more playful and entertaining than this about the characters he sees close up. In his account, Thatcher is unpredictable and autocratic, with foreign secretary Douglas Hurd at one point characterizing her Cabinet agenda as parliamentary affairs, home affairs and xenophobia. Her relationship with the FCO is consistently tempestuous, but Wright’s account of her toxic interactions with Geoffrey Howe makes any more recent (alleged) prime minister/foreign secretary differences of perspective look very tame. She likes individual ambassadors, especially those who are tall, unbearded and handsome (see excerpt, over). But she finds the FCO itself obsessed by compromise and lacking in imaginative ideas. She constantly overturns Wright’s carefully laid plans for ambassadorial appointments.

Wright (left) gets to know the foreign secretaries better. He characterizes Howe as hardworking but “dithering and indecisive… nit picking and work creating”, in constant need of reassurance. Howe copes badly with the constant humiliations from Thatcher – the proposal he makes at one EU Council is accepted by every leader present except, scowling alongside him, his own PM.

John Major’s brief tenure at the FCO is more of a success, though he also needs a certain amount of quiet reassurance. He is tougher with No 10, modest, informal, easy, direct, and his initial nervousness on the policy detail quickly eases. By contrast with his two predecessors, Hurd is self-confident and briskly efficient, though more aloof and less jokey. After he stands up to Thatcher over the closure of the Beirut embassy in 1989, Wright calls him “a joy to work with”. It helps both of them that Hurd, like Wright, had once himself been a private secretary to a PUS.

The cast of junior ministers fare less well in the memoirs, proving Lord Chalfont right that they tend to be a “source of constant irritation, but only rarely producing a pearl”. Chris Patten impresses the FCO, but Alan Clark and Douglas Hogg do not, and the David Mellors and William Waldegraves fret constantly over the relative sizes of their portfolios, offices and newspaper column inches.

Wright captures plenty of moments that will resonate across the decades. The FCO fights off plans for a No 10 foreign affairs unit and Europe minister, and mandarins threaten resignation over sofa government and the influence of officials in Downing Street. Ministerial churn, turf battles, paperwork and leak inquiries too often consume more time and energy than actual foreign policy.

There are also entertaining cameos from more recent diplomatic heavyweights. Simon Fraser, the last PUS, writes a speech that even Thatcher admires. Geoffrey Adams, most recently ambassador to The Hague, quietly puts out fires. Tony Blair’s future chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, shows early political judgment by winning the office sweepstake on the Heseltine/Thatcher leadership election. Simon McDonald, the current PUS, marries Wright’s daughter. Nicola Brewer and Mariott Leslie, more recently part of an overdue wave of senior female ambassadors, start to break through glass ceilings.

It is though diversity, or lack of it, that is the most striking difference. Wright was PUS just over a decade after the FCO had lifted its ban on married women. Elspeth Howe – wife of Geoffrey and now a crossbencher in the House of Lords – and then-junior minister Lynda Chalker (now also a life peer) fight valiantly to get more women in senior roles, but with limited success.

Wives, including ministerial wives, were still expected to be a major part of their husband’s work, including travelling with them. Meanwhile, Wright starts the process of dropping the appalling institutionalised discrimination against homosexual diplomats. He and Major are sad to “leave a career in tatters” when a 38-year-old serving officer discovers he is gay. It is sad to think how many great diplomats either never fulfilled their potential or suffered in silence under these strictures.

The media environment has also changed dramatically. Like all PUSes, Wright had to deal with a series of exasperating stories about FCO pointlessness, No 10’s disdain, and the misperception that the FCO is more fizz and Ferrero Rocher than Sauvignon and sausage rolls. He feels time speeding up (though still has to intervene to prevent an eight-day visit to Mongolia by one junior minister). But Wright never had to consider how to secure public trust for diplomacy in a social media age, and his advice to ambassadors to be “high profile overseas, low profile at home” is a much harder trick to pull off today. He never had to find a cat capable of titillating Twitter.

Near the end of his tenure, Wright has to break it to former ambassador Nico Henderson that his diaries will need to wait fifteen years for publication. Happily they didn’t in the end. And thankfully Wright’s have also emerged to entertain and challenge a new generation of public servants. Wright rightly decries the idea that foreign policy is about woolly and meaningless ‘good relations’. For him the key to diplomacy is common sense. It doesn’t need to be more complicated than that.

Don’t put it in a Foreign Office submission, but these unique memoirs are a timely tool to utilize as public service goes through its current transformation.