by Christopher Meyer. Weidenfeld and Nicholson £20

Sir Christopher Meyer was a fun diplomat to visit. To see him in his underwear or his wife without make-up early in the morning in Washington was to see the grandeur of high diplomacy reduced  to mere mortals with their ambitions, fears and vanities. As a minister I used his residence as a drop-in place for Washington friends like Christopher Hitchens or Senator John Edwards and would send out Chris to get a bottle of champagne to cheer us up. Peter Mandelson famously turned down the chance to be Ambassador in Washington because he said he did not “want to be a hotelkeeper” but  hotel keeping is a noble art and Meyer was one of the best.
 His book reads like foie gras hotel gossip. Bitchy comments about house guests who Chris considers, quite frankly, to be a bit below the salt. John Prescott shares with Ernie Bevin, Britain’s greatest 20th century foreign secretary, the habit of mangling awkward foreign words. Hands up those who could spell or pronounce Milosevic or knew where Rwanda was 15 years ago?  Neither David Cameron nor David Davis knew the name of the Iranian president when asked by Sky’s Adam Boulton. Chris has his heroes. Bernard Ingham was one of them. He swoons in the presence of Margaret Thatcher. And Chris found Geoffrey Howe a most inspiring boss. No American Republican gets a bad word. No European leader of left or right gets a good one.
 Therefore it may be safe to assume that Chris is a Tory. Tony Blair went out of his way to raise the problem of Chris’s lovely wife and her non-access to her sons in Germany with the German Chancellor. I even talked to Schröder about Chris’s step-sons as the German courts which refused her access behaved with great cruelty. I doubt if any British citizen has had such high level personal pressure exercised on her behalf. Our reward? Chris’s wife returned to London to chair a Tory anti-European campaign against the doomed EU constitutional treaty which had at least one merit in that it would have outlawed the foul behaviour of German judges who denied her access to her sons. Hating Europe however had a higher priority.
 The extracts printed by the anti-Blair Axis of Weevils – the Daily Mail who hate Blair because he likes Europe and puts up taxes to pay for social justice and the Guardian who hate Blair because he likes America and ignores the liberal-left-lawyer-luvvie-literary  Londoners who think they speak for Britain – has caused great excitement. Chris is kind about me as a minister though his endorsement seems to have led to new thrills on the back-benches rather than promotion.
He has done immense damage to his chums at the Foreign Office. Blair and Labour ministers have been pretty good since 1997 in not seeking to impose political appointments. They trusted ambassadors and now their trust has been repaid by one of the most senior diplomats with his snobbish sneers at the democratically elected government of the day. “Crummy” was how one top UK ambassador decribed Chris’s book to me over a drink at his embassy recently. And in FCO-speak there is no greater condemnation than being “crummy.”
 Chris records that Gordon Brown preferred to stay at hotels in Washington rather than with Chris and Catherine at their grand Lutyens residence on Massachusetts Avenue. As in many other matters, perhaps the Chancellor of the Exchequer had the prudent foresight to work out that staying as an ambassador’s guest is a mistake for a senior minister if they are to end up pilloried in a book or joked about in Pall Mall clubs.
 But are there any serious points about the conduct of foreign policy and the work of diplomacy and Foreign Office in this book?  Meyer protests that the Foreign Secretary and ambassadors were carved out of key decisions by the Downing Street machine. But this is not new. Prime Ministers have always controlled foreign policy. It is the chancellor of Germany and the president of France who take all key foreign policy decisions not their foreign ministers. In his new book on Francois Mitterrand, Jacques Attali describes a dinner with Margaret Thatcher in which she went out of her way to humiliate, her Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe, in front of the French president.  Whatever his views on his two Foreign Secretaries, Blair behaved with scrupulous politeness in their presence.
But No 10 makes foreign policy and has done so for centuries. That is why the Foreign Office sends its best and its brightest to work not in embassies around the world or even in its own offices but through its courtyard straight into Downing Street. In every key European or international decision that Blair has taken as prime minister he has been surrounded by Foreign Office men (alas, eight years of Labour has done little to make the FCO a place for other than white Brit chaps) who work the longest hours of any civil servant and whose patriotism and desire to see their country prosper is remarkable. Blair’s chief of staff, the unshowy but effective Jonathan Powell, who is one of the unsung heroes of the Northern Ireland peace process, is also a Foreign Office hand.
 So rather than lamenting the absence of the FCO from key Downing Street decisions, Meyer should acknowledge that his fellow diplomatists are more at the centre of British state power than any other corps of Whitehall functionaries. That they did not bother to spend hours negotiating a placement at the White House or Camp David that would have given pride of place to an ambassador is his problem not their failure.
 Where the Foreign Office may be faulted is the excessive time a British Foreign Secretary spends duplicating the Prime Minister’s role in seeking to be close to the United States. Robin Cook was proud of the special phone he had installed which connected directly with his opposite number, Madeleine Albright, in the State Department in Washington. It rang just once. A pizza delivery biker wanted to check the address for a Sloppy Guiseppe.
 British Foreign Secretaries should leave Washington to the Prime Minister. Instead, a Foreign Secretary should look East to Europe, to China, India, Japan and Korea and build a powerful network of influence to promote British interests which are primarily commercial rather than geo-strategic. No British Foreign Secretary has set foot in Latin America for years if not decades. Yet Latin American votes are crucial in  key UN decisions.
 Good personal relations between a Foreign Secretary and a US Secretary of State are important but it is difficult to think of any moment in the last eight years when they made a difference. Blair had to intervene to get Clinton to move on Kosovo and Bush over-ruled Colin Powell who wanted a more calibrated approach on Iraq. ‘Twas ever thus and ‘twill ever be so. A British Foreign Secretary who comes to Washington as a leader in Europe or an acknowledged networker in the new power centres of the world will be heard beyond the confines of the foreign policy salons in Georgetown.
 To work effectively, British foreign policy-making needs good information. Chris was Ambassador in Germany at the end of the 16-year-old Kohl era. I remember being horrified at how the newly-elected Blair was advised to suck up to German conservatives around the ageing Kohl because the advice from the embassy was that the SPD would select the left-wing and unelectable Oskar Lafontaine as their candidate and so the CDU would stay in power. I campaigned with Gerhard Schröder in regional elections in the spring of 1998 and it was obvious he would be the SPD candidate and would win. I was even in his car as he negotiated with a disappointed Lafontaine the distribution of cabinet seats. I asked the man who would emerge as German Chancellor a few months later if he had ever met someone from the British Embassy. He shook his head.
 Chris claims that Downing Street were unprepared for and resented the Bush victory in 2000. Yet I sent a memo to Blair and his entourage in August 1999 entitled: “Why George W. Bush Will be the Next President of the US.”  It was not brilliant insight just a reasonably adult reading of how the Governor of Texas was campaigning and the obvious inability of the Democrats – on the part of both Clinton and Gore – to prepare for the succession. Moving successfully from one leader to the next is where progressive politics in government usually stumble.
 British diplomats are unique in the world in that they not meant to hold political views. What that means is they tend to be small-C conservatives. And it hard to sustain progressive values of idealism, vision and optimism of the will while watching the cynicisms, manoeuvres and national self-interest at play as the world’s nations try to get along with each other
 Yet the low cunning of understanding politics is vital in advising what will happen next and making necessary plans. Investing in Kohl or Gore was not what No 10 should have been doing but Chris does not seem to have much interest in politics outside the Daily Mail-Spectator range of approved ideology.
 During the run-up to the Iraq conflict Chris had a seat in the upper circle with the occasional visit to the dressing room but clearly his views on the conflict add little that is interesting or new. Blair performed a small miracle in persuading Bush to make his September 2002 speech to the United Nations when he agreed to a second UN resolution against the wishes of his Vice-President. Bush also announced that America would re-join Unesco which for most of my political life was more loathed by American neo-conservatives than the Soviet Union and Al Quaeda. Under Blair’s urging, Bush became the first American president to come out for the establishment of a Palestinian state and the tectonics shifts currently taking place in Israel are the consequence of this shift.
 Chris is strong on hindsight but if he believed Blair failed to use leverage to stop or stall the war why did he not say so at the time? Diplomats in other countries resign on points of principle. Not Chris. On WMD the big lie is that there was a big lie. I can testify from meetings with every European government in 2002 – including those hostile to Bush or neutral – that no-one disputed the belief that Saddam had WMD, was hoping to re-construct his arsenal, and was a menace to regional peace by his open support for terrorism. The debate was over timing, containment or the amount of force needed to be used to make Saddam comply with UN resolutions or persuade his fellow Arab leaders to exert enough pressure on him to stand down.
 Meyer argues that a further six months – a wait until the autumn of 2003 would have done the trick. This is disingenuous. The Americans and Europhobe British press blame the French for Chirac’s famous invocation – twice in the same interview – of a willingness to veto any second UN resolution in March 2003 authorising the use of force. Yet France, despite the crude anti-Americanism of the cultural-media elite in Paris, had always been careful not to get on the wrong side of the United States. As de Gaulle put is, France’s relations with America should be solidaire pendant la tempete, indépendant par temps  calme. America since 9/11 felt itself in the tempest of the war launched by Islamofascism against the West. The French aircraft carrier, Charles de Gaulle, was sent off towards the Gulf in the autumn of 2002 and France flew more sorties against the Taliban in Afghanistan than the RAF.
 What changed the dynamic of European politics was the return of German neutralist pacifism as the election-winning force for the unhappy SPD-Green coalition in the election of September 2002. The right-wing candidate, Edward Stoiber, representing the deep southern German Catholic cultural dislike of Amerika said that if he became Chancellor he would not permit US overflights of Germany in the event of conflict with Iraq. This appeal proved popular and required Gerhard Schröder to trump it with even more virulent opposition to tackling Saddam Hussein.
 He won the election and Europe suddenly had its biggest member state locked into electoral promises that threatened the Atlantic Alliance. Moreover, Germany had recently acquired a capacity for real foreign policy thanks to Joschka Fischer’s courageous leadership in changing the German constitution to allow German soldiers to operate in a full military sense outside Germany or NATO. The normalisation of German foreign policy was an epochal shift in Europe’s balance of power. No longer would Germany yield to its Nato partners, or its key EU ally, France, the right to call foreign policy decisions that implied use of force.
 Instead Schröder looked for support and validation of his shift to neutralism. He offered France’s President Chirac a secret deal on sustaining the Common Agricultural Policy, ruinously protectionist, but a vital source of income to a France with serious budget problems in October 2002 and the two leaders bounced the rest of Europe into accepting proposals which destroyed any chance of reforming the EU’s lop-sided budget. The pomp and ceremony of the giant gathering of the Bundestag and the National Assembly at Versailles to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the 1963 Paris Treaty sealing reconciliation between France and Germany led Chirac deeper into a German embrace and made it impossible for Paris to do anything but parrot the anti-American lines of the German right and left.
 As late as February 2003 the most senior officials in charge of foreign policy in Paris assured me that when the moment came France would not de-solidarise herself from America. But already Germany was dictating French policy and giving fresh hope to Saddam that a divided West would allow him to survive. The United States had no  effective European diplomacy in this period – no latter-day Harry Hopkins trusted by Europe and able to persuade Berlin and Paris at least not to divide the democratic world. As Chris demonstrates the only game in Washington was between the Pentagon and the State Department and between those policy-makers who knew Iraq history and those for whom history is bunk. The first Bush presidency had no Europe policy worthy of its name. Britain at the time of the Iraq crisis was on its sixth Europe minister in as many years and the Foreign Office, despite urgings from Downing Street, rejected a new European politics of networking and winning political friends and influence by thinking of Europe in political terms rather than a Spielfeld from classical diplomacy.
 Alas, none of these themes are discussed in Chris’s book. Foreign policy has its players and makers. Chris was a foreign policy player while his predecessor and successor as Ambassadors in Washington were foreign policy makers. Chris’s breach of most norms of privacy and the rules of hospitality have aroused great controversy. It is hard to see how he can stay as head of the Press Complaints Commission, a post which is in receipt of more private confidences and personal details than lawyers and doctors. The Blair-hating press establishment will rally round him but the PCC is greatly damaged by keeping him on.
The Foreign Office has also suffered great damage by this book. It has been squeezed of funds with the vast bulk of British public spending on overseas policy going to the Department of International Development which has given more than £1 billion to consultants like the Adam Smith Institute and given £1 billion to India since 2000 despite India running its own lavish overseas aid programme. Chris’s book is unlikely to help promote the institution which paid him well, paid for his children to go to expensive private schools, secured him a knight-hood, pays a generous pension and gave him the status that has brought directorships and the sinecure of the PCC chair.
 This is a shame as British diplomats are hard-working, deeply patriotic and many of them show initiative and a commitment to core British values of democracy, rule of law and helping to make the world a better place. Many serve in unglamorous and hostile parts of the world. I had to attend the funeral of a young woman diplomat blown up by the Islamofascists when they attacked the British consulate in Istanbul. I mumbled words of condolence to her parents at the service near Manchester. Her father replied: “You know what she would have wanted, Minister. That we pitch a tent in the rubble of where she worked, plant a Union Jack beside it and show them Britain is still in business. That’s what our Lisa would want.” That is the Foreign Office I prefer to celebrate not the gossip and self-importance of this tawdry book.

Denis MacShane was PPS and a Minister at the Foreign Office between 1997 and 2005.