On Her Majesty's Diplomatic Service: From The Arab World To The Berlin Wall

Preface

Istarted writing these memoirs in 2011. The reason they have taken me so long is due mainly to a certain hesitation at adding to the already substantial corpus of diplomatic memoirs. To overcome this reticence, I had to convince myself that there was a story worth telling. I was helped, in overcoming this hurdle, not only by the encouragement of friends and family, but also by a number of people attending lectures I have given, whose interest had been sparked by some aspect of my diplomatic career, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, or background to the international and diplomatic events and circumstances which in so many instances drove the relationships between states. They were also interested in learning what a diplomat actually does.

In the events I recount, apart from my early days in the Gulf, I worked in partnership with my wife, Henrietta. It was not always an easy journey. Our getting married was problematic, due to the Foreign Office’s objections, for Cold War reasons, to my marrying a Czech-born girl (as described in Chapter 3). After we were eventually able to marry, without my having to resign from the Service, our first child was born with a congenital condition, which led to her untimely death at the age of 2. We came through this together. My wife’s loyalty and devotion at my side, were what, above all, enabled me to achieve whatever I have achieved. It was only fitting that my final posting should have been as ambassador in the land of her birth, after it emerged from its communist experience.

As regards my methodology, I kept no diaries, so I have relied largely on my memory, reinforced by a few key documents to which I have had access and the numerous memory-jogging photographs I have taken throughout. I have worked on the principle that only those incidents of which I have a clear recollection have been worth recording. I have tried to minimise recounting events where I felt my memory was not entirely accurate and checked whatever I can. Those errors that have survived are entirely my responsibility.

I am deeply indebted to my editors, Iradj Bagherzade and Elizabeth Stone, for guiding me through the process, and giving me confidence that the end product would be worthwhile. I am also grateful for the patience of my family.

Fulham, London

August 2021

Introduction

These sketches of my career in Britain’s Diplomatic Service cover a wide canvas, from the sands of southern Arabia (in what is now the United Arab Emirates), before the advent of oil riches, to the banks of the Nile in Khartoum, the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan under Soviet control, to Paris in the sixties, and then to Berlin before and after the Fall of the Wall. They culminate with my appointment as ambassador in Prague, a post in which I had been told I could never serve for security reasons when I married my Czech-born wife, twenty-five years earlier. The wheel had come full circle.

They also range over some of the main themes of British foreign policy during the last four decades of the twentieth century: the problems of the Middle East – from the Six Day Arab-Israel War in 1967 to the optimistic moment of the Oslo Agreement in 1993; the crucial Anglo-French Summit in Paris in 1971 which paved the way for Britain to join the Common Market; to the ending of the Cold War following the fall of the Berlin Wall; and reconnecting thereafter with the postcommunist countries in Central Europe.

Along the way, I was involved in three features of that period which have now almost, or completely, disappeared into the mists of time. The first of these is National Service for which I was one of the last young men to be called up. The complaint of many of my contemporaries was that it was a waste of two years, and that they were thoroughly bored. This was not my experience. After going through the ranks, and then obtaining a National Service commission, I commanded a rifle platoon on active service during communist-inspired insurgency in Malaya at the time of the Emergency (as recounted in Chapter 2). This was not boring.

Secondly, there was my first Foreign Office posting, as an Assistant Political Agent, in what were then called the Trucial States, in the southern Persian Gulf (described in Chapter 3). This was a loose group of sheikhdoms in an exclusive treaty arrangement with Britain, which provided both their protection and security. At that time a perceived threat to the old-world sheikhly system was the Arab nationalism inspired by Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose adversarial rhetoric and warm relations with the Soviet Union were regarded as hostile to British interests. For anyone with an appreciation of the simplicities of the desert Arabs’ way of life, the Trucial States seemed like a delightful anachronism, which would not long survive those winds of Arab nationalism after Britain’s departure, which took place in 1971. As it turned out, the system, and the foundations Britain laid on which modern states could be built, proved durable. On them, powered by oil wealth, arose the gleaming skyscrapers of the United Arab Emirates of today.

Thirdly, we jump forward to the British Military Government in the Berlin of the 1980s, still under the protection of the Allies who had occupied the city since the end of the Second World War. I was destined to be the last Minister (a diplomatic rank) at its head, before it lost its function, and disappeared, with the reunification of Germany and Berlin in 1990. Again, this looked like an anachronism (which, in my view, its title was), but the reality was that the continued presence of the Western Allies guaranteed the freedom and security of the West Berliners against the potential threat from the surrounding Soviet forces (Chapter 9 tells the tale).

My diplomatic career, like that of most other senior diplomats, encompassed a wide range of experiences, from the adventurous – close encounters with armed and hooded men on a mountain road in Lebanon, manning the command centre in London during a critical hostage crisis which had to involve the SAS, or a tense Berlin face-off with the Soviets over my initiative to assist escapees from the East – to more standard diplomatic fare such as negotiating with the Iranian government for the lifting of the fatwa on the author Salman Rushdie, working to adapt the UK position on the Arab/Israel dispute following the dramatic breakthrough in the Oslo Process, or pointing out to London certain realities in the immediate aftermath of the opening of the Berlin Wall, such as the hunger of the East Germans for the purchasing power of the D-Mark, which would drive the process of reunification – something that many in the West, including our own Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, did not immediately welcome. And occasionally a royal visit, or twice representing Britain at the Cannes Film Festival, added a welcome touch of glamour.

My career in the Diplomatic Service lasted thirty-seven years, ending in 1997. The cast list in these memoirs is therefore quite extensive and includes, apart from foreign personalities from all the countries in which I served, four Prime Ministers with whom I had dealings: Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair.

But the outstanding figure is that of the Queen. I played an increasingly senior role in the organisation of four of her overseas state visits, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, each of which had its own particular significance: France, in 1972, celebrated a reset in Anglo-French relations following the lifting of the French veto on Britain joining the EEC; Kuwait, in 1979, was the first visit by a British monarch to the Gulf States, which had been under British protection prior to achieving independence in 1961 (in the case of Kuwait) and 1971 for the others; Berlin, in 1992, celebrated the peaceful reunification of Germany, and Berlin, with her walk through the Brandenburg Gate (and a controversial visit to Dresden); and Prague, in 1997, a few months before my retirement, marked the return of the Czechs to the Western democratic family, from which they had been torn by the infamous Munich Agreement of 1938 in which Britain and France acquiesced in Nazi Germany’s occupation of the Sudetenland (which was followed by the invasion and occupation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia shortly afterwards) – all in an eventually futile attempt to preserve ‘peace in our time’ in Europe.

There were many lighter moments along the way. What I have tried to show above all else is what a diplomat actually does – although, of course, every diplomatic career is different – in an attempt to demystify the particular profession to which I have devoted thirty-seven years of my life. I was fortunate that, in my case, it brought me into contact with some of the significant events of the last forty years of the twentieth century, as well as having the privilege of being a member of that family which is Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service.

Chapter 1

In the Beginning: Family, Wartime Childhood and Schooldays

Why would anyone go into a life of diplomacy, as I did? In my case, no previous member of my family, on either side, had taken this exotic route. The idea came from my father, who had been a brigadier in the Indian Army, when he called me in for a career discussion. I was studying French and German in the sixth form at school at the time. The conversation, as I remember it, went something like this:

Pa: Mike, you’re good at languages.

Me: Yes, Pa.

Pa: That means you go into the Diplomatic.

Me: What’s that, Pa?

Pa: I don’t quite know, but it’s what you do if you’re good at languages!

I won’t pretend that this rather ridiculous conversation settled the matter for good and all. My obedience was not unquestioning, and my father and I were actually having some quite vigorous arguments at this stage (on questions like whether Picasso was a great artist, as I asserted, or a fraud). But the idea, once it entered my head, never quite left it. An ambition began to take shape.

This fateful career talk took place in the drawing room of our family house in Bedford where my two brothers and I attended Bedford School. The family had moved to Bedford when my father left India, on retirement from the British Indian Army, at Independence in 1947. There wasn’t much money, and Bedford at the time offered favourable terms for the sons of overseas military and civilian families.

As for my father, he came from a family with a long tradition of service in India. He had been born in India and, after Sandhurst, had taken a commission in the 5th Royal Gurkha Rifles, the elite of the Gurkha regiments, and the only one to have ‘Royal’ in its title. His father, my grandfather Pop, had been in the Indian Police and had risen to become the Deputy Inspector General of Police in the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh), the largest state in India. More of him later.

Pop’s father was a captain in the navy of the East India Company, and the family man of mystery. He is said to have turned down a title in England following a violent argument with his family. The story, true or not, is that a lawyer wearing a tall black hat who was rowed out to his ship at Madras in order to bring him the glad news was sent packing. Great-grandfather also changed his name, from Thomas St Just Bridgeman to John St Edmund Burton – that much is factual. I was given his middle name.

During the war my father fought in the 14th Army, under Lieutenant-General William (Bill) Slim (later Field Marshal Sir William, then Viscount Slim), throughout the Burma campaign against the invading Japanese Imperial Army. He was the youngest brigade commander. As the Japanese army advanced through Burma, he was one of the few battalion commanders to withdraw his troops back across the Sittang River with their arms and equipment intact. For this action he was awarded his first of three DSOs.

He went on to receive two Bars to the DSO in the course of the campaign, the first in the brutal battle for the Tiddim Road in the Battle of Imphal, the key engagement of the war, which blocked the Japanese advance into India. And the second Bar was a rare Immediate Award in the field for his role in defeating the Japanese at the Battle of Meiktila in 1945, the last major action before their surrender at Rangoon. This made him one of the most highly decorated soldiers of the war.

Of course, this all meant that the family saw little of my father at this time. He himself felt the lack of contact keenly and it was one of the reasons he decided not to remain in the Army after the Independence of India in 1947. He resigned and returned to make a new life at home.

During my father’s absence my mother had held the fort in the family. I had been born in 1937, two years before the outbreak of conflict, and my brother Clive two years earlier. My younger brother Derek came along four years after me.

Throughout the war we lived in Camberley, which was then a sleepy Surrey town with a distinctly military flavour, due to the presence of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, and the Army Staff College. There were also numerous retired officers, many of them from the Indian Army. Both my sets of grandparents lived there. Pop and my grandmother, Munna, lived in a large house up the hill from the centre of town on the Portsmouth road. My mother’s parents, Ganna and Grandpa, lived further down the hill on Bath Road, an unmade cul-de-sac which gave access to the private road leading to the Staff College and the RMA.

My mother, Barbara, a warm and positive woman, must have had in earlier years a touch of John Betjeman’s poetic fancy Miss Joan Hunter Dunn about her (‘Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun’). Indeed, we used to play tennis at the Officers Club at Aldershot. My mother wasn’t a typical army wife and had not much enjoyed life with the regiment before the war in Abbottabad, the regimental depot on the North West Frontier, where my brother Clive was born. It has won notoriety in more recent times as the place where Osama bin Laden met his end.

My mother’s whole life was her family. She also employed her excellent organisational and secretarial skills in support of causes dear to her heart, ranging from the election campaign of our Bedford MP, Christopher Soames (later my ambassador in Paris), to raising money for the Save the Children Fund. In her final years she turned to typing books in Braille for the blind. These commendable activities sometimes crowded out, I felt, the more mundane demands of the household chores. The fridge was occasionally best left unopened!

My parents were deeply devoted to each other. Their greatest pleasure, in later years, was driving at a leisurely pace down to the South of France in their vintage (and not wholly reliable) Bentley, to spend a few days in Monte Carlo. My mother plotted the route with great care, avoiding motorways and choosing scenic roads and villages which held out the prospect of welcoming inns with good (but not overly fancy) food. She became very good at this. In Monte Carlo they stayed, if the budget that year allowed, at the Metropole Hotel. When my father had checked in, as a regular guest, there was just time for Reception to alert Monsieur Sheikh at the bar so that he could greet my father on arrival with the words ‘Bonjour, mon Général’. I accompanied my parents on one of these trips.

My mother’s family had, if anything, a more military slant than my father’s, although more on the naval side. Further back up the tree the emphasis was heavily on clergymen. My mother was good at her family’s genealogy, and one egregious star she laid claim to (although she could not trace the exact link), was Master Betty, the child actor at the turn of the nineteenth century, who created a sensation in London with his performance of Hamlet. The House of Commons adjourned early in order to enable Members to attend. A painting of him has pride of place in the Garrick Club.

My mother’s family name was Kemmis Betty. This came about when, in 1867, Catherine Kemmis, the widow of the Revd William Betty (the Rector of a parish in County Meath, Ireland), together with her three children, gave notice that they henceforth intended to use the surname Kemmis together with Betty, and before it.

My grandpa, Colonel Hubert Kemmis Betty DSO OBE, had gone to Canada before the Great War to make his fortune. He did not succeed. He then returned to Europe as a senior officer in the Canadian Expeditionary Force to fight in the trenches of Flanders, and was gassed at the Battle of Ypres, which badly affected his lungs. After the war he took his family to live for a time in Switzerland for the sake of his lungs, where he developed his talent for watercolour painting and carving wooden furniture. I remember him as a sweet and kindly man. He spent much of the Second World War, apart from his service in the Home Guard, making wooden toys in his garden shed. He was assisted by a German POW called Hans, who must have been on parole. Grandpa and Hans made a happy pair.

As for grandmother Ganna (Ethel Kemmis Betty, née Watts), she was a real star. She was brought up in South Africa. On coming to England, she became a nurse at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital before she married. A striking woman of unfailing good humour and common sense, she was a source of good advice and a rock of support to me until her death at the age of 93. She also taught me to drive.

Enough of family affairs, apart from mentioning two uncles, my mother’s brothers. Both were in the army. The elder brother, Mervyn, was an Indian Mountain Gunner. His great enthusiasm in life was skiing. He took Clive and me skiing at Grindelwald in Switzerland when I was ten. It was our first foreign trip. 1947 was the depth of post-war austerity and one could not take more than £50 out of the country. We sat up all night in the train. Uncle Mervyn kept our spirits up by telling us of the amazing omelettes we would have when we reached the station restaurant at Basel.

He was right. The omelettes were frothy concoctions made with seemingly limitless eggs. For travellers coming from gloomy, rationed Britain the experience was magical. And then there was the unrationed chocolate which Clive and I put away in vast quantities. We also learned to ski, while gazing in awe at the Eiger and Jungfrau mountains.

As for my mother’s much younger brother, Uncle Peter, he also became a Gurkha officer, in the 2nd King Edward VII’s Own Goorkha Rifles. Peter, who was also my godfather, died only in 2016, having just passed his hundredth birthday. His (lead) obituary in The Times , illustrated with the picture of him as a dashing young Gurkha officer, captured him accurately under the heading ‘Impeccably mannered Gurkha officer awarded the Military Cross for holding a vital bridge in Malaya’. This occurred during the Japanese advance down the Malayan Peninsula towards the capture of Singapore in 1941. After the fall of the island, Peter’s unit, who had taken up a defensive position on the road north to the causeway, were ordered, to their total chagrin, to cease fighting and march into captivity at Changi.

As a POW at Changi, Peter and a fellow Gurkha officer cultivated a vegetable patch to supplement the meagre rations of the Changi prisoners, those in hospital and the Gurkha soldier captives held elsewhere on the island. In consequence, he was never included in a draft to work on the infamous Burma railway. Afterwards he acknowledged that the Japanese had done unspeakable things to Commonwealth prisoners, but had effectively left him alone.

In 1945 my grandmother took me up on the train up from Camberley, gazing at the barrage balloons over London as we approached Waterloo station, to visit the Madame Tussauds waxworks. When we were halfway round the exhibition an official climbed onto a chair and announced in jubilant tones that Japan had surrendered. At the thought of Peter’s release from captivity Ganna became faint, and I went to find a chair for her, and a cup of tea. It was an emotional moment.

As a child growing up in Camberley during the war, I remember little of it, apart from sweet rationing. There was the occasional excitement when the air-raid sirens sounded, announcing a Luftwaffe raid targeted at the RMA down the road. Clive and I would spend the night in a cupboard under the stairs, which we much enjoyed. We also had a scare when Lord Haw-Haw, the Irish traitor William Joyce, who broadcast nightly propaganda for the Nazis from Berlin, announced – after his customary drawled introduction of ‘Germany calling, Germany calling’ – that the Luftwaffe intended next night to bomb Camberley High Street, aiming particularly at our grocers Tietgens. To our enormous relief, the raid did not take place.

When I was seven my schooling started in earnest. My mother drove me the few miles to Windlesham to become a boarder at Woodcote House. It was a no-nonsense family-run traditional boys’ school with about seventy-five pupils. The headmaster was Mr Paterson. Successive generations of the Paterson family have run the school to this day. I have nothing but happy memories of it. The teaching must have been good because when I moved on, rather prematurely because of my father’s return from India, to my public school in Bedford, I found that I was somewhat ahead of my classmates – which did not make me popular. I had also acquired a taste, and aptitude, for acting.

One memory that I do have of Woodcote House is of the whole school being assembled to hear on the radio the judges in Nuremberg passing sentence on the Nazi war criminals. I suspect, but cannot be sure, that we raised a hearty cheer each time the death sentence by hanging was imposed. We also felt cheated by the news that Hermann Goering had escaped the hangman’s noose by taking poison. I little knew that forty years later I would encounter Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who, by feigning mental instability, had been lucky to escape a death sentence that day.

It is a striking coincidence that two of my contemporaries at Woodcote House would be colleagues in Germany, also forty years later. Christopher Mallaby was the ambassador in Bonn when I was minister in Berlin and Patrick Brooking, by then a Major-General, was the British Commandant in Berlin. It is a sort of testimony to the old-boy network that this small prep school in Surrey provided the three top British officials in Germany at that time.

At school the boy who made the biggest impression on me was the one destined for the most louche and entertaining future. Willie Donaldson, a strongly built, ginger-haired boy would go on to enjoy a huge inheritance. He used it to finance the satirists of the 1960s in Beyond the Fringe. He also took to crack cocaine and lived in a brothel and then, in the persona of Henry Root, ‘wet-fish merchant’, wrote hilarious spoof letters to assorted members of the establishment, including Margaret Thatcher, enclosing the generous sum of £1 for their respective causes! The published replies became a source of deep embarrassment to the victims.

I was pretty miserable to leave Woodcote House, at the age of 10, when the family made the move to Bedford. It was the start of a new chapter.

* * *

Bedford in the late 1940s was an attractive county town. The main feature was the River Ouse which flowed through municipal gardens only about 100 yards from our family house. Rowing was a major sporting activity for the boys’ schools in the town, culminating in a regatta in July which was the climax of the summer season. When I arrived at Bedford School it was basking in the glory of having won the Princess Elizabeth Cup at Henley for the past three years – which I think entitled it to keep the cup.

The school had received a Licence of Letters Patent from Edward VI in 1552, the 400th anniversary of which was commemorated while I was at the school in 1952 with a memorable visit by Princess Margaret (whose beauty quite dazzled me). It was then endowed in 1566 by Sir William Harpur, a citizen of Bedford who became Lord Mayor of London. The endowment provided also for the foundation of a girls’ school, Bedford High School. Two other schools founded later also benefited from the Harpur Trust, so that education was a major feature of the town.

The Headmaster when I arrived was a stern martinet named Humphrey Grose Hodge, a short man with a fine head of silver hair and a commanding presence. My teachers, as I progressed up the school, were mostly ‘old school’ in their approach, but effective in instilling the basics into their pupils.

The German teacher, PK Bourne, the brother of a distinguished general, had a rather forbidding manner, always striding as if sideways with a stiff neck. On Cadet (CCF) days he’d squeeze himself into the uniform of an Army major, delighting in playing the role of wartime officer once more. He drummed the essentials of German grammar into our heads with the aid of his ‘dotty ditties’ to help one remember the exceptions to the rules. But if time remained in the period after this tedious business he would bring out a small battered suitcase which contained his photographs and postcards from travelling in Germany before the war. These were a revelation to me. Pictures, for example, of the baroque glories of Dresden before the Allied air-raid of 1945 awoke an interest in me to visit these places one day.

It was evident to my parents that my particular bent was for modern languages. When I became a teenager, they furthered my progress by arranging a summer holiday exchange with a French boy. A cousin of my mother’s, Fred, owned a yacht in which he regularly took part in a race to Dinard, the fashionable seaside town in Brittany across the River Rance from St Malo. At the Dinard Yacht Club he met a family of prosperous textile manufacturers from Lille, called Bigo, who were in the habit of renting a villa in Dinard for the summer. The Bigos were looking for an English family to take their son Christian, to improve his English. Cousin Fred passed the proposal on to us.

So it was, that in the summer of 1952 our family crossed the Channel and drove through Normandy to Dinard. For the first time I sampled French white wine, unchilled but delicious. The Bigos welcomed us warmly, but when the exchange had taken place and I watched the family, plus Christian, disappear down the road to head home, I felt a great feeling of desolation.

However, I quickly settled in. The younger Bigo boy, Daniel, and I had fun sailing a dinghy in the bay of La Rance and swimming in the tide-filled pool below the villa on Place du General de Gaulle. I spent two more summers at the Bigos, although Christian opted out of his side of the exchange. My confidence in French grew. In time girls became part of the picture, with impossibly glamorous names like Solange.

I used to read Paris Match , mainly for the pictures. The French Prime Minister, the socialist Pierre Mendès-France, who was generally considered the best hope to bring greater stability into the political