Our delegation had arrived in an RAF VC10 the evening before. They had their own minor dramas. Sadat had awarded both the Prince and the Princess of Wales the Order of the Nile, First Class, when they had visited Egypt on their honeymoon in August 1981. Sadat’s funeral would be just the occasion to wear this decoration, out of respect for the late President. But Prince Charles found that his valet had packed the Princess’s insignia, not his. Worse still, the valet had forgotten to bring a ceremonial sword to go with HRH’s naval tropical-dress uniform. Our Naval Attaché spent the evening frantically buffing up his own long-neglected sword. The next day, no one important seemed to notice when the heir to the British throne appeared at the funeral wearing the insignia of the equivalent of a Dame Commander of the Order of the Nile.
The funeral was chaos, but satisfactory chaos, as most big Arab funerals need to be: somehow the pushing and shoving, and sweating and waiting, are all part of the liturgy of respect for the departed. Lesser men do not have a press of hundreds or thousands at their obsequies.
Our Ambassador decided that the Death of Sadat was worthy of a formal despatch to London, to be printed and circulated, on special blue paper, around all Foreign Office posts and departments, and across Whitehall too. Flatteringly, he asked me to have a go at the first draft, which I did, with relish. I cannot now remember how much of my effort survived. But I can take credit for the pretentious final line, from Lucretius: ‘Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum’ (Such is the evil that can be brought about by religion), applied by the Roman poet to the sacrifice of Iphigenia, which was supposed to appease the gods and allow the Greek fleet to sail for Troy. The previous Foreign Secretary, David Owen, had banned the use of foreign languages in diplomatic reporting, as pompous and old fashioned (he was right, of course). But we broke the rule for Sadat. Paradoxically, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, later confessed to the Ambassador that an expensive education hadn’t equipped him to decrypt the vital phrase, and that he had had to ask for help from private secretaries who had been more diligent students of dead languages.
At about the same time, the Ambassador sent a telegram offering a pen portrait of Hosni Mubarak, and an assessment of the prospects for his Presidency. We reported that Mubarak had been a loyal and competent deputy to his larger-than-life leader. We recorded the nicknames Egyptians gave him – ‘Tefal’, because something (we didn’t know what) didn’t stick, and ‘La Vache Qui Rit’, based on a popular TV ad for the cheese, featuring a yes-man to whom Egyptians compared Sadat’s loyal Vice President. The Ambassador concluded that Mubarak’s limited political and other abilities meant that he was unlikely to last more than six months as president. He would be a transitional figure, before a new strong man emerged.
I had started my job in Cairo, just over a year earlier, in late July 1980. It was soon Ramadan, and many people, including the Ambassador, were away. The quiet heat of summer gave me time to settle in. My first priority was to find a flat. I quickly did, in the once smart district of Zamalek, which occupied much of the island of Gezira (meaning ‘island’) in the Nile. The flat was on the first floor of a grimy block built in Cairo’s modern prime, in the 1930s. It was not slick, but it did the job that I, as a bachelor, wanted it to do: to provide good spaces for entertaining my guests, and for having visitors from London to stay. The furniture was reproduction Empire, what we called Louis Farouk. There were ceiling fans in the main rooms, plus loud and noisy wall-mounted air conditioners there and in every bedroom – this soon became the subject of comment among the Embassy wives, as at that time third secretaries were supposed to have only one air conditioner, in the main bedroom, and one other in the guest room, and no others. Everything was covered in dust and, at times, sand. A balcony gave a sideways-on view of the Nile.
I was delighted, and even more so when, aged twenty-five, I found myself looked after by an elderly cook cum houseboy (known in Egypt as a suffragi) and an almost equally ancient maid. The former, known as Abdul since his days with the Eighth Army, was a Nubian, and carried a faded photograph of Mr Churchill in the breast pocket of his galabia. Like Mr Abu Awad, Abdul could speak a few unprintable words of British military English. At 7 a.m. every day except Friday he produced porridge, and a full cooked breakfast. Lunch, served when I returned from the Embassy at 2.30 p.m., was always three courses: a heavy soup, meat or fish and fried or boiled vegetables, and then pudding, usually with custard. I began rapidly to put on weight, something corrected only when I married the next year. Abdul could also do a good dinner party, even, as one Embassy wag suggested, ordering up the guests. But his fondness for the dregs of the wine bottles made his performance, and that of his Sudanese friends drafted in for such occasions, increasingly erratic as the evening progressed. Once, when the Embassy got rid of its emergency stock of British Army ‘compo’ rations, Abdul asked me to bring him a ten-man pack: all he wanted was the British military Spam, remembered fondly from forty years earlier. Poor Abdul, and all the other suffragis in the building, lived in windowless rooms off the garage underneath the apartment block. They travelled back to Sudan to see their families only once a year, by train, and then by boat across Lake Nasser.
Um Nasr was different. She was Egyptian, from the Delta, and had no English whatsoever. She kept the flat reasonably clean, and washed my clothes. But they were ironed by an ancient makwagi, or ironing man, in his open shop across the street: from the front balcony I could see him heating up his flat iron on a venerable coal stove, and then spitting on the clothes to wet them before they were subjected to a pounding from his iron. Shirts from Jermyn Street did not long survive such brutal assault.
In 1980, despite the pretensions of the British Embassy in Jeddah (then headed by our most distinguished Arabist, Sir James Craig), the British Embassy in Cairo was still our largest in the Arab world. It was, it seemed to me, a proper embassy, headed by a proper ambassador. Sir Michael Weir had read classics at Balliol before joining the Foreign Service. After MECAS, he had spent most of his career working in and on the Middle East. He had started as an assistant political agent in what were then the Trucial States, manumitting slaves by allowing them to touch the flagpole of the British Government compound. He had gone on to key Middle East policy jobs in London, Washington and New York. But Michael was certainly not an ambassador out of central casting. He had gone to Oxford after service in RAF intelligence and from a Scottish grammar school, and spoke with a hint of a Scots accent. Highly intelligent, with excellent judgement (despite the miscall over Mubarak’s prospects), he was neither pompous nor censorious. He had a wry sense of humour. And he had four amusing children, of roughly my age, who came out for holidays and were at the centre of young expatriate Cairo: one of them, Arabella, became a successful actress and author, rising from playing an anonymous rustic wench in The French Lieutenant’s Woman to starring in The Fast Show. Michael’s second wife, Hilary, with whom he had two younger sons, had also been a member of the Diplomatic Service. Again, appearances were deceptive. Hilary Weir had been educated at Benenden and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and had all the confidence and poise of the upper-middle-class milieu from which she came. Hilary’s family and mine lived close to each other in Kent, and she had had the same riding teacher as my brothers. Whereas Michael was relatively short and quiet, Hilary was tall and could be loud. But all that was superficial: what mattered to us in the Cairo Embassy in the early 1980s was that Michael and Hilary Weir operated as a true team. In their love of their work, of Egypt and – it has to be said – of each other, they showed what a powerful tool for promoting national interests and influence a committed diplomatic couple can be. Together, they entertained, and were entertained, not just in the usual society circles in which diplomats move in most capitals, but far beyond, among Egyptian architects and archaeologists, painters and poets, Nasserite intellectuals sceptical of what Sadat was about, and orchard-owning horse breeders who wanted nothing to do with politics. They shared a sceptical left-of-centre view of the world, born of wide experience and high intelligence. In my first post, I felt lucky to be working with and for such a talented couple. More than twenty years later, in September 2006, I was honoured to be asked by Hilary to give an address at Michael’s memorial service. Two years later, I proudly entertained Hilary in Kabul, which she was visiting in order to see what the Brooke Trust (which she chaired) could do to help the working animals of Afghanistan. Within weeks, she was dead, of a cruel and unexpected cancer.