Ever the Diplomat: Confessions of a Foreign Office Mandarin. Sherard Cowper-Coles

no one then regarded military confrontation in the seas to the south and east of China as a likely possibility. A second paper, on Turkey, rather cornily entitled ‘One Country, Two Continents’, excited more interest, but with the usual agonising about whether Turkey could be ever truly European. Our heads told us we had to welcome it into the European fold, Islamic warts, obstinate generals and all, but our hearts were not enthusiastic. Prolonged courtship, with full consummation a distant and ever receding prospect, seemed then, as now, the preferred policy prescription.

      But, then, in early 1984, I had a breakthrough. Furious at Reagan’s unilateral decision to invade Grenada in October 1983, the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, was fretting about what would happen if Reagan decided to do the same to Nicaragua. If she believed in one thing, Mrs Thatcher believed in the rule of law, abroad as well as at home. For her an unprovoked attack on Grenada, a sovereign state – which happened to be part of what the Americans persisted in calling the ‘British Commonwealth’, with the Queen as its head of state – was a gross breach of international law. As with other difficult issues during Mrs Thatcher’s time as PM, the answer, her staff concluded, was to dig deeper: to hold a policy seminar at Chequers. The format was almost always the same. Outside experts, usually including Mrs Thatcher’s favourite historian, the Chichele Professor of the History of War at Oxford, Michael Howard, would attend for a morning session, followed by a lunch for everyone. Then, in the afternoon, ministers and officials would go into private conclave, ‘to draw conclusions for policy’. Given the Prime Minister’s intellectual rigour, and her love of debate, it was a formula that worked well, and was one which later resulted in her courageous decision to reverse course and engage with the Soviet Union in general, and Mikhail Gorbachev in particular.

      But in 1984 the matter in hand was armed intervention in other states. Someone had to produce a paper for the Chequers seminar, and I was given the task. I could not have asked for a more enjoyable, or more interesting, challenge. I ranged quickly across the literature on the moral, legal and humanitarian arguments for and against invading another state outside the hallowed principle of self-defence enshrined in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. I produced a paper – a mini-dissertation really – entitled ‘Is Intervention Ever Justified?’ Although the Permanent Secretary’s first reaction to the draft was that it was too intellectual, it was read and approved by one of those invited to the seminar, the Professor of International Law at the London School of Economics, Rosalyn Higgins. My conclusion was that, unless in self-defence, armed intervention without the authority of the Security Council could hardly ever be justified and was even more rarely wise. It was a conclusion which was to stand the test of time, and one which I had much in mind as, twenty years later, the Government for which I worked intervened in two Muslim states. In an early example of open government, the Foreign Office decided to publish, anonymously, the Chequers Seminar paper in its Foreign Policy Documents series.* I was surprised, and I confess flattered, later to find it cited in footnotes to academic articles on intervention.

      The seminar came and went, without any real consequences for policy, except that the Prime Minister was reinforced in her conviction that it would be wrong (in every way) for the Americans to invade Nicaragua, and that she should tell them so – in private of course. Unlike at least one of her successors, Mrs Thatcher believed that the Special Relationship should be a load-bearing structure, capable of carrying two-way traffic. A couple of years earlier, a mole in our Washington Embassy told me, Mrs Thatcher had spent just a bit too much time and energy telling the President what she thought. Sitting beside her, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, had passed her a note which read ‘Shut up, now, Margaret,’ or words to that effect. The vignette says something about both the Prime Minister’s and her Foreign Secretary’s courage in speaking truth to their respective powers.

      That spring, however, the chief speechwriter in the Planning Staff decided to leave the public service, to try his hand – rather successfully, it turned out – in the private sector. I was thrilled when Pauline asked me to succeed him.

      Writing for the Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, did not, however, offer much scope for great rhetorical flourishes. We relied more on the steamroller effect of remorseless legal logic. I assembled a shelf of books of jokes and quotations, with which to liven up our speeches. But the Foreign Secretary almost always substituted, after last-minute discussion in the car with his detectives, Welsh legal jokes. I realised what hard work it was going to be when I wrote the Foreign Secretary’s speech for the annual dinner of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs, and proudly booked expensive tickets for the dinner, in order to hear my words of wisdom delivered by my boss. Sir Geoffrey’s mellifluous Welsh-Wykehamical monotone had the effect which many of my fellow guests wanted after a large and lovely dinner, and they dozed contentedly. The balloon of my pride was properly punctured. Those of my words he had used were largely inaudible.