Collateral Damage

Meanwhile, in the heat of that 1975 summer – at the time, it was the hottest August on record – I also started to look for a more permanent job. My co-workers at the factory were worried about me. They could see that I wasn’t up to manual labour. And they were bemused when I told them of my degree in Zoology. As one of them put it to me: ‘How many zoos are there in the country? And there’s already that Johnny Morris on the TV.’ Encouraged by this show of confidence, I fixed an appointment with the university careers advisory office. My interviewer asked me what I wanted to do. I confessed that I had no idea, but mentioned the Foreign Office. Vanessa’s father had suggested this to her previous boyfriend who was studying Classics at Oxford. The ex had dismissed the idea, but she found a readier audience in me. Diplomacy, after all, sounded just the ticket for someone who had read Ian Fleming’s entire literary output by the time I was fifteen.

The careers adviser, however, was less persuadable. She looked quizzically at me, observed that leaping from zoology to diplomacy was a bit of a stretch, and added that it was in any case almost impossible to get through the entrance exams. She suggested instead that I think about a career in business, and try applying to some of the big British multinationals with graduate schemes. I took away a sheaf of application forms; but also a growing determination to try for the Foreign Office, primarily to spite another authority figure.

There were two entry levels to the Foreign Office: the ‘fast stream’ and the ‘executive’. Knowing no better, I applied for both – as well as throwing in a handful of applications for companies, chosen on a more or less random basis. The FO process kicked off well before anything else stirred in the employment jungle. Within a few weeks, I found myself in a large hall somewhere in Oxford, working through a day of exams – a strange mix of IQ-style tests and an essay about how you would respond to some sort of existential national crisis, a plague, invasion by zombies, that sort of thing. Mysteriously, I passed – and got invited to two days of further tests and exercises. These were intriguing, including an interview with a psychologist, more essays, more IQ tests, a general knowledge exam, and a session where groups were created and everyone took turns in chairing a meeting.

Having somehow survived this – especially the interview with the psychologist – I was invited to the third stage, the final selection board. And here I came seriously unstuck. Having drifted into the interview with no thought or preparation, I was stumped on basic questions like, why did I want to join the Foreign Office? Saying that I enjoyed travel didn’t hack it. The rejection letter popped through the letterbox a few days later.

I had in parallel been pursuing the process for Foreign Office entry at executive level – or ‘the slow stream’ as I subsequently discovered it was dismissively called within the system. It was much simpler: a half day of exams and then a final interview. And some of the companies to which I had applied had offered me interviews. About a week before the first of these, with ICI, then the largest industrial conglomerate in the UK, the Foreign Office accepted me. Vanessa and I pondered for at least a couple of hours that evening how I should respond – and we agreed I should give it a go. There was nothing to lose: if I didn’t like it, in those golden days there were many more career options available for even the most average of university graduates. And after all, the Foreign Office had been the first to offer me a job.

I moved to London and joined the Foreign Office in September 1976. I found a basement flat on Mount Ephraim Road, a few hundred yards from Streatham Hill Station. It was basically a bedroom about the size of a large bed, with a small bathroom and an even smaller kitchen. But its overriding feature was damp – mould on the walls and the carpets, cracks and holes in the plasterwork, peeling paper on the ceiling. I thought it was great and still feel nostalgic about it. As for life in government, Labour were in power. Jim Callaghan was Prime Minister and Anthony Crosland was Foreign Secretary (though he died in office with a cerebral haemorrhage). I rapidly discovered what being in the ‘slow stream’ meant. My entry group were given a single day’s induction, which concentrated on where the lavatories were and how a file of papers should be put together. We heard that the fast streamers had a welcome to the service lasting a week, during which they were told many times how wonderful they were to have triumphed against such intense competition. Their week reportedly concluded with a glass of sherry with the permanent under secretary. All of us, whether fast or slow, were then dispatched to departments to learn our trade. But there was a hierarchy here too. The fast streamers were sent to the elite political departments, with names like Near East and North Africa Department and Latin America Department: NENAD and LAD for short. I was sent to Protocol Department – Protocol Department for short – to labour on the diplomatic privileges and immunities of the foreign diplomatic community in London, mostly cheap cars, cheap booze and unpaid parking tickets.

I found this more incentivising than discouraging. Even in the unglamorous surroundings of Protocol Department, I was enjoying the proximity to power, and the buzz from working next door to Downing Street – not to mention the events to which I got invited because, although protocol didn’t involve high policy, it did involve lots of parties. I remember being given a lift to one of them by one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. As we approached the gates of some appropriately grand building, she said to me: ‘Young man, could you please get my tiara out of the glove compartment?’

Nevertheless, fifteen months later, as soon as I was allowed, I retook the fast stream exams. This time I passed. Possibly, after a year in the institution, I could better answer the question ‘Why do you want a career in the diplomatic service?’ Vanessa and I celebrated with the luxury of the day: a bottle of supermarket cider. And my course was set.

And thereafter I was, in essence, extraordinarily lucky. There were many ‘sliding doors’ moments when my career could have taken a different course. I remember three in particular. The first came towards the end of my first posting in Tokyo. There didn’t seem to be any interesting jobs coming up back in London – until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher unexpectedly decided she wanted to build the Channel Tunnel. I became the UK secretary of the Anglo-French Channel Fixed Link Treaty Working Group (‘Channel Fixed Link’ because it was thought at the time that it might be a bridge rather than a tunnel). And that led to my organising the ceremony to mark the signing of the Channel Tunnel treaty. I chose, and sold to No. 10, Canterbury Cathedral Chapter House for the ceremony; and the dean of the cathedral’s house for Thatcher’s lunch with François Mitterrand. When, some ten years later, my son arrived for his first day at King’s Canterbury, the wonderful school in the grounds of the cathedral to which both my children went, I was able to show him the plaque commemorating the event. I’m not sure he was impressed! But No. 10 were happy; and it launched me, in terms of making the senior levels of the Foreign Office aware of my existence.

The second moment came in the mid-1990s, when I was deputy head of European Union Department. It was time for me to bid for an overseas posting. I was vaguely attracted to the job of deputy ambassador in Prague; a beautiful city, an interesting country, and fascinating politics, a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. So I bid. A few weeks later, my boss, the head of the European Directorate, called me in and said he was about to go to the postings board. Did I really want to go to Prague? For some reason – perhaps the cold grey drizzle that day, which struck me as all too central European – I said, ‘Not really. I’ve changed my mind.’ He told me a few hours later that I would have got it, had he not intervened to kill it.

Had I not, on the spur of the moment, said no, I would have missed out on one of the most exciting jobs of my career. Six months later, by which time I would have been in Prague, I was asked at short notice to become head of Eastern Adriatic Department, which was then dealing with the war in Bosnia. It was the biggest foreign policy issue of the moment, and it catapulted me to a different level in terms of profile in the FO, No. 10 and Whitehall. It also sent me, within a few weeks, on a military plane into Sarajevo, a city terrorised by Bosnian Serb snipers who manned the surrounding hillsides, shooting at any residents within range. Perhaps out of boredom, they also shot at our plane as it came in to land, prompting the cancellation of our flight out that evening. I thus spent the night in besieged, war-torn Sarajevo, which at the time was suffering from frequent electricity and water cuts. It also led to one of the more memorable meals of my career, in one of the few functioning restaurants – ‘Sarajevo schnitzel’, an unidentified piece of meat deep-fried in breadcrumbs. Judging by its corrugated appearance, whatever it was had been run over by a tank.

And the third sliding doors moment came in 2004, when I was director general for Europe. Stephen Wall was the Prime Minister’s Europe adviser – the most important European policy job anywhere in the system. This is Stephen’s story rather than mine, but because of policy differences with Tony Blair, especially in relation to the euro, he unexpectedly and suddenly resigned. A few months previously, I had run for, but failed to get, the post of political director in the Foreign Office. Suddenly, I was the only credible candidate on the scene for Europe adviser to the Prime Minister – a job that was actually a grade higher than political director, elevating me to the ranks of permanent secretaries. I spent three years in No. 10 advising Tony Blair on Europe policy – which led directly to my appointment as ambassador to the European Union in 2007. This in turn led to my becoming national security adviser to David Cameron in 2012; which in turn led to Washington. I owe a lot to Stephen Wall … or as Bob Dylan put it: ‘Blame it on that simple twist of fate’.

3

Discovering ‘Real America’

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‘I like Donald Trump; he says what I’m thinking’

– an Uber driver in Jackson, Mississippi, November 2015

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‘DONALD TRUMP is making quite an impact, and leading in the opinion polls. But he won’t win the nomination.’

It was late 2015. The words were spoken by one of America’s leading political pundits, to general agreement around the table. Thanks to the hospitality of the then British ambassador, Peter Westmacott, and his wife Susie, Vanessa and I were staying at the British residence in Washington DC for a couple of days before embarking on an American road trip; a personal journey around ‘real America’ before I took up my posting in late January 2016. And I was attending one of the regular ‘pundits’ breakfasts’ which generations of British ambassadors in Washington have hosted.

A US road trip, exploring the freedom and romance of the endless highway, had been a longstanding ambition of mine, ever since being hooked by the classic American ‘road movies’ of the late 1960s and early 70s: Easy Rider, Vanishing Point, Two Lane Blacktop, and my all-time favourite film, Five Easy Pieces. And with three months’ ‘preparation’ for my posting to Washington, it seemed like the perfect time. Like most Britons of my generation, I had visited New York and Boston, and San Francisco and Los Angeles on the West Coast. But the rest of the country was uncharted, imagined through watching too many American films. It being November, we had to go south to avoid the cold, snow and ice. So we planned a drive from Nashville, where our son Simon was teaching at Vanderbilt University, down to New Orleans through the heart of the Deep South. We were then going to fly to Las Vegas for a two-day introduction to that symbol of American excess; after that we would drive across to Utah to see something of the American south-west, and in particular to experience the wonders of Zion and Bryce National Parks. As for where we finished, our oldest friends, Nigel and Lou Graham, whom we had known since our university days, had volunteered to join us for the trip: they offered their apartment in Long Boat Key, a short drive and long bridge across from Sarasota in Florida, as the perfect oasis for the final week.

It wasn’t just about reliving the Seventies. I would be arriving in Washington at the start of election year. Who is running America matters to everyone. Every government has a reason to want to influence the White House on one issue or another. And the central figures in a future White House tend to be drawn from the leading figures in the campaign team. So tracking the election, and building relationships with the top advisers, would be an overriding priority. And I wanted to get a head start by understanding how the candidates were seen in other parts of America.

But before flying down to Nashville, there were two more events in Washington. We attended a dinner in the residence at which the guest of honour was Frank Luntz. This was the first of many encounters with Frank, who became a good friend. He is a big, colourful personality; to see Frank interrogate a focus group is to see an artist at work. He describes himself as a political and communications consultant, pollster and pundit. He is a lifelong, but mainstream, Republican: a familiar face on US TV politics shows. Most of all, he is a great Anglophile from his days at Trinity College, Oxford, where he advised our current Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, on his bid for the presidency of the Oxford Union. Successive British ambassadors have benefited from his knowledge and judgement and his generous nature. Frank duly presented to the assembly his latest polling figures, and concluded that, while the Republican race was still open, Hillary Clinton was likely to win the Democratic nomination and eventually the White House. To be fair to Frank, every pollster was saying the same. And every pundit was transfixed by the Democrats’ Blue Wall: the theory that the Democrats were ‘guaranteed’ 240 electoral college votes from states which were ‘certain’ to vote Democrat, and only needed another 30 or so to reach the 272 required to win the presidency.

We concluded with a day exploring Washington. On the way to look at the White House, we drove past the Watergate building. As someone who, while a university student, had followed every twist of the Watergate saga, it felt like touching history. But the highlight was a trip to the top of the Washington Monument – all 555 feet of it. We were accompanied and guided by an engagingly enthusiastic park ranger. I confess that we took the lift up, saving the spiral staircase for the downward journey. But so knowledgeable was our guide that we probably climbed half of it anyway, so frequently on the descent did we double back to see things we had missed. His potted history of the monument included the information that its construction had been halted for more than a decade in the mid-1800s, because its backers had run out of money; a reminder that, in America, the land of private enterprise, it is for the most part wealthy philanthropists that build the monuments, not the state. The ranger pointed to the visible manifestation of this temporary bankruptcy: halfway up, the stone changes colour slightly because when construction restarted, the stone from the original quarry had been exhausted. Once you know this, it leaps out at you to a degree which the monument’s original backers must have found vexing. But the view from the top remains timeless. Dusk was falling as we gazed out across Washington; as the lights came on across the city, we looked down the Mall, glimpsed the White House, and thrilled at the adventure to come.

Nashville was utterly different. We stayed with our son, Simon, who, having done his doctorate at Yale, had been made assistant professor of geology at Vanderbilt University, right in the heart of the city. Knowing Nashville only by reputation, I imagined a bar on every corner, each with a resident country and western singer. This wasn’t actually far from the truth, except it wasn’t only country and western. Nigel and Lou joined up with us at this point; and on that first night, Simon took us to the epitome of a dive: an old-fashioned Nashville music venue called The Basement, a sweaty, shabby and stained cellar with a tiny ramshackle bar in one corner, selling beer and some of the worst wines on the planet. There was no stage, with the performers standing a few feet from the audience. A succession of bands performed, some with recording contracts, some just hopeful wannabes; but all were exceptional musicians. The show opened with brief singer-songwriter acoustic sets, but swiftly moved on to loud, hard rock music and blues. We loved it.

It being after midnight, we took an Uber back to Simon’s apartment. The driver was female – married, young children, earning some extra money. I asked her how she saw US politics. She said she ‘kinda liked Donald Trump’; she remembered him from The Apprentice and thought he must be a smart businessman. I expressed surprise: wasn’t she hoping to see the first woman President? She said emphatically: ‘I’m not with Hillary Clinton. I just don’t trust her.’ I asked why. The response carried an edge of genuine dislike. ‘She just says what she thinks you want to hear. She doesn’t really care about people like me.’

Back in the apartment, I reflected on what I’d heard, and how perceptions confounded reality. Hillary Clinton had been raised in a classically middle-class family, her father the owner of a small drapery business and lifelong Republican, her mother a Democrat. And her presidential campaign was about ‘inclusive capitalism’: keeping jobs in America, sharing profits with the workers, equal pay for women, more affordable healthcare. Donald Trump was the billionaire son of a New York property developer, who had been loaned $400 million by his father to start his business career, had his own jet, and ran expensive hotels, casinos and golf clubs. Yet Trump was seen as the authentic one, who cared about America’s blue-collar classes, and Clinton as the fake. There was clearly something very wrong about how Clinton was marketing herself or very right about how Trump was selling himself.

Back on the music trail, we also went to a much larger, but similarly raw, Nashville venue called Cannery Ballroom, there to see a nationally renowned Southern rock band, with a multiple-album recording history, called The Drive-By Truckers. I had grown up with the rock music of the American South – The Allman Brothers Band, Little Feat, Lynyrd Skynyrd – so I knew what to expect; and they were terrific. Their best tracks remain on my playlist to this day. Add to these musical experiences some great restaurants and a wonderfully cool cocktail bar called The Patterson House, and we could have stayed in Nashville for weeks.

But we didn’t. Instead, we set off for New Orleans. There were limits to our embrace of the 1960s counterculture; we hired a large SUV rather than a couple of Harley-Davidsons. We loaded up with emergency rations of that wonderful American invention, trail mix, from Trader Joe’s and hit the road.

It is a little over 500 miles from Nashville to New Orleans; a day’s drive for an American, three for those of us lacking the frontier gene. On a map, it is due south, then about an inch to the left, so there were several route options. We decided to drive down the length of Mississippi, mostly using the Natchez Trace Parkway, a famous road built in the 1930s; it follows the route of the Natchez Trace, a historic forest trail created and used by Native Americans from prehistoric times, then colonised by early European explorers and settlers. During the War of 1812, the US army used the Trace to supply General Jackson’s forces in New Orleans. This led directly, I suppose, to Jackson’s decisive and fabled victory against the invading British forces in the Battle of New Orleans on 8 January 1815, his ascension to national hero status, and ultimately to his election as President in 1829. The ‘simple twist of fate’ here is that the battle should never have happened: the two governments had already signed a peace deal, the Treaty of Ghent, on 24 December 1814. But news travelled slowly in those days, with the British forces in the area not learning of the treaty until a month later. I could not but wonder whether Jackson would have made it to the White House if WhatsApp had been invented at the time.

Notwithstanding the Trace’s crucial role in the defeat of our countrymen two hundred years earlier – perhaps we had deserved it for burning down the White House and the Capitol in the same war – we joined it a few miles outside Nashville. It was extraordinarily beautiful; a two-lane blacktop through a fairytale, sun-dappled forest that stretched to the horizon. And with scarcely a building visible on the entire route, the view to each side was the one the early explorers would have seen – when the Trace was known as the Devil’s Backbone, because if the diseases didn’t get you, the highwaymen and bandits would. We rapidly discovered, however, one drawback to this journey through a woodland wilderness. In the days when the Trace was the main route southwards, there were trading posts along it where travellers could get provisions, eat and sleep. These were all long gone. Around lunchtime, we googled the nearest diner: I think it was called Maisie’s Family Cafe. But when we arrived at it, a couple of miles off the Parkway, it was a scene from a post-apocalypse movie; a wrecked shell of a building, broken windows and a kicked-down door. Even worse, it wasn’t even serving food: so, trail mix for lunch.

After another hundred miles of glorious greenery, we turned off the Trace and took the short detour to Jackson, the capital of, and largest city in, the state of Mississippi. And yes, it is named after the victor of New Orleans and scourge of the British: more humble pie. We stayed at the Old Capitol Inn, a pleasingly quirky independent establishment just across the road from the Mississippi State Capitol. And on their recommendation, we set off by Uber for ‘the best Mexican restaurant in Jackson’.

Still intrigued by what I had heard in Nashville, I asked this Uber driver whether he was following the early days of the election race. ‘I’m interested,’ he said. I asked him who he liked. He replied, in an echo of his female Nashville counterpart: ‘I like Donald Trump, he says what I’m thinking.’ I asked about the rest of the field. He shrugged dismissively. ‘They’ve all been bought up by big business; they’re working for them, not us. But Trump is different. He’s self-financing.’ ‘Could Trump actually win?’ I asked. ‘Maybe,’ he replied, ‘a lot of people agree with what he’s saying.’

The Mexican restaurant was indeed good. Among its specialities was guacamole freshly made at the table. One of the waiters pitched up with some avocados and proceeded to perform his party trick. Hearing our accents, he said, ‘Are you Australian?’ We told him we were visiting from England. ‘Why on earth have you come to Jackson?’ he said, looking genuinely amazed. We explained that we were driving from Nashville to New Orleans. ‘Well, I’d get out of this place as soon as possible if I were you,’ was his parting comment.

The guacamole was excellent.

Actually, we didn’t get out of Jackson quickly. We stayed a day, seeing the sights of the city. The highlight was a guided tour of the Capitol building. The Mississippi legislature wasn’t sitting and there were few visitors, so we had the building, and the tour guide, almost to ourselves. Built in 1903, it was ancient by American standards and a formally designated ‘Historic Place’. Intriguingly, in a typically American back story, it had been financed by the proceeds of a successful law suit for unpaid taxes won by the state of Mississippi against the Illinois Central Railroad; and it was built on the site of the old state penitentiary, which presumably helped to focus the minds of successive generations of Mississippi politicians.