Collateral Damage

We reopened the embassy the following Tuesday, though perhaps a third of the staff were still stranded down impassable roads. I eventually delivered the traditional arrival address to the whole embassy on Thursday, which was followed by an equally traditional drinks party. Life gradually returned to normal, apart from the lingering grey, grubby piles of snow that littered the landscape, melting reluctantly in the frigid air. I started on a round of introductory calls, beginning with the State Department. And within a few days, I found myself presenting my credentials to President Obama at the White House.

‘Letters of credence’, as credentials are more properly known, date back to the fourteenth century. In those days, when an ambassador pitched up at the court of a neighbouring king, there were risks attached. If the relationship had somehow soured during the journey, which would perhaps have lasted months, the ambassador might find himself taken hostage, imprisoned, or even dismembered. The modern generation is fortunate that such practices have largely died out. Ambassadors are now processed by conveyor belt. Most heads of state, at least in the world’s major economies, get through the business of receiving credentials as rapidly as decently possible, by seeing new ambassadors in job lots: no lengthy discussions over refreshments about the state of bilateral relations. So in Washington, a group of the newly arrived is assembled once every few months. Each of them gets sixty seconds, a handshake and a photograph with the President.

I had never actually experienced a credentials ceremony before. There was no such procedure for ambassadors to the European Union, as the EU was not a country, despite the superstate dreams of the Brussels idealists. Unsure what exactly I was meant to be doing, I was completely unprepared for the photograph and so was captured in a robotic pose, looking somewhat uncomfortable. The result was Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame, with much accompanying ribaldry on social media.

I avoided the Twitterstorm by immersing myself in a succession of meetings to learn about the embassy. Washington, as the capital of the most powerful country in the world and our strongest ally, was rightly regarded as having the most important bilateral British diplomatic mission. It had more than 450 staff, divided into 22 teams, and oversaw a network twice that size, with consulates (which nowadays are more about trade than lost passports) in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York and San Francisco, and pure trade offices in Denver, Minneapolis, Raleigh, San Diego and Seattle. The embassy connected to every department of government in the UK, and got involved in pretty much every conceivable aspect of the UK–US relationship. Around half of the embassy staff were Americans (‘locally engaged’, in the Foreign Office jargon), including the entire congressional liaison team and two-thirds of my private office; coming from all parts of the country, they brought invaluable knowledge and understanding. The biggest single section was the 150-strong defence team. Their tasks included looking after the welfare of the several hundred British servicemen and women embedded in the US armed forces, overseeing the dozens of joint US and UK equipment and technology projects, and managing the day-to-day interactions necessitated by our forces’ joint operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. And I quickly discovered that, somewhere in the embassy, there was someone covering each and every conceivable interaction between the UK and the US, from British nationals on death row to future trade deals and everything in between.

I started to think about how I should spend my time, given that there were three or four options for every hour of life as British ambassador to the US. First, it was election year. We needed to get alongside the leading campaigns, build relationships with the main advisers, and provide London with a constant flow of insights and analysis; crucially, material that they weren’t reading in media reports. Second, supporting British business had to be one of the highest priorities. National wealth is created by the private sector, not by government; and 19 per cent of total British exports go to the US, by a long way our largest bilateral market. So I told the commercial team that I would see any senior visiting British businessman who was coming through Washington, and that I would host at the residence any export promotion events they wanted to put my way. Third, I resolved to spend two afternoons a week in Congress, seeing senators and congressmen; more time with them than some of my predecessors had spent, but I reckoned it would be repaid, sooner or later.

I also recognised that I had to get out of Washington and around the country, as I had learnt on my road trip. DC wasn’t America, there were eight consulates to visit, and I was personally intrigued to visit Silicon Valley and the headquarters of the internet giants. Beyond this, I knew that each week was bound to be filled with the normal business of bilateral diplomacy: a steady stream of senior ministers and officials visiting from London, and the daily task of understanding, assessing, reporting and, most important of all, building the relationships which would enable me to intervene on any aspect of US federal and state activity that had implications for British interests.

That was the day job. There were also the evenings. Washington comes alive at night. And the British ambassador is in the fortunate, if demanding, position of being invited to pretty much everything. I got into the habit of spending an hour a week with Amanda Downes and the private office team, deciding which of the dozens of invitations I received each week should be accepted – and often, how many different events could be crammed into one night. There was a real art to this, and I was seriously lucky in having Amanda at the table. In particular, she warned us against accepting all but a handful of a Washington speciality, the ‘charity gala dinner’. The best of these could be spectacular. The worst were a deadly combination of endless speeches preceding a meal of shoe-leather steak, followed by more speeches stretching into the late hours. Throughout my diplomatic career, I had reckoned that if I didn’t get at least a couple of insights worth reporting back to London from each and every evening event, then I had been wasting my time. Thanks in part to Amanda’s judicious advice about which invitations to accept, and in part to Washington being the most political, and gossipy, of cities, the problem became, not collecting worthwhile insights, but finding the time to report all of them, so rich an environment was the Washington social circuit.

And then there was the residence. Designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, considered the greatest British architect of his age, and completed in 1928, this was a building designed for parties – whether an intimate dinner for a dozen in the smaller of the two dining rooms, a reception for 350 in the ballroom (under a portrait of the Queen by Andy Warhol), or a garden party for 600 to celebrate a royal wedding. Adding together breakfasts, lunches, receptions and dinners, Vanessa and I found ourselves hosting some 800 events a year there; and thanks to a brilliant head chef and his team, as well as an accomplished front-of-house operation, it ran like a well-oiled machine.

The biggest of these 800 events was the annual embassy open day. There was a Washington tradition that all the embassies opened their doors to the public over a couple of Saturdays in May. For us, this had become, over the years, a Cecil B. de Mille style spectacular. Jaguar, Bentley and Rolls-Royce displayed their latest models. There were stalls showcasing British food and drink. The residence was decked out for a black-tie dinner. The Washington Shakespeare Company performed extracts of his plays on the terrace. The rose garden looked at its most glamorous. Local TV news film crews roamed the compound. On a sunny day, around 10,000 people would come through the gates, producing a queue half a mile up Massachusetts Avenue.

The first year, I lingered for a while near the Jaguars, eventually sitting in one for the benefit of a TV crew. I noticed among the thousands of visitors a young man, studying me with intent. As I clambered out of the car, he approached me and asked for a photograph with me. I readily agreed. He then said, ‘I really love your show. When’s the next season?’ I asked who he thought I was. He said, ‘Aren’t you Jeremy Clarkson?’ I explained that I was someone far less important than the presenter of Top Gear, namely the ambassador. Did he still want a photograph? Looking mildly embarrassed, he said, ‘Yeah, okay then,’ did the selfie thing, and vanished. One of the embassy staff overheard: by Monday, several thousand people knew the story.

The Foreign Office also required us to make the residence generate income by hiring it out commercially. So we found ourselves hosting everything from company boards to gala dinners. The one disadvantage to this otherwise lucrative practice was that a short speech by the ambassador came as part of the package. So I found myself speaking about an extraordinary range of subjects to a highly varied range of audiences. Night after night, I gave silent thanks to a succession of creative speechwriters. And most nights, as the guests filed out, dazzled by the grandeur of their surroundings, I wondered what they would think if they knew that, thanks to decades of under-investment, the fabric of the building was in a parlous state. There were leaks whenever it rained, floods whenever a pipe failed, misbehaving fire alarms, periodic power cuts, and unreliable lifts. Late one evening, Vanessa was trapped in a lift for fifty minutes. Dodgy lifts are a feature of British residences worldwide; there was a similarly troublesome example in the Brussels residence, though my jamming it by stuffing a redundant Christmas tree in it one January may not have helped.

We started to settle into a pattern of life. Vanessa had also started work as a teacher at the British International School of Washington. (She had worked throughout every posting of my career, finding it kept her grounded and gave her a life outside mine.) So we rose at 6 a.m., Vanessa to get ready for her 7.30 start, while I caught up on the US news and the emails from London. Vanessa had a short walk through the woods and I did the thirty-second commute to the embassy at about 8 a.m., unless there was a working breakfast, and spent most days on a combination of meetings, video conferences and calls. Vanessa got back to the residence at about 5 p.m., giving her an hour’s turnaround before the evening event. I generally went straight from work. If it was one event, we might be home by 8 p.m.; if two or three, 10 p.m. or later. In short, it amounted to an extraordinarily interesting and rewarding life; but also to an unending and sometimes exhausting succession of fifteen-hour days.

Within a couple of months of our arrival, the residence acquired two additional occupants. Vanessa took on two rescued Washington street cats, which she named Monty and Pico (both names inherited from former occupants of the family cat position). The rescue charity carefully vetted the residence and gardens for their suitability for homeless cats before releasing them to us. They became well-known figures around the compound, and indeed in the New Zealand Embassy next door and the Naval Observatory across the road – the latter the official residence of Vice President Mike Pence and his wife Karen. The cats even took to following Vanessa on her walk through the woods to school. Sadly, Pico was killed on Massachusetts Avenue a couple of years later. Monty, however, thrived, and stayed on after our departure, in the care of the residence manager. He developed into an exceptionally effective – that is, lethal – hunter. We came home one evening to discover he had dragged a rabbit through the cat flap into the kitchen, there to dismember it – leaving entrails on the carpet and splashes of blood halfway up the walls. Mrs Pence famously kept rabbits; and I pondered briefly, but dismissed, the notion that Monty’s victim was one of hers. As I swabbed the blood from the kitchen walls, however, it did occur to me that it was a fitting metaphor for the political times in Washington.

At the weekends, we started to get to know the city. To a Londoner, it feels compact; in the car, in some directions, one can be out of it in twenty minutes. Perhaps appropriately, as the capital city of the melting pot that is America, it is a mash-up of architectural styles, from the neoclassicism of the Capitol, the White House and Union Station through the Norman style of the Smithsonian, the gothic revivalism of the National Cathedral, all the way to the African influences in the extraordinary new Museum of African American History on the Mall (designed, as it happens, by a brilliant British architect, David Adjaye). It is also a strikingly low-rise city, thanks to the Height of Buildings Act of 1910. This restricts buildings in business areas to 110 feet in height, and those in residential areas to a mere 90 feet. But most of all, we enjoyed walking around the quiet, leafy nineteenth-century streets of old Georgetown, some fifteen minutes’ walk from the residence. Or at least, we usually did: there is one month when those streets should be avoided. The streets are full of ginkgo trees. But they planted females, not males; and for a month in autumn, the pavements are covered in seeds from the trees – which smell, precisely and disconcertingly, of vomit.

Those first weeks passed in a blur of social gatherings – save three events which remain in the memory. The first was a Washington institution called the Alfalfa Club. Though it is called a club, it meets but once each year, on the last Saturday in January, for a black-tie dinner at the Capitol Hilton. Its membership is a combination of corporate America and Washington politics. Its proceedings are, in sharp contrast to the more famous White House Correspondents’ Dinner, entirely private. But they are similar in the sense that the entertainment comprises a series of theoretically humorous and disrespectful speeches. The club’s name is a tribute to the alfalfa plant, which has an exceptionally wide-reaching root system, designed to capture all available moisture; a plant, in other words, that is willing ‘to do anything for a drink’. It was founded in 1913, by four Southerners, to celebrate the birthday of the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. It didn’t admit African Americans until 1974, and women until 1994. The serving President would always be invited. Sportingly, President Obama attended twice, in 2009 and 2012. In his 2009 speech to the dinner, Obama noted that ‘if General Lee were here with us tonight, at this dinner in his honour, he would be 202 years old. And very confused.’

So I pitched up for my first Alfalfa, to be greeted by a sea of faces including many of the most famous corporate figures in America; from the giants of Wall Street to the stars of Silicon Valley. I was one of about a dozen ambassadors in attendance, and we were treated mysteriously well. At a certain point in the pre-dinner drinks, we were selected out and ushered into a ‘VIP area’, from which Wall Street and Silicon Valley were excluded; only ambassadors and senior American politicians were allowed entry. Hence mysterious; anywhere to which I am allowed access while, say, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett are excluded has to be strange. As I walked in to this exclusive gathering, I could scarcely believe my eyes: among the twenty or so people there were two former Presidents, George H. W. Bush (in a wheelchair) and George W. Bush; several senior White House figures including presidential adviser Valerie Jarrett; and a sprinkling of cabinet secretaries, including Secretary of State John Kerry. I gleefully made the rounds, picked up what gossip I could, and sent an email to London on Monday morning, beginning ‘I talked to both George Bushes, John Kerry and Valerie Jarrett on Saturday night …’

A week or so later, there was the National Prayer Breakfast, traditionally held on the first Thursday in February. By comparison with Alfalfa, this was a newcomer, having been founded by President Eisenhower in 1953 with the encouragement of the Reverend Billy Graham. But it is the bigger event, with more than 2,000 guests packed into the Washington Hilton’s largest room, several hundred more in an overflow room, a handful of visiting heads of state, and live coverage on national TV. It also always gets a keynote speech from the President.

I had no idea what to expect when I walked into the vast auditorium in the hotel basement. But in fact, it was exactly what it said on the tin: a range of national figures, mostly politicians, but also Church leaders, leading a series of prayers. Obama gave a brilliant, deeply personal speech, in part about his relationship with his daughters. It reminded me that, at his best, Obama had few equals as a public speaker. The unexpected highlight, however, was the performance of the two unannounced ‘mystery speakers’. These turned out to be Mark Burnett, a TV producer, and Roma Downey, an actress.

Had I been in America longer, I might have known that these were national figures. Downey played the angel (yes, really) in a long-running TV show, Touched by an Angel; and Burnett was a giant of TV production, having invented two hugely successful TV shows, Survivor and The Apprentice, in the latter casting as the CEO figure an aspiring TV star called Donald Trump. They gave a confident and professional performance, and I was struck in particular at hearing a British accent from the podium. Mark Burnett had been born in London and had served in the Parachute Regiment, including during the Falklands War, before emigrating to the United States in 1982. I emailed him later that day to congratulate him on his performance and to say how nice it had been to see a Brit as the star speaker at such a quintessentially American event.

Then, a month after my arrival at the embassy, I had my first taste of American election campaigns. The first two events on the Republican calendar, the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary, had been and gone, with Donald Trump winning both, in continuing defiance of the Washington pundits. The next primary was South Carolina. Vanessa and I flew down to the state capital, Columbus, on the day of the vote. We had lunch with the local Republican Party representatives. They insisted we eat catfish, which was apparently caught by being wrestled by hand out of muddy riverbanks. They were outstanding (the Republicans, that is – the catfish was okay): friendly, frank, full of insights. We then talked that afternoon to some of the journalists covering the primary. Everyone thought Trump would nail a hat-trick of successes, but there was uncertainty over the margin of victory and the order of the runners-up. And no one, especially not the local Republicans, seemed happy. They didn’t like the tone of the Trump campaign, and they didn’t see him as a proper Republican.

The tradition is that every campaign, whether winning or losing, holds a party (sort of; warm beer in plastic cups) as the results come in. The Trump campaigners were holed up somewhere else in South Carolina, a fair distance from Columbus. So Vanessa and I and the embassy political team went to the Marco Rubio event. Rubio was a young, charismatic, good-looking senator from Florida, with a striking back story. His father had fled Cuba in the 1950s and worked as a bartender, initially in Nevada, then in Miami. A lot of knowledgeable people thought Rubio had a real chance of winning the Republican nomination.

In the event, he never came close to challenging Trump. His candidacy was effectively destroyed by Chris Christie. At the televised debate preceding the New Hampshire vote, Christie, a gifted exponent of bare-knuckle politics, metaphorically beat Rubio up, accusing him of spouting vacuous, pre-programmed, robotic soundbites. A flustered Rubio was prompted into responding with some words best described as, well, vacuous, pre-programmed, robotic soundbites. When I heard this, I felt a stab of sympathy for Rubio, given my own trial by Twitter a few weeks earlier; we robots had to stick together. That said, Rubio actually ran second in South Carolina, prompting an upbeat mood at the event I attended. Rubio spent a few minutes with me and the team, and then delivered a speech to the assembled crowd that would have been spot on had he actually won the primary rather than come second. But it was a false dawn; a few weeks later, after being ridiculed by Christie, losing his home state of Florida to Trump, and having run out of money, Rubio pulled out.

The big news, however, from South Carolina, apart from Trump’s third victory, concerned another candidate. Jeb Bush, George W. Bush’s younger brother, had been a successful governor of Florida from 1999 to 2007. As George W. Bush’s presidency began to fall apart under the pressures of failure in Iraq, senior Republicans could be heard increasingly to say ‘we got the wrong Bush’. So when Jeb announced his candidacy for President in June 2015, money poured in (some $100 million). He immediately became front runner. But that was as good as it got. Of his campaign, it was said ‘he never walked without stumbling’. Once under the national spotlight, he emerged as a clunky, uninspiring public speaker and a diffident, nervous performer in debate. In particular, he couldn’t cope with Donald Trump, looking like a deer in the headlights whenever Trump attacked him. Trump dubbed him ‘low energy Jeb’; Bush never got close to an effective response. Some debaters have an instinct to go for the jugular; Jeb’s habitual response was to deliver the harmless glancing blow.

So by the time the Bush campaign reached South Carolina, it was the land of the last chance saloon. I was due to call on both Bush and on the senator for South Carolina, Lindsay Graham, that afternoon. Both cancelled at short notice. I was told that they were in conference, with Graham providing some campaign advice and analysis. If this was true, then Graham’s advice must have been sharp-edged; Bush withdrew from the presidential race the next day.

A few weeks later, I went down to see Jeb Bush in his Florida office. He gave me a lot of his time, spoke freely and frankly, and came across as a transparently decent human being and a serious policy thinker. But he also looked and sounded like he had been hit by a truck. He fretted about letting down his team by being such a weak candidate. He worried about the Republicans becoming the anti-immigration party on the back of Trump’s success. He said he had spent decades building support for the Republican Party in the Latino community, only to see Trump destroy it in a few months. But most of all, he seemed shattered by the experience of the campaign: his precipitous fall from front runner to roadkill in the space of a few months. And the anger was still there. As I left, he said, ‘Trump may win the nomination. But you can be sure of this. He will not win the presidency.’

Back in Washington from the South Carolina primary, and just over a month into my posting, I wrote to London with my first considered assessment of the presidential race. On the Democratic contest, I predicted that Hillary Clinton was likely to win, but noted that she was facing much tougher opposition than anyone had expected from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Sanders, who described himself as a democratic socialist, and who looked to me disconcertingly like Doc Brown from the Back to the Future films, had virtually dead-heated with Clinton in Iowa, and had then convincingly won New Hampshire; but had been blown out of the water in South Carolina, where the African-American community voted overwhelmingly for Clinton.

As for the Republicans, I wrote that Trump had been underestimated throughout his presidential run; that ‘the likeliest outcome’ was that he would win the Republican nomination; that Clinton was damaged goods with serious likeability and trust issues; and that it was therefore conceivable that Trump would go on to win the presidency. For the record, this judgement was made on 25 February 2016.

5

The Brexit Vote