GHASTLY DIPLOMATIC MOMENTS

PFormer UK Ambassador Charles Crawford entertains us with his dodgy diplomatic experiences and those of others.

Ghastly Diplomatic Moments (hereinafter GDMs). We’ve all had them. Those split seconds when your vertically mobile stomach whizzes upwards past your plummeting heart, as your body temperature achieves both absolute zero and boiling point simultaneously. Those instants when you realise that things may never be the same again, for both you and your career.

Here I am not talking about events of appalling violence, such as the 1979 murder in The Hague by the IRA of British Ambassador Sir Richard Sykes. Or the assassination of Egypt’s President Sadat in 1981 at a military parade: many Ambassadors were sitting close by and the Cuban Ambassador died in the hail of bullets. Or the death of my colleague and friend Charles Morpeth and other senior international officials in a helicopter crash in the Bosnian mountains in 1997. Such horrors stay forever with those colleagues who survive.

Rather I want to explore the different sorts of GDMs which cast some light on the ups and downs of the diplomatic existence. Usually by showing us all what happens when the self-important formality of the diplomatic role collides noisily with real life.
The Guardian newspaper a while back published a list of diplomatic embarrassments, reminding us that GDMs have been around for a long time. Thus the case of the Ambassador wearing fashionably tight breeches who bent so low bowing to King George II that said breeches split, “giving a whole new meaning to the expression ‘presenting his credentials’”.

Let’s start with a couple of easy modern ones involving Sex. The most awesome GDM of all time must have occurred to hapless French diplomat Bernard Boursicot in 1983, when he found out that his inscrutable – and, as it turned out, inscrotable –Chinese lover was a he, not a she. More recently, British diplomat James Hudson showed how diplomats need nerves of steel to turn on local TV in Russia. He briskly left the FCO after a local channel showed him ‘cavorting’ with two Russian ladies.

Then there was the slightly less well known case of the central European Ambassador in Beijing who was told by the Chinese authorities (a) that they had arrested someone trying to break into his Embassy in the middle of the night; and (b), that that person was his wife. She had been trying to find evidence of his suspected adultery.

On to Embarrassments – always a rich source of GDM material. So much of diplomacy is about maintaining high levels of good form and punctilious etiquette where senior people are concerned. And when things go wrong, it is often more than noticeable. Thus we all have stories of top local VIPs being turned away from National Day receptions because, being so senior, they arrived at the gate without an invitation expecting to be ushered in, only to be confronted by a suspicious and utterly inflexible individual tasked with ‘security’.

Turning away the right people is always a risk. But so is letting in the wrong people. All diplomatic communities have their share of hangers-on and gatecrashers – people desperate to be ‘seen’ at diplomatic functions who resort to all sorts of low ruses to get into gatherings uninvited. Imagine the dismay of a Scandinavian Ambassador posted to Warsaw when he hosted a party for the Crown Prince, only to see the most notorious gatecrasher in Poland elbowing her way to the front of the line of VIPs decorously waiting to be presented to the Royal couple.

Poland is a country which takes protocol especially seriously and usually does things perfectly and with style. But when I was there certain, ahem, unfortunate lapses took place. Such as the ceremony at which the Polish President greeted a visiting Head of State with the wrong national flag for the visitor’s country proudly displayed. Or the baffling episode of the angry walk-out by the then Foreign Minister from his Ministry’s Diplomatic Ball at what he saw as a protocol sleight towards him by one of his own people.

The British too have achieved one stunning GDM in Warsaw, during the State Visit by HM The Queen in 1996. A freakish error in the issuing of invitations for HM The Queen’s Banquet led to a number of distinguished Poles turning up on the night when there were no places for them. Gulp.
Then there are Mishaps. Such as took place on one glorious weekend summer’s day some decades ago. The FCO Resident Clerk was basking on a deckchair in the sun on the roof of the FCO in Westminster. He was handed a message from Stalin to Prime Minister Churchill, which he needed to read before it was passed to Number 10. A sudden gust of wind caught the telegram and sent it wafting merrily over St James’s Park.
Airports are invariably tricky places. A Finnish Ambassador told me a fine story about the arrival of a top-level delegation. The hordes of waiting officials poured into the waiting convoy to take the senior Finnish visitor straight to a conference. Off sped the cars. They screeched to a halt at the conference and everyone leapt out to escort the VIP into the event. It then became clear that in their zeal to be expeditious, the VIP had been left at the airport.

Most of diplomacy is about detail. In interviewing people for protocol jobs I would ask the following question: What is the first thing that happens during any senior visit that needs careful attention from an organisational point of view?
a) the visiting vip gets off the plane
b) the press conference at the airport
c) the local security personnel need notifying that the vip has arrived
d) the ambassador’s pa needs notifying that the vip has arrived
e) the drivers of the official vehicles need notifying that the vip has arrived the answer is, of course

Does the airport have the steps needed to get the VIP off the plane or does the plane have them? Former British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe told me that he once had to make his way gracefully down the emergency slide shute because there were indeed no steps. No-one had checked.
The Queen’s State Visit to Russia in 1994 had a similar problem, albeit one in which Her Majesty was not involved. The Rolls Royce was sent to Moscow in a special lorry without anyone thinking to check in advance for handy ramps at the other end to get the vehicle safely unloaded. Feverish searches of railway sidings in the middle of the night on the eve of the Visit finally found a ramp suitable for this vital job.
That same visit saw a senior colleague reduced to gibbering wildly with anxiety at the Embassy as he dressed for President Yeltsin’s Banquet, the first black-tie dinner in the Kremlin since the Russian Revolution, only to discover with minutes to go before we all had to be on parade that he had forgotten his dress-shirt studs. Luckily for him, spares were found. Mind you, I accompanied Pauline Neville-Jones (now Dame Neville-Jones) to Moscow in 1986 for FCO/MFA Planning talks and had the exquisite embarrassment of having to tell her that I had left my suit trousers back in London. She was not impressed.

One other busy category of GDM is Food and Drink. At the Number 10 meeting hosted by Prime Minister Tony Blair to greet Poland’s President Kaczynski, a glass of champagne was served to open the proceedings in a warm way. This gesture of hospitality was marred by one oafish official knocking his glass over the tablecloth as he reached for his notebook. Splash. The President and Prime Minister stared at me and then looked at each other, divided by language but united in thought: you just can’t get the staff these days.

Not to mention the items which are intended to be a treat, but just aren’t. Such as the sheep’s eyeballs as reserved for a distinguished guest in many parts of the world where roast lamb is served. Or, in my case, the Romanian speciality Mamaliga cu brinza de oi, a cloying starter made of polenta, cheese and sour cream, which for Brits is like eating dairy-flavoured glue.

Anyway, my own very finest GDM came in 1984 at the Sarajevo Winter Olympic games. To cut a long and horrible story short, I was tasked with moving the belongings of one member of the Royal Family from one hotel room to another. Off I went to do this task, glumly fearing the worst.
It arrived. After packing as best I could the royal personage’s clothes (suits, socks, underpants, the lot) in a suitcase, I put some papers in an attaché case and then foolishly attempted to shut the briefcase. The internal brass hinge was stiff or there was a knack to closing the case which I did not possess. In my nervousness I somehow overpushed, and the hinge bent a little out of shape. Aghast, I turned to my Serbian driver from the Embassy. Nema problema! He tried to bend it gently back into position and…snapped it off completely! His cheery proclamation on this awesomely ruinous development still rings in my ears some 25 years later: ‘Don’t worry – he won’t notice!’

Thus I waited until the owner of the case reappeared at the new hotel room, where I confessed what had happened. He looked at me the way a condor might look down from an Andean peak at an undernourished and exceptionally stupid vole. I beat a dolorous retreat.
GDMs. So many to choose from. So momentous. And so, so ghastly.

Diplomat will welcome further examples of Ghastly Diplomatic Moments from its distinguished readers. Send them in to info@diplomatmagazine.com, anonymised as necessary, and they will be pulled together for a future article.