TABLE TALK
A nation of shopkeepers
DENIS BROGAN
I have had the ambiguous pleasure of reading in the press the report of a com- mittee on the future of our diplomatic service. On the report itself, I shall com- ment lower down. But the first reading of this document brought back to me many memories of the old diplomatic service, not all of them flattering to the Fo or its various satellites. That very many intelligent people entered the Foreign Office or the diplomatic service, some of them quite late in their careers, is, of course, true. But a good many people high in the service had no visible qualifications of any kind. Some of them had nothing but negative qualifi- cations—for instance, Sir Nevile Hender- son in Berlin in 1939.
I should admit, however, that I have never been a frequenter of embassies. There seems to be a built-in stuffiness about them which does not appeal to me. The only embassy I can say that I frequented was the Paris embassy under the Coopers. But this was less due to my interest in the Paris embassy than to my interest in my host and hostess. Of course, there have been extremely intelligent and enterprising British ambassadors in Paris other than the first Lord Norwich. I can remember one of them pointing out to me that I was sitting in a remarkably battered, torn, and disgracefully obsolete armchair. He said, 'I have been careful not to get these chairs in this room repaired because the Daily Express is running a campaign on our scandalous wastefulness. I think if one of their bright young men has to come here and sit in a chair like that he may pull his punches a bit about the extravagance and luxury in which we diplomats are supposed to live!'
In the nature of things, of course, I have from time to time been forced to visit the British embassy in Washington, but I have very seldom done so with any en- thusiasm. The only ambassador who was good, as apart from important, company was the late Lord Inverchapel. From time to time he would summon me to the atrociously inconvenient and aesthetically disgusting embassy erected by Sir Edwin Lutyens and give me tea, i.e. whisky. He would then talk in a remarkably casual way about his duties and a good many things that were not now his duties. He talked quite a lot, for instance, about his long diplomatic career. 'They always say, "Archie doesn't mind," and send me to the most unattractive places.' He seemed to think that Santiago de Chile had been the most unattractive of his postings. He was extremely amusing and, as far as I could judge, intelligent on the subject of Chung- king, and even more amusing about Mos- cow, where he had got on very well with Stalin but had no particular illusions about this getting on well meaning much.
Inverchapel's presence in Washington was due, he told me more than once, to his in- sistence that he would only retire to a good job, and that meant either Paris or Wash- ington, and 'Archie does care, whatever anybody in the Foreign Office may think.' He got Washington, and it cannot be said that he worked very hard at whatever the duties of the ambassador were supposed to be at that time. I once asked him what changes he had seen in Washington since he had first come there as a young attaché forty years before. 'Only two. The trees are bigger, and Alice Longworth' (the famous Princess Alice, the daughter of Theodore Roosevelt) 'is older.'
Not all British ambassadors in Washing- ton hive been entertaining, and not all have been competent. Some have been scand- alously incompetent in my lifetime, al- though I suppose the record for incom- petence is held by Lord Sackville, though I think Sir Cecil Spring-Rice during the first war was a good runner-up. By far the most competent ambassador during the first war was in fact the German ambas- sador, Count Bernstorff. If his foolish chiefs in Berlin had paid more attention to him, the Germans might have escaped defeat.
Washington was a particularly dangerous place to send young men to because, al- though it had a very complicated pecking order, very few of the standard young diplomatic types mastered it. It was not only a matter of causing scandal. It was simply a matter of knowing the wrong people, saying the wrong things, and often of knowing very little about the people it was important to know and to know about. One tremendous gaffe which was about to be made before the last war was, in part at any rate, stopped by a note by Wilson Harris in this journal based on information I sent him in high alarm about the antics of a lady in the embassy. The present em- bassy, as far as I can judge it, is not staffed by quite so many disastrous mis- fits, but perhaps it does suffer from 'the special relationship' and the failure to pay adequate attention to the other forces in American life not represented by, let us say, the English-Speaking Union or even by the very smart Anglophile figures in New York.
On the policy recommended by Messrs Duncan, Roberts, and Shonfield, I may have something to say later. Some of the things they suggest are sensible, some are not. It is quite obvious that the main bus- iness of the members of the foreign service today is to act as commercial travellers, mobile or stationary. Whether it'would not be better to start at scratch, get rid of virtually all the foreign service and create a highly specialised huckstering salesmen organisation or not, I simply don't know. A good many people are going to lose their jobs under the new scheme, and per- haps everybody at present employed ought to lose his or her job in the commercialised world to which we are reduced.
There are some quite sensible remarks about the role of the British Council, about libraries, about the rather fantastic scheme of getting high academic people to take jobs among the commercial travellers for unspecified purposes. But there is one thing that strikes me about this report of suggested reform. The British Council is rightly given credit for doing very good work in teaching English, and this is per- haps as valuable a service as teaching businessmen to suck eggs in the commer- cial world. (For example, I formed the highest opinion of the work done by the British Council in India, even by non- Scotch members of its staff.) And the pre- servation of English as a great language in India seems to me an object of the highest political and cultural, possibly even economic, value. But having read with care the version of the report printed in the Times, I can only suggest that there should be hung in every office of the British Council, and perhaps in every embassy, if that is what they are going to be called in future, a copy of the report with, in large letters along the top, 'On no account write like this'; because this seems to me one of the worst written documents I have read for a very long time. I fear that his colleagues must have over-ridden Mr Andrew Shonfield, and I feel very sceptical of the effectiveness of a commercial policy advocated in a jargon which is neither good nor 'business' English.
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