For 500 years our little island Britain
has punched above its weight around the world...
Getting Our Way.
The means to our success?
Not just gunboats and commerce, but ruthless power broking,
Machiavellian manoeuvring and plenty of charm - diplomacy.
Diplomats are the people you don't often get to hear about.
It is the kings and queens, the politicians and the generals
who dominate the history books, but this series is about my predecessors,
who championed Britain's interests abroad - ambassadors and envoys,
power-brokers and negotiators.
You must never forget
that it is British interests you are there to promote and protect.
You are constantly having to talk to, make deals with,
make concessions to, people who, in other ways, are doing things
you thoroughly dislike and disapprove of.
You have to be a bit of a schemer,
otherwise you can't do the job properly.
As Our Man in Washington, I saw history in the making.
Now, I'm going back over the last five centuries to put myself
in the shoes of different diplomats
who helped Britain's rise to greatness...and managed our decline.
Our diplomacy must always be driven by the national interest.
That's easier to say than to define, but of one thing we can be sure,
our top priority is, as it has always been, our security.
Well, it's the irreducible national interest
and this is the minimum
a diplomat or statesman
must try to accomplish.
When I was at school, I was taught that the roaring seas
had protected England from invasion for a thousand years.
But back in the 16th century, we were far from safe.
For Queen Elizabeth I, a key line of defence, was not the roaring seas,
but her spymasters and diplomats -
ruthless, pragmatic men, like Lord Burghley and Sir Francis Walsingham,
who had made it their life's mission
to confound the Queen's foreign Catholic enemies.
What I would give to have been in that game!
The nearest I got to it was playing cat and mouse
with the KGB in Soviet Russia.
In 1572, shocking news arrived from across the Channel,
where Elizabeth's chief spy, Walsingham, ran our Paris embassy.
Thousands of Protestants had been slaughtered on St Bartholomew's day.
Throats were slashed and bodies dismembered.
The River Seine ran red with blood.
Burghley called it, "the greatest crime since the Crucifixion".
The grisly news from France tapped into a deep fear
that a great international Catholic conspiracy would come together
to depose Elizabeth and restore Catholicism in England.
The Pope had just issued a Bull, calling for the violent overthrow
of "this monstrous heretic". Poor Elizabeth.
As they said about Richard Nixon, just because you're paranoid,
it doesn't mean that they aren't out to get you.
The survival of the nation, no less, was at stake
and the Queen immediately summoned a diplomat for help.
He was a Cornishman and his name was Henry Killigrew.
Killigrew was one of a new breed of professional diplomats,
key players in the 16th century world of rapidly shifting alliances,
cold-blooded assassinations and devious espionage.
Elizabeth I might not yet have had a Foreign Office,
but she had moved from the medieval world
into a recognisably modern era of professional statecraft,
where resident ambassadors abroad kept a wary eye on neighbour states
in the defence of Britain's national interest.
So much of real history happens behind the scenes,
where diplomacy likes to ply its trade.
These days, ambassadors summoned home to see the Foreign Secretary
come here - the Ambassadors' Waiting Room
at the very heart of the Foreign Office.
It can be nerve-wracking awaiting orders.
Eventually, Henry Killigrew's moment came from his queen.
Killigrew had earned a reputation as a troubleshooter,
whose discretion was such that there is not a single portrait of him.
Less than a fortnight after the Paris Massacre,
Elizabeth gave him instructions for a new and vital foreign mission.
Without even pausing to say goodbye to his wife and children,
Killigrew made haste.
From Paris, Walsingham had reported rumours of plans
of a French military enterprise against England
and he strongly advised that steps should be taken
to shut up what he called the "postern gate".
BAGPIPES PLAY
And that postern gate was Scotland.
Edinburgh in 1572 was up for grabs.
A two-year civil war had reached stalemate
and Killigrew's task was to negotiate a settlement
between the rival Scottish factions.
Holed up inside Edinburgh Castle
were the Catholic supporters of the dethroned Mary Queen of Scots,
Elizabeth's most dangerous rival for the English crown.
We are the Billy Boys!
Keeping them under siege was the Protestant faction
that governed as Regent in the name of Mary's infant son, King James.
Why on earth should Elizabeth, as the Texans say, have a dog in this fight?
Well, it was already bad enough that Mary had a respectable claim
to the English throne, but what really rang the alarm bells in London
was the danger of the French joining in on Mary's side.
There was an "auld alliance"
between Scotland and France against the "auld enemy", England,
and what Elizabeth dreaded most of all was Scotland becoming
part of a Catholic 'Axis of Evil' on England's doorstep.
Well, the 'auld alliance' stretches back to the late 13th century.
I mean, it had already been running the best part of 400 years
by the time we got to Killigrew.
But, of course, Scotland had just actually come out of
a union with France.
Mary's mother, Mary Guise, a very, very formidable woman,
and she'd have had Henry Killigrew for breakfast, incidentally.
She'd negotiated a union with France, so that Scotland
was in a union with France before it was in one with England.
Killigrew made it his business to sow mistrust of the French in Scotland,
by building a network of influential contacts and making sure
they all heard the news about the Paris Massacre.
I mean, this is reasonably typical of the sort of tradition
of the English statecraft and diplomacy being of divided rule,
so separate your opponents, try to divide and make the enemy uncertain.
In fairness to that sort of statecraft, I mean, you could argue
that kept an empire together for the best part of 200 years.
Before I went as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia,
a very wise predecessor of mine gave me a word of advice
which I have subsequently passed on to a lot of younger members
of the Foreign Service and that was, "if it moves, call on it".
And I spent a lot of my time, and I may say the recipients of my calls
were very tolerant of it, I spent a lot of my time just simply in going
calling on people, not necessarily to do any particular piece of work,
but to keep in contact,
because you never know when you're going to need that contact.
Scotland was a bracing experience for a Sassenach diplomat.
Even Killigrew, a Machiavellian's Machiavelli,
felt obliged to report to Elizabeth and her advisers that
"these men be so devilled and uncertain in their doings
"as I cannot tell what to write of them,
"but of this, your honour may be assured, I trust no-one further
"than I see with my eyes or feel with my fingers".
What, so trusting, Killigrew?
First Minister, what does that tell you about the way
in which the English tried to deal with the Scots?
Well, it just tells me that Henry was a diplomat, wasn't he?
Sent abroad to lie for his country, so his attitude to the Scots
was no different probably his attitude to the French
or anyone else would have been.
I think it's a bit much if you're sent in effectively as a spy
to try and interfere in the Scottish succession then to start complaining
about your hosts, as opposed to your own nefarious motives.
The Scottish Catholics inside the Castle might have been wise
not to trust Killigrew himself too far.
There was also a hidden agenda to Killigrew's mission,
a set of instructions that dared not speak its name.
An enterprise so hush-hush
that it was written down in a separate document.
These secret instructions were drafted by Elizabeth's
main adviser, and Killigrew's brother-in-law, Lord Burghley.
You can see from the crossings out that this was, shall we say,
a tricky document to write.
"It is found daily more and more that the continuance of the Queen of Scots
"here is so dangerous, both for the person of the Queen's Majesty,
"and for her state and realm, as nothing presently is more necessary
"than that the realm might be delivered of her".
Killigrew was being instructed by Elizabeth to devise a plan that would
deliver Mary Queen of Scots into the hands of her Scottish enemies.
"Use all good speed, with the most secrecy that you can, to understand
"their minds and yet to deal to your uttermost, that this matter might
"be rather opened to you, than yourself to seem first to move it".
In other words, cunningly persuade the Regent's party
to assassinate Mary and make them think it's their own idea.
Mary was a threat to the throne and to England's security.
She had to go - without the English queen getting her own hands dirty.
For Killigrew, with his strong Protestant faith
and intense loyalty to the Queen,
if the nation were under threat, the end justified any means.
Softly, softly, he sounded out the Regent's party,
headed by the Earls of Mar and Morton,
about carrying out judicial murder on behalf of the English Queen.
"Give us money and soldiers
"and only then will we do your dirty work", they said.
But Killigrew knew that Elizabeth would be extremely reluctant
to get involved in a costly war in Scotland.
So how could he keep the Protestant party onside?
Killigrew could not promise what his Queen was unwilling to deliver,
but he knew better than to give an outright refusal.
He disappeared into a fog of vague assurances to keep his
allies onside, even feigning illness at one particularly tricky moment.
It's a tried and tested weapon in the diplomat's armoury. Playing for time.
I'm not sure that being a Machiavellian, scheming type
is not a rather good description of what a diplomat ought to be.
You have to be very thoughtful,
you have to find ways to get your way, to get your country's way,
and often that means you can't be entirely straightforward.
What you must never do is lie. Once you lie,
your credibility is destroyed, not just on that occasion, but forever.
So you have to be very careful, but equally, there are ways
of presenting things and, perhaps, occasionally
withholding certain aspects, which could be considered relevant,
but maybe you don't want to emphasise. So you have to be
a bit of a schemer or you can't do the job properly.
As New Year's Day 1573 dawned,
the ceasefire between the Scottish factions was broken by cannon fire.
Mary's party in the castle fired a warning shot onto the town below.
They expected military help from France imminently
and were spoiling for a fight.
With Scotland once again at boiling point,
Killigrew decided that he needed new instructions urgently.
He made a secret trip home.
The time had come for diplomacy to be backed by force.
He had to persuade the Queen to send guns and troops
to help the Regent's party defeat the Scottish Catholics,
even though they were back-pedalling from the secret plot to kill Mary.
Sometimes, a diplomat has to use his arts of persuasion as much back home
as in the country to which he is posted.
Getting your government, or in this case, your queen,
to accept that you know better what is in the nation's interest.
I have to admit that my own record in this respect
was patchy at the best of times!
But you are failing in your duty if you don't tell it like it is.
Too bad if that is not the message people want to hear back home.
You have to recommend on policy
and you haven't to be afraid in your recommendations.
The worst kind of diplomat
is one who tells his Foreign Secretary
what he thinks the Minister wants to hear.
Talking the notoriously stubborn Elizabeth into anything wasn't easy,
but Killigrew was a trusted and, above all, persuasive adviser
and he returned to Scotland with 10,000 gold crowns for the Regent,
to be followed by an army of 1,500 English soldiers.
The English guns sailed into Leith harbour and trundled up here
to face the castle. It must have been an impressive sight,
but a sight to fill you with dread
if you were standing guard on the ramparts.
Even Killigrew, who had once been a soldier,
got his hands dirty, and helped dig the gun mounts with pick and spade.
The only time I ever used an ambassadorial shovel
was to plant a tree in the embassy vegetable garden.
When the guns finally opened fire, it took just 11 days' bombardment
before the eastern defences of the medieval castle
came crashing to the ground.
Thanks to Killigrew's resourcefulness, astute reading
of the situation and deft footwork, the Queen's enemies were confounded
and the postern gate shut tight. It was not a moment too soon.
Inside the castle, Killigrew found the hard evidence
that the rebels had expected help
not just from the French, but from Catholic Spain, as well.
As for Mary Queen of Scots, she never did suffer extraordinary
rendition to Scotland, but 14 years later,
she felt the English executioner's axe.
500 years on, Henry Killigrew is sitting on his diplomatic cloud,
observing us from the great Foreign Office in the sky.
He'll see that much has changed.
Quills and manuscripts have gone,
replaced by strange, infernal machines.
And the magnificence of the ambassador in his doublet,
codpiece and hose, have given way to boring suits.
But Killigrew could have done my job in Washington, just as, I hope,
I could have done his in Edinburgh, because the essential skills
of the diplomatic trade have remained unchanged.
The ability to negotiate, to interpret, to persuade.
All of this to get your way in the nation's interest.
For a young diplomat like me,
the Madrid embassy in General Franco's dying days
was an exciting place to be, but it was regularly blighted by the
protocol hell of having to organise the Ambassador's dinner parties.
I was far too junior to be invited myself, but I had to spend hours
devising seating plans that reflected the fiendish complexity
of Spanish protocol.
I got it wrong once, when a Duque walked out of the Ambassador's dinner
because he thought a mere Marques had a better seat.
The Ambassador's receptions are noted in society for their host's
exquisite taste, that captivates his guests.
Truth is, life wasn't a million miles away
from the cliche of the diplomatic circuit.
Though in all my time, I never clapped eyes on a Ferrero Rocher.
Excellente. With this Ferrero Rocher, you are really spoiling us.
Ferrero Rocher.
A sign of good taste.
So does this flim-flam matter?
Diplomatic history tells us that it does.
The peace and security of Europe has even depended on it.
It's the capital of the Austrian Empire in late 1814
and just about everyone who was anyone accepted an invitation
to attend the Congress of Vienna.
The city's population swelled by 100,000 visitors.
The hosts laid on for their guests 1,500 liveried servants,
more than 100 new carriages and 1,200 extra horses, all of them white.
Beethoven was on hand to compose and conduct the music,
as Europe's statesmen and diplomats, their wives and mistresses,
gathered to join a party which would last the best part of a year.
With just a touch of that pomp and circumstance,
I've come with my wife, Catherine.
My goodness, I missed my time, by a couple of centuries or so.
The European Union in bureaucratic Brussels, this was not.
There were glittering parties aplenty and, most important of all,
a real sense of history in the making.
The delegates had gathered to bring peace to the continent
after decades of warfare.
Perhaps the most important person in town was not the Austrian emperor,
not the Russian tsar and certainly not a mere king,
though Prussia, Denmark, Bavaria and Wurttemberg all sent theirs.
He was the British representative.
In my book, one of Britain's greatest diplomats.
Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, an Anglo-Irishman in his mid-40s,
was Britain's Foreign Secretary.
He arrived in Vienna in 1814 with one guiding principle -
that security and peace for England
depended on security and peace in Europe.
The French Revolution 25 years earlier had set in motion a war
that saw most of Europe fall to Napoleon,
before his eventual defeat leading to abdication and exile.
Now in 1814, it was time to divide the spoils and,
from a myriad of competing claims,
draw up in Vienna a new blueprint for Europe's reconstruction.
Here was a situation where
Europe had been at war for nearly a quarter of a century.
It's quite a difficult thing for us to imagine,
because we've not experienced that in our lifetime, thankfully,
or, indeed, ever since. Although there has been the two World Wars,
there hasn't been a war of that length, almost an entire
generation in length, of conflict in Europe from 1792 onwards.
And so the people who came to the end of that conflict
were looking for an entirely new framework,
looking for something that would mean there would be
no more wars in Europe.
So, they were looking for a very ambitious solution.
Behind him, Castlereagh had the might of the growing British Empire,
deep pockets and unchallenged naval supremacy.
So what Britain wanted, Britain was likely to get.
Castlereagh was our first great Foreign Secretary.
He had to do two things. He had to keep together
the coalition against Napoleon, which was always splitting off.
He had to keep it together with money, with persuasion and,
secondly, when we'd beaten Napoleon, he had to negotiate the peace.
He had the Russian troops all over Europe.
He had the Russian tsar, a very strange man, who was insisting
on keeping Poland, but also had all kinds of Christian ideas
about the shape of Europe. He had to deal with the French.
How do you keep France as an important European power,
while not allowing her to rampage again, as she had under Napoleon.
'He had to deal with all kinds of very tricky situations and people.'
Like all good negotiators, Castlereagh had an eye for detail.
He was incredibly diligent and knew that being thoroughly on top
of his brief was the most vital weapon in the diplomatic armoury.
Austria's spies reported that he even prepared to the point of practising
the latest waltzes with a chair.
TRUMPETS SOUND
Today, the nearest one gets to the melee of 19th century Vienna,
is the annual Officer's Ball at the Hofburg Palace,
which hosted many of the Congress's grand soirees.
The Congress saw the restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy in France
and a scramble by the moustachioed scions of Europe's Ancien Regime
to get back what Napoleon had seized from them.
So, the ambitions of the Congress were intensely conservative,
but the way it set about achieving them certainly wasn't.
The unending round of balls and entertainments,
the bed-hopping, the pillow-talk,
everybody rubbing shoulders with everybody else,
from the Russian tsar and Austrian emperor downwards,
this was a diplomatic revolution, it was the start of informal networking
which, despite all appearances, was absolutely avant garde.
Entertainment is important
provided it is focused.
I mean, I found one of the most satisfying ways of entertaining,
as an Ambassador,
was if the entertainment was designed to introduce A to B.
When people have met
over a period of time, you know, they they find it easier to relax.
They find it easier to get to know each other
and that getting to know people is essential,
if you're going to reach agreements which are going to work.
If, to quote Churchill, "jaw jaw was to prevail over war war",
the diplomats would have to agree
to a generally acceptable balance between all the competing interests.
So, Castlereagh was faced with a task of fiendish intricacy.
Of course, with such a vast throng and such a complex agenda,
it's normally mission impossible to get anything significant agreed.
Just look at the European Union, with its 27 member states.
When I was in Brussels, we couldn't even get the then ten members
to agree tariffs on the import of Romanian shoes.
Castlereagh's genius was to work the room tirelessly,
to get alongside everyone, to make even the smallest duke
feel important and then to cut most of them
out of the decision-taking. And that's multilateral diplomacy today.
If you think it is difficult to get consensus
out of the United Nations Security Council,
imagine how it would be if decisions had to be taken by
the almost-200 members of the United Nations General Assembly.
As Castlereagh himself put it,
"In such a large confederacy, an equality and community of council
"is utterly incompatible with the march of business."
So though there were numerous nationalities -
the Italians, Belgians, Poles - jostling for a place
at the negotiating table to have a say in their own futures,
Castlereagh realised that lasting peace depended, before all else,
on striking a deal between the Great Powers,
regardless of who else got trampled in the process.
Now, of course, there were many controversial aspects of this,
because the solution involved a strong active role for the
major powers in Europe and rather aggrandisement of the medium-sized
powers in order to create more of an equilibrium
and that meant the extinction of some small countries.
It showed in one of the quotations of the time,
"no special tenderness to nationality",
which meant that people were lumped together in countries
that they probably didn't really feel they belonged to.
Of course, in the long term, that would create difficulties.
This is often one of the conflicts in foreign policy.
Are you looking for an equilibrium that guarantees the peace
or are you trying to give people their rights to be citizens
of the countries they want to be in, to self-determination?
Those two things don't always sit together
and Castlereagh was very much on the side of a balance of power,
of law and security, rather than nationality.
Back from ball after ball, Castlereagh burnt the midnight oil,
plotting a course through the well-nigh intractable issues,
which kept the parties poised between peace and renewed conflict.
A barrier had to be built against a revanchist France,
which meant a strong Netherlands, whatever the Belgians said.
An expansionist Russia, threatening from the East,
had designs on Poland, where they had placed 200,000 troops.
Poor old Poles.
Meanwhile, how to create that vital counterweight in central Europe
against any Franco-Russian alliance? And then there was the dangerous
rivalry between Prussia and Austria.
Prussia wanted all Saxony, to compensate for losses in Poland.
Austria would then demand compensation in Italy,
not to mention a kick in the balls to the King of Saxony.
And this was not all.
There was a huge range of other issues to be grappled with,
such as ending the slave trade,
preserving the emancipation of the Jews,
regulating Europe's integral waterways.
If Castlereagh ever felt tired,
he was said to snatch an hour's rest by dozing in the bath.
Castlereagh was also expected to do his share of entertaining,
though his soirees were notoriously meagre.
It is still an essential part of diplomatic life
in the British Embassy in Vienna.
Tonight's host is the British Ambassador to Austria, Simon Smith,
and he's a defender of "The Ambassador's Reception"
against its critics.
Simon, Norman Tebbit once said, notoriously, that
the Ministry of Agriculture
existed to look after the interests of farmers
and the Foreign Office looked after the interests of foreigners.
I mean, what's the riposte to that?
I think the riposte is that if you don't understand
what makes foreigners work, if you don't understand what makes a country
that you're accredited to, what makes its government do what it does,
what makes its people feel the way they do, think the way they do,
then you're not going to be terribly good at getting them to agree to see
things your way, at getting them to line up with British objectives.
I think that one can make the mistake that, by understanding a country
that you are working in, you are supporting its position,
you are advocating that country's position. You would never go native?
Never, but you are more likely to get listened to
in advocating that position if you demonstrate an understanding
of where your partners across the table are coming from
and you won't get that without effort.
It is an occupational danger to go native and, every once in a while,
when I worked in the state department of the White House,
I would see people who began to see too much of their job
as explaining them to us, as opposed to us to them
and every once in a while I used to take them aside and say,
"Remember you work for the blue team. We are the blue team.
"It's good to have a take on them, but your bigger job, quite honestly,
"is to make us understandable to them and to make our case".
As the Congress moved towards its diplomatic climax,
the entertainments grew ever more elaborate.
In January 1815, a party came out to the palace here at Schonbrunn.
A grand procession of 32 sleighs was led by an orchestra.
At the same time, Castlereagh's fragile coalition of Great Powers
was inching towards a compromise and a deal that redrew the map of Europe.
The significance of the Congress of Vienna
is that it ushered in the longest period of peace without general war
in European history.
In the 100 years that followed it, there were only local conflicts
and never involving all the powers simultaneously.
That was a considerable achievement.
So, Castlereagh's contribution was seminal and his tenacity
made it possible.
Castlereagh understood that for Europe to remain at peace,
a balance of power was not enough and there needed to be
a system of regular meetings between nations to defuse problems
before they blew up and that is what the Congress of Vienna created.
It was, to use the jargon of today,
a system of multilateral collective security.
Castlereagh certainly favoured strong diplomatic engagement
with the other powers of Europe, wanted a concert of Europe.
They really saw the guarantee of the settlement
that he and his colleagues arrived at,
at being the major European powers working together
and being prepared to actively defend the settlement.
Militarily defend, if necessary, the settlement that they had arrived at.
So, yes, that is strong, active engagement in Europe
and I don't think any British statesmen have ever been in favour
of anything else other than strong active engagement in Europe.
The debate now is whether strong active engagement
means automatically signing up to anything that is ever proposed
in the rest of Europe or be prepared to give a lead ourselves.
Castlereagh was, of course, himself no visionary idealist.
In fact, he refused to sign up to the Tsar's grander vision,
the Holy Alliance, of a united Europe of shared Christian values.
"Sublime mysticism and nonsense", he called it.
For Castlereagh, that was taking a shared European project too far.
In our more liberal age, the Congress of Vienna has a terrible reputation
for the way the Great Powers
rode roughshod on the smaller nationalities.
After the First World War, Woodrow Wilson hoped that
"no odour of Vienna would influence the peace settlement".
And David Miliband, not so long ago, declared that,
"Europe cannot have its destiny settled
"on the basis of the Congress of Vienna".
In his own time,
poor old Castlereagh's reputation also suffered.
His achievements were taken for granted
and yet he was blamed for failing to achieve the impossible - democracy,
self-determination for small nations and universal happiness!
He became the whipping boy for England's liberal set.
And through it all, he never stopped working.
In August 1822, he confessed,
"I am quite worn out. This is more than I can bear".
Four days later, he killed himself.
When the great statesman was brought here,
to Westminster Abbey, to be buried,
the hearse had to make its way through a mob of jeering protesters.
And could poor Castlereagh rest in peace? Not a bit of it.
Byron wrote this epitaph,
"Posterity will ne'er survey A nobler grave than this.
"Here lie the bones of Castlereagh.
"Stop traveller...and piss!"
Diplomacy is sometimes a thankless task.
It was April 2002 and Tony Blair and his team, including me,
had been invited to President Bush's Texas ranch,
for what the press were calling "a Council of War".
This was a crucial moment.
The big question was, "Would Blair put British
security on the line and sign on for regime change in Baghdad?"
On arrival, Blair was whisked off for a tete-a-tete with the President.
Indeed, for most of the weekend he was alone - no advisors,
nobody to record what was agreed. A diplomat's nightmare.
Meanwhile, the rest of us - Condi Rice, Alastair Campbell
and so on - went off to a nearby Tex-Mex restaurant for dinner.
The President's political guru, Karl Rove, flew in his bootmaker,
who measured me up for these superb specimens, suitably emblazoned
and adding at least two inches to your height.
I never did find out exactly what Blair committed to that weekend.
Afterwards, the Americans believed that he was on board for whatever
they decided to do in Iraq.
It may have been a case of good personal relations
leading to a hug too close.
But, in modern times, there's no doubt that Britain's security
has sometimes depended on how well the two at the top really get on.
In 1962, just before Christmas, two aircraft carrying
two national leaders flew towards the same destination.
They were heading for a show-down that would determine
Britain's international role, in particular, whether Britain could
continue to have a seat at the top table as a nuclear power.
Elderly Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan,
spent much of the flight
reading Gibbon's Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire.
History does not relate whether this was for amusement or for instruction,
but the harsh truth was that the British Empire too
was disintegrating. India had gone, colonies were breaking away
and Britain's recent bitter humiliation at Suez
had underlined our diminished, vulnerable position.
Macmillan would be negotiating from weakness,
a supreme test for diplomacy.
Much more comfortable was the popular young president
sitting in the other aircraft.
Something to drink, Sir?
Yeah, a Bloody Mary, please.
John F Kennedy had every reason to feel pretty sure of himself.
He was, after all, president of the most powerful nation
that the world had ever seen.
As Castlereagh and his Victorian successors had discovered,
this makes getting your way in the world a darn sight easier.
Macmillan staked his foreign policy on two things -
a close relationship with America
and on Britain's possessing an independent nuclear deterrent.
Now both were at risk.
America was threatening to go back on its offer
to sell Britain nuclear missiles.
So the stakes could not have been higher,
but riding on Air Force One with the President
was Macmillan's secret weapon,
a Brit with a very special relationship.
Her Britannic Majesty's Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
to the United States of America.
David Ormsby-Gore arrived in Washington in 1961.
He was considered a brilliant appointment
because of his brilliant contacts.
Macmillan's nephew by marriage and an old family friend of the Kennedys.
When I got the same job 36 years later, Number 10 told me to
"get up the arse of the White House and stay there".
Not very elegantly put, but I understood the point.
In diplomacy, access is everything,
and David Ormsby-Gore had access to the President
for which ambassadors would sell their grandmothers.
Ormsby-Gore was practically a family member of the Kennedys.
I was a consultant to the Kennedy administration
and he was infinitely closer to the Kennedys than I was
even though I was technically working in the White House.
Being his Private Secretary gave me an extraordinary
and a very exciting insight into what life was like
in what was called Camelot.
I mean, these glamorous characters
who piled into the British Ambassador's Residence,
including the President himself.
He impressed me immediately
as a very intelligent, likeable man who shared the same ideals
and objectives that Kennedy and I already shared.
So here we are in the British Embassy Residence,
3,100 Massachusetts Avenue.
This is where all the guests would come
when attending receptions or lunches or dinner.
In our time we reckoned we had about 12,000 of them every year.
You'd be greeted by the ambassador and his wife
somewhere round about there.
We'd stand here saying, "Good evening, how are you?
"Welcome to the British Embassy. This is my wife, Catherine."
After you've done that about 200 times your brain started to go,
and once I called my wife by the name of my ex-mother-in-law,
but you shake a lot of hands, you lose your sanity after a while.
This is the great ballroom. This is how you put networks
of high level contacts together, networks of influence.
You brought them into the house and gave them a good time.
That's new... That picture of the queen.
So you go down here towards the drawing room,
this is a very good place in which to just have a handful
of influential American friends. You could sit around in a circle here
and have a really good political discussion.
With his contacts both sides of the Atlantic,
Ormsby-Gore was the perfect middle man to oil the relationship
between President and Prime Minister.
A vital role, because by the end of 1962 Anglo-American relations
were strained almost to breaking point.
Early in December, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson
made his notorious speech declaring that Britain had
"lost an empire and not yet found a role".
Britain, I think, was struggling to find a role and hadn't at that point
decided whether to join the EEC, as it then was.
It had a difficult relationship with the United States
over the Suez crisis where Britain and France
had really been abandoned, as they might have seen it,
by the United States. Had not been supported by the United States.
Acheson's wild words have caused an international furore.
About the Acheson thing, Jack, it's Harold here,
Harold Macmillan. M-A-C...
I'm calling from London.
Now, look here, this thing doesn't represent the views
of your government, does it?
Oh!
Oh, goodbye, then.
Acheson's scorn exacerbated a row already brewing
between Britain and America over their co-operation
on a missile called Skybolt.
This was Britain's main hope for an independent nuclear future.
Ormsby-Gore was summoned to a meeting
with the Secretary for Defence, Robert McNamara.
There he heard that, while no final decision had been taken,
the Americans were seriously considering Skybolt's cancellation.
The missile was failing tests and proving exorbitantly expensive.
For any ambassador, news like this is red alert.
It demands an urgent report to London.
That evening, Ormsby-Gore's reporting telegram was sent off,
classified "emergency" and "top secret".
"I said I was sure he would realise that a decision to abandon
"the Skybolt programme would be political dynamite
"so far as the United Kingdom was concerned".
Harold Macmillan was furious.
He instructed the ambassador to make sure the President
didn't decide anything until the two sides had consulted.
Macmillan asked Ormsby-Gore whether he should telephone Kennedy.
Technology had, of course, moved on since Killigrew or Castlereagh
and it wouldn't be long before hotlines connected
the world's most powerful leaders.
But there are dangers to bypassing the local ambassador,
as Ormsby-Gore knew well.
A golden rule of diplomacy, that has remained unchanged by technology,
is to get your timing right when you deploy your biggest gun.
Ormsby-Gore advised Macmillan to hold off, only a face-to-face meeting
with Kennedy stood any chance of success.
It's very often thought that by telephoning your opposite number
every month or so
a head of Government can do the job perfectly well
that these expensive Ambassadors can't, don't need to do.
The fact is that an ambassador is a continuity man
in constant contact with the locals
and governments have found they can't do business
without some intermediary.
Diplomats tend to be professional, whereas much diplomacy these days
is conducted by politicians who are definitely not professional.
So a good diplomat spends a lot of time clearing up the mess,
trying to repair things politicians have either broken,
or trying to put into some usable form the very broad conclusions
which politicians have reached. It's a bit of a thankless task.
These days it's probably much more fun,
much more professionally interesting
in out-of-the-way countries where politicians are less tempted to go.
So it was that in late December, Prime Minister and President
set out for the Bahamas for the showdown over Skybolt.
It was highly unusual for a foreign ambassador
to travel on Air Force One,
but Ormsby-Gore's special relationship got him a ride
and half an hour's tete-a-tete with the President.
If you ditch Skybolt the consequences for our relations,
and the Prime Minister personally, will be very severe.
He would be desperately exposed and the Government might fall.
I fear also that if the British public think that they have been
let down by the United States,
a storm of anti-Americanism will sweep the country.
As I know myself, the Americans
are not overly sensitive to the domestic politics of others,
but, thanks to Ormsby-Gore's intervention, perhaps Kennedy
had begun to be persuaded that it was not in America's interest
to leave Macmillan high and dry
and provoke a political crisis in Britain.
Ambassador and President hammered out a deal.
The Americans would not themselves procure Skybolt, but would offer
to split its development costs 50-50 with the Brits.
Would this generous gesture of good faith be
enough to placate the Prime Minister and avoid a huge row in the Bahamas?
Mr Macmillan flew into the Bahamas late on Monday night
for what many of them were calling
the worst moment in Anglo-American relations since Suez.
# Welcome, welcome
# Macmillan and Kennedy... #
Then in the warm sunshine of this British island colony,
full airport ceremonial for the arrival of President Kennedy.
# The whole world is makin' a fuss
# About Skybolt you came up to discuss
# But you can be sure definitely
# We have the maximum security
# We don't mind Russia saying this or that
# Three cheers for the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack
# Yes, I said welcome, welcome
# Your visit to Nassau will go down in history... #
Ormsby-Gore had done all he could.
It was time to hand the diplomatic baton to the Prime Minister.
Ormsby-Gore briefed the Prime Minister on the 50-50 deal
that Kennedy was offering.
The Ambassador's groundwork mollified Macmillan,
but he'd already made up his mind.
If Skybolt wasn't good enough for the Americans,
it wasn't good enough for the British.
The talks were to take place at a secluded luxury villa, Bali Hai,
lent to Macmillan for the occasion.
This is the moment of truth, straight talking, statesman to statesman.
It's where personal chemistry can really make the difference
and luckily, Macmillan and Kennedy got on.
What made Macmillan so captivating for Kennedy
was that Kennedy was a bit of a romantic
and Macmillan seemed to him like a breath from Edwardian England,
where the great and the good were comfortable with the use of power
but weren't vulgarised by it.
Macmillan was able to play act the role of the wise Greek
to the sturdy young Roman Emperor.
Face-to-face personal chemistry is very important.
Perhaps more important now because of the number of occasions in which
they are actually face to face.
The fact that Macmillan and Kennedy were on those terms.
The fact that Margaret Thatcher was on bad terms with Helmut Kohl,
the German Chancellor.
They do make a difference. You must try and prevent them
so dominating the scene that you forget the realities.
I think some of the rhetoric about our relationship with America
does get out of control
and it arouses expectations which won't ever be fulfilled.
When the formal talks began,
Macmillan made the speech of his life.
He talked emotionally about British sacrifice in the wars,
he charted the historic friendship between America and Britain
and waxed lyrical about his own personal friendship with Kennedy
and he made it clear that all this was at risk if America attempted
to cut Britain out of the nuclear club.
What Macmillan now wanted was the new American weapon, that Britain had
no previous stake in, the submarine launched missile, Polaris.
Proven more reliable and cost effective than Skybolt, Polaris,
and only Polaris, he argued,
would keep the Anglo-American relationship alive.
To get his way, Macmillan pulled out all the diplomatic stops.
Alongside his emotional appeal, he kept everyone on edge
by repeatedly adjourning the discussions to consult
Ormsby-Gore and the team,
insisting that no agreement was better than a bad compromise.
It was a masterpiece of play acting and of diplomatic technique.
And it worked.
Against all the British expectations, and against the advice
of his own State Department, Kennedy agreed to let Britain have Polaris.
Kennedy would not have done that for the French,
he would not have done that for the Germans, the Italians,
not even for Israel which has
its own unique qualities of relationship.
So the fact that he did it for England -
I'd rather say he did it for Macmillan -
shows that the relationship was indeed special.
Britain got a bargain,
a better missile than Skybolt, without having to pay
any of the initial research and development costs.
This final agreement was reached by some masterly ambiguity
which blurred the lines between independence and interdependence.
Polaris would be under NATO except where Her Majesty's Government
may decide that the supreme national interests were at stake,
which is, of course, they only time you would need a nuclear weapon.
What was agreed here at Bali Hai
remains the basis of our security policy to this day and beyond.
In the 1980s, we acquired Trident, the successor to Polaris,
on similar terms and we're still committed
to Britain's remaining nuclear well into the 2040s.
At the end of the day, our security is in our own hands.
Of course we have the alliance with the United States but really,
even in the best circumstances, you should be able to defend yourself.
We had the nuclear technology, we were one of the first to acquire it.
I think our giving it up would've been a sign of resigning
from a leading role in the world.
It is the ultimate deterrent.
The security of Britain is the fundamental aim of British policy.
The threat to security comes in all shapes and sizes.
Not long ago it was the Soviet Union
and now you could argue that it's terrorism. In a few years' time,
it may be the threat from the deteriorating planet -
i.e. the threat will change, but, all the time,
your fundamental objective is the security.
The safety of these islands and the people who live in them.
Ormsby-Gore and Macmillan
achieved a remarkable victory for British diplomacy.
It cemented our position in the first rank of great powers,
it improved the relationship with the United States of America
and, above all, it protected our security in a nuclear world.
You might not have heard of Killigrew, Castlereagh or Ormsby-Gore
but the lesson of history is clear.
True national security is not possible without effective diplomacy.
In the next programme...
I'll explore the history of our troubled diplomatic relationship
with China, beset by rows over opium, protocol and Hong Kong,
and how it has so often come down to money.
Moolah.
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