This is the secret world of Whitehall. It's dominated by
three great offices of state that deal with money, power and crime.
In this three-part series, I'm talking to ministers
past and present and to normally camera-shy Whitehall mandarins
and telling the story of the great offices from the inside.
Tonight, the Foreign Office.
Many behind-the-scenes battles have been fought here, battles against
prime ministers and between Foreign Office mandarins and ministers.
'The Foreign Office regards the arrival of a new minister
'like an oyster regards the arrival'
of a grain of sand - the intrusion of an irritant
with a very low statistical probability
of ever producing a pearl.
'Mrs Thatcher? Oh, she didn't like the Foreign Office at all.
'Famously, she said,'
"We have a Department of Agriculture to look after farmers,
"a Department of Defence to look after the soldiers,
"and the Foreign Office to look after the foreigners."
The Foreign Office is the grandest of the three great offices,
and has long been a Palace of Dreams.
It was built at the height of our Victorian imperial power,
specifically to impress foreigners. Its grand staircase offers
a daunting introduction to the place for every new Foreign Secretary.
It's quite intimidating. On my first week here, I had to pinch myself
when I went into my office, and at some level you still feel that.
What's interesting about the diplomats, kings, presidents
who come here is that they're obviously struck by
the grandeur of it, but they really like it, they really like it.
They come into my room and say,
"I've been here before in 1984
"under Geoffrey Howe, and I'm really pleased to come back."
So there's a sense that they're having to perform on the big stage.
This is the Foreign Secretary's room, from where the Liberal
Sir Edward Grey looked out on the eve of the First World War.
When you stand and look out of the window where Grey said,
"The lanterns are going out all over Europe,
"and they may not be lit again in my lifetime,"
you have a very strong sense that this is a country
that has helped shape history.
Many of the problems in the world
started or had real links to this building.
Yesterday, I met the President of Afghanistan.
The Durand Line, 2,600 kilometres between Afghanistan and Pakistan,
was drawn by a man from this building.
It's still not agreed.
The countries named on that dome from the League of Nations
didn't work. The Locarno Rooms over there that were so-called after
the Treaties of Locarno in 1925, they were meant to foster amity and peace
between nations of Europe in the interwar period - a terrible failure.
So you have a sense of humility in this building, as well as
a sense of grandeur, and I think that's probably quite important.
The Victorian Lord Palmerston, who served for 15 years as
Foreign Secretary, had the Foreign Office built in the style
of a Renaissance palace to proclaim Britain's status in the world.
And today, even though we've lost an empire,
the Foreign Office sees itself as the institution that
allows Britain to punch above its weight on the international stage.
It has a network of over 250 embassies and consulates,
and Britain is a permanent member of the UN Security Council
with a seat at the top table of the European Union, the G8 and NATO.
And we have the military and intelligence muscle
to back our diplomacy.
As the self-proclaimed standard bearer of Whitehall,
the Foreign Office has always prided itself on recruiting
the brightest and best. Inside,
with conscious echoes of imperial Rome,
the faces on the statues of the men in togas aren't Romans
but Victorian men from the ministry.
You were clear that it was an elite service
and that it had a different examination
and the people were grand.
It was awesome, the actual building,
which was then dark and rather dirty and very post-war -
we're talking about 1952.
But it was awesome.
I think I was rather terrified of the Foreign Office
when I first went there.
Anyone above the age of about 40 was still wearing a bowler hat
every day, a black jacket and pinstripe trousers,
and even at my insignificant level, we were expected to wear
stiff white collars to be laundered every day.
And the old system of the Foreign Office still prevailed.
The most junior officers, desk officers,
sat there in groups of three or four in front of
coal fires which were topped up by messengers every hour or two.
The Foreign Office was very masculine, extremely few women.
We had an awful lot of sporting metaphors
when I joined the Foreign Office.
We kept straight bats on sticky wickets against pretty fast bowling,
and we went home at close of play.
Yes!
Foreign Office people always had a special something,
and they were almost the last generation for whom the word "duty"
could be used without people smirking.
At the top end, they recruited from very clever people, very competitive.
It was a remarkable accolade, if you were a 22 or 23-year-old,
to be offered a place in the Diplomatic Service, you see,
and it still is, they still recruit wonderfully well.
In contrast to the domestic civil service,
people in the Diplomatic Service
have, as the Scots would say, a very fine conceit of themselves,
and...certainly if they were suffering from any self doubt,
they didn't show it.
You mean that they were rather superior...? Well, they could be.
I mean, I actually got on with them absolutely fine, but one or two
predecessors had a difficult time in the Foreign Office, and if you're
not up to..."up to snuff", as they would say, you'd get spat out.
Well...where is the staircase?
'Robin Cook met his top officials on the day he was appointed
'New Labour's first Foreign Secretary.'
What they'd like to do, Secretary of State,
is just pause here for a second. Yes.
Shouldn't I have a globe to hold up or something?
Like the Budget box?
'After 18 years in opposition, Cook was determined not to
'become the creature of silky smooth Foreign Office mandarins.'
It's not a bad place you've got here.
Well, not bad for the son of a chemistry teacher.
Well, I think I'll take the jacket off and get down to business.
'This was built to impress foreigners.
'I must confess, particularly in the early days,
'it quite intimidated me.
'I said, after my first fortnight,'
that I wasn't quite clear
whether I had a Rolls-Royce of a support staff, which was
looking after me exceptionally well, or whether I'd been kidnapped
and taken into custody,
and the dividing line between these two concepts is actually pretty fine.
In the Foreign Office, there was an ethos that
foreign policy was somehow separate,
not something which politicians should be taking decisions.
There was an area of policy which was sort of over and above politics.
Well, that's hogwash, but that was felt by some people.
Over the years, a belief has grown up
that whichever politician is nominally in charge,
Foreign Office mandarins always pursue
their own enduring set of policies.
But senior diplomats dispute
whether the Foreign Office does seek to make ministers its mouthpiece.
'We don't set out to run the ministers who are put
'in charge of this department.'
These people are elected to run the government, and it would be absurd,
I think it would be a denial of the profession of public service,
to try and capture a minister in that way.
That's the stuff of the music halls,
the Sir Humphrey and the Yes Minister stuff.
We don't do that.
The Foreign Office regards the arrival of each new minister
like an oyster regards the arrival of a grain of sand -
the intrusion of an irritant with a very low statistical probability of
ever producing a pearl.
For the top mandarins who come to work in the grandest part
of the Foreign Office, the celebratory murals are
a daily reminder of the time when the British Lion strutted the globe.
But just over 50 years ago came a prime example of how their sense of
effortless superiority was to be tested to destruction.
The Suez Crisis of 1956 split the country down the middle.
Its chief architect was Sir Anthony Eden, who'd been
Foreign Secretary for 12 years before becoming Prime Minister.
Suez was a cautionary tale of what can happen when a Prime Minister
takes over foreign policy himself to the exclusion of the Foreign Office.
Eden had identified his enemy number one
as an Arab strongman.
The Egyptian president Colonel Nasser
was a charismatic nationalist and anti-colonialist.
He'd taken back into Egyptian hands
the Suez Canal, the jugular vein of the British Empire,
from the Anglo-French company that ran it.
REPORTER: It was Colonel Nasser, Egypt's dictator,
who seized the canal over two months ago.
His army has recently been strengthened by the provision of
arms and equipment from behind the Iron Curtain.
The Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd,
was widely regarded as a creature of the Prime Minister.
Eden and Lloyd met with their French opposite numbers to work out how to
deal with the Egyptian president.
Together, they hatched a plan to snatch back the Suez Canal
and to overthrow Colonel Nasser.
Their allies in the top-secret plot were the Israelis.
To work out the final details, Selwyn Lloyd was dispatched on
a cloak and dagger mission.
He was driven to Sevres, a Paris suburb, and, wearing a disguise,
the British Foreign Secretary met his French and Israeli
opposite numbers and their military chiefs.
D'abord, il a fait mauvaise impression...
TRANSLATOR: 'He didn't make a good impression
'on those who knew him because he had a false moustache on.
'It was ridiculous, and we wanted to laugh as he took it off.'
But the agreement Selwyn Lloyd reached with his co-conspirators
was no joke.
The plot was to bring down an Arab leader by invading his country.
The French record of the top-secret meeting shows it was agreed that
the Israelis would invade Egypt and Britain and France
would then intervene.
The plan went ahead.
British paratroopers were landed at Port Said.
The pretext was that British and French troops were going into Egypt
as peacekeepers.
In fact, the plan was to seize back the Suez Canal.
But the invasion caused the gravest consternation in the Foreign Office
amongst its senior officials, almost all of whom had been
deliberately kept out of the loop by Eden and Selwyn Lloyd.
'The Suez crisis was fascinating,
'because that generation of senior figures in the Foreign Office felt,
with a couple of exceptions -
one of whom was the permanent secretary -
they thought it was madness,
and many of them were excluded from the inner councils -
Eden wouldn't listen to the Foreign Office's legal adviser,
because he knew he was going to tell him it was illegal and unwise.
And it's a sign of insecurity, and a form of mania, too,
if you don't listen to the old pros in the Foreign Office.
Because Eden was presented - within a few days of the nationalisation of
the Suez Canal Company by Colonel Nasser -
with a Joint Intelligence Committee assessment,
which was remarkably prescient about what would happen
if we tried to go alone, or even with the French, without the Americans.
The United States was not consulted in any way
about any phase of these actions,
nor were we informed of them in advance.
We believe these actions to have been taken in error,
for we do not accept the use of force as a wise or proper instrument
for the settlement of international disputes.
Eden, who had lied to the Commons about Suez,
felt increasingly under siege.
He'd ordered all documents about the plot to be destroyed,
and when the White House threatened
to pull the plug on the pound sterling, Eden gave up the ghost.
Goodbye.
Eden resigned on health grounds after pulling our troops
out from Suez.
Selwyn Lloyd returned to the Foreign Office
through an arc of raised eyebrows but was later to be moved on.
Sir, I'm from the BBC. It sounds as though you had a wonderful send-off.
Have you any specific reactions now that you
leave the Foreign Office after such a long tenure of office?
Well, I leave the Foreign Office with great regret.
I've been there for seven-and-a-half years out of the last nine years,
and the Foreign Service is a wonderful service,
and no body of men and women could have served a Foreign Secretary
with greater loyalty, willingness nor efficiency than the way
in which I have been served, and I am very sorry to go.
Well, may we wish you a very happy birthday, sir?
I understand it is your birthday today.
Thank you very much.
The senior mandarins bidding farewell to Selwyn Lloyd had almost
to a man been sidelined over Suez, and their opposition to the whole
venture ignored by the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister.
Goodbye! Goodbye.
So the Foreign Office, though very battered because of
Britain's influence in the world,
particularly the Middle East having this terrible setback,
and the Anglo-American alliance being put under immense pressure,
to put it mildly,
felt that they had tried to speak truth unto power.
And it was a terrible scar, Suez, and indeed it affected the conduct
of British foreign policy for a generation afterwards.
Nasser's triumph showed that the age of
Palmerston-style gunboat diplomacy was long gone.
Well, the meaning of Suez is...
that there is an end to the mess of the 19th century.
The Suez story was a disaster which left a very long shadow.
The feeling that we had dropped from
being a great power to a very minor power
was a tremendous shock to Whitehall,
and particularly to the Foreign Office.
Suez caused a period of agonising reappraisal for the Foreign Office.
Our mighty empire was vanishing as in a dream,
and Britain had to find new territory to operate in.
The Elysee Palace in Paris. Having long stood proudly
in splendid isolation from Europe,
Britain had applied to join the Common Market,
but the French had kept saying, "Non".
But in 1971, the Prime Minister, Ted Heath,
continued the negotiations for entry
he'd begun ten years earlier as a Foreign Office minister.
With the full-hearted support of the Foreign Office, Heath went into
two days of tete-a-tete talks with President Pompidou.
'The press, by this time, were absolutely convinced that nothing was
'going to happen, the whole thing was a breakdown, and so we went in,
'and there they all were, all the British press looking rather fed-up,
'and we sat in two glorious chairs.'
And then President Pompidou said,
"Well, ladies and gentlemen, we have settled everything."
And the whole press... absolutely startled!
'It was wonderful to see them all.
Even our own people, our own civil servants were...shaken by the fact
that we had complete success.
Government organised fireworks
celebrated Britain's entry into Europe.
The life of the Foreign Office changed dramatically,
Brussels became the most frequent destination for
ministers and mandarins. But how would Britain adapt to the rules
of the European club which they had joined as Johnny-come-latelies?
British Foreign Secretaries were to discover they had a rather
different image in Europe from at home.
'One of the difficulties of the British Foreign Secretary,
'when he gets into his plane to go to Brussels or Paris,
he goes in the view of the British media as, on the whole,
a weak fellow, feeble, wet, bound to compromise, bound to give way,
'and who is at the top of a department which is
'tumbling over itself to compromise and sacrifice British interests.
'He'll be outwitted by those clever foreigners.
'His plane arrives an hour later in Brussels, and he emerges
'with quite a different reputation,
'as somebody much better briefed than anybody else, devious,
'intelligent and completely ruthless in the pursuit of British interests.
'So the Foreign Secretary suffers
'both from the image of the Foreign Office at home and from the image of
'Britain abroad, which are completely opposite.'
'Each month, foreign ministers from the 27 EU countries
'meet to try to agree common policies.
'The meetings are fuelled by regular infusions of caffeine,
'and ministers often seem to feel that an agreement is only worthwhile
'if it's reached in the small hours.
'The meetings offer Foreign Office diplomats the chance to
'deploy their deal-making skills and then to compose a communique
'for the media on what the Council of Ministers had actually agreed.'
The communiques, of course,
they drove you really up the pole,
because there's nothing that bureaucrats like better
than drafting.
And when you get,
as we were then, 12 members of the community drafting a communique,
every comma, every apostrophe was queried,
the translation between English and French, the nuances.
It went on and on and on and on.
We could use the verb "agree", could we?
"Decide." I would like to use the word "agree" rather than "decide".
I hope we don't have to...well...
They might prefer "agree".
I mean, "agree" is better, it's a treaty word.
They say they want "decide". Hmm, well.
I don't think we ought to accept that "decision" is definitely dead.
No, I don't. Eight people said this morning that they would prefer...
Exactly. .."declaration" to "decision",
but I'm not certain that that was bottom line for... No.
For all their skills at finding just the right form of words,
Foreign Office mandarins have over the years
been attacked as a gentleman's club,
a self-perpetuating elite drawn from far too narrow a social base.
New Labour's first Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook,
wanted to challenge what he saw as a cosy club.
He decided to use the Foreign Office's historic chambers
as recruiting offices to transform its traditionally stuffy image into
one more representative of modern Britain.
One of the reasons why we end up with recruits who are mostly from
public schools and Oxbridge is because other people aren't applying.
Wow! I don't think I've seen this room so full.
'Potential recruits were invited into Cook's inner sanctum.'
So, Mr Robin, do you like your new office? Yeah, I like my office.
I'm trying to change the paintings -
that fellow over there I felt, he's not the modern image I would like.
My problem is finding something to replace it
because you need something that big, that shape,
and the trouble is, all the paintings that are that big
are backward-looking, ideologically unsound. We're working at it.
Cook had the painting removed
and replaced for a time with an antique mirror.
But he too was to be unceremoniously removed by the Prime Minister.
Some years later, Tony Blair shook up the traditionally male
Foreign Office by appointing Margaret Beckett as
the first ever female foreign secretary, to her astonishment.
'What did you say when he gave you the job?'
Nothing repeatable on a family show!
I heard you used the "F" word, you were quite surprised.
And I heard from Jack Straw that's exactly what HE said when HE was
asked to be Foreign Secretary, so it's a track record!
I can't quite remember, is the answer. I mean,
I may have said, you know, "Oh, dot, dot, dot..."
The "F" word?. No, I don't think it was.
I think it was...
the "C" word.
No, not...! I said "Oh, Christ" or something, or, "Oh, cripes."
Something like that.
The question was, what is the point of the FCO now?
The answer is, there has never been
a more important time for foreign policy.
Never been a greater need for a dedicated foreign service
of the highest quality.
We are lucky in ours.
Let's keep it that way.
'But among her dedicated, high-quality officials,
'there were some who were less than elated by their female boss.'
Obviously, for them, it was new territory.
They'd had Jack for so long and they were used to Jack.
'The people around me were very supportive.
'Equally though, I got the impression that across the Foreign Office,
'there were those who thought there was something profoundly wrong
'about having a woman as Foreign Secretary.
'I found it a bit difficult to believe in this day and age.
'But there you go.'
From within the Foreign Office, some officials used
the cloak of anonymity to brief the press against Margaret Beckett.
I thought it was a bit contemptible.
But I thought they'd have to get used to it. Get used to you? Mmm.
There was a quote in one of the pieces I read,
which allegedly came from a foreign office official, that
you were inaudible, invisible, and incompetent as Foreign Secretary.
I thought that was a very clever phrase from a very stupid man.
Do you know who it was? No idea, don't care.
I don't think highly enough of him,
whoever he is, to want to know who he is.
David Milliband took the place of Margaret Beckett
when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister.
Brown wanted his youthful political rival
to bring a modern management style to the old Palace of dreams.
We are a permanent member of the Security Council,
a leading member of the European Union,
we've got to be a country that behaves in a serious way
and we, I think, have to take seriously that responsibility.
I suppose the building brings that out. There's a danger of faded glory,
and we work very hard to make sure we don't fall into that trap.
The trap...the faded glory comes, I think, in two forms.
One, that you're not a serious player, or secondly, that you
try to behave in the way your predecessors did 50 or 100 years ago.
And if I behaved like that, I wouldn't be taken seriously either.
The thoroughly modern Milliband produced this booklet,
which was distributed to all our diplomatic posts abroad.
It included peel-off stickers to encourage good work by staff.
And Milliband became the first Foreign Secretary
with his own video blog on the Web.
Hello and welcome to the FCO's new blog pages.
These blog pages, where ministers and officials of the Foreign Office,
ambassadors, but also young entrants into the Foreign Service,
will be talking about priorities, the ideas, the values that underpin
British foreign policies,
are intended to open up
what too often has been a secret garden of diplomacy.
The most exotic plant in the secret garden of diplomacy is MI6,
the secret intelligence service.
MI6 comes under the authority of the Foreign Secretary and sends
our spies around the world, often under diplomatic cover.
Until recently, the Foreign Office wasn't prepared publicly
even to acknowledge the existence of its secret intelligence service.
Too great an openness about a secret service lands you into an awful lot
of trouble, and as we've tried to be more and more open about MI6,
so we land ourselves in more and more trouble.
In my day it was simple - it didn't exist.
Of course, everybody knew it existed, it was absurd!
But it's...quite often those absurdities are quite helpful.
And how did you refer to MI6 in the Foreign Office?
Well, formally and publicly, I never referred to it.
No, but within the Foreign Office?
I'm sure that's secret.
I thought the phrase is "the friends."
"What do 'our friends' say?"
My lips are sealed. Some things you take to the grave with you.
The panoply of protection that goes with Intelligence
has an insidious power
because this has been secretly obtained and you mustn't leave
this paper lying around. There's a man standing beside you with
a locked box, he's going to take it away as soon as you've read it.
You attach slightly more importance to it, probably,
than if you'd read exactly the same thing in the newspaper that morning.
And sometimes, it seemed to me that
you could have read exactly the same thing in the newspaper that morning.
But it's exciting and it's...it has this extra dimension of secrecy.
So I think sometimes ministers, particularly,
attach more importance to
Intelligence that has come covertly than they should.
Intelligence failures very often come, not because you can't see
what's happening, but because you misinterpret the intentions,
and when you misinterpret the intentions,
it's known as the Wykehamist fallacy.
You read their intentions as if
they'd been educated at Winchester, you know, and they haven't been,
they're a bunch of thugs.
And actually their intentions aren't our sort of intentions
and they may not be bluffing, they may be out to do
something catastrophically dangerous.
The Foreign Office is also responsible for GCHQ,
which runs a worldwide eavesdropping network
to intercept the communications of Britain's enemies.
But while it's natural to seek to find out
what one's enemies are up to,
what about our friends in Europe?
It's been reported that successive British Prime Ministers
and foreign secretaries
have had the advantage of secret intelligence reports
on our European partners, when negotiating with them in the EU.
Did MI6 provide you with intelligence
on our European allies and what they were doing?
Well, I don't believe you should spy on your European allies,
I'm quite clear about that.
Europe is a different relationship to most other ones
and I think you don't spy on your friends.
Well, I must say, I used to go to Paris,
I used to discuss all sorts of things with my French colleagues.
I can't believe they would ever spy on me
under any circumstances, I simply can't.
They wouldn't do that, would they?
But would you spy on them?
That's a separate question. You'll have to ask, you know, whoever.
Does MI6, SIS, spy on our partners in Europe?
One never comments on intelligence matters.
Does MI6 spy on our own European allies?
I'm never going to go into detail about what we do
or what we don't do.
Nobody ever goes that. But I'm just telling you that
what MI6 does, as MI5 does and GCHQ does, is ensure that it works
in the national interest
and that all its operations are lawful and ethical.
That's always a very sensitive thing and I can't talk much about it,
even now. But...
how shall I put it? I wasn't left in ignorance.
You weren't left in ignorance because MI6
was spying on our European allies?
Well, I had a whole... you know,
whole flow of information coming in all the time
which they could supplement,
but I really don't want to say more than that. Why not?
Because there are ways and means of doing things,
which continue no doubt, though I have no knowledge of that,
and anyway, which I'm not really supposed to...
don't want to talk about.
The absolutely key relationship
for the Foreign Office is with the Prime Minister of the day.
The Foreign Office looms physically
over 10 Downing Street, but Prime Ministers often want
to be their own foreign secretaries and cut a dash on the world stage.
This has led to a number of battles royal,
with No.10 often accusing the Foreign Office
of being temperamentally inclined to kowtow to foreigners.
The toughest negotiations any Foreign Secretary has
are always with his own Prime Minister.
For the Foreign Secretary to be effective, he has to have the backing
of the Prime Minister and his cabinet colleagues.
Otherwise, he's ineffective.
And the worst thing any Foreign Secretary can do, really,
is say to his other colleagues,
"Well, of course I agree with you,
"but she - meaning Mrs Thatcher - won't."
Or alternatively, some other Prime Minister won't.
That's the worst thing you can do.
When Margaret Thatcher came to office, in her early days,
like most Prime Ministers,
she said she would concentrate her energies on the home front.
The Foreign Office had no idea what was about to hit them.
Good Afternoon.
Margaret Thatcher had not the slightest experience
of the Foreign Office when she went to No.10 and didn't regret it.
Mrs Thatcher's view of the Foreign Office was
never a very generous one.
I think it's one of the curious shortcomings
about her qualifications for the job, actually.
That unlike most Prime Ministers,
she'd never held any of the great offices of state.
She would love to have been Chancellor,
so she had a love/hate relationship with the Treasury.
She knew it and wanted it, but never had it.
She never had that sort of love/hate relationship
with the Foreign Office, she was always wary of it.
She didn't like the Foreign Office. Famously she said,
"We have a Department of Agriculture to look after farmers,
"a Department of Defence to look after the soldiers,
"and the Foreign Office to look after the foreigners."
Mrs Thatcher quickly began to relish her role on the world stage
and liked to quote the line
that when it came to standing up for British interests,
the Foreign Office was just a hotbed of cold feet.
The Foreign Office thought I didn't have much skill at diplomacy,
certainly diplomacy wasn't my forte.
It was a policy that was right for Britain which was my forte
and certainly I spoke with a directness,
a truth and a strength,
to which they were not used
and they might even, some of them, have been shocked.
After all, their whole culture
was not sense of purpose, sense of direction,
it was compromise,
it was negotiation, it was diplomacy.
Compromise was a dirty word in Mrs Thatcher's political lexicon.
She felt that we, because we spent so long studying foreigners
and learning their languages and living in their countries,
that from time to time we forgot
who paid us and where our interests were.
She used to hate that expression,
"Let's find a form of words, Prime Minister."
That sort of implied to her,
papering over our differences and distinctions
and trying to obscure concessions.
No, she wanted it black and white and she liked to confront
people and issues very directly.
The Argentine invasion of the Falklands,
ordered by General Galtieri's military junta,
played to Mrs Thatcher's black and white world view.
The Falklands had long been British territory,
which the Argentines passionately believed belonged to them.
But the junta's military occupation of the islands
came as a complete surprise to the Foreign Office.
It was a failure of our diplomatic and intelligence services.
The Foreign Office was accused of having signalled to the junta
that Britain no longer cared about the Falklands.
Lord Carrington, who was Mrs Thatcher's Foreign Secretary,
felt compelled to resign.
I mean, this was an appalling humiliation for the British
and there was a deep sense of outrage in the country.
I felt that somebody
had better take the blame for what had happened
and we ought to clear the deck
so that we didn't have a sort of internal dispute
about who was responsible.
So it cleared the air. I think it was absolutely right to resign.
I've just taken over from Lord Carrington,
who was a very fine Foreign Secretary,
very fine indeed. And of course my first concern
is the affair of the Falkland Islands
and I've already started on work on that this evening.
Francis Pym, an Old Etonian like Lord Carrington,
was a political rival,
whom Mrs Thatcher had felt forced to appoint
to try to steady the ship.
But she was almost immediately at odds with him.
Knowing her political survival was at stake, Mrs Thatcher was convinced
that force was the only language the junta would understand.
But she was dismayed when Francis Pym
and his top Foreign Office officials warned her strongly
about the grave dangers of military action.
Well, I do think it's spineless when you put all the difficulties.
They wanted us to negotiate. You can't negotiate away an invasion,
you can't negotiate away
that the freedom of your people has been taken.
Taken by a cruel dictator.
You've got to stand up and you've got to have the spine to do it.
Mrs Thatcher dispatched a naval task force
to sail the 8000 miles to the South Atlantic.
It was part of a twin-track approach.
The prospect of war, coupled with diplomatic efforts to prevent it,
led by her Foreign Secretary.
For all his somewhat fey manner,
Francis Pym had won a Military Cross during the Second World War,
though some saw his diplomatic efforts
as little more than appeasement.
I thought it was my duty as Foreign Secretary to go to the
ultimate limits in trying to find a way of not having to go to war.
I had three years of war in a tank in a desert and in Italy of many,
many battles I was involved in.
And anybody who'd been through that experience
would want to avoid it if they possibly could.
I'm not in the business of appeasement.
Appeasement is wrong.
It only encourages dictators.
Dictators have to be beaten.
Appeasement is no part
of my psyche.
Mrs Thatcher thought the Foreign Office were a bunch of appeasers -
always wanting to negotiate away sovereignty and all the rest of it.
And there's two ways of looking at that.
One of the great reasons for having a top flight diplomatic
service and a really good Foreign Office, is that you avoid war.
One of the prime requirements
of any country, let alone an open society like us, is to avoid war.
And if you avoid war, you save blood and you save treasure
and you pay for yourself many times over
by just preventing one conflict.
And so their entire bias is to solve international disputes
through talk and reason rather than war, except as a very last resort.
And that can be seen, if you're a Prime Minister
who thinks in terms of primary colours, as appeasement.
But it isn't necessarily.
And in retirement, she said some terrible things about them.
About, my job was to "buy a backbone and put it into the Foreign Office"
or words like that.
Mrs Thatcher unleashed the task force after diplomacy had failed.
Our ships were bombed as we prepared to land.
The battle for the Falklands would turn out to be a damned
close-run thing.
But in the end, we won a famous victory.
Mrs Thatcher took the salute at the victory parade.
And she remarked privately, "In the Falklands, I thought I was fighting
two enemies at the same time - the Argies and the Foreign Office."
Margaret Thatcher felt she'd taught the Diplomatic Service a lesson
in what could be achieved by standing up for Britain.
And she now decided that if the depictions
of Britain's glorious past in the Foreign Office
could be seen more clearly,
it might inject some backbone into its diplomats.
She sanctioned extensive restoration works.
When the elaborate work
on the Foreign Office had been finished, I was Foreign Secretary
and we gave a party in the Locarno Room, which is full of splendid gold.
And I stood at the top of the stairs and I was slightly alarmed
when I saw the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, approaching.
Of course, she'd been asked.
Because I never quite knew, because of these mixed feelings
she had about the Foreign Office, she might well say...
she was capable of saying, "What a terrible waste of money!
"This money could have been better spent elsewhere."
But she was beaming and she said...
she always spoke to me as if I was going to disagree with what she said.
She said, "You see Douglas, you know,
"you've got to remember,
"you've got to keep these places in really good state.
"It's terribly important".
And she swept on very happy and I was happy too.
Officials were determined to keep the newly refurbished Foreign Office
up to snuff. Tons of accumulated pigeon droppings
had been cleared from the office roofs,
and they brought in an avian predator.
She's a North American Harris Hawk,
lives in sort of Arizona, around that sort of area.
This is Jess, she's a four-year-old one,
and we just use her for, like, the pigeon control.
The hawk's instincts seem to mirror
Margaret Thatcher's own style of diplomacy.
My job is to come every other day
to make the pigeons think that she's a resident hawk.
Can you just stand back a second? Thank you, Madam.
Sometimes her own Foreign Secretary would be in the Iron Lady's sights.
Tensions between the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister are not unknown.
They're always bound to develop with the passage of time as prime
ministers become more confident of their own view
and more experienced in the world they're trying to deal with.
And it becomes all the more important for Prime Minister
and Foreign Minister to retain a close working relationship
to hammer out such differences
in advance rather than in public.
We have achieved that, because we have been able,
during the two terms in office,
to move Britain from the sidelines
to the centre of the European Community.
Mrs Thatcher's relationship with her Foreign Secretary
grew steadily worse over the years.
I think they were a rather effective duo, in a way,
provided neither tried to play the other's role.
Trouble is, of course,
both of them often wanted to play the other's role, as well.
I used to sit there
in bilateral meetings which the Foreign Secretary
and Prime Minister had once a week if they were both in London.
I used to feel I was almost like a marriage counsellor
seeing this relationship breaking down
and being helpless to do much about it.
Charles Powell had been a high-flying young diplomat
when he was sent to No.10 on a short secondment
as Mrs Thatcher's foreign affairs adviser.
But he quickly became indispensable to her,
particularly over Europe, where she was much more Euro sceptic
than the Foreign Office, and there was a major battle
over a speech that Mrs Thatcher was to make in Belgium.
The College of Europe in Bruges had long been pestering
for Margaret Thatcher to give a speech there
and they said that every other head of Government in Europe had done it
and she should do it.
So the Foreign Office recommended it and I used to say to them,
"Look, I wouldn't. I don't know what will come out of this
"if you give her this opportunity,
"you may not be happy with the outcome."
"No, no, only Britain has not given this speech.
"She really has to do it."
So all right, we ended up we were going to do it.
From his office in No.10,
Charles Powell worked on the first draft
of Mrs Thatcher's Bruges speech,
and with her approval, sent it over to the Foreign Office for comment.
What was the reaction when the first draft of the speech
was sent to the Foreign Office? Horror. Horror? Yes.
I would resist "horror". The Foreign Office is never horrified -
the Foreign Office reacted with reasoned argument.
Horror...? Well, horror because she was taking
such a forceful view about how
power should be exercised in Europe.
But part of it was weariness - "Oh, God, here she goes again.
"All our careful work in keeping things on an even keel" -
a favourite Foreign Office expression -
"with our European partners is going to be put at risk,
"because she's determined to stir things up
"and put a different point of view."
Partly, "Oh, God, we don't say things this way,
"this is not our style of explaining Britain's European policy."
I remember thinking it wouldn't do.
I thought the tone was unnecessarily critical
and self-defeating.
Foreign Office attempts
to delete what they saw as inflammatory passages
and substitute more emollient language were rejected by No.10.
My anxiety was that certain passages which
had been, I thought,
too abrasive and striking the wrong note -
which we thought we'd had changed -
had reappeared, if anything in a stronger form.
We have not successfully rolled back
the frontiers of the State in Britain
only to see them reimposed at European level,
with a European superstate
exercising a new dominance from Brussels.
Geoffrey Howe's view of the speech and the attitudes towards Europe -
he thought it revealed, he said,
"I thought it was a little bit like being married to a clergyman
"who suddenly proclaimed his disbelief in God."
I should think it probably took him five years to think of that phrase.
She said of you that "He fell into the habit that
"the Foreign Office seems to cultivate
"of subordinating national interests to negotiating tactics.
"In the end, his vision became finding a form of words."
Yes. A grotesque parody and a remarkable insight into
her own LACK of insight.
COCKERELL LAUGHS
She talked about your insatiable appetite for compromise,
and that would sometimes lead her to lash out at you in front of others.
Yes, that's certainly right.
But one could hardly accuse HER
of having an insatiable appetite for compromise.
It needed someone around to moderate
that lack of appetite for compromise.
Charles Powell's power at No.10 had grown so much
that he was increasingly referred to as "the real Foreign Secretary".
And senior mandarins felt that one of their own
had gone over to the enemy.
This made life difficult for Powell's younger brother Jonathan,
who pronounced his name "Pow-ell",
and was a fast rising young diplomat in the Foreign Office.
Well, I had a unique view of No.10 when I was in the Foreign Office
because my brother was Mrs Thatcher's foreign policy adviser
and had been there for many years, so I was seen with some suspicion
as somehow related to Charles and therefore responsible for him.
At the Permanent Secretary's morning meetings
people would be sniggering about some terrible thing
that Charles had done to the Foreign Office,
and then all looking at me as if I was responsible.
So I did have this erm... this feeling.
And I remember Douglas Hurd interviewed me for the job of
one of the assistant private secretaries at one stage,
and at the end he said, "I'm not sure I can do that -
"there'll be a Pow-ell/Poe-ell problem."
Because my brother calls himself "Poe-ell".
So I always sort of felt put in a bit of a disadvantage
in the Foreign Office because
Charles was there running foreign policy from No.10.
I'd poisoned the trail for him, had I?
Well, I mean, it seems to me
he was lucky to have been turned down - he clearly got a better job
as a result of it, so I don't think he need feel too badly about that.
Ironically, Jonathan Powell was recruited by another
destiny Prime Minister, and was the Powell behind the throne
throughout Tony Blair's years in No.10.
JONATHAN POWELL: When Tony Blair came to office, as with Thatcher,
they were interested in domestic rather than foreign policy.
It's when they realise what they've got to do
in terms of foreign policy, how much of the responsibility lies on them -
that's when they get fascinated by it.
And were you aware of how the Foreign Office saw Tony Blair
in terms of what was said to be a marginalising of the Foreign Office,
because he would take over foreign policy himself?
Well, yes, I knew precisely what they thought. When my brother was there
they felt that Thatcher had been marginalising the Foreign Office
and foreign policy.
And when we were there, they thought the same thing.
There's always a sense in the Foreign Office
that No.10 is trying to trump them,
trying to run foreign policy and it should be left to them.
But for the Prime Minister
it is somehow easier to make things happen in foreign policy.
You can by saying or doing something change things in a way that
takes a much longer time in domestic policy. In health or education
there's a long hard grind to make things change.
Foreign policy - by attending a conference or agreeing an EU budget,
you can make a bold stroke much more easily.
But it was on the question of the use of military force
that Blair made his boldest strokes and battled with the Foreign Office.
Tony Blair went along with the US view
that Saddam Hussein was the West's enemy number one in the Middle East.
Saddam was accused of having weapons of mass destruction
that were an immediate threat to Britain.
Secret plans were drawn up by Britain and America
to overthrow Saddam by force.
Two months before the invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair arrived
to address a unique meeting in London.
All 150 senior British ambassadors from across the world had been
summoned to attend the meeting, and Tony Blair began
with a tongue-in-cheek compliment to them.
Thank you very much indeed.
It's my great pleasure to come along this afternoon and to begin by
saying a word of thanks as Prime Minister
for all the help that the Foreign Office...um...
give Prime Ministers over the years.
The wonderful advice,
the unstinting spirit of cooperation and help
which has seen me through many difficult situations.
Among the ambassadors at the meeting
was the distinguished career diplomat Sir Ivor Roberts.
It was extraordinary to be at this meeting of ambassadors -
the first time that such a meeting had been convened
of every ambassador and high commissioner in the globe,
brought back to the Foreign Office for a meeting
addressed by the Prime Minister, addressed by the Foreign Secretary.
And there was this enormous elephant in the room that wasn't
addressed, which was the Iraq war.
Absolutely extraordinary.
One of the most fundamental foreign policy decisions,
certainly in my professional career,
and on a par with Suez,
wasn't open for discussion.
And meanwhile we spent an inordinate amount of time
on management process and management speak.
The phrases that were regularly trotted out of
synergies, value for money, silo building, empowerment, push-back...
These are all candidates for a game of bullshit bingo,
and they're not worthy terms, I think, for use in modern diplomacy.
Sir Ivor Roberts said that there was this great meeting of ambassadors
before the war in Iraq was declared, and it was all
Wall Street management speak and all the ambassadors were there and
none of them were asked their view about the forthcoming war in Iraq.
I'm not really in a position to comment on it,
but I do think it's a good thing
if the Foreign Office thinks a bit more about management.
It's been quite antediluvian in the past.
Inside the Foreign Office, there were real questions
about whether No.10 was keeping the Foreign Secretary Jack Straw
and his officials in the loop over Iraq.
How much had Tony Blair involved the Foreign Office in the policy,
and Jack Straw, in the run-up to war?
I think the Foreign Office felt, and I'm pretty sure they were right,
that even if they were as explicit as they could be in their anxieties
about the run-up to the war, and the legal position,
that Tony Blair was going to do it anyway.
They had become really quite considerably marginalised
compared to the great department of state they'd once been.
They hadn't got the self-confidence that they once had,
and I think the run-up to the Iraq war
was another blow to them.
I suppose what some of the Foreign Office feel
is that they were kind of cut out of the loop,
and big decisions would be taken
despite what the Foreign Office felt or thought about it.
Well, you have a discussion about foreign policy...
They weren't cut out, they were always informed meticulously
by letters which have made their way into newspapers all too often.
But letters were written from No.10
informing them exactly of the discussions -
but they weren't the ones who got to make the decisions.
They would be made by the Prime Minister
on advice from the Foreign Office and elsewhere.
It isn't necessarily going to be what they want.
A million people took to the streets to try to prevent war in Iraq.
Their route was to take them past the Foreign Office and No.10.
PROTESTOR: We don't want your slaughter in the Middle East,
we don't want your blood for oil...
Only one senior Foreign Office mandarin had resigned over Iraq,
and Jack Straw publicly supported Tony Blair's position on the war.
I like Jack Straw, I've known him for over 30 years,
and I don't know,
but I have a suspicion that one day
he will come out after time has elapsed
and say he didn't really believe in that war.
Certainly without a specific UN authorisation, which we didn't get.
He strove mightily to get it till the very last minute.
I'm sorry to disappoint Peter Hennessy,
but I'm comfortable about the decisions I took,
and I was responsible for them. And I could have stopped the war.
You could have stopped the war? How?
I could have stopped Britain's involvement.
If I'd said to the House of Commons, "I don't think we should go to war",
there's no way they would have voted for it.
If I'd left the Government, that would have been it.
Were you ever tempted to do that?
Not at... No, I mean what...
It doesn't quite work that way because what happened was that
in the weeks... What I was anxious to try and do
in the weeks leading up to March
was to ensure that the United Kingdom could go down a different path.
And so was Tony. Although I think that he was
always more ready to embrace the idea of military action.
For the second time in 50 years the Foreign Office,
whose prime duty is to use diplomacy to prevent war, had
had been sidelined by No.10 over a British invasion in the Middle East.
A Prime Minister had used what many people saw as a concocted case
for going to war,
and our diplomats, who'd long prided themselves on their
expertise in Arab affairs, had once again been powerless to prevent war.
There was nobody left who had personal memories of Suez,
but I think for that generation in the Foreign Office,
2003 was comparable to 1956 for two generations before.
It was the great blot
in their career life as officials,
and it was something which they will never forget
and will affect them profoundly
to the end of their days in Crown Service.
I really do think it was comparable to Suez for their generation.
Lord Palmerston's palace was built to protect and promote
Britain's interests across the globe.
But in recent years the Foreign Office has suffered
both from the No.10 takeover of foreign policy
and from Treasury spending cuts,
raising the question whether this great office of state
is now more show than substance.
LORD HURD: The whole weight of the Foreign Office has become less.
I think that Tony Blair assisted in that process.
I think we're
diminishing our overall representation,
I think that some particular closures of posts are unwise.
And I have a feeling, as I've said in debate,
that the Foreign Office itself,
the process of advice in London, has become somewhat hollowed out.
You don't have quite those reserves of experience and wisdom
available to the Foreign Secretary which there used to be.
Do you accept this idea that
the Foreign Office has been "hollowed out"?
No, I think that's nonsense.
I think the Foreign Office is every bit as capable as it was,
every bit as well manned as it was.
I think that the nature of foreign policy has changed
and will carry on changing, and you will get more done
between leaders themselves,
and that will mean that there is less for ambassadors to do.
Communications change - old-fashioned telegrams
or before that letters were the key way of communicating,
and often would take weeks and months to come back to England.
Now, just as the 24-hour news, you have 24-hour diplomacy.
Well, the people who alerted me first, oddly enough, to the decline
in the relative position of the Foreign Office
in the constellation of departments,
were my friends in the Secret Intelligence Service.
MI6? Yup.
And they first alerted me by telling me how they were
really quite upset at the number of research analysts being cut back.
Because the first people the SIS would
try their special stuff on
were the research analysts of the Foreign Office,
to see what was new and what wasn't.
And they felt rather bereft, because they were being thinned out
because of budget cuts.
But one of them put it really rather wonderfully.
A veteran of the Cold War. He said to me,
"The two pillars that sustained my Secret Intelligence Service,
"for the bulk of my time,
"have both gone -
"the Soviet Union and the Foreign Office."
And that's when I realised how serious it was getting.
The Foreign Office never publicly expresses doubts
about its superior status.
Yet in recent times, it's often seemed to resemble
less a great office of state, and more a palace of dreams.
Next time, the Treasury.
The oldest of the three great offices,
it's the ministry of tax and tears.
In Whitehall, knowledge is power, and the Treasury likes to think
it knows most of all.
KENNETH CLARKE: The Treasury was a brilliant department,
the best department I ever served in.
It's like an Oxbridge college -
brilliant minds engaged in open debate,
and completely detached from the real world.
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