Weidenfeld £20 pp288
Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, what did you think of the book? Sir Christopher Meyer’s kiss-and-tell memoir of his life and times in diplomacy has reduced the media and Downing Street to apoplexy beyond a publicist’s wildest dreams. The reader hesitates to ask what is in it. How did it pass the vetting committee, which normally censors and bans such stuff? Could it contain nothing more sensational than some prime ministerial underwear?
Meyer’s book reveals no state secrets. Its chief victims are British politicians and their ill-mannered aides. I can see why a committee of civil servants might have thought them fair game. As for Meyer, he would get his comeuppance from the Establishment. So why spoil a good time for all?
The book mostly reads like a series of Garrick Club anecdotes. “I say, did I tell you about the time when I . . .” The first-person singular seems the subject of every sentence, mostly conjugating the verbs to meet, to wine, to dine and to speak. It confirms my suspicion that British diplomacy can rot the most talented mind with mind-numbing lists of dinners and guests, trivial small-talk and no sign of a cost/benefit analysis. Meyer reports typically, “Having lunch after a game of tennis, Condi [Rice] agreed with [my wife] Catherine that Putin was an attractive man who walks like an athlete.” I found myself wondering how much this dazzling aperçu cost the British taxpayer.
Modern embassies supposedly offer local rest and relaxation to those hurtling across the firmament of power. Politicians and their aides enjoy none of a diplomat’s comfort or job security and are entitled to some discretion in return. No man is a hero to his valet, and no minister to an embassy abroad. Nor, despite what Meyer said last week, do politicians make a practice of abusing civil servants in their memoirs when the latter are still in office. I have some sympathy with the anger that Meyer has provoked.
That said, I cannot detect any material not revealed already in a dozen American memoirs of the pre-Iraq period. The book is not a discourse on international relations. Meyer is not a student of foreign affairs in the manner of such predecessors as Lord Renwick or Sir Percy Cradock. He is not the man for Chatham House or Ditchley Park.
But he is a first-class, up-market gossip columnist. The newspaper extracts have been, as he well knew, heavily biased against his subjects. But the publicity they have won is due to his undeniably vivid pen. Hence the celebrated account of John Major’s ablutions, Tony Blair’s tight jeans and John Prescott’s malapropisms. We learn, from earlier in Meyer’s career, the FO rules on diplomatic sex: “white, single, female and Nato”. A minister, Liz Symons, sits next to George Bush “like a teenager in the presence of Brad Pitt”. Meyer and Blair are together in a Rolls-Royce asking each other, “Can this be happening to me?” When Stevie Wonder sings My Cherie Amour to Blair’s wife, she is so star-struck as to be overwhelmed.
Small wonder this book is the story of Blair (and Meyer) being snowed rotten by the glamour of power. They are like mendicants at a medieval court. As the dinner list lengthens, the reader begins to sense something sinister. Blair’s total susceptibility to American flattery, to the White House, Camp David and the Crawford ranch turned his head and induced in him a rhetorical crescendo of unconditional support. Britain would fight alongside America, said Blair, “however tough . . . no grandstanding, no offering implausible and impractical advice from the touchline . . . We will stay with you to the last”. That line, always received with thunderous applause, was, as Meyer points out, “a line with consequences”.
The climax of the book is Blair finding himself at war in Iraq. Meyer’s controversial thesis is that this war might have gone otherwise had Blair used the leverage that he, Meyer, had carefully prepared for him. I am sceptical of this. Diplomats are much given to believing that when they have “rolled the pitch”, politicians have no excuse for not scoring runs. He admits that the decision to oust Saddam Hussein was taken by Bush and Blair in early 2002, but was concealed by Blair from parliament for a further year. From then on Blair was trapped.
Meyer makes much of his own social bonding with Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz — to all of whom he seems as susceptible as was Blair. He shared their unquestioning belief in Saddam’s weapons threat. He is blind to Cheney’s illiberal fanaticism and Wolfowitz’s astonishing naivety about Iraq. He thinks Britain could have secured a proper post-invasion plan, yet shows no awareness of the feuding over this subject within Washington at the time, crucial though it is to the leverage thesis.
It is fanciful that the neocon mafia would have agreed to alter their deeply flawed policy just because London leant on them. Meyer remarks that “there is no substitute for being as tough and direct in negotiation as the Americans are invariably with us”. How then did he leave Blair so unaware that America and Britain have always kept apart when either has no dog in the other’s fight? The Americans stayed out of the second world war, Suez and the Falklands. Britain stayed out of Vietnam. But that does not confer leverage. It merely leaves Britain free not to go to war, a freedom Blair seems never to have contemplated.
America is the one country where a British diplomat is allowed to “go native”. Meyer freely boasts his liking for Bush rather than Blair, though he often admires Blair’s mastery of platitude. He oozes contempt for the British cabinet and Downing Street staff, against Washington’s “big beasts”.
As a result we often sense the nakedness of the ambassadorial emperor. Meyer’s fury at being excluded from dinners is comical. He seems equally miffed at being sidelined by Downing Street and the Foreign Office, hardly a new complaint from holders of his job. This book ends in a burst of disillusion, as of an eager man who rushed at the flame and found himself burnt. But it is the more honest for it. And Meyer is never less than readable. He tells a juicy tale. Hire him, editor.
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