AFTER-THE-FACT wisdom is the unique prerogative of the memoirist. When you write your account of a life lived, vindication holds the pen. The fire of one-sided history torches your enemies and illuminates your own sagacity. Every success of your own is not the fortuitous confluence of accident and design but the perfectly plotted outcome of the sharpest mind in the room.
Sir Christopher Meyer has joined the ranks of those who have discovered the brilliant acuity that hindsight brings. The British Ambassador to Washington from 1997 to 2003 has written an account, DC Confidential, of his turbulent time in the engine room of diplomacy.
I haven’t read the whole book yet; only the excerpts published this week in The Guardian and the Daily Mail. So in taking issue with it I might be guilty of selective reporting. Then again, if Sir Christopher really thinks he’s been misrepresented, he is in a somewhat privileged position from which to complain. He is, after all, the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission.
The burden of Sir Christopher’s tale is that Tony Blair screwed up the Iraq war. He could have slowed the US rush to war if he had not been so feeble and credulous and had listened more to his ambassador in Washington. “We may have been the junior partner in the enterprise, but the ace up our sleeve was that America did not want to go it alone,” Meyer writes. “Had Britain so insisted, Iraq after Saddam might have avoided the violence that may yet prove fatal to the entire enterprise.”
It’s a new variant on the slightly tired get-out deployed by many who supported the war (as Sir Christopher claims he did). The argument usually goes: the war itself was fine in legal and moral conception. But the postwar execution was terrible. The mess now is not my fault, guv. It was Bush. Or Rumsfeld. Or Bremer.
But in Meyer’s recollection, it’s Blair. If only he had used his influence in Washington more wisely we’d have gone to war later, with more allies, and Iraq would now be at peace.
This is a terrible injustice to the Prime Minister. Mr Blair did use what little capital he had in Washington wisely. It was the Prime Minister who, in the summer of 2002, was crucial in persuading President Bush to take the UN route rather than go directly to war. But the price of getting the Americans to take that route was clear: it had to be an accelerated one.
That summer, you may remember, Vice-President Dick Cheney was against going to the UN at all. He was against it precisely because he wanted to avoid the situation Meyer thinks Mr Blair could have brought about — a long-drawn-out diplomatic tussle.
Once you got into that process, Cheney argued, quite reasonably, Saddam Hussein would spin it out, giving the UN just enough here and there, just as he had for 11 years.
And Meyer’s account underestimates in any case Mr Blair’s own commitment to force Saddam to meet his obligations. The Prime Minister didn’t do it because he was too weak to stand up to the Americans. He did it because he believed it was right.
So feeble is this argument in fact that it is hard not to succumb to the suspicion that Meyer has dressed it up as the central critique to give his memoir the patina of seriousness. Most of the book actually seems to be an entertaining romp through the foibles of ministers Meyer has known.
Blair is the biggest villain, of course, always showing a lack of intellectual depth, always looking wimpish in the face of steely Americans. One story may capture the source of much of the animus. Meyer feels he was slighted when he discovered that the Downing Street crowd had left him off their guest list for a dinner at the White House. Grown-up officials are not supposed to allow a blow to their pride to dictate policy; but I suspect the truth is that what really upset Meyer was that Blair ’s relationship with first President Clinton and then President Bush was so good that the ambassador was supernumerary and was miffed that he was often left out.
All this juicy recounting of court gossip points to the bigger objection to the book. We journalists love it when officials dump on ministers; and kicking the PM when he’s down looks particularly clever right now. But what on earth will become of the system of government that has nurtured and promoted people like Meyer if it becomes routine practice to publish memoirs while the politicians are still in office? What influence do officials think they will have if ministers know that, as soon as their back is turned, embarrassing details will be on the front pages of the most hostile newspapers?
Revealing that John Prescott thought southeastern Europe was called “the Balklands” or that the Prime Minister was star-struck by all the celebrities Meyer entertained at the British embassy is going to get you lots of admiring coverage, perhaps a regular guest slot on the Today programme. But is it going to improve the operation of British government?
When he was in Washington, the ambassador and his delightful wife enjoyed a nickname among officials. They were known as Fred and Ginger. This was not simply a tribute to their terpsichorean skills in the ballrooms of Washington. It was a reflection of the fact that there were some who found Her Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador to have a faintly cinematic evanescence about him, a passion for publicity and self-promotion that reminded them more of a matinée idol than a serious envoy.
Perhaps when he has finished basking in the cheap thrill of being lionised by The Guardian and the Daily Mail, he might like to ask himself. Is this really what he served his country for?
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
