Bad Days in Basra is the laconic title that Sir Hilary Synnott has attached to his account of six months as Britain's first man in the south of Iraq. It undersells his story — as does the gently amused demeanour that he adopts, although that does make it to date the only Iraq book with jokes.

There is now a small library of books written by the main players in the five-year drama of Iraq, hurling accusations at others and denying responsibility themselves. This month's contribution, by Douglas Feith, is almost unique in defending his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, the US Defence Secretary, as well as himself.

Synnott, a former British High Commissioner in Pakistan, is peripheral to this blame game, having been responsible only for the south of Iraq, and not all the decisions there. But he does argue that the US is partly to blame for its unfairness towards the south.

He accepted the stint only days before retirement while he was repainting his ceilings after years spent abroad, trying not to get paint on the phone as he took the call from the Whitehall mandarins.

He has written this chronicle as the Scoop of diplomacy, almost an accidental ambassador. His best tale is of asking an earnest American woman whether she would like a date; she whirled on him in horror to find him gesturing at a plate of the fruit that a local sheikh had given him.

This wryness is perhaps what David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, wanted to dispatch in his speech last week about changing the old-fashioned character of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

But underneath, Synnott's judgments are sharp. He argues that it is too easy to say that the invasion was “lost from the start”; the early decisions played a crucial part in setting Iraq on course for turmoil. He holds that British ministers accepted too many compliments for the skill of their forces in delivering the calm of the south compared with Baghdad, and that this handicapped them in arguing that more US money should be diverted there. The south got about a fifteenth of the main tranche of congressional funds earmarked for reconstruction.

Because Basra, at that point, was more peaceful than the north, it should have allowed British officials a better appreciation than their American counterparts of the “leviathan” problems springing from the huge expectations of Iraqis, he suggests. He also argues that the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran Iraq for the first 15 months, concentrated on large, nationwide, US-led projects, which “distracted from the need for small and feasible projects which benefited large numbers of individuals”.

He pulls his punches, perhaps inevitably for a former diplomat. He skates over the “inescapably high level of corruption”, particularly on the Iraqi side. “The Coalition's need for rapid results became an invitation to corrupt practices” is the most that he says.

But the most serious constraint, he says, was the lack of officials with enough experience to allocate the huge sums available and get projects up and running. He criticises Britain for failing to send enough officials and for failing to resolve the barriers to sending civilians to war zones. “Seen from Iraq and notwithstanding [Tony] Blair's rhetoric, there was little evidence that the British Government as a whole saw itself as being at war.”

One of his last actions, in January 2004, was to write back to London cautioning that British officials were giving “disturbing reports” about US soldiers' treatment of Iraqis in prison. The Abu Ghraib story broke four months later. On that, he should have said more.

Bad Days in Basra: My Turbulent Time as Britain's Man in Southern Iraq, pp 287, I.B. Tauris.

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