When Glen Balfour-Paul was appointed British Ambassador to Baghdad in 1969 a friend remarked: “How clever of the Foreign Office to send someone to Iraq who doesn’t look like an ambassador.” Saddam Hussein was then plotting his way to the presidency but meanwhile had to be content with running the Baath party’s security apparatus. Later Balfour-Paul had to confront the tyrant, but he had come up through the Army and the Sudan Political Service (SPS), so was accustomed to taking the rough with the smooth.

His introduction to the SPS came about in an unusual way. While seconded from the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders to the Sudan Defence Force (SDF) in the Second World War, he was brigade major (chief of staff) of the SDF force in the Western Desert. During a visit by the British Governor-General of the Sudan, he abruptly remembered that he had not told the motorcycle outriders leading the great man’s car where to turn off the track towards the next outpost of troops. Urging his own driver to maximum speed, he overtook the Governor’s car and outriders while vigorously indicating the turn by hand signals and losing his cap amid the inevitable clouds of dust. The political head of the SPS, also present, was so impressed by this display of uninhibited initiative that he invited Balfour-Paul to join the service on the spot.

He had to wait until the war ended, but then spent nine enjoyable and instructive years in contrasting districts of that vast country until handing over his post to a Sudanese in 1954. After a period in Blue Nile Province, he served in Darfur as Resident at Geneina and adviser to the Masalit Sultan. He established excellent relations with the Sultan and his more westernised younger brother, pitting his mounted police polo team against theirs. (The cruelties inflicted on the Masalit and other non-Arab peoples of Darfur 50 years later caused him great anguish.)

Before leaving Darfur and the SPS in 1954, he took his wife and two tiny daughters by camel to explore the Ennedi foothills in the French district of ‘Tibesti, in search of prehistoric rock paintings. Leaving his wife and children at the last waterhole, he pressed on with a guide who was sceptical of finding any cave drawings, but they discovered some fine examples.

Briefly unemployed, he won the last remaining vacancy in the Foreign Service reserved for former Sudan officials and served in the British Embassy in Santiago, Chile, before being assigned, rather more appropriately, to Lebanon in 1960. This proved a useful apprenticeship for his subsequent service in Dubai and Bahrain where, despite his three later posts as head of mission, Balfour-Paul made his most valuable contributions to British interests in the Arab world.

His authoritative and immensely readable The End of Empire in the Middle East (1991), traces the ending of British administration in Sudan and southwest Arabia and most of Britain’s treaty responsibilities in the Arabian Gulf. In dealing with the often prickly rulers of the Trucial States, he was aided by his fluent if imperfect Arabic and a sense of humour well matched with the mischievous sallies of the rulers or their officials.

While acting as Political Resident in the Gulf States in 1966, he was obliged to tackle the delicate issue of replacing Sheikh Shakhbut of Abu Dhabi with his more enlightened brother, Sheikh Zayed. Despite Balfour-Paul’s diplomatic arguments expressed in his best flowery Arabic, the Sheikh declined to budge until a detachment of the Trucial Oman Scouts called to his bodyguard manning the palace ramparts to come out with their hands up. The Scouts then courteously formed a guard of honour for Shakhbut as he walked to take the aeroplane to Bahrain.

Balfour-Paul’s first head of mission post was as Ambassador to Baghdad in 1969. The Baath party had not then extended its stranglehold on society and he made many friends in the spheres of art, archaeology and music. In his first audience with Saddam Hussein, by then President Ahmed Bakr’s right-hand man, Balfour-Paul mentioned the British Government’s concern about Iraq seemingly cosying up to the Soviet Union. Saddam leapt to his feet and marched the Ambassador up and down the room exclaiming “Can’t you British understand there is nothing I detest more than a Russian communist — except an Iraqi one. It is London’s hostility that compels me to turn to Moscow.”

Moved as Ambassador to Jordan in 1972, Balfour-Paul found the political atmosphere in Amman more friendly. There he married his social secretary, Jenny Scott, his first wife Margaret (Marnie), whom he married in 1950, having died of spongiform encephalitis in 1971. The Yom Kippur war, putting King Hussein in a difficult situation vis-à-vis his Arab neighbours, occurred while Balfour-Paul was in Amman, but he and his American counterpart were able to persuade the King to lend only token support to the Syrians on the Golan Heights.

Balfour-Paul completed his diplomatic service as Ambassador to Tunis, where he enjoyed the beautiful residence at La Marsa but found little of political challenge. On leaving the service, he became director-general of the Middle East Association in London. Having bought a hunting lodge in Devon, this proved not wholly convenient, so he resigned to become a research fellow at the University of Exeter and devote himself to writing and travelling with his wife, a researcher and writer on the use of indigo dyes, in the Maghreb and in south-west and South-East Asia. He published a book of poetry, A Kind of Kindness, in 2000, and his autobiography, Bagpipes in Babylon, in 2006.

Hugh Glencairn Balfour-Paul was the fourth son of Lieutenant-Colonel J. W. Balfour-Paul. Born at Moniaive, Dumfriesshire, he was educated at Sedbergh and Magdalen College, Oxford. Throughout his life, whatever the hazard, he was led by an irresistible sense of inquiry. He loved language, was an accomplished raconteur and among the most companionable of men.

He is survived by his second wife, a son and three daughters from his first marriage, and a son and daughter from his second.

Glencairn Balfour-Paul, CMG, soldier, colonial administrator, diplomat, traveller, writer and poet, was born on September 23, 1917. He died on July 2, 2008, aged 90