The ambassador doesn’t serve Ferrero Rocher chocolates, but he knows how to treat his guests. Earlier this year, he had 240 pots of Rodda’s Cornish clotted cream flown out to serve at a tea party in Warsaw to celebrate the beginning of the British presidency of the EU.

While serving as ambassador in Belgrade two years ago, he sent a coach to rescue some Newcastle United football fans who were being held under armed guard in a city centre hotel by Serbian police and invited them to a reception before kick-off at his house. (He kept a signed photo of the footballer Paul Gascoigne in one of the loos).

His own preferred team is Spurs, but the 51-year-old official lists other hobbies as music and chess. One of his family treasures is a chessboard given to him by the world grandmaster Gary Kasparov when he was working in Moscow. It is inscribed with the words: “Good luck in the chess game of diplomacy”. After his injudicious email is disclosed today, he may need all the luck he can get.

According to colleagues, this is not the first time he has sent a frank memorandum back to London early in the morning. “Charles is very hard-working although he does have an off-beat sense of humour. He is a very funny guy, trying to do his best,” said one friend yesterday. “The email was probably an expression of his frustration.”

His diplomatic career spans nearly a quarter of a century, joining the Foreign Office in 1979 after training to be a barrister.

By his own account he has had a “fascinating” career, serving in the embassy in South Africa just as the apartheid regime came to an end in the late 1980s. “I recall vividly my own private meeting with Nelson Mandela soon after he was released from prison,” Crawford says on the foreign office website.

Then in 1991 he was “plunged into the drama” of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1993 he went to Moscow as counsellor in the embassy. He says that highlights there included the first black tie dinner at the Kremlin since the Russian revolution and the attack on the White House, the parliament building in the city. The fighting occurred only a few hundred metres from his flat. He keeps a videotape of his children playing in the yard with the noise of gunfire in the background.

From Moscow, Crawford was moved to post-war Sarajevo to take forward the Dayton peace accords. He describes the posting in Bosnia-Herzegovina as “exhausting”.

Afterwards he took a year’s “career development” sabbatical to Harvard University in America, which he says “I used mainly to learn how to use the internet”.

He returned to London in 1999 to run British policy towards the former Yugoslavia, working closely with Serbian leaders to bring about the downfall of Slobodan Milosevic. A posting to Belgrade to re-open the British embassy followed.

Crawford began his current job as ambassador in Warsaw just over two years ago, and in a recent interview described Britain’s relations with Poland as “terrific”.

He is married to Helen and has two sons and one daughter, signing off his droll career notes by saying he and his “long suffering wife” are hoping his time in Poland “will be rather calmer” than what he went through in the Balkans. That may be hard now.

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