Cynics or idealists

There ought to be more mileage than there is in stories of diplomacy. Publishers long ago got wise to the memoirs of ex-ambassadors, which in a more servile age used to clog up their catalogues just as the ghosted anguish of reality starlets does now. I am a sucker for the autobiographies of politicians, however atrociously written, self-serving, drab or ‘humorous’; but I draw the line at the memoirs of ex-foreign secretaries.

The subject of diplomacy sounds much more fun than it really is. Negotiations make for dull reading; Lord Salisbury, thinking about Castlereagh at the Congress of Vienna, said: ‘There is nothing dramatic in the success of a diplomatist. His victories are made up of a series of micro- scopic advantages.’ It might act as a warning to anyone proposing to write a book about it, or publish one.

Douglas Hurd’s book, written with the under-advertised collaboration of Edward Young, is lucid and pointed in its opinions as it goes through the merits of various foreign secretaries from Castlereagh onwards. But somehow it lacks the quality of fun which would mitigate the lurking tedium of the subject. Roy Jenkins wrote a very entertaining book about chancellors of the exchequer, not an obviously more promising subject; but then Jenkins was much more interested in human nature at its most freakish.

You will gather what sort of book Lord Hurd’s is from the single fact that it passes up on the glorious opportunity to write about Harold Wilson’s catastrophic but richly enjoyable foreign secretary, George Brown (subsequently George George-Brown and then Lord George-Brown). You will not hear the (discredited) story of Brown propositioning the Cardinal Archbishop of Lima here. Nor is Hurd tempted by the tale of the Washington radio station asking Sir Oliver Franks what he wanted for Christmas, and getting the answer ‘a box of crystallised fruit’ (the French ambassador had hoped for world peace).