A diplomat with a difference

Senior diplomats may be a charming bunch, but as a rule they are not known for their modesty. Years of rubbing shoulders with world leaders, however inconsequential, tend to go to their heads. Taking themselves too seriously is an occupational hazard.

When it comes to publishing their memoirs, such arrogance and pomposity are not necessarily a bad thing. A diplomat’s inflated sense of his own importance can be hilariously, unintentionally entertaining. What more wonderful example of the genre than DC Confidential: The Controversial Memoirs of Britain’s Ambassador to the US at the Time of 9/11 and the Iraq War, Sir Christopher Meyer’s gloriously self-regarding tome of last year? A monument to the man’s vanity, it superbly demonstrated what a complete ass he is. My own favourite in this field is Lord Edward Cecil’s brilliantly funny The Leisure of an Egyptian Official, published in 1921.

Glencairn Balfour Paul is more Edward Cecil than Christopher Meyer. Admittedly his father was not foreign secretary and prime minister during his career as a bureaucrat, but we cannot hold that against him. He appears, fundamentally, to be a modest man and betrays few of the delusions of grandeur that made Meyer such a comic figure. Indeed, he is at pains to let the reader know that ‘my aim has been to record my own modest involvement, seldom significant and sometimes ludicrous’ over the past 80 years. That sets the tone for what follows.

He makes light of his wartime record as an infantry officer in Libya. The bravest thing he did, he says, was to address the Long Range Desert Group on the qualities of the Sudanese soldier: ‘They lay around in the dark, bearded, silent and properly scornful even of my jokes — reacting much as a body of Muslim mullahs might react to a talk on the qualities of the Anglican Sunday school.