John Preston

Colossal windbags

‘Senior British diplomats really knew how to write,’ declares Matthew Parris in his introduction to The Spanish Ambassador’s Suitcase, a collection of ambassadorial despatches about funny foreigners and filthy, far-flung climes. Well, up to a point. The pieces in this collection, a successor to Parting Shots, are often elegantly phrased and colourful, but at the same time there’s a weird sense that they were all written by the same person — someone peering down a very long nose beneath which lies an indulgently curled lip.

In 1962, Sir John Russell, the then ambassador to Brazil, writes that his plane had to make an unscheduled stop in a place called Belem. ‘The usual scruffy Brazilian airport,’ he notes. ‘But delicious hot fried crabs in the buffet, washed down with an appalling white cane-alcohol of a truly industrial proof.’

Twenty years on, Sir Alan Donald, ambassador to Indonesia, addresses the Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe, on the general election campaign. It had begun that afternoon, Donald writes,

with the burning of the platform on which the government spokesman was addressing a large crowd. Later on, the Indonesian papers described the campaign as having got off to a ‘good and quiet start’.

Just as in Ira Levin’s thriller, The Boys from Brazil, a mad scientist planned to send hundreds of Hitler-clones goose-stepping across the world, so you get the feeling here that you’ve stumbled on a factory churning out legions of would-be Evelyn Waughs. The trouble is that few of them come anywhere near the grade, partly because they’re seldom as funny as they think, and partly because they tend to be colossal windbags.

The best bits come when the ambassadors aren’t trying to impress their masters with their carefully buffed wit, but are simply recording what they’ve witnessed.

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