The welcome return of the valedictory dispatch

‘All I ever tried to do was hold a mirror up and show you how beautiful you really are. Shine on, you crazy diamond.’

I have just read one of the finest ambassadors’ ‘valedictory’ dispatches ever composed, except it isn’t one: it had to be posted on the internet, and was, last month. What was essentially a sometimes-exasperated love letter to Lebanon will never see the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s printers. The valedictory died in 2006. So Tom Fletcher, who after four years as ambassador in Beirut had come to the end of his posting (‘Unlike your politicians,’ he tells Lebanon, ‘I can’t extend my own term’) had to write his loving, infuriated, despairing and hopeful tribute to the country as a personal blogpost.

It must have been around the turn of the century that here in The Spectator I first mentioned the valedictory. This had become a kind of Foreign Office institution. Ambassadors departing their post abroad would write a candid but carefully considered and (typically) polished formal dispatch about the country they were leaving. It could be whimsical, anguished, informative, affectionate or scornful. The quality of FCO prose was such that some were minor masterpieces, eagerly awaited by the foreign secretaries to whom all, nominally, were addressed. The letter (usually classified under the Official Secrets Act) would be formally printed and circulated as widely as discretion allowed within the Office, and sometimes as far afield as the Bank of England and Buckingham Palace.

In the Daily Telegraph on 6 August Sir Christopher Meyer, a former British ambassador in Washington — drawn, like me, to Tom Fletcher’s blog — offered a lively obituary of the institution with a link to Mr Fletcher’s blog, but (in mourning, like me, for the valedictory’s demise) is perhaps a little hard on the poor old FCO.