‘The West is like the Great Satan’

Sir Crispin Tickell tells Mary Wakefield that George Bush’s ‘illegal’ war has brought shame on us all

I’m on the telephone, talking to the editor of this magazine, trawling for last-minute background information, when Sir Crispin Tickell, GCMG, KCVO, our former ambassador to the UN, appears in the doorway. He looks alert, beaky, sleek, like a smallish, zoo-kept hawk. ‘Well, his middle name is Cervantes, does that help?’ says the voice in my ear. ‘Sorry!’ I mouth at Sir Crispin.

Cup of tea, Sir Crispin? Coffee? Neither. Since signing the open letter that warned the Prime Minister to ‘see better’ over Iraq and Israel, Sir Crispin has been caught in a flash flood of media requests and must swoop off to Newsnight in half an hour. No time for hot drinks.

Of the 50 former diplomats who signed the open letter, few can claim more capital letters than Sir Crispin. He has served as the Chef de Cabinet to the President of the European Commission, as our Ambassador to Mexico, Permanent Secretary in the Overseas Development Administration, British Permanent Representative to the United Nations and on the UN Security Council. He has been President of the Royal Geographical Society, Warden of Green College, Oxford, and Convenor of the British Government Panel on Sustainable Development.

Sir Crispin crosses his legs, folds his arms and looks at me slightly sceptically. ‘What, specifically, would you like to talk about?’ he asks. My eyes slide down his burgundy tie and back again. The letter, I say — what were your personal reasons for signing it?

‘In 1990, when Saddam walked into Kuwait, it fell to me to put together the first resolutions to authorise the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait,’ he says. ‘The resolutions we drafted did not authorise the destruction of Saddam’s regime nor a march on Baghdad.