Was there, I asked Sir Christopher, any sense of being let off the leash when he retired? ‘Oh yes! It was intoxicating. I’d been locked in the womb of the Foreign Office for thirty seven years, and though I had a very varied career, I was suddenly out – blinking in the light after all that time.
‘It took me a while to understand that I was free, and I no longer had that structure in my life. The Press Complaints Commission was great as a transition, before I embarked on this job-lot of things that I do now.’
Sir Christopher says that he ‘stumbled’ into broadcasting, and it’s very obvious that he enjoys it enormously. ‘I’m very interested in the process of broadcasting – indeed I often forget that I’m supposed to be performing – and I really do like it.’
Isn’t it unusual though for a diplomat to be so high profile, I wondered? ‘I was never a shrinking violet when I was in the Foreign Office’, Sir Christopher says, ‘but of course there are certain constraints. I suppose it came about because I was in America at the time that I was, and that thrust me forward a bit.’
The broadcasting was offered on a plate; having left Washington and flown back to the UK, he and his wife were in a taxi on their way home when his mobile phone rang; it was Channel 4 asking him to be a commentator on the Iraq war. His first instinct, he admits, was to decline the offer, but Lady Meyer’s better counsel prevailed. Interestingly, the FO was very keen for him to do so – there was no sense of his kicking against the traces, as some might have thought.
Sir Christopher was born in 1944, four days after his father – a Flight Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force – was killed in action. He studying in Paris, Cambridge and Bologna, and joined what was then the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1966. He was posted to Moscow two years later, in the dark days of Leonid Brezhnev’s regime, and went on to serve in Spain before returning to Moscow for a two year posting from 1982.
Back in the UK in the early Nineties, he worked with three Foreign Secretaries in succession, and with both Sir Geoffrey Howe and Sir John Major, before becoming our ambassador to Germany in 1997. His tenure in Berlin was brief; he became ambassador to the USA the same year. He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George the following year.
Sir Christopher’s most recent book and TV series, Getting Our Way, is about the history of British diplomacy. He agrees that British diplomats abroad in the Georgian and Victorian years must have been enjoyed a golden age; ‘Diplomacy is a valid and necessary profession, whatever the state of your nation, but it must have been a very wonderful thing to have been a diplomat then – and to know that because of the physical dominance of your country over world affairs you could get you way. We faced big dilemmas back then. It wasn’t all easy, but it must have put a lot of wind in your sales to have British might behind you.’
Nowadays of course, as a far less powerful country, Britain has to work with its allies – and usually be more pragmatic in its approach. ‘Everything has to be approached on a case by case basis’, Sir Christopher says, ‘You do have to make compromises but you have to remember that it’s often more difficult to manage relations with allies than with enemies. It’s hard to take a firm line with your allies when you have to. We have a triangle of allies in France, Germany and the USA, and these three are quite unique in their relationship with Britain; at different times they have been our enemies and our allies. Those three relationships are very different, and managing them is incredibly difficult.’
Sir Christopher is concerned by a couple of things in modern British diplomacy – both of which stem from government. He feels that we have lost the subtle skills of negotiation; ‘There are simple rules, like never going into any negotiations without knowing where your bottom line is. And knowing at what point it’s better to have no agreement than a bad agreement. Tony Blair, for example, never had a bottom line – either in dealing with the European Union or the United States. We can seem wishy-washy …’
His second point is that Britain suffers in many ways because we have a poorer knowledge and understanding of history than previous generations. History, he feels isn’t taught comprehensively enough these days; ‘If you can make history popular – through the middle-market of television even – then you can compensate for history not being taught well enough in schools. But the way history is taught in Britain is terrible.
‘For example, the Copenhagen climate change conference was a complete disaster because no one had any idea how to run a huge and unwieldy conference; Castlereagh and the Victorians were up to it but we weren’t. Tony Blair’s greatest failing was that he had no respect for history’.
Sir Christopher accepted the offer of a non-executive directorship with the Arbuthnot Group because, he says, ‘It looked like an interesting challenge.’ He was also attracted by the bank’s historical conservatism over risk; an approach which has been proved to be absolutely correct in the current recession.
‘I liked the idea that the bank was small’, he says, ‘And I did my due diligence, and looked at the liquidity ratios and capital in hand, and one of the things which was absolutely clear was that that the bank was minimally exposed to any risk of bad debt. It had, and has, very good margins.
‘There had been some very shrewd decision-taking. If you’ve got money in Arbuthnot’s it’s as good as being in the Bank of England; they don’t take untoward risks. Another benefit from being a small and well-run bank is high morale. The people are highly motivated; there’s a firm hand at the top but they let their people get on with the job.’
Going back to his diplomatic career, I wondered if there was a real satisfaction in being ‘our man in Washington’; if he ever arrived back to the official residence (a spectacular building designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens) from the White House and thought ‘Wow, this is good’? ‘Oh yes!’ was the instant reply. ‘It was a total surprise when I got the appointment. I’d only just arrived in Berlin, and I had been number two in Washington ten years previously, and it’s very rare to go back as number one. It was the last thing I would have expected. It was terrific!’
Patriotism is regarded as a devalued currency in many quarters these days, so does Sir Christopher regard himself as a patriot? ‘Yes. I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘my country, right or wrong’, but you have to have an anchor somewhere. You have to be pragmatic; I am patriotic but I am also a great believer in the notion of the national interest – which is certainly not redundant in the twenty first century.
‘Other people have tried other things. You saw it in the Thirties in the New Diplomacy Movement – the peace movement – you see it today in people wittering on about post-modernism and people talking about the need for global values rather than national values when there are trans-national problems. Those turned out to be feeble hand-holds. They didn’t work and they’re not working now. I am patriotic and I don’t regard it as a bad guiding light’.