DC Confidential by Christopher Meyer
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20)
Leaving aside the snobbery and sneering of Christopher Meyer’s now infamous Washington ambassador’s memoir, it is difficult to find in the book any serious points about the conduct of foreign policy. He protests, for example, that the foreign secretary and senior ambassadors were kept out of key decisions by Downing Street. But prime ministers have always controlled foreign policy. It is the chancellor of Germany and the president of France who take all key foreign policy decisions, not their foreign ministers. In his new book on François Mitterrand, Jacques Attali describes a dinner with Margaret Thatcher in which she went out of her way to humiliate her foreign secretary, Geoffrey Howe, in front of the French president. Whatever his views on his two foreign secretaries, Tony Blair behaved with scrupulous politeness in their presence.
No 10 makes foreign policy and has done so for centuries. That is why the foreign office sends its best people to work not in embassies or even in its own offices but through its courtyard straight into Downing Street. In every key European or international decision that Blair has taken as prime minister he has been surrounded by foreign office people. Blair’s chief of staff, Jonathan Powell, an unsung hero of the Northern Ireland peace process, is also a foreign office hand.
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