The Civil Service takes letters from members of the public seriously. Apart from anything else, they alas exist. Once they have been placed on someone’s desk they have to go somewhere, and unless they are simply incomprehensible utter rubbish (a non-trivial proportion by the way, usually involving HM The Queen, MI6 and aliens) this somewhere can not be the bin. If they are filed it would look bad subsequently if there were no record therewith of what action had been taken on the letter. Hence, there should be action. Usually a reply.

My first main encounter with letters from members of the public came in September 1979 when I was sent to the Indonesia Desk immediately on joining the FCO. A tricky job for a new entrant, as there was to be in the coming November a full State Visit to the UK by Indonesia’s President Suharto, a leader with an, er, ambiguous human rights record.

As news of the visit emerged various human rights groups started to lobby the British Government either to abandon the visit completely or at least to use it to press hard on numerous human rights cases, particularly those involving East Timor.

These many letters to all sorts of Ministers and other senior people tended to wend their way to my desk in the FCO, where I was tasked to draft replies to them all. Most letters raised the cases of named Indonesian political prisoners and urged the Government to take them up with the President. The then policy was to the effect that we did not plan to raise individual cases such as that of Mr X during such visits, but of course HM Government would use the visit to make known privately to the President our concerns on human rights questions in Indonesia. That formed the substance of my various draft replies.

But one letter, from (if I recall) Amnesty International members the Paton family of Hospital Road, Bury St Edmunds was different. It did not mention any prisoner’s name but was written as if it had done – a slip? There was no sense in our asking the Patons for the name of the prisoner and then telling them that we did not raise individual cases anyway. So it was decided that I should send a reply so ingeniously worded as to give the general line but not mention the political prisoner’s name, as of course we did not have it. Off went the reply, signed by me.

As luck had it, after the visit Mrs Paton then wrote another letter to the then FCO Permanent Under-Secretary whose name she had spotted on the Guest List for the State Banquet at Buckingham Palace. This new letter did mention the political prisoner whose cause the Patons were championing. That letter too came down the line to me with the request to submit a draft reply to her from the PUS.

We duly submitted a draft, backed by my earlier letter to the Paton family so that the PUS could see the full picture. Imagine my horror when the papers came back from the PUS’s office with a peevish note on top saying that the draft reply was too thin; the PUS in particular "was not satisfied with Mr Crawford’s first letter [to the Paton family] which in his opinion completely failed to answer the question".

For an FCO new entrant such a missive is a bit like a reticent but eager-to-please vole being hit squarely on the snout by a Zeus with an Attitude testing one of these.

A new more fulsome draft letter, stained with my tears, was submitted and duly issued. But it boiled down to the same point, namely that whereas the case of this specific prisoner had not been mentioned during the State Visit, HMG’s wider concerns on human rights in Indonesia of course had been raised.

Somehow my FCO career survived this calamity. And if anyone out there knows how I might contact the Paton family concerned to pass on my belated regards and to describe to them this episode personally, I’d be happy to hear from you: mail@charlescrawford.biz.