A reader sends me this striking quote from Coningsby by Benjamin Disraeli, spoken in the novel by Sindonia, the brilliant Sephardic Jew:
I always look upon Diplomatists as the Hebrews of politics; without country, political creeds, popular convictions, that strong reality of existence which pervades the career of an eminent citizen in a free and great country.
Which takes us to the obituaries for Sir Nicholas Henderson, a legend of British Diplomacy who died on 16 March. Another former Ambassador Brian Barder links to several, focusing on the 1979 Despatch written by Sir Nicholas which was leaked to the Economist and which rehearsed at some length the causes of British Decline. Plus he links to the Despatch itself (via a pdf). It reads strangely now – a style and substance from a very different world.
 
While serving in Warsaw I galloped through Sir Nicholas’ memoirs, Mandarin, as his first Ambassadorial-level posting had been in Warsaw back in the 1960s and I wanted to read his impressions of communist Poland (disappointingly few, it turned out).
 
The book had a lot to say about British post-war decline as seen from his later vantage-points of the grand Embassies in Bonn and Paris, but in an oddly fatalistic way, as if the problems had gone too far to be correctable and had acquired a sort of comfortable squalid predictability (see eg his gloomy complaint about the scruffiness of the FCO main building and partly filled milk-bottles everywhere – what did he himself then try to do about that one, to smarten the place up?).
 
Insofar as his book and the leaked Despatch pointed to answers to British Decline, they seemed to lie in More European Community – not really explained why that was expected to make us more successful. Sir Nicholas did not evince much support for the approach in fact taken by a brash and ideologically defiant Mrs Thatcher, taking on socialism by name, attacking organised labour and promoting renewed national pride and free enterprise. It’s not expressed in so many ways in the book, but it seemed to me that Sir Nicholas’s public school pro-European Fabianism saw that all sort of thing as just a bit too, well, vulgar?
 
Anyway, Brian Barder’s piece on Sir Nicholas prompted an interesting exchange (see the Comments) with another former senior diplomat Sir Brian Crowe on which former Ambassador Oliver Miles too has weighed in. The theme: diplomats and ambassadors ‘going native’, ie letting local or other ideas skew their work in pursuit of British interests.
 
A big question, worth some extra analysis when I get round to it. One obvious point is that a diplomat posted overseas sees a bilateral relationship from both ends, and so (perhaps) might be well placed to see new options for developing it in ways beneficial to both sides. But what if the home politicians for domestic vote-getting reasons prefer to do down the other foreign side or win something at their expense, rather than looking for ways to make both sides better off?
 
Go back to that Coningsby quote: that strong reality of existence which pervades the career of an eminent citizen in a free and great country.
 
Can one imagine anyone in eg an EU member state now even thinking anything like that, let alone writing it in a novel?