Non-diplomatic folk may not know the  different levels of visit for national leaders.

These include Private: the leader visits another country for a family holiday (and may or may not have an affable pre-arranged lunch or other meetings with that country’s leader while there).

Then there is Official (or Working): a leader visits another country to meet that country’s leaders but without the highest pomp of state. Thus David Cameron going to Germany to meet Chancellor Merkel. Note that a UK Prime Minister might meet a country’s head of state for heavy official business if that is how things are done there (see eg France).

And at the top there is the State Visit: the head of one state visits the other country as a personal guest of that country’s head of state. This symbolises the highest possible level of amity between the two states. The hospitality and welcome are warm and generous.

State Visits of course take the most planning and may be agreed years in advance. For much of her reign The Queen has hosted two inward State Visits a year: here’s the list.

In his DIPLOMAT piece earlier this year, former diplomatic correspondent Michael Binyon gave his thoughts on the problems associated with organising a State Visit:

A state visit is the acme of diplomatic relations, the symbolic celebration of friendship between two nations and the occasion to look back on past ties and lay the foundations for even deeper mutual links.

A state visit is almost the greatest nightmare diplomats have to face. It has to run faultlessly. If the slightest thing goes wrong – a flag missing, a delay in the schedule, a comical incident or a lapse in security – there is hell to pay. The gaffe will be splashed across the world’s press and all the anticipated goodwill thrown away.

Little wonder, therefore, that months and even years go into the planning of state visits. Every minute of the day has to be choreographed, every step of the visitor’s route measured out and timed, every nuance and joke in the set speeches weighed for effect. What will the visiting king or president eat? What will they wear? What language will they speak at the formal dinners? What would be an appropriate gift? What will the spouse like to be seen doing during her special separate programme? And how can the visit be coordinated with the timetable of Buckingham Palace, which is usually fixed at least two years in advance?

So I have replied in the latest DIPLOMAT, giving the diplomatic insider’s view:

The great advantage of being a diplomat, howsoever lowly, is that you are on the inside. The great foreign correspondents have huge readerships around the planet. Some are seen by millions on TV in war zones. But while vital top-level international discussions proceed, the diplomats hovering outside the leaders’ meeting-room have the delicious satisfaction of looking out through the window at all those forlorn famous correspondents standing in the heavy rain, waiting for someone to open the door and toss out a scrap of meat.

In the previous issue of Diplomat, Michael Binyon, former Diplomatic Editor of The Times, gave readers his views on the privileges and pitfalls of organising state visits. Mainly the latter: “a state visit is almost the greatest nightmare diplomats have to face.”

I disagree. State visits are complicated and involve many unusual, pernickety details. Blunders take on an embarrassingly high profile. July 2011 Diplomat noted the ghastly British mistake when some wrong invitations were sent out for The Queen’s return banquet in Warsaw during the state visit to Poland in 1996. But top-level visits are also interesting and glamorous, and many people work on them, so the chances of serious mistakes are low…

So The Queen’s State Visit to Moscow in 1994:

The Embassy plunged into the preparations. Negotiating the programme with our Russian partners and explaining to London why certain obvious and normal things could not happen was hard work. Right at the heart of our efforts was a young Second Secretary, Catherine White. She startled the sardonic Russian security officials – and the rest of us – by driving forward the planning with a brand new invention, a ‘mobile phone’ the size and weight of a brick.

The visit began. Just before it started, a bizarre problem appeared. The Queen’s magnificent old Rolls Royce had been shipped out to Moscow on a lorry to await her arrival. Visits are all about details. In this case the not unimportant detail of getting the Rolls Royce off the lorry: where to find strong ramps to bear its weight? The lorry toured the railway stations of Moscow deep into the night until this problem was triumphantly solved.

The first official public appearance of the Queen with President Yeltsin came at a gala evening at the Bolshoi Theatre. Her Majesty walked out onto the balcony with President Yeltsin to thunderous applause. A wonderful moment, restoring British-Russian relations at the highest level for the first time since 1918, when Lenin ordered the murder of Tsar Nicholas II and other relatives of the British Royal Family…

I joined the banquet in the Kremlin, the first black-tie event there since the Russian Revolution. Word had it that the Russian guests had been scrambling around Moscow theatres to find suitable capitalist dinner jackets for the occasion. John Sawers (now head of MI6) was there supporting Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd. John and I had served together in South Africa as apartheid ended.

I pointed out to him that if in Pretoria in 1988 I had told him that 300 weeks later both apartheid and the USSR would have collapsed, and he and I would be sitting in the Kremlin with the Queen listening to a Russian army brass band playing Engelbert Humperdinck’s greatest hits, he might not have believed me.

Read the whole thing. Diplomacy is often droll.

UPDATE

A former colleague send in this first-hand description of what actually happened when The Queen and President Yeltsin visited Red Square in Moscow:

You’re right that the Russians had cleansed Red Square of all elements above the size of a cockroach.  Throngs gathered in side streets, bemused.  Arriving on Red Square with the Met Police advance party, perhaps an hour before The Queen and President Yeltsin issued from the Bashnya near St. Basil’s, I realised that the square needed a few people present to be interesting and more newsworthy. I remonstrated with a blue-lapelled (KGB) Colonel-General in my best Russian, and witnessed him turning puce and barking orders to allow some people from the side-streets near GUM on to the square.

The BBC Royal reporters caught some of my intercourse with the General on camera with a long-range microphone and played some of it that evening on BBC News.  Conforming to all possible public stereotypes of FCO ‘camels’ [Note: diplomats who have grown too close to the Middle East and its ways] I was sporting an unfortunate but prescient Arabic keffiyeh scarf inside my black greatcoat to ward off the Muscovite Autumn chill.

The Queen and Yeltsin exit the gate, to great fanfare, and break left.  The Duke of Edinburgh breaks right and goes towards the crowd near St Basil’s, standing behind silver barriers. He’s keen to meet Russian people from whom he has been denied contact, despite his Russian ancestry through his grandmother.

With his interpreter he asks a bystander, “Have you come far across Russia today?”

“Not half“, she replies.  “I’m from Birmingham!”

The Duke indicated an element of surprise: “My first chance to speak to real Russians and I get a Brummie instead!”. And after exchanging pleasantries on he strolled, hoping at last to talk to a member of the Russian public as per the programme of the Visit.