Back in the early 1980s as a junior Second Sec Pol/Info at the Embassy in Belgrade I now and then would accompany the then Ambassador Edwin Bolland on his regional visits round the country.

Edwin Bolland (later Sir Edwin) was a fascinating if complex senior colleague. On these long tours I would hear his many stories of life in the post-WW2 Foreign Office. His first posting had been to Moscow and he had attended some of the infamous show trials, held in cavernous halls with Stalin himself occasionally appearing on a lofty balcony to gaze down impassively.

The Ambassador’s final official visit to Pristina (not long after the fateful ‘disturbances’) was an excellent example of the genre.

We had five official meetings of an hour each starting at 0800 and finishing at 1300 when we were hosted for a massive lunch. Each meeting including the 0800 starter featured a cup of Turkish coffee, mineral water and a stiff plum brandy.

The lunch was a steaming mass of lamb. The local tradition had it that the guest of honour would be proudly awarded the sheep’s eyes to eat, but I seem to recall that they did politely ask if that would be welcome and the Ambassador equally politely passed on that one.

The meetings themselves were banal encounters, successive senior apparatchiks and ‘Socialist Alliance’ stooges, Serbs and Albanians alike, blandly assuring us that all was well in Kosovo. Which it wasn’t. The real local leaders of course were the Communist Party hard men who would not meet Ambassadors (at least not Western ones) on the pretext that they conducted only ‘party to party’ relations with Western political groupings and avoided state representatives.

We reeled away from all this primitive communist hospitality none the wiser but stuffed to the gills. Mission accomplished by the locals. And look where it got them.