Can you have too much of a good thing?

In some instances, yes.

But not when it comes to my Oral Career History as recorded for the British Diplomatic Oral History Programme (part of the Churchill Archives Centre at Churchill College, Cambridge).

Here is my entry.

It looks to be the first one recorded by a British diplomat born after 1950, and is listed after the contributions of many distinguished names in British diplomacy. Some of the material and the ideas (and jokes) expressed will be familiar to readers here. But not all.

I should note that I edited the first transcript to remove some mistakes and redundancies, but also to add various glosses and some other recollections. I did not change it to make it read like a written smooth text. It is a bit jerky and very much a transcript.

The text has some quite strong material at different points critical of what HMG did or how/why they did it, but it was all passed quickly by the FCO (who as agreed with the Archive get to have a look at the material before publication) without comment. So maybe not strong (or disloyal) enough? 

Anyway it offers a full 20,000 words of frank off-the-bat thoughts to mull over, with special reference to (of course) my life and times in the Balkans, South Africa, Russia and Poland plus various sections dealing with the way the FCO worked or works.

Here as a taster is a short extract from the final passage where I talk about my role in the downfall of Milosevic:

We’d sent messages to his key military people and the intelligence people saying – Listen, when the moment comes, be on the right side of history. Messages which I’d written in London. A master-plan rolled out on all fronts simultaneously, sustained over eighteen months.

In football terms, we’d worked the ball forward, put him under pressure, forced him to make a mistake, and finally the Serb strikers we’d trained slammed the ball in the back of the net…

I was there when Robin Cook had a press briefing later and said to the media – That campaign was the high point of my Foreign Office career.

And I ran it. And I got a ‘B’ in my appraisal, missing an ‘A’ for not being good enough at management [laughter]. So farewell then British diplomacy. 

The Dutch, by the way, do their diplomatic oral history properly. On retirement senior diplomats are questioned for several days by expert colleagues and then get linked to brand new diplomats to act as mentors. This creates an impressive sense of continuity – and Collected Wisdom.

In the FCO’s case you just walk off the set.