‘Outposts of Diplomacy’ by G.R. Berridge review

We all know what embassies are: grand houses where pompous people stand under chandeliers drinking champagne to no obvious purpose. Why should we waste our money on these overpaid toffs when modern technology allows instant communication between world leaders?

G.R. Berridge tackles the question in his history of the permanent diplomatic mission. It is a convoluted story, covering many continents and cultures, but Berridge has mastered the voluminous literature and the intricate detail. He is a fluent storyteller, though the story is overwhelming. It probably began in the Renaissance, when the Italian states decided to keep people in rival cities to handle business. The questions started immediately: did an ambassador need to be so grand? Or live in such an expensive house? Couldn’t the business be done by people sent from home?

For an answer you have to go back to the basics. Governments need to pass messages safely to their opposite numbers and understand the replies. That sounds simple, but it isn’t. Politicians have little idea how foreign minds think. The messages they send may make sense to them, less so to their correspondents. They need someone who can ensure each side understands the other and can mop up the tears when things go wrong – as they so often do. An ambassador can also be a convenient scapegoat.

Ambassadors can best acquire this kind of intimate knowledge by living among the people they deal with and learning their quirks and fears, domestic rivalries and likely intentions towards their own master. Time and again British ministers visited me in Moscow, briefed to the eyeballs, but still desperate to hear what Mikhail or Boris really wanted from them. That was true even of Mrs Thatcher, who numbered diplomats among her closest advisers, despite her public scorn for the Foreign Office itself.

Diplomacy is cheap compared with other ways of conducting relations between nations. David Frost allegedly called it ‘the art of letting other people have your way’. Sir Henry Wotton put it differently, describing the ambassador as an ‘honest man sent to lie abroad for his country’. Mendacity is only the most genteel of the methods used by nations to get their way, and ambassadors can’t avoid being caught up in the skulduggery. Locals usually regard even the most innocent ways of gathering information as espionage. It is a rare embassy that doesn’t provide cover for its country’s secret operators.

All this is intrinsically unglamorous, and done in uncomfortable and even threatening circumstances. Ambassadors need protection if they are to function which is why, as Berridge points out, they are surrounded by a body of immunities and understandings that have grown up over the centuries. There are now more diplomats than ever before, as the number of countries has rocketed since 1945.

So the diplomat is not yet an endangered species. The chandeliers and the champagne still twinkle in the larger embassies, but the toffs are fewer and there are far more women at the top. If you want to know what the life is really like, I recommend the BBC comedy Ambassadors, about a British embassy in a fictitious Central Asian country, Tazbekistan. Staff are beset by demanding visitors, including a royal duke promoting trade and a courageous human rights activist who has to be rescued from the dictator’s death cells. In their spare time the harassed ambassador and his wife tend to the demands of a teenager 6,000 miles away, while their bosses tick boxes in a ‘game of bullshit bingo’.

And yet despite the absurdities, most of us found the career stimulating. We were rarely bored. We never stopped learning. In retirement we felt that we had done the state some service. You could hardly ask for more than that.

• Outposts of Diplomacy: A History of the Embassy
  G.R. Berridge
  Reaktion, 312pp, £25
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Rodric Braithwaite was British Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988-91).