Storm Signals : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971 (9781551996806)

by Ritchie, Charles

  In the afternoon, as an escape from an east-windy grey day in Oxford Street I popped into a German film entitled Sex and Love. It was the kind of thing to give pornography a bad name. I came away fearing that I might have been put off sex for life.

  The French Embassy party in the evening ostensibly given for the Finnish Ambassador and his wife, but nobody spoke to them and they looked like Finns out of water.

  18 May 1969.

  Went down on the train to Devon with Derick Amory, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, former High Commissioner to Ottawa, and could, I believe – if he had wanted to – have been Prime Minister. I am becoming very fond of him. He is ironical, invalidish (terrible wounds from the First War, served again in the Second), now a Director of the Hudson’s Bay Company. He lives by faith or stoicism, covering permanent pain. In dealing with people he pushes away all directness with kind inquiries and malicious asides. He spends his weekends with his old aunt (eighty-eight) in her bungalow in the grounds of her Tudor former house. We stayed there for the night. Derick’s aunt is a redoubtable old Anglo-Irish woman, lost a husband and a brother in the First War and all her three sons in the Second War, now shrivelled, shrunken, wearing an old felt hat and gardening boots as she stumped into the yard to greet us. But in three minutes her recalcitrance, quick-wittedness, and engagingness were apparent. Round the garden we went with her. She was fond of this flower, disparaging about that flower, asking no questions, giving no answers, occasionally a crooked smile – and she had us!

  20 May 1969.

  To the Mounties’ Musical Ride at the Devon Agricultural Show. Many bulls, cows, goats, sheep, in procession before the Mounties got a look-in. Presented prizes, took the salute (slight uncertainty on my part as to when to take off my hat and when to put it back on again), toured the tents, tasted local cheese, drank local small cider. Most tricky was my visit to the “Lines” of the Mounties. I patted horses’ necks, started talking to each member of the Mounties’ team, began to run down on matey chat, knew they knew it, felt a fool. Suppose they only saw a silly old man – what does it matter?

  22 May 1969.

  Macdonald, President of the Privy Council, and Mrs. Macdonald are here on a visit from Ottawa. We gave a luncheon for them today. He has the reputation of being one of the most “with it” Ministers, close to the Prime Minister and opposed to the old establishment. One of his staff warned me that Mrs. Macdonald is strongly anti-English. But in spite of my “Englishness” I got on very well with her. She is an extremely attractive woman, tall, fair, fresh-skinned, and her talk has freshness too. She is, however, imbued with the anti-External Affairs virus.

  5 June 1969.

  Yet another Cabinet Minister – Pepin, the Minister of Trade and Commerce. Went to the airport to meet him. I had never seen him before but guessed as he came off the plane that he would be carrying a spare suit on a hook under a cellophane cover, and I was right. He is big and jovial, and looks a cross between an Assyrian emperor and Groucho Marx. Very easy and open in manner. A group of us went back to the Dorchester to work on his speech. It is a long time since I have put in such a session, yet how many hundreds of times I have done it and with so many different Ministers – battles of wits, will, prestige, over the inclusion of one civil servant’s draft or the substitution for it of another; attempts by civil servants, gently, firmly, persistently, to eliminate the Minister’s wilder, bolder – or just more vote-getting – passages in the text. Block that metaphor! Drop that joke! A final exhausted tug-of-war over the elimination of the word “despite” in paragraph 4.

  Home, and a quick change, and to Anne Fleming’s party. Literary figures, a don or two, and Andrew Devonshire. Our hostess, Anne, looks sadder and more human since her husband Ian Fleming’s death. Diana Cooper, in a pyjama suit, greeted me in joke tones of thrilling sincerity. In the next room Elizabeth and Stuart Hampshire stood murmuring by the bar. The writer Leslie Hartley sat on a sofa like a giant panda, being patted and petted, making mumbling and inconclusive sounds. He is loved by all. Our hostess, in grey and diamonds, was alternately pert and pensive. Of herself she said, “In my youth I did what I wanted and never knew guilt. Women’s frustrations are different and simpler than those of men, and come from not getting what they want, usually something quite uncomplicated – a husband, a lover, a home, children – but men suffer from not knowing what or whom they want.”

  14 June 1969.

  Went to a stupid reception at the Dorchester given by the Sheik of Abu Dhabi. It was full of hawk-nosed sons of the desert with lustrous eyes, and oil men, and Foreign Office Middle East experts who would like to be oil men. When I was presented to the Sheik he said, condescendingly, “We have heard of your country and its good reputation.”

  Dinner with Elizabeth. She thinks that one is born with “innate ideas,” reflections of the social and mental climate of one’s parents. If this is so, in my own case the idea of loyalty (and its obverse, disloyalty) was a dominant. Loyalty, but not necessarily fidelity. She thinks that instead of being awarded the Order of Canada I should have been knighted. I explained that this was impossible for a Canadian, and that in any case I did not want a knighthood. I should feel a damn fool among my friends at home, being addressed as “Sir Charles.” In fact I am very pleased to have this award. After all, I have acted for my client, Canada, for thirty-five years and defended its interests like a son of the law and swallowed my own prejudices in the process.

  27 September 1969.

  A muggy, murky, misanthropic day. Went to the doctor about my itching legs. He has always been such a sensible, reassuring practitioner, but I believe that he has now gone mad. He had a speck of froth on his lips and his kind horse face looked blurred. Without ado upon my entry he asked, “Shall I read you some of my poems?” Then one poem followed another, sunsets, leaves turning … “You see, I paint in words.” And then, odder and more personal ones, one called “The Midnight Doctor of Hythe.” “Why Hythe?” he asked on a puzzled note. He is in fact Elizabeth’s doctor also. In his dream he is driving around the sleeping town in his Mini thinking of those lying awake in their beds tortured by anxiety, on whose heads he might lay a calming hand. Later in the day he telephoned me to ask my advice about a letter he is writing to The Times which he believes “will bring the Government down.”

  On my way back from the doctor’s I sat in a deck-chair in the park and must have dropped my wallet, which unfortunately had £40 in it.

  4 October 1969.

  I went to Oxford to my old college for the annual dinner of the Pembroke Society. After dinner, when the very old and the young had gone to bed, my sixty-odd-year-old surviving contemporaries got together at one of the tables in Hall and the serious drinking began, a new bottle of whisky being ordered every five minutes. I would not have recognized any of them if I had fallen over them in a London street, but in that Hall, where we had all sat together drinking when young, their faces gradually got attached to earlier faces once belonging to them, and we peered and stared at each other through the mists of time and whisky.

  On the morning after, I pensively promenaded the meadows and lanes and quads of grey, autumnal, out-of-term Oxford, encountering by the way several of last night’s convivial contemporaries. We passed each other with averted eyes, nursing our separate hangovers.

  5 October 1969.

  Earlier in the day I had lunch with an old painter. He tells me that some young women are “gerontophiles,” meaning that they prefer old men. He says he has a list and offered to lend it to me. At lunch there was a woman who said, “I know my husband is an old lecher but there are so many pansies about that I prefer him like that.”

  The afternoon was depressing. I had to read to the “Canada-based staff” the Minister’s telegram about the withdrawals of personnel and the new economies. I thought it best not to try the Pollyanna note but to give them the treatment direct. I was upset by the whole proceeding because of the botched and clumsy way it is being done under this absu
rdly poised time gun and for the wrong reasons – almost nonexistent economies – when it could and should have been done over a period of time as a process of reorganization and a re-targeting of the functions of the Department. The present exercise is being conducted in a cloud of public and political criticism of the Department. It seems almost punitive and gives our people to think that their work has all been a waste of time and that the Department would like to shuffle them off anywhere to get them off the payroll. Louis Rogers says that my morale is bad.

  Ted Heath said to me the other day, “You Canadians have a good Foreign Service; why are you buggering it about?”

  24 November 1969.

  Lunched with a group of super-rich oil men at the Dorchester, organized by Roy Thomson,14 who said it did him good to hear talk which seldom got below the level of a billion dollars. I found the conversation fascinating, though sometimes incomprehensible. Plainly I had been invited as a social or symbolic gesture – I came with the flowers, the smoked salmon, and the wine, to show that the old pirate knew the amenities.

  I am not at my ease with tycoons, except, for some reason, Jewish ones.

  In the office we spend two-thirds of our time administering ourselves and coping with the swarm of regulations that our new “management approach” has resulted in. Questionnaires, union contracts, program budgeting, task forces, goals targets, ratings, policy analysis, computerized forecasts. There is no policy work in the office, and Louis Rogers and I are both bored.

  4 December 1969.

  I was thinking back today to my October visit to Ottawa, Trudeau’s capital and court, ruled by an icy enigma. He seems to have cowed Parliament, the Civil Service, and his Cabinet colleagues. He does not bully – his method is more oblique, a mixture of chilly scorn and scorching impatience, and all overlaid with the quick, disarming smile.

  How well does he govern Canada? He has been quick to see the need to hold and weld into political society the young and the outsiders. He has attacked and is demolishing the obsolete assumptions behind the criminal code. His rule is only at its outset. He has joined battles but not yet won them. Will his method work in Canada, a country traditionally governed by compromise, by subterfuge, all wrapped up in the opaque jargon of politicians who learned their style from Mackenzie King? Will Canadians long endure Trudeau’s explicitness of will and his caustic language? Could these begin to goad and irritate? Behind this question lies the limit of his power and his quest to extend it. Some say that this quest for power will lead him to an American or Gaullist conception of the Executive; that he plans by stages to bring not only the Civil Service but Parliament itself to heel. Yet he is a cautious man – he shows more than he moves. First there is a resounding defiance of established policy and patterns; then prudent pragmatic withdrawal, with still some ground gained; then a sally in another direction. So in the end he is compelled, like every Canadian Prime Minister before him, to a balancing act – to enrage one section of the population one day, to appease them the next, to play one region or interest or prejudice or race against another. This he does with virtuoso effect.

  Is Trudeau a surgical analyst come in to cut off the layers of inefficiency and out-of-date ideas? Can he construct something solid in the place of what he wants to change? Again a question. Every statement about Trudeau crumbles into its contradiction. An intellectual, yes, but is he? If so, his conversation does not reveal one. A social swinger, yes, yet not at ease socially. A power-loving French-Canadian politician, but how different in tone and temper from any of that breed. What then has one got to go on? He is a dandy, an actor, a loner, a secret – even a shy – man.

  He dominates the Canadian scene without a rival. The Opposition, at any rate the Conservative Opposition, is feeble and sterile. This is how things look in December 1969 – how will they look two years from now? The going will get tough for Trudeau. He could end up as an exploded myth. His problem will be not only to establish “mastery” but to produce radical solutions to match his radical criticisms. Or he could turn out to be a sphinx without a secret.

  As to the international scene, they say that Trudeau would like it to get up and walk away. Also, he is reacting against what he thinks to be the over-responsiveness, busy-body-ism, do-good-ism, of his predecessors, and hence to their instrument, the Department of External Affairs. There is animus in his reaction. He would like not so much to destroy the Department as to serve it a very sharp lesson. What is that lesson? Part of it is simply to come to heel. But there is more to it than that. He has genuinely concluded that our operation is over-extended, wrongly targeted, and out of date. Just as he has set up a task force on the role of the soldier, so he wants a categorical answer to the question no one has ever satisfactorily answered – What is the role of the diplomat? The answer he would like would be a cybernetic answer, a computer answer, something that could be shown on a graph, an extrapolation, something fished out of a “think tank,” for he has a weakness for this language and these concepts. What he does not want is an answer from the Department which implies a mystique, a trade secret, something elect, inherited from Trudeau’s predecessors and shared between them. He has a right to put the questions, but not to the animus with which he puts them. It is true that there has crept into the Foreign Service a note of both self-congratulation and self-pity which irritates others besides the Prime Minister. It is true that a portion of the work done by the Service is not focused on concrete Canadian interests, that telegrams assiduously and conscientiously prepared sink into the Department without a trace, without response or influence. This unreality is partly a function of size. At the insistence of the politicians we have opened many missions which are far from essential, and at our own instigation we have over-padded many of our missions abroad. It is time that we and all the other Departments functioning abroad took a look at our operations and expenditures.

  11 December 1969.

  To see Burke Trend15 at the Cabinet Office. He says, and I think so too, that the great task that faces our political leaders is to humanize the computer age, to give back to people a sense of connection with the growing scale and impersonality of modern technology. He wants Wilson and Trudeau to talk about this when next they meet. Certainly Trudeau is one of the few politicians to be impressed with this question of the dehumanization of our life and environment, which is really behind so many of the protest movements of our times.

  Went to the Beefsteak Club and was richly rewarded as Harold Macmillan16 was there in wonderful form; witty, wise, wide-ranging talk.

  Margaret Meagher is staying with us. She is very good value, down-to-earth in a Nova Scotian way.

  Bobby Rae,17 now a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol, came to lunch. Intelligent, left-wing views, student power at the University of Toronto. Dislikes Trudeau as being much too conservative.

  12 December 1969. Manchester.

  Having got drunkish the night before, I had to rise at 6:30 on a pitch-black morning, pile into my clothes, and set off with Sylvia by train for my visit to Manchester. On the train they gave us a huge breakfast – sausages, bacon and eggs, God knows what – I couldn’t touch it. I wondered how I would get through the day, though in fact got through it very well. There is nothing like being treated as Royalty, and being gracious back, to bolster morale, and one sees how those in the public eye go on and on forever and never lose the taste for it. Manchester lived up to its reputation for murk. On arrival we were escorted down the platform by the station-master and Rolls-Royced to the Manchester Liners’ new building which I was to open. I was met at the door by Stoker, the Chairman of the Company. Then I swung a bottle of champagne (which to my surprise broke, as it should have done, on the first shot) to launch the new building. Then unveiled a totem-pole, then shook hands with two hundred people, then, after a very long lunch in a very hot room, speeches by Stoker and myself, both attempting to be facetious. He is a “whirlwind of energy,” with a nice Scotch wife and a son who wants to be an artist. He presides over a container
shipping line, and all the talk was of the container trade from Manchester to Montreal. I found this interesting and instructive. The container business is progressively eliminating dockers – another example of making people unnecessary. No more dockers, no more porters. Why not no more diplomats? How our Prime Minister would love to computerize the whole Foreign Service and eliminate the human element. After lunch we all bundled into buses and drove, in the driving rain, along the ship canal to see the containers being lowered into the ships. Later Sylvia and I went to stay with the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress for the night in the Town Hall in which the Mayor resides. It must be one of the most stupendous buildings of the Victorian age, built at the peak of Manchester’s greatness. The State Apartments were vast, gloomy, decorated, painted, tiled, panelled, frescoed; there were outsize stone and marble staircases and ironwork everywhere. The Mayor and Mayoress gave a dinner party of the local magnates for us. The Manchester people are very forthcoming and not at all gentlemanly – what a relief!

  The next day we set out after breakfast in the Mayoral Rolls for a tour of the city. It was raining, with drifting fog patches which mercifully obscured some of the new housing units, great grey blocks of prefabricated flats, sited in a sea of mud. By contrast the little old (Industrial Revolution) bleak hutments with outdoor plumbing looked almost cozy. They are hauling Manchester out of the nineteenth century at a great rate and building, building, everywhere, as they are in the vast industrial sprawl through which we passed in the train on our way home to London, giving one a notion of the huge industrial wealth and strength of this country. And everywhere new housing, high-rises, and terraces in former fields.