Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22523 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-28
• Released on: 2006-07-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 344 pages

Aimee Shalan, THE GUARDIAN
'it is delightfully undiplomatic - brimming with barbed comments, colourful anecdotes and amusing assesments of No 10's top talent.'

Review
'it is delightfully undiplomatic - brimming with barbed comments, colourful anecdotes and amusing assesments of No 10's top talent.' (Aimee Shalan THE GUARDIAN )

'...absorbing account by Meyer of his tenure as ambassador to Washington during distinctly interesting times. His descriptions of the building of new Labour's relationship with the US administration, and the battles between the foreign office and No 10 are fascinating'. (SUNDAY TIMES, )

'the insights into buffoons who run amok in our name makes this a rude, iconoclastic delight.' (Martin Tierney THE HERALD )

James Cusick, THE SUNDAY HERALD
'the delicious portraiture, razor-sharp character assessments and the sharing of undiplomatic discretions, are all beautifully, and often comically, presented.'

Customer Reviews

Important book, but not compulsive reading
Written at times in an almost tabloid style - albeit a polite, educated, gentlemanly tabloid style - the account is certainly not a stuffy, academic description of one small (but vital) corner of foreign policy. Christopher Meyer was British ambassador to Washington from 1997 to 2003, so had a unique perspective on the agreement between Bush and Blair which led up to the Iraq invasion. Collusion, delusion, or deceit?

Meyer witnessed the demise of the Clinton presidency; a veteran of the diplomatic corps, he'd also seen Thatcher's foreign policy in action. He points to the spinelessness of Blair's approach compared to the Iron Lady's. Although Meyer supported the invasion of Iraq, he is quite disparaging about New Labour's conduct. Britain has effectively become a US poodle.

Meyer's book has caused acute embarrassment in political and diplomatic circles, and will almost certainly lead to further censorship of civil service memoirs and leaks. It provides a vital perspective on the workings of the Labour Party and its failure to think through the invasion and occupation of Iraq. There are anecdotes and insights aplenty, and it is a book which has its fascinating and entertaining passages, but it's not one which will be to everyone's taste.

If you are interested in politics and foreign policy, then this is an engaging and informative read. Serialised in the 'Guardian', it may be absorbing in small doses, but it's not really a book you'd choose for bedtime reading. It's essential message is that Blair has settled into a cosy little relationship with the US, so much so that British foreign policy is taken for granted by the White House. Any expose which throws light on the way our politicians behave is to be valued, but this is probably a book which is better read as edited highlights, not one which will rivet your attention from cover to cover.

Interesting but not that controversial
Although there was a hoo hah when this book first came out I can't see that there is anything within it's pages that is hugely controversial. Meyer certainly doesn't condemn Blair wholesale as a poltician without any merit but as you read the book you do come to the understanding that Blair's political preferences are not the same as Meyers. Nevertheless Meyer was a diplomat and by his account anyway seems to have executed his duties nuetrally and very helpfully for his country.

The book is full of anecdote but hardly any real polticial gossip. He's very carefully to say nice things about almost everyone and if he is disparaging about Blair and New Labour it's nothing we haven't already read in the press. If anything he strives to give a rounded, balanced, diplomatic view of Blair and friends although it is possible to detect a note of disgruntlement that his efforts were not always appreciated by Blair and often suspected. Meyer would not be the first person in public life to feel this way about our current glorious leader - he joins quite a list of disgruntled ministers and back benchers.

My conclusion is that it's worth reading and gives you a fascinating insight into the goings on in Washington during a very tumultuous period. This book is also a good explanation of exactly what amabassadors and diplomats do for us in far flung places.

THE INSIDER
Sir Christopher Meyer resigned as British ambassador in Washington just before the start of hostilities in Iraq. He has started a new career as chairman of the Press Complaints Commission, but his frequent appearances on television since he left the diplomatic service have been almost exclusively in connexion with his privileged insights into the origins of the war. The title of the book is a slight misnomer – most of it is indeed about his time as ambassador to the USA, but the first few chapters are partly concerned with his early life and career and partly with a personal issue that burns him up, namely his second wife’s grisly experiences with German justice in obtaining access to her children from her first marriage.

In Britain the book has given rise to a good deal of comment for supposedly disparaging or even attacking prominent politicians, and I noticed that he had to appear before a parliamentary committee to respond to such points. These allegations are simply balderdash, and the politicians concerned have no business being so thin skinned in my own opinion. John Prescott’s malapropisms are the stuff of legend, and the ones that Meyer records are not only relevant but vintage efforts too. They make Prescott look ridiculous, but nowhere near as ridiculous as his own over-reaction did. In any case Meyer’s overall assessment of Prescott is fair and far from unfavourable, and he is not afraid to tell a similar story about himself – after three years of shuffling along presentation-lines he was overcome with a kind of catatonic amnesia, forgot his wife’s name and introduced her to the puzzled grandees by various alternatives including ‘Christopher’. As for the other seemingly contentious matters, I find it difficult to imagine that even Jack Straw himself supposes he has very many groupies, and to find anything sensational about an account of seeing John Major partly dressed sets the qualifying-bar for sensation as low as I can ever recall. In fact the book seems to me conspicuously fair-minded in general. A British civil servant is required to be professionally neutral, but even when I knew him 40 years ago I never recall Christopher showing any particular political inclination. He has a strong streak of irreverence, but he is not a committed scoffer either. He has a fairly traditional sense of awe in respect of Churchill for instance, he was obviously impressed with Mrs Thatcher, and Blair’s strongest opponents would be hard put to it to deny that he is what Meyer finds him to be – a bit of a genius in some ways.

The style of writing is light and informal, at least until we get to the really serious chapter entitled ‘War’. It is entirely free of the portentousness that one tends to associate with Whitehall mandarins called Sir Hector this and Sir Herbert that, but there was a time when no senior civil servant would have used ‘aftermath’ to mean after-effect or ‘cataclysmic’ to mean disastrous, just as there was a time when no eminent publishing house would have put a full stop in the name Harry S Truman. The early chapters are interesting in their own right, and the author comes across basically as the man I used to know all those decades ago, even looking 20 years younger than he is. I’m in no position to form an opinion about the clearly distressing issue of his wife’s treatment by the German legal process, apparently supported by its British counterpart. Everyone seems to be wrong except Catherine, but for all I know that may be the truth of it. When it comes to the medical problem that he discloses near the end of the book, all I can do is to offer him my sincerest wishes for a full and speedy recovery.

The climactic section of the book is obviously the build-up to war in Iraq. Whatever one thinks of the ambassador’s conclusions, this is an account such as nobody else could have given. This is the full-dress professional writing now, and the style changes noticeably. He sees reason to suspect that future historians will not deal very kindly with Bush and Blair over the issue, but however that turns out future historians will have a document to work on that they had no right to expect. Far from attacking the politicians I feel that Christopher gives them a good deal too much benefit of a good deal too much doubt. Be that as it may, he presents his evidence and his reasoning with scrupulous fairness and admirable clarity. He sees Blair as being convinced of the case for pre-emptive action before Bush was, he does not buy the usual caricature of Bush (nor do I), and he finds against allegations that war was decided on from the outset and the rest was lies. He fairly obviously believes that Blair’s basic analysis is right but that the war was botched through haste. He was there and I wasn’t, of course, but I wonder whether he has also – like the Blairs as he rightly says – been seduced by the proximity and glamour of America, to which he was a latecomer. Blair’s stories about the WMD’s take some explaining away, and it surely will not do to say that all the Washington hawks sincerely believed that Saddam was implicated in 9/11. What does ‘sincere’ mean in this context? To me it means that they were letting their passions run away with their brains: a moment’s rational reflection would surely have told anyone that Saddam was not likely to give assistance to an organisation that liked him little better than it liked America and that would give him problems he didn’t need at a time when he didn’t need them. I also wonder how this ‘sincerity’ squares with the suspicion, stated some chapters earlier, that the attack on Iraq was displacement activity – Al Qaeda were elusive, so bomb someone and be perceived to be ‘doing something’. That is a view that seems more than persuasive to me.

This is the main section of the book, but there is a lot more to it, and the author’s mindset makes his way of telling it all illuminating as well as highly readable. The squawks of outrage seem to have died down and I hope he took no notice of them. If Christopher has anything more to say on the Iraq war between adjudicating on press complaints, I shall be more than interested to hear it.