A Fortunate Life (26 page)

When I got back from this exercise, I was told that it was time for me to start preparing to go to Staff College in order to qualify for further promotion. But by now it was already clear to me that, since that mysterious lunch in Hong Kong, wheels had been turning behind the scenes, and the direction of my life was about to change again.

Shortly after I returned to UK from the Far East I had received another mysterious phone call. ‘The Foreign Office’ had noted my Chinese exam results. If I was interested in following up my lunchtime conversation in Hong Kong, they would like to meet again. Another lunch was duly arranged in London, this time in a most expensive and salubrious
restaurant (as I later discovered, eating seems to be an important concurrent activity when it comes to both diplomacy and espionage). Again no mention was made of the true identity of my prospective employers. My lunch companion simply confined himself to outlining the procedures. There were certain exams to take, then an interview to undergo, and finally a process designed to test initiative and lateral thinking, which included a psychological profile. All this would entitle me to enter as a ‘fast-stream’ and ‘late-entry’ member of the Diplomatic Service. It would probably take a year or so to go through. Did I want to proceed? I said I did, and we agreed to launch the process but reserve final decisions for both sides until later. We then got down to a very agreeable lunch washed down, as I recall, by a fair quantity of exceptionally good wine. As a humble ‘grunt’ Marine, I viewed all this as rather romantic and very exciting. But I was never in any doubt about the true nature of the approach, despite my host’s best efforts to disguise this with little anecdotes designed to lend verisimilitude to his claim to come from the Foreign Office.

During 1971 I completed the exams and interviews. At the end of this process, which included, without my knowing it, a rigorous check on my background, I was called into an anonymous office close to St James’s Park in central London, where the real identity of my prospective employers was revealed and I was asked if I would like to join them. I affected the surprise and astonishment apparently expected of me – and immediately accepted the invitation. It was decided that I should leave the Royal Marines and start my new career in the middle of 1972.

I originally hoped that I could see out the remainder of my time in ‘The Corps’ as Company Commander of my beloved E Company. But events soon dictated otherwise. In June 1971 we heard that 41 Commando was to leave Bickleigh and take up temporary quarters on an old World War Two hutted camp on Dartmoor, in preparation for being posted to Malta in the autumn. Whenever a military unit goes on a foreign posting such as this, it leaves behind a ‘rear party’ whose job it is to look after the unit’s interests at home and to assist with welfare and administrative issues that can only be resolved in the UK. Since I was about to leave anyway, I was the obvious person to command 41 Commando’s rear party during their deployment in Malta.

I understood the logic of this, but I hated giving up E Company, and hated even more the drudgery of the purely administrative tasks which were now about to take up all my time. So I decided to try to learn another language and enrolled with someone who taught me German in my spare time.

With the Commando gone, the last months of 1971 were very quiet, and I thought they would remain so until I started my new life in the shadows in mid-1972. But on 29 December, after a wonderful family Christmas (my mother had come over from Australia), the phone rang in the corner of our sitting room in Lillipit. It was the MOD duty officer in London, who told me that Dom Mintoff, the Prime Minister of Malta, had just announced that he was ending more than a hundred-and-fifty years of connection with Britain and kicking all British forces off the island. The withdrawal would start immediately, with the wives and families flying back in two weeks, and the Commando following four weeks after that. There was, he explained, a severe shortage of suitable accommodation in the UK, and the only place where they could all be housed was a closed and largely derelict World War Two wooden-hutted army camp at Houndstone, outside Yeovil. I was to go there immediately, open the place up and get it ready, first for the families and then, in due course, for the Commando. I left that night in a mixture of driving rain and snow and arrived in the outskirts of Yeovil at about 11 p.m., leaving instructions for the rest of the rear party to follow the following day. When I got to the camp it was locked, and there was no one about. So I broke open the door to one of the empty wooden huts, laid out my sleeping bag and went to sleep on the floor. And that was how I spent my first night in the area which I was subsequently to represent in Parliament, both in the Commons and the Lords, and which was to become our family home for the rest of our life.

Just as I am not very religious, I am not superstitious either. So I do not believe much in premonitions. But, again, there are exceptions. The following morning was cold, the hut damp, and I was grumpy at being here rather than back at home. But through the cracked windowpanes of the hut in which I had spent the night I looked out on frost-covered trees, silver meadows and a champagne December morning, and was quite suddenly hit by the unbidden and totally surprising premonition that this was where I was going to spend the rest of my life.

The feeling soon passed, however, as I got down to the grinding business of opening up long-deserted family quarters for the returning wives and children, doing deals with local tradesmen to provide them with the necessities of life on tick, because the families’ finances had not yet been sorted out, and working with Yeovil District Council
*
to ensure that they were properly provided for. As with my previous experience as the Mess Deck Officer of HMS
Bulwark
, I loved it, made firm friends in the local community, learned how local councils worked and acquired a huge admiration for the skills and sense of service of most of the Council’s employees.

Jane came to see me one weekend, leaving the children with her parents at nearby Burnham-on-Sea. I told her I had fallen in love with the area. When we had to leave Lillipit to go to London for my new job, would it not be a good idea to buy a little cottage here and a small flat in London? As a Somerset girl born and bred she jumped at the idea of having our roots once again in her native county, and we started looking for a house. We eventually found Vane Cottage, which sits in the middle of a terrace in Great Street in the little village of Norton Sub Hamdon, about six miles from Yeovil. It was exactly what we were looking for. We sold Lillipit with great sadness – though we were not sad about the price we got (
£
24,000, which meant we had quadrupled what we had paid for it in just over two years).
†
With the proceeds we bought Vane Cottage for
£
14,750 and moved into it during the summer of 1972 – it is our home still. Shortly afterwards we were also able to buy a small flat in Wimbledon, which we would use when I started my new job in September 1972.

Meanwhile, first the wives and families returned, and then the unit, and, after seeing them properly settled into the camp, I took my leave of the Royal Marines in August 1972, after thirteen years and three months of service.

W
RITING THIS CHAPTER
in our lives presents me with a problem. Before I started my new job I undertook a lifetime obligation never to reveal in public either the name of the organisation for which I worked or anything beyond the barest outline of what I did. For reasons which are no doubt excellent, the authorities have asked me to stick to this undertaking and to go no further than the words used by my old friend Sir Menzies Campbell, then Leader of the Lib Dems, in an interview in the
Evening Standard
in September 2007, when he, perhaps inadvertently, admitted that I had been ‘in the more shadowy side of Foreign Office activity'. And I have agreed to do that.

I started my new job with a small collection of fellow trainees, in September 1972, when Jane and I also moved into our newly purchased flat in Wimbledon. At weekends, we regularly bundled the children, the dog and the cat onto a mattress in the back of our old mini-van on a Friday night and drove down to Vane Cottage, returning on Sunday night.

Our training took place in a faceless building in south London and in an equally faceless establishment in the south of England where we learned all the skills and techniques necessary to our trade. We also learned about the past successes of the British intelligence community, such as the recruitment and running of the great British agent Oleg Penkovsky. And we learned of our failures, too: Philby, Maclean and the rest of the Cambridge five, as well as Blake. This, as I soon discovered, is a world which teeters, sometimes crazily, between high drama and danger at one end and farce and hilarity at the other.

My favourite story from these times concerns the period when I was fighting in our little conflict in Borneo (though, sadly, I have to confess it may be apocryphal, since it was vouchsafed to me one rather bibulous evening by an ‘old hand' who claimed to have been there). His tale went thus. Despite the fact that Britain was, in effect, at war with Indonesia, both countries maintained diplomatic relations with each other and embassies in each other's capitals. As you might imagine, the Jakarta
Embassy was one of the biggest in the world at the time. Some way into the conflict, an expert in these things thought he spotted something in the behaviour and demeanour of the Indonesian President, General Sukarno which, he believed, could be the tell-tale signs of a fatal illness. He announced that if, somehow or another, one of the President's stools could be obtained, then not only could the illness be confirmed but a fair estimate could be made of how long he had to live. Jakarta was asked to obtain one of the articles in question, preferably in pristine condition, as a matter of the most urgent priority.

Early attempts, including the recruitment of some of the President's personal cleaning staff resulted in a series of near-misses, but, as they say, no coconut. About this time, a tunnel dug under the Berlin wall to intercept Russian communication cables on the other side was discovered and closed down by the Russians, leaving a lot of secret but now redundant tunnellers in the pay of the British Government. So the Jakarta office were instructed to obtain not only an accurate plan of the layout of the Presidential Palace, including, crucially, the drainage and sewage pipes, but also a ‘safe house' as close as possible to the perimeter of the Presidential grounds. This done, a team of tunnellers were secretly flown out to Jakarta and tasked to dig a tunnel from the safe house to intercept the drain running from the President's personal loo. In this way a near pristine example of the sought-after article was finally intercepted on its journey to the outside world, carefully bagged and packed with ice to stop deterioration, and then smuggled from hand to hand, through a series of dead-letter boxes, until it finally reached the safety of the British Embassy. Here it was put into the diplomatic bag and flown with utmost urgency back to London. The story did not have the expected ending, however. When the item was examined it was discovered that the Indonesian President was in rude and robust health!

When I first joined, our headquarters was in an anonymous multistorey tower block south of the Thames, whose existence was never supposed to be made public. Indeed, we were all instructed to approach it with discretion, taking appropriate precautions. The game was, however, rather given away by the conductors of the London buses that passed our door at regular intervals: they delighted in announcing the local bus stop with a cheery (and usually very loud) shout of, ‘Lambeth Tube Station. All spies alight 'ere!'

After training, I worked for a few months in a department of the London headquarters before getting my first foreign posting – to Geneva where I was to take up the public post of a First Secretary in the United Kingdom Mission to the United Nations. Alert readers will recall that my expertise was as a Chinese-speaker, whereas in Geneva they speak French, a language in which I received the all-time record low mark of 2.5% in my school ‘O' levels. In fact, however, posting me to Geneva was not quite as foolish as it might, on the face of it, have seemed. For Anglo-Chinese relations were just beginning to warm up slightly, after many years in the deep freeze following the sacking and burning of the British Embassy in Peking in 1967. One of my tasks in Geneva was to see if we could help the process of Anglo-Chinese diplomatic
rapprochement
through contact within the ‘neutral' framework of the United Nations.

Nevertheless, Geneva meant learning my fifth language, French.
*
This led in due course to a house in France, a French son-in-law and French grandchildren – yet another way in which fortunate circumstance, rather than planning, has shaped my life.

I flew out to Geneva for a short visit to prepare for the job and find a house for the family just before Christmas 1973, taking out a lease on a very beautiful but very run-down house, Maison Kundig, on the shores of Lake Geneva. It had its own pier and boathouse in the little village of Coppet, some six miles from the city.

Before making the final move, Jane and I were told we would have to attend a ‘pre-deployment course' in the training department of the Foreign Office (in full, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, or FCO). When we got there we discovered that, rather than being an induction into the mysteries of diplomacy, this was actually devoted entirely to matters of etiquette. There were lessons in how to lay a table, how to fold napkins correctly and how to hold our knives and forks. All of which was laid out in diagrammatical form in a book they presented to us at the end of the course, in case we absent-mindedly forgot how to do things properly when far from home shores. (These things are, I imagine, no longer part of the curriculum in today's modern Foreign Office.)

There were even lessons in how to employ and treat servants, which were given by the wife of the then head of the Foreign Office. She told us about servants in Africa (which we didn't think would have much relevance in Geneva), including one story designed, I suspect, to underline how important it was to brief your servants properly. She related how, one day when ‘we' (her illustrious husband and herself) had been relatively junior and posted to some small African country, they had decided to have a gala dinner after the Queen's Birthday Party (the big event on every British Embassy calendar). To this they had invited, not only senior members of the local diplomatic corps, but also most of their host Government. Our redoubtable FCO hostess decided to splash out and serve roast suckling pig. She attended to every small detail, including supervising the cooking of the unfortunate animal, leaving only the serving to be carried out when the guests were safely at table. She firmly instructed the ‘head boy' how the pig was to be served – with an apple in the mouth and sprigs of parsley coming out of the ears. When the great moment arrived the dish was duly borne in by the enthusiastic servant whose appearance was much enhanced, precisely as his mistress had instructed, by having an apple stuffed in his mouth and a sprig of parsley sticking out of each ear.

In the event, when we got to Geneva Jane initially tried to follow diplomatic practice of bringing in caterers to cook and serve the official dinners we gave. But we both found this so unpleasant that she soon decided to do the cooking herself, and we shared the job of serving it between us. We found this was more relaxing for our guests and more effective when it came to doing business.

But that was still some time ahead. At this stage we were still heavily engaged in preparing for our new life in Geneva. I was firmly informed by the Foreign Office that when I got to Geneva I would need a ‘representational car'. I have never been much interested in cars, and both of us had grown rather attached to our mini-van, 907 PYD, the only car we had so far had since our marriage. Indeed Jane, who has a strong penchant for anthropomorphising almost anything, regarded 907 PYD as a fully paid up member of our extended family. It was therefore with sadness that we decided this old friend would have to be disposed of, and Jane agreed to do it, advertising for purchasers in the local paper. She quite quickly received an offer
£
60 from a nearby farmer who wanted to turn it into a mobile chicken shed. To my chagrin, she refused this with outrage and sold it instead for
£
40 to a young couple who, she said, would ‘give it a good home'.

In early 1974 I took a couple of weeks' leave to help pack up our things and prepare to move house again (I remember calculating at the time that this was our twenty-first house move in twelve years of marriage). The country, meanwhile, was feverishly preparing itself for the February 1974 general election.

I had remained a Labour supporter, even in the face of the fiasco of the 1967 devaluation of the pound and the evident failures of the late 1960s Wilson Government. By this time, however, I do not think I would have called myself a socialist. My political beliefs were on the move, and I was inclined to think that the encouragement of responsible individualism and the creation of an effective meritocracy was a better route to social justice than state intervention and social engineering. But I still saw Labour – and especially its new stars, like Roy Jenkins and Shirley Williams – as the best available instrument for delivering this kind of Britain, by breaking the class structure and creating an industrial-relations system based on partnership in the workplace. I had, however become quite nervous about the power of the trades union movement, and especially about its ability to hold a government to ransom. Barbara Castle's 1969 White Paper ‘In Place of Strife', which proposed a new, more constructive basis for industrial relations seemed to me, therefore, a powerful vindication of my support for Labour. I consequently felt utterly betrayed when the Labour Cabinet led by Jim Callaghan ditched this far-sighted programme in the face of union opposition. I concluded that Labour could never break its dependency on the unions and parted company with it in disgust.

I knew I could never be a Tory, of course, and thought the Liberal Party too small, too zany and too incoherent to be worth looking at. From about 1970, therefore, I turned away from politics and joined the millions in Britain whose attitude towards politicians of whatever party was basically, ‘a plague on all your houses'. So, despite the fact that the 1974 election looked as though it would be an exciting one – with Labour and Tory neck-and-neck, and support for the Liberals, who had just won a stunning series of by-elections, on the rise – I felt neither excited nor engaged by the prospect of the imminent contest. My thoughts were on Geneva and what the next phase of my life would bring, and nothing else.